Altered carbon, the whole resleeving of a person into another body. Made it seem like they could have done loads of stories in that universe with different actors.
Shame they only made one series.
Have you ever watched Dollhouse? Slightly similar theme and (unlike Firefly) it had two seasons that as best I can tell were aired in the proper order.
Dollhouse is weird though. I enjoyed it a lot but i don't think it's for everyone.
Plus the ending is not well done. They got cancelled and tried to pull together an impactful ending over a few episodes, when the original plan was to take a few seasons. I respect the urge to offer a real ending, but unsurprisingly it feels cheap and sudden.
This concept and many other interesting sci-fi ideas are touched on in Ghost in the Shell stand alone complex which I'm watching right now. It's pretty good! A little quirky at times, and doesn't have the same level of emotional investment as some other animes I've watched, but I'm definitely enjoying it quite a bit
I loved the first series so much. With the exception of a bit of weakness transitioning to the second half, it was incredible, beautiful, poignant, smart, almost perfect. Then they made more, and it was clearly written by someone who understood nothing of the first series and approached a character driven exploration of philosophical questions of identity, ontology, and social responsibility with the intelligence and subtlety of Wile E Coyote vs Roadrunner produced by the Hallmark Channel.
Heroes. First season was great, if they kept the concept of each season being a be set of people with special powers they could have made endless seasons and stories.
There was a miniseries on the SyFy channel called "Ascension" that, ostensibly, had the premise of being a murder mystery set on a massive generation ship launched at the height of the Cold War, which sounded fun in theory. 1960s Space Race technology, generations raised on Red Scare values despite the Soviet Union being a distant memory in every sense, a bunch of already-paranoid people trapped with a murderer with safety literally decades away - seems like there's a lot of room for a story there, right? Well, if the words "miniseries on the SyFy Channel" didn't tip you off...
::: spoiler spoiler, not that I recommend ever watching this show
They solve the murder by the end of the second episode, or at least they think they do. The subplot is nonetheless dropped entirely.
Turns out the ship never left Earth. It's in an underground bunker. The entire thing was a ploy to trap America's greatest minds in a self-contained generational think tank and steal all the super-cool technology they invent. Which also eliminates the 1960s Space Race aesthetic because the ship is now, by design, more technologically-advanced than modern Earth, leaving... exactly none of the original hook intact.
Except two episodes later they reveal it wasn't even that, it was actually part of a top-secret government eugenics program designed to breed telepathic super-soldiers, and the show ends with a child super-soldier using her nascent psychokinetic powers to teleport all the bad guys into space for realsies. And the real murderer is some guy we'd never even heard of working for the, again, top-secret government eugenics program, and his motives were... Either never explained, or explained after the part of the show where I stopped watching.
:::
So anyway, a show that actually stuck to that premise would probably make for a pretty compelling yarn.
I don’t want to read your spoiler because I have pretty low standards and enjoy things I probably shouldn’t just for the sake of it being novel; why do you not recommend it? Like is it at all any good and just disappointing how the plot was handled or bad generally?
It's a show that relies a lot more on plot twists than actual plot, and they're the sort of twists that heavily recontextualize the story in such a way that everything that happened prior is rendered kinda irrelevant and thus never followed up on, which kills a lot of the narrative momentum before it even really has a chance to build. There's maybe one halfway-decent "oh shit" reveal followed by a long series of "huh?"s and a big final "where the fuck did that come from?". And by the time it's two or three twists in, anything that seemed unique about the concept gets sidelined in favor of some increasingly credibility-straining political intrigue with token sci-fi elements.
And in general I kinda thought they did a poor job of making the spaceship feel like a spaceship, making the descendants of the Red Scare people feel like descendants of Red Scare people, and making the 1960s Space Race technology feel like 1960s Space Race technology, but in that annoying way where it's clearly not from a lack of budget, just from a lack of imagination. It's all just some very generic people with generic sci-fi technology living in a generic sci-fi city that just so happens to be shaped like a spaceship. And it's one of those shows where the main plot (term used generously) grinds to a halt every couple act breaks so everyone can fuck and backstab each other for no reason other than the characters that aren't part of the plot right now need something to do. And then the whole thing kinda just... stops.
All in all I found the whole thing dull, generic, more than a little frustrating to watch and harder to get invested in the longer it went on. The main characters weren't all that relatable, barely likeable and not particularly memorable; the mystery at the very heart of the premise was handled in a way that made it very uncompelling, and the ending fails to justify about 70% of the story that preceded it.
It kinda sounds like the same overall problems that 1899 had.. I watched that knowing the “big reveals every episode that makes everything pointless” problems (from comments much like yours) and was just as disappointed as I expected to be by that aspect, but it was still pretty good imo (probably blessed by lowered expectations), and I’m curious what another few seasons could have done after the big end reveal.. I’d probably have given it another season of my time. It was actually pretty well done, imho, all things considered. But then I have admittedly pretty low standards.
Although maybe this has lower production quality, by the sound of it. Any show that has to shoehorn multiple sex scenes when they don’t need them is just.. mmrf.. uncomfortable. So I expect to be uncomfortable.
I’m gunna give it a go with open eyes, I hope to be as disappointed as you were! Thanks for the detailed reply! I can’t wait to know exactly what you mean! :D
Probably blaspheming here, but another show like Firefly would rock. Don't try to catch that exact lighting in a bottle, just give us space cowboys. In space.
'Cowboy bebop' did it three years earlier and much better. But then I'm very partial to jazz and film noir. Then got remade by the same people much grittier as a period piece set in immediately post-feudal police state Japan.
