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  • 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...

    So anyway, a show that actually stuck to that premise would probably make for a pretty compelling yarn.

    • God this show pissed me off with how silly it got

    • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

    • The show actually had a great ending, but season 4 was really bad

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • Once Upon A Time, Van Helsing (the Syfy tv show), Supernatural (specially the heaven lore), and Yellowjackets

    • 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.

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