Edit: in kind of the same way a lot of Kurosawa films got remade as westerns
Bebop is very different from Firefly imo. They're both good, but I wouldn't say to watch one over the other. I can't directly compare them like that.
Bebop is smooth and classy, more focused on music and choreography. Firefly is way more grounded and physical; lots of greebled grimy tools, machinery, carts.
You can see a similar divide in the themes. Firefly is way more rural, frontier type western. They get rid of small-town despots and help trading outposts under siege, because they're the only help around. Bebop is the end of the wild west: they all have stories about the real west, but that era is over. Cities are growing, the government starts playing a role, outlaws are on the run. The heroes are struggling to let go of the past and find their place in this new world.
I also want to shout out Outlaw Star, released in the shadow of Bebop. It's not western at all, a bit messier in its theme, but still a lot of fun.
Yeah I love space westerns and unfortunately they're very uncommon and rarely done well. Firefly had the huge advantages of being Whedon at his peak with a great cast (as he often had) at the right time and with the courage to commit to the genre in a way I wish more would.
I don't want more Whedon, his golden era is over and I'm now convinced that he really only excels at the overlying ideas for a show and casting. What I want is someone who loves the genre to do something similar, but better.
When Star Trek: The Next Generation was announced, everybody was pissed. "You can't have Star Trek without Captain Kirk!" "The first officer is a soap opera supporting actor!" "The captain is bald??!"
And then, lo and behold, it was the best Star Trek, almost entirely absent of rehashing, paying slavish tribute to, or shamelessly trading on nostalgia for The Original Series.
So, have someone go to the used spaceship dealer, buy a rusty old Firefly class light freighter, and go off on their own adventures. Nothing wrong with new crew, same universe.
Haven't watched ‘Firefly’, but that description sounds like 50s-60s Western sci-fi literature, which was criticized by Stanisław Lem with these exact words.
This one hurts. The potential was there, the visuals were genuinely incredible, the acting was solid, and I remember liking the music. But the writing was atrocious. It was like they went with the first draft. And also they piled on all those stupid prequel tropes like: "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to find out how this iconic character got their NAME!"
The music and the visuals are what I kept going back for, and the clearly-insane hope that someone on the writing team might have picked up any of the Silmarillion or History of Middle earth books and just given them some consideration
The concept behind Rings of Power is what is wrong with the show.
The Silmarillion is a terrible “book” to try to adapt to a TV show. The whole thing is a bunch of incomplete ideas. Add to that, Amazon wasn’t even able to get the full rights to it..
Amazon should have just done an adaptation of the LOTRs or done nothing at all.
The original plan for the second season of Stranger Things was supposed to be a separate story with a few connections to the first season, each season being a different story and cast. I would have loved to see that actually happen, since the second season lost my interest a couple episodes in.
They fucked up the most important thing possible with a series changing actors for the same character. YOU NEED TO MAKE US LOVE THE CHARACTER NOT THE ACTOR. They didnt lay in a bunch of physical gestures, catchphrases, signature moves, character traits. Nothing that made be believe Anthony Mackie was the same guy as Joel Kinnaman.
Altered Carbon had trouble keeping their premise straight too. When anyone can swap their body, you can't recognize people by sight any more. They used this to the MC's advantage a few times, but you'd think that people in that society would be more aware of the possibility.
Like they had the subplot with the MC's sister(?) where he spills all his secrets to the person in his sister's body. I'm sure he really needed someone to trust, but at least verify someone's identity before you share life-or-death information!
I would love to watch something like The Walking Dead, but more chill. More to do with building a community, and re-imagining society. Surviving the zombies would be a topic, of course, but without all the extra evilness of the remaining humans.
And episodes that don't force me to increase my TV's brightness to the max.
You know, I’ve never really fucked with that show. I watched it a couple times n it’s just fine-ish. Idk why tho, it should be up my wheelhouse but it doesn’t do it for me.
Sword art online. Drop the rape and incest beats entirely. It had potential to be a great anime about the meaning of life and instead largely ignored that possibility.
Is that rework anything like full metal alchemist Vs. FMA brotherhood? Like starts the same but then goes somewhere else?
I already have a copy of the whole SAO so I’ll probably still watch it (I’ve watched some pretty questionable stuff all the way through just because I started it..) but if it’s genuinely worth watching both, even if just for the sake of comparison, I’ll try to find a copy.
SAO abridged is a fan parody that you can find on YouTube, but as said before me, it has a way better storyline than the original and the production quality is incredible for a fan project.
The only downside is that the team can make approximately one episode per year.
Brotherhood is an official anime. SAO abridged is a fan made parody on YouTube. it recuts and redubs but that's it. And its purpose isn't to tell the whole SAO story, it's to make gags. It just inadvertently made a better story than SAO itself, mostly by changing certain characters motivations
Edit: oh and if you're intent on watching the full version at all, watch it before the abridged
I want a faithful adaptation of Asimov's Foundation, where it's the 1940s in space like in the novels.
Guy gets to planet, immediately buys a physical newspaper with physical cash. Takes a taxi cab. Everyone smokes constantly. Space soldiers are bribed with dishwashers and fridges, computers barely exist. Every desk has an integrated atomic ashtray to vaporise cigarette butts. Scientists carry bulky pocket calculators.
I’d love a proper retro-futuristic TV series. The latest Fantastic Four film showed that people will swallow a retro-futuristic vibe. Just something unironic with rayguns.
Applies to lots of anime. I've been really disappointed by Dragon Maid. Lots of LGBT+-themed anime in general, I'd want to see them remade in an environment that lets them be more explicit about the LGBT+ themes instead of dancing around the issue with that "just really really good friends" stuff (or just cancelled before the story gets there).
Dancing around queer romance is a problem in Japanese games as well, and it's so very disappointing. It's plain as day to everyone's what's going on but they won't go there.
Tangentially, sanitizing romance in general is also a problem with Japanese games (and games developed abroad that borrow their concepts). Some studios are outright afraid of offending men by having a woman character express a love interest in anyone, so it's just absent entirely from swathes of the cast, if not everyone.
With gaming having become such a big footprint in entertainment, I worry that sort of thing is going to feed back into TV.
It was fun sometimes watching Tracy Spiridakos struggle to emote 😄
(And all the yanks thinking the woman clearly speaking in an Australian accent was British.... no, actually that was confusing. Took me almost a season to realize the character was actually supposed to be British.)
I object, they didn't 'Bungle' that series. Fox out and out murdered it. The show was great and if Fox had any faith at all it would have run for seven seasons and movie.
If you haven’t seen the UK version, I recommend it over the US version, since it was the original :) I like foreign tv though, fewer nonsense romance plots in general.
Oh, I didn't even watch the american version. Like the office (and other shows) showed, americans just take something, dumb it down, make it bad, and then call it the height of comedy.
The Starlost needs a remake. Great premise, dollar store execution.
What they wanted:
Foreseeing the destruction of Earth, humanity builds a multi-generational starship called Earthship Ark, 50 miles (80 km) wide and 200 miles (320 km) long. The ship contains dozens of biospheres, each kilometres across and housing people of different cultures. Their goal is to find and seed a new world of a distant star.
In 2385, more than 100 years into the voyage, an unexplained accident occurs, and the ship goes into emergency mode in which each biosphere is sealed off from the others.
Centuries after its original launch, most of the descendants of the original crew and colonists are unaware that they are even aboard a spaceship.
How it went:
Unable to sell The Starlost for prime time, [20th Century Fox television producer Robert] Kline decided to pursue a low budget approach and produce it for syndication. By May, Kline had sold the idea to 48 NBC stations and the Canadian CTV network.
Originally, the show was to be filmed with a special effects camera system developed by Doug Trumbull called Magicam. ... The technology did not work reliably, however. In the end, simple blue screen effects were used, which forced static camera shots. ... The failure of the Magicam system was a major blow, as the Canadian studio space that had been rented was too small to build the required sets. In the end, partial sets were built, but the lack of space hampered production.
As the filming went on, [the writer Harlan] Ellison grew disenchanted with the budget cuts, details that were changed, and what he characterized as a progressive dumbing down of the story. ... Ellison broke with the project before the airing of its first episode.
Of course they had to end the second season in a cliffhanger so we'll never get to see its resolution thanks to Netflix canceling it. There should be a law about that.
Dare I continue? I kind of switched off from it as the main female protagonist went from brilliant bad ass engineer to weak love struck teenager. It was galling. The story was so fun, but I was suffering through the teen drama.
I made it when they went through the thing
and made discoveries on the planet. (Vague but failed at spolier tag).
Without spoilers, the books are kinda written like GoT where they change perspective a lot and in the books she had kinda just seen like 9/11 x 30 and then a little first hand and her best friend react to it in a very unexpected way and say he wanted more... They turned her PTSD into teen drama and when it wasn't wildly decried the teen drama eventually took over everything.
They really do the books pretty well up to that actual point though. And the events that happen do lead up to the main story points for the most part
No you should not continue. Seasons 1-3 of The Expanse the show was owned y SyFy. It was canceled and Amazon picked it up for Seasons 4-6 and the show turned to utter dogshit.
Not only did the Naomi character turn to shit so did all the others, particularly the heart of the show Amos.
I think what made that so annoying at the time was that by that point we knew the show was coming to an end but the story was moving at a snail's pace. There was less and less time to cover an enormous amount of content and it felt like Naomi's arc was taking way too much time.
Wayward Pines. Great concept but then they basically explained everything in a handful of episodes and took the whole mystery out of it. Also, some of the acting was terrible.
In some ways, Silo is its spiritual successor but without
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
monsters.
:::
It corrects for those mistakes and sustains the mystery.
Another one I’d like to see redone or relaunched, West World. Incredible first season. Nothing left in the writer’s tank after that. That first season was so good though that I don’t think it can be rebooted.
Lost Girl. I was so in for a succubus themed mystery drama type affair, but I couldn't maintain interest through the second season. It was slow and awkwardly written, but I think the subject is solid and it could have been done a lot better.
Give me Lucifer with a Succubus lead, come on TV execs
Unless there are budget constrain, why not? You can always make longer seasons.
I do realize that 14 seasons x 20 episodes seems unrealistic and will probably be cancelled, though.
Tbh I never needed a "Halo" series, I already have one and it's perfect (though I heard it came back, I stopped watching at the OG "end" and didn't know until way late that it had returned):
You know what, I already did one but I'm gonna do another one: Lovecraft Country.
First episode did just about everything you'd want out of a Jim Crow-era supernatural horror road trip mystery. Felt like they really had a handle on the whole "fear of the unknown and incomprehensible" vibe that you don't see done well very often, the cast had great chemistry, and the whole theme of "the real incomprehensible eldritch abomination threatening human sanity is racism" was executed flawlessly. They walked a very fine tightrope between homage and condemnation of Lovecraft's whole... deal and nailed it in one.
And then the main mystery is resolved by the second episode and the whole thing devolves into a very uneven anthology of psychic snakes and angry ghosts and like, Nazi wizards worshipping what I think was just the regular devil and overall very known and comprehensible horrors that didn't really hold my attention for long enough to see if they even tried to tie them all together.
Man, all I wanted was a long-form cosmic horror story wrapped in a character-driven prestige TV period drama with some biting social commentary that doesn't suck. They don't make a lot of those!
I'd kind of like to see someone do Brave New World a bit better. It was done in the 60s(?) but it's just a bit out of date today, while the book is absolutely something the world needs to think about now. A modern version might actually be even enhanced by certain elements of the modern style.
Once Upon a Time had a great concept. The execution often was so so but the concept very neat.
They should have gone through the first season fully fantastic without ever acknowledge if Henry was right or simply crazy and started to reveal the fantasy part only for the season 2. They should also have made the family less tangled and never ever pretended dead people could ever (ever) be revived. Finally they should have somehow either improve Emma's character or glorifying her way less.
Swamp Thing was so much worse than it could have been. Gothic horror, beauty and the beast, cosmic terror, body horror, monster of the week serial but it's a bigger monster hunting monsters, etc it's got all these interesting angles and they ended up focusing on none of them.
Severance. Season 2 was a money grab and an artistically fraught endeavour from conception.
They shouldn't have tried to write it, let alone record and release it.
123 Comments
sicarius@lemmy.world · 62 pts · 265d
Altered carbon, the whole resleeving of a person into another body. Made it seem like they could have done loads of stories in that universe with different actors.
Shame they only made one series.
robolemmy@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 15 pts · 265d
The books follow a similar quality arc. The first one is great but each subsequent one gets less great. He could’ve done so much more.
superduperpirate@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 265d
Have you ever watched Dollhouse? Slightly similar theme and (unlike Firefly) it had two seasons that as best I can tell were aired in the proper order.
Hegar@fedia.io · 17 pts · 265d
Dollhouse is weird though. I enjoyed it a lot but i don't think it's for everyone.
Plus the ending is not well done. They got cancelled and tried to pull together an impactful ending over a few episodes, when the original plan was to take a few seasons. I respect the urge to offer a real ending, but unsurprisingly it feels cheap and sudden.
Skavau@piefed.social · 6 pts · 265d
Well they made 2 lol, but S01 was done well
Ioughttamow@fedia.io · 14 pts · 265d
No, I’m pretty sure it was only one >.> <.<
dditty@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 265d
This concept and many other interesting sci-fi ideas are touched on in Ghost in the Shell stand alone complex which I'm watching right now. It's pretty good! A little quirky at times, and doesn't have the same level of emotional investment as some other animes I've watched, but I'm definitely enjoying it quite a bit
Sunsofold@lemmings.world · 4 pts · 264d
I loved the first series so much. With the exception of a bit of weakness transitioning to the second half, it was incredible, beautiful, poignant, smart, almost perfect. Then they made more, and it was clearly written by someone who understood nothing of the first series and approached a character driven exploration of philosophical questions of identity, ontology, and social responsibility with the intelligence and subtlety of Wile E Coyote vs Roadrunner produced by the Hallmark Channel.
The_Jit@lemmy.world · 55 pts · 265d
Heroes. First season was great, if they kept the concept of each season being a be set of people with special powers they could have made endless seasons and stories.
Brkdncr@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 265d
writers strike killed heroes.
Lemming6969@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 264d
They had insane power creep that wasn't sustainable and they wrote themselves into a corner anyway.
FishFace@piefed.social · 11 pts · 265d
By now the "loads of people have superpowers" trope had been done to death (and the best incarnation was Misfits), what more would you want to see?
ButteryMonkey@piefed.social · 5 pts · 265d
Misfits was amazing. I loved that it was people you wouldn’t normally give powers to, cinematically speaking.
whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 264d
Asbo X-Men was a lot of fun
ButteryMonkey@piefed.social · 2 pts · 264d
Had to look up that acronym/abbreviation, but that’s the best description of it I’ve ever seen, yes.
(Antisocial behavioral disorder, if one else needs to know)
Skavau@piefed.social · 6 pts · 265d
I've heard that Moving (Korea) is supposed to be a bit like Heroes.
goldteeth@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 32 pts · 265d
There was a miniseries on the SyFy channel called "Ascension" that, ostensibly, had the premise of being a murder mystery set on a massive generation ship launched at the height of the Cold War, which sounded fun in theory. 1960s Space Race technology, generations raised on Red Scare values despite the Soviet Union being a distant memory in every sense, a bunch of already-paranoid people trapped with a murderer with safety literally decades away - seems like there's a lot of room for a story there, right? Well, if the words "miniseries on the SyFy Channel" didn't tip you off...
::: spoiler spoiler, not that I recommend ever watching this show They solve the murder by the end of the second episode, or at least they think they do. The subplot is nonetheless dropped entirely.
Turns out the ship never left Earth. It's in an underground bunker. The entire thing was a ploy to trap America's greatest minds in a self-contained generational think tank and steal all the super-cool technology they invent. Which also eliminates the 1960s Space Race aesthetic because the ship is now, by design, more technologically-advanced than modern Earth, leaving... exactly none of the original hook intact.
Except two episodes later they reveal it wasn't even that, it was actually part of a top-secret government eugenics program designed to breed telepathic super-soldiers, and the show ends with a child super-soldier using her nascent psychokinetic powers to teleport all the bad guys into space for realsies. And the real murderer is some guy we'd never even heard of working for the, again, top-secret government eugenics program, and his motives were... Either never explained, or explained after the part of the show where I stopped watching. :::
So anyway, a show that actually stuck to that premise would probably make for a pretty compelling yarn.
Alcyonaria@piefed.world · 5 pts · 264d
God this show pissed me off with how silly it got
ButteryMonkey@piefed.social · 3 pts · 265d
I don’t want to read your spoiler because I have pretty low standards and enjoy things I probably shouldn’t just for the sake of it being novel; why do you not recommend it? Like is it at all any good and just disappointing how the plot was handled or bad generally?
goldteeth@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 264d
It's a show that relies a lot more on plot twists than actual plot, and they're the sort of twists that heavily recontextualize the story in such a way that everything that happened prior is rendered kinda irrelevant and thus never followed up on, which kills a lot of the narrative momentum before it even really has a chance to build. There's maybe one halfway-decent "oh shit" reveal followed by a long series of "huh?"s and a big final "where the fuck did that come from?". And by the time it's two or three twists in, anything that seemed unique about the concept gets sidelined in favor of some increasingly credibility-straining political intrigue with token sci-fi elements.
And in general I kinda thought they did a poor job of making the spaceship feel like a spaceship, making the descendants of the Red Scare people feel like descendants of Red Scare people, and making the 1960s Space Race technology feel like 1960s Space Race technology, but in that annoying way where it's clearly not from a lack of budget, just from a lack of imagination. It's all just some very generic people with generic sci-fi technology living in a generic sci-fi city that just so happens to be shaped like a spaceship. And it's one of those shows where the main plot (term used generously) grinds to a halt every couple act breaks so everyone can fuck and backstab each other for no reason other than the characters that aren't part of the plot right now need something to do. And then the whole thing kinda just... stops.
All in all I found the whole thing dull, generic, more than a little frustrating to watch and harder to get invested in the longer it went on. The main characters weren't all that relatable, barely likeable and not particularly memorable; the mystery at the very heart of the premise was handled in a way that made it very uncompelling, and the ending fails to justify about 70% of the story that preceded it.
ButteryMonkey@piefed.social · 2 pts · 264d
It kinda sounds like the same overall problems that 1899 had.. I watched that knowing the “big reveals every episode that makes everything pointless” problems (from comments much like yours) and was just as disappointed as I expected to be by that aspect, but it was still pretty good imo (probably blessed by lowered expectations), and I’m curious what another few seasons could have done after the big end reveal.. I’d probably have given it another season of my time. It was actually pretty well done, imho, all things considered. But then I have admittedly pretty low standards.
Although maybe this has lower production quality, by the sound of it. Any show that has to shoehorn multiple sex scenes when they don’t need them is just.. mmrf.. uncomfortable. So I expect to be uncomfortable.
I’m gunna give it a go with open eyes, I hope to be as disappointed as you were! Thanks for the detailed reply! I can’t wait to know exactly what you mean! :D
shalafi@lemmy.world · 28 pts · 265d
Probably blaspheming here, but another show like Firefly would rock. Don't try to catch that exact lighting in a bottle, just give us space cowboys. In space.
cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 20 pts · 265d
'Cowboy bebop' did it three years earlier and much better. But then I'm very partial to jazz and film noir. Then got remade by the same people much grittier as a period piece set in immediately post-feudal police state Japan.
Edit: in kind of the same way a lot of Kurosawa films got remade as westerns
Hoimo@ani.social · 4 pts · 264d
Bebop is very different from Firefly imo. They're both good, but I wouldn't say to watch one over the other. I can't directly compare them like that.
Bebop is smooth and classy, more focused on music and choreography. Firefly is way more grounded and physical; lots of greebled grimy tools, machinery, carts.
You can see a similar divide in the themes. Firefly is way more rural, frontier type western. They get rid of small-town despots and help trading outposts under siege, because they're the only help around. Bebop is the end of the wild west: they all have stories about the real west, but that era is over. Cities are growing, the government starts playing a role, outlaws are on the run. The heroes are struggling to let go of the past and find their place in this new world.
I also want to shout out Outlaw Star, released in the shadow of Bebop. It's not western at all, a bit messier in its theme, but still a lot of fun.
Ageroth@reddthat.com · 2 pts · 265d
What's the remade show? Samurai champloo?
cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 265d
Yep. Same characters, secondary characters shuffled slightly.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 265d
Yeah I love space westerns and unfortunately they're very uncommon and rarely done well. Firefly had the huge advantages of being Whedon at his peak with a great cast (as he often had) at the right time and with the courage to commit to the genre in a way I wish more would.
I don't want more Whedon, his golden era is over and I'm now convinced that he really only excels at the overlying ideas for a show and casting. What I want is someone who loves the genre to do something similar, but better.
cannedtuna@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 265d
What about dandy guys? In space.
GraniteM@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 264d
When Star Trek: The Next Generation was announced, everybody was pissed. "You can't have Star Trek without Captain Kirk!" "The first officer is a soap opera supporting actor!" "The captain is bald??!"
And then, lo and behold, it was the best Star Trek, almost entirely absent of rehashing, paying slavish tribute to, or shamelessly trading on nostalgia for The Original Series.
So, have someone go to the used spaceship dealer, buy a rusty old Firefly class light freighter, and go off on their own adventures. Nothing wrong with new crew, same universe.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 264d
Haven't watched ‘Firefly’, but that description sounds like 50s-60s Western sci-fi literature, which was criticized by Stanisław Lem with these exact words.
yessikg@fedia.io · 1 pts · 264d
Have you watched Killjoys? Very similar vibes
boydster@sh.itjust.works · 24 pts · 265d
Rings of Power. I really wanted it to love it.
CallMeButtLove@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 265d
This one hurts. The potential was there, the visuals were genuinely incredible, the acting was solid, and I remember liking the music. But the writing was atrocious. It was like they went with the first draft. And also they piled on all those stupid prequel tropes like: "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to find out how this iconic character got their NAME!"
boydster@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 264d
The music and the visuals are what I kept going back for, and the clearly-insane hope that someone on the writing team might have picked up any of the Silmarillion or History of Middle earth books and just given them some consideration
MutilationWave@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 263d
It's my understanding that they were limited to the Lord of the Rings appendices for source material. Weren't allowed to touch Silmarillion.
I want a Silmarillion show very much. I don't think it would work as movies, but each episode telling a different story.
IWW4@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 261d
The concept behind Rings of Power is what is wrong with the show.
The Silmarillion is a terrible “book” to try to adapt to a TV show. The whole thing is a bunch of incomplete ideas. Add to that, Amazon wasn’t even able to get the full rights to it..
Amazon should have just done an adaptation of the LOTRs or done nothing at all.
psion1369@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 265d
The original plan for the second season of Stranger Things was supposed to be a separate story with a few connections to the first season, each season being a different story and cast. I would have loved to see that actually happen, since the second season lost my interest a couple episodes in.
SaraTonin@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 264d
Heroes, too. Same deal.
Delphia@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 264d
Altered Carbon.
Season 1 was GREAT. Season 2 wasnt.
They fucked up the most important thing possible with a series changing actors for the same character. YOU NEED TO MAKE US LOVE THE CHARACTER NOT THE ACTOR. They didnt lay in a bunch of physical gestures, catchphrases, signature moves, character traits. Nothing that made be believe Anthony Mackie was the same guy as Joel Kinnaman.
Hoimo@ani.social · 5 pts · 264d
Altered Carbon had trouble keeping their premise straight too. When anyone can swap their body, you can't recognize people by sight any more. They used this to the MC's advantage a few times, but you'd think that people in that society would be more aware of the possibility.
Like they had the subplot with the MC's sister(?) where he spills all his secrets to the person in his sister's body. I'm sure he really needed someone to trust, but at least verify someone's identity before you share life-or-death information!
Delphia@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 264d
Oh definitely, there were flaws. The absolute disbelief that Mackie was Kovacs was what made S2 almost unwatchable.
nothrone@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 19 pts · 265d
I would love to watch something like The Walking Dead, but more chill. More to do with building a community, and re-imagining society. Surviving the zombies would be a topic, of course, but without all the extra evilness of the remaining humans.
And episodes that don't force me to increase my TV's brightness to the max.
ThunderComplex@lemmy.today · 6 pts · 265d
Modern Family with Zombies
federated_toast@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 264d
Santa Clarita Diet?
ThunderComplex@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 264d
You know, I’ve never really fucked with that show. I watched it a couple times n it’s just fine-ish. Idk why tho, it should be up my wheelhouse but it doesn’t do it for me.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works · 19 pts · 265d
Sword art online. Drop the rape and incest beats entirely. It had potential to be a great anime about the meaning of life and instead largely ignored that possibility.
ButteryMonkey@piefed.social · 7 pts · 265d
I have that show on my watchlist so thanks for the warning about themes.
A7thStone@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 265d
My recommendation for SAO is watch the first season and pretend like the rest doesn't exist.
Lairo@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 264d
Mine is legitimately just watch SAO abridged. It reworks story beats for a smoother story in addition to adding gags
sulgoth@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 264d
Better character writing too.
ButteryMonkey@piefed.social · 1 pts · 264d
Is that rework anything like full metal alchemist Vs. FMA brotherhood? Like starts the same but then goes somewhere else?
I already have a copy of the whole SAO so I’ll probably still watch it (I’ve watched some pretty questionable stuff all the way through just because I started it..) but if it’s genuinely worth watching both, even if just for the sake of comparison, I’ll try to find a copy.
Nikelui@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 264d
SAO abridged is a fan parody that you can find on YouTube, but as said before me, it has a way better storyline than the original and the production quality is incredible for a fan project.
The only downside is that the team can make approximately one episode per year.
Lairo@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 264d
Brotherhood is an official anime. SAO abridged is a fan made parody on YouTube. it recuts and redubs but that's it. And its purpose isn't to tell the whole SAO story, it's to make gags. It just inadvertently made a better story than SAO itself, mostly by changing certain characters motivations
Edit: oh and if you're intent on watching the full version at all, watch it before the abridged
ryathal@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 265d
None of the cringe happens until the end of the first season.
termaxima@slrpnk.net · 17 pts · 265d
I want a faithful adaptation of Asimov's Foundation, where it's the 1940s in space like in the novels.
Guy gets to planet, immediately buys a physical newspaper with physical cash. Takes a taxi cab. Everyone smokes constantly. Space soldiers are bribed with dishwashers and fridges, computers barely exist. Every desk has an integrated atomic ashtray to vaporise cigarette butts. Scientists carry bulky pocket calculators.
SaraTonin@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 264d
I’d love a proper retro-futuristic TV series. The latest Fantastic Four film showed that people will swallow a retro-futuristic vibe. Just something unironic with rayguns.
Redacted@lemmy.zip · 16 pts · 265d
Please remake and give proper endings to warehouse 13 and utopia
rumschlumpel@feddit.org · 15 pts · 265d
Applies to lots of anime. I've been really disappointed by Dragon Maid. Lots of LGBT+-themed anime in general, I'd want to see them remade in an environment that lets them be more explicit about the LGBT+ themes instead of dancing around the issue with that "just really really good friends" stuff (or just cancelled before the story gets there).
Ashtear@piefed.social · 8 pts · 265d
Dancing around queer romance is a problem in Japanese games as well, and it's so very disappointing. It's plain as day to everyone's what's going on but they won't go there.
Tangentially, sanitizing romance in general is also a problem with Japanese games (and games developed abroad that borrow their concepts). Some studios are outright afraid of offending men by having a woman character express a love interest in anyone, so it's just absent entirely from swathes of the cast, if not everyone.
With gaming having become such a big footprint in entertainment, I worry that sort of thing is going to feed back into TV.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 265d
That was my thought on Nina. Like, very, very close to just nailing it. Then folding entirely on what they had been setting up.
ITGuyLevi@programming.dev · 14 pts · 264d
Heroes had so much going for it before the writers strike, the premise of that show felt so good then it just got bad.
IcyToes@sh.itjust.works · 13 pts · 265d
Revolution.
faintwhenfree@lemmus.org · 10 pts · 265d
For those wondering, premise was what if all electricity just stopped working. What would happen to our society.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 265d
Yeah, the premise was awesome, world building was decent, but just too teen drama imo
klu9@piefed.social · 2 pts · 265d
It was fun sometimes watching Tracy Spiridakos struggle to emote 😄
(And all the yanks thinking the woman clearly speaking in an Australian accent was British.... no, actually that was confusing. Took me almost a season to realize the character was actually supposed to be British.)
TribblesBestFriend@startrek.website · 13 pts · 265d
Almost Human
Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 265d
I liked that show a lot as is. But it definitely had a lot of potential with more season.
showmeyourkizinti@startrek.website · 4 pts · 265d
I object, they didn't 'Bungle' that series. Fox out and out murdered it. The show was great and if Fox had any faith at all it would have run for seven seasons and movie.
dethedrus@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 265d
Fantastic show intentionally destroyed by Fox.
TribblesBestFriend@startrek.website · 2 pts · 265d
👆
burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 265d
Was that the one with the supernatural roommates? What went wrong with it? I loved the show for as long as I watched it.
bitchkat@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 265d
British sentient robots. I thought it was quite good.
SaraTonin@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 264d
Was there a US version? Or did they rename it in the US? Or are we thinking about different things? Gemma Chan as the lead robot?
bitchkat@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 264d
This is the ahow: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4122068
There was an original Swedish show I think.
SaraTonin@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 264d
Yeah that’s the one. They must have renamed it in the US
ButteryMonkey@piefed.social · 2 pts · 265d
I think the one you are thinking of is Being Human, and there’s both a US and a UK version of that.
burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 264d
Sounds right. It definitely wasn't sentient robots.
ButteryMonkey@piefed.social · 1 pts · 264d
If you haven’t seen the UK version, I recommend it over the US version, since it was the original :) I like foreign tv though, fewer nonsense romance plots in general.
burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 264d
Oh, I didn't even watch the american version. Like the office (and other shows) showed, americans just take something, dumb it down, make it bad, and then call it the height of comedy.
Tehdastehdas@piefed.social · 10 pts · 265d
The Starlost needs a remake. Great premise, dollar store execution.
What they wanted:
How it went:
kandoh@reddthat.com · 10 pts · 265d
Star Trek Voyager. I don't think I need to explain further, we all have the same ideas.
Looks like the upcoming game will do the fixing though, so that's good.
Gibberish9031@lemmy.ml · 10 pts · 265d
Space Force, really good cast and concept but I wish they better writing.
Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 265d
Of course they had to end the second season in a cliffhanger so we'll never get to see its resolution thanks to Netflix canceling it. There should be a law about that.
Delphia@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 264d
Some of the writing was VERY good, but you had to wade through a lot of filler to find it.
I still love Steve Carrell hiss yelling "Stop saying Panties!"
eldoom@lemmy.ml · 10 pts · 265d
The Expanse. Or at least an ending to the Expanse that we have. I loved those books so much and they did the series so dirty.
I do accept that the last (I think it was) 2 books don't translate to film very well but at least they could have tried!
IcyToes@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 265d
Dare I continue? I kind of switched off from it as the main female protagonist went from brilliant bad ass engineer to weak love struck teenager. It was galling. The story was so fun, but I was suffering through the teen drama.
I made it when they went through the thing and made discoveries on the planet. (Vague but failed at spolier tag).
eldoom@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 265d
Ya see that's how they did the books dirty.
Without spoilers, the books are kinda written like GoT where they change perspective a lot and in the books she had kinda just seen like 9/11 x 30 and then a little first hand and her best friend react to it in a very unexpected way and say he wanted more... They turned her PTSD into teen drama and when it wasn't wildly decried the teen drama eventually took over everything.
They really do the books pretty well up to that actual point though. And the events that happen do lead up to the main story points for the most part
IcyToes@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 263d
Fair point and you captured it well. Maybe I need to hold my nose and finish it. Not sure if my partner is ready for this yet though.
IWW4@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 261d
You stopped in Season 4..
No you should not continue. Seasons 1-3 of The Expanse the show was owned y SyFy. It was canceled and Amazon picked it up for Seasons 4-6 and the show turned to utter dogshit.
Not only did the Naomi character turn to shit so did all the others, particularly the heart of the show Amos.
IcyToes@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 258d
Oof. So, the payoff on the story wasn't worth it?
IWW4@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 258d
Absolutely not. It was such a waste of great characters and a great setting.
blackn1ght@feddit.uk · 1 pts · 264d
I think what made that so annoying at the time was that by that point we knew the show was coming to an end but the story was moving at a snail's pace. There was less and less time to cover an enormous amount of content and it felt like Naomi's arc was taking way too much time.
Re-watching it later was more enjoyable.
IcyToes@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 263d
Covered my feelings. Maybe I need to give it another try.
ToffeeIsForClosers@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 265d
Wayward Pines. Great concept but then they basically explained everything in a handful of episodes and took the whole mystery out of it. Also, some of the acting was terrible.
In some ways, Silo is its spiritual successor but without
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler monsters. ::: It corrects for those mistakes and sustains the mystery.
Another one I’d like to see redone or relaunched, West World. Incredible first season. Nothing left in the writer’s tank after that. That first season was so good though that I don’t think it can be rebooted.
moopet@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 264d
Yeah, when I started WP I thought it was going to spend the whole series building up to some kind of slow reveal but no.
toomanypancakes@piefed.world · 8 pts · 265d
Lost Girl. I was so in for a succubus themed mystery drama type affair, but I couldn't maintain interest through the second season. It was slow and awkwardly written, but I think the subject is solid and it could have been done a lot better.
Give me Lucifer with a Succubus lead, come on TV execs
yessikg@fedia.io · 2 pts · 264d
The show actually had a great ending, but season 4 was really bad
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 264d
Is it too early to say Wheel of Time?
Skavau@piefed.social · 2 pts · 264d
Is Wheel of Time even viable to be adapted into a TV series? Isn't it just flatout far too long realistically.
Nikelui@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 264d
Unless there are budget constrain, why not? You can always make longer seasons.
I do realize that 14 seasons x 20 episodes seems unrealistic and will probably be cancelled, though.
Darkaga@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 263d
Supernatural got 15 seasons of 20+ episodes each so I feel like the only thing holding us back is that it's not 2005 anymore.
Everything is 10 episodes per season and inconsistent release schedules now.
sexual_tomato@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 264d
Eh, you could condense books 7-9 into a single season imo
Skavau@piefed.social · 1 pts · 264d
Yeah, that's what I mean. Amazon has the money to throw at it. But many actors would not stick around for that length of time.
Ashtear@piefed.social · 7 pts · 265d
I'd love to see an un-bungled True Detective again.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 265d
night country was pretty good.
BodePlotHole@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 264d
Halo.
Just make it animated, and don't add anything.
It's almost impressive how bad they fucked this up...
ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 264d
Tbh I never needed a "Halo" series, I already have one and it's perfect (though I heard it came back, I stopped watching at the OG "end" and didn't know until way late that it had returned):
goldteeth@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 264d
You know what, I already did one but I'm gonna do another one: Lovecraft Country.
First episode did just about everything you'd want out of a Jim Crow-era supernatural horror road trip mystery. Felt like they really had a handle on the whole "fear of the unknown and incomprehensible" vibe that you don't see done well very often, the cast had great chemistry, and the whole theme of "the real incomprehensible eldritch abomination threatening human sanity is racism" was executed flawlessly. They walked a very fine tightrope between homage and condemnation of Lovecraft's whole... deal and nailed it in one.
And then the main mystery is resolved by the second episode and the whole thing devolves into a very uneven anthology of psychic snakes and angry ghosts and like, Nazi wizards worshipping what I think was just the regular devil and overall very known and comprehensible horrors that didn't really hold my attention for long enough to see if they even tried to tie them all together.
Man, all I wanted was a long-form cosmic horror story wrapped in a character-driven prestige TV period drama with some biting social commentary that doesn't suck. They don't make a lot of those!
yeather@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 264d
You might like Watchmen. The TV show on HBO not the movie. It’s actually a sequel to the original run of comics and original ending.
Tronn4@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 265d
Battlestar Galactica. How can anyone mess up a 70's disco sci fi?
Sunsofold@lemmings.world · 4 pts · 264d
I'd kind of like to see someone do Brave New World a bit better. It was done in the 60s(?) but it's just a bit out of date today, while the book is absolutely something the world needs to think about now. A modern version might actually be even enhanced by certain elements of the modern style.
Skavau@piefed.social · 4 pts · 264d
There was a modern attempt by Peacock in 2020. It got cancelled.
Sunsofold@lemmings.world · 2 pts · 264d
Quite disappointing.
Skavau@piefed.social · 1 pts · 264d
The adaptations quality, or that it got cancelled?
Sunsofold@lemmings.world · 1 pts · 264d
I haven't seen it. It's disappointing that it was cancelled.
Skavau@piefed.social · 1 pts · 264d
Ah, it was okay. It was a reimagining of it. Very philosophical. Closer to Westworld imitation than Brave New World in many ways.
yessikg@fedia.io · 4 pts · 264d
Once Upon A Time, Van Helsing (the Syfy tv show), Supernatural (specially the heaven lore), and Yellowjackets
pseudo@jlai.lu · 2 pts · 264d
Once Upon a Time had a great concept. The execution often was so so but the concept very neat.
They should have gone through the first season fully fantastic without ever acknowledge if Henry was right or simply crazy and started to reveal the fantasy part only for the season 2. They should also have made the family less tangled and never ever pretended dead people could ever (ever) be revived. Finally they should have somehow either improve Emma's character or glorifying her way less.
whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 264d
Swamp Thing was so much worse than it could have been. Gothic horror, beauty and the beast, cosmic terror, body horror, monster of the week serial but it's a bigger monster hunting monsters, etc it's got all these interesting angles and they ended up focusing on none of them.
SynAcker@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 264d
Dead Like Me And the Dark Crystal show needed the ending it deserved.
timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 264d
LA Brea.
Great premise ruined by bad writing full of plot holes and somehow worse acting. But man, the concept could go so far.
cockmushroom@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 264d
Severance. Season 2 was a money grab and an artistically fraught endeavour from conception. They shouldn't have tried to write it, let alone record and release it.
thejoker954@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 260d
Powers (2015). The Biggest problem was it was on PlayStation network. Limited who could watch it and lacked a real budget.