You'll never see them again

That explains why I'm so familiar with boomer shows and movies, despite being a millennial. There was a lot of old content and remakes on TV then.

We don't talk about that.

In general I feel like reboots are lazy. There is a plethora of created and not-yet-created IP to choose from but producers continue to reboot the same franchises often ignoring established cannon in favor of “popcorn eating masses” appeal. Reboots frequently result in a generalization or dilution of the original plot with character traits dialed up to 11.

To answer your question more specifically; yes. Movies like ‘The Magnificent Seven’, franchises like Star Trek in the 90s, even shows like MASH or Buffy the Vampire Slayer (both based on films of the same name) showed that reboots don’t have to be in the same vein as their source content either by a change of genre, a change in timeframe, or even a change in medium. The best reboots have always brought their own new flavor to or take on the original material. But even doing that little means taking a risk and that doesn’t seem to be something producers are willing to do right now.

Nu Trek has been consistently awful.

only SNW has come close to anything that feels like the spirit of trek

The 'Lost In Space" reboot was amazing. They took everything that was dumb in the original show and made it smart. Then they took the one really good thing [Dr. Smith] and made them fantastic.

I'm reserving my judgement until I see the reboot of the Munsters.

Yeah. That first season was really good! And Kate Mara!

My guess is that if you didn't like the dog scene, you wouldn't like the rest of the show. The tone is the same.

Its the idea that not every character should be likeable and not all media should be without friction.

I... generally think stuff like that in the first few episodes is really stupid. Mostly it just turns things into misery porn and is a great way to alienate your audience. I think a much better approach is to lure the audience in so that they don't quite realize when Walter/Saul/Kim became truly irredeemable monsters... even if that tends to lead to people never realizing it.

And I think it is extra disingenuous to pretend that House of Cards was some daring show that bucked all the norms. It wasn't HBO levels of sexposition but they definitely were playiing up the "you can't watch this on network TV" from the first episode.

Print, not TV, but one of my favorite authors is Harry Connolly and his Twenty Palaces series had a pretty infamous chapter that was all one long run on sentence (I forget how many pages but I want to say 5-10?). You don't necessarily realize it in the moment but it is a hard read that is mentally tiring and it perfectly suits the contents of the chapter. Apparently basically every single beta reader hated it and he has alluded to it being why his Agent and Publisher dropped him and... I probably would too. I loved it but it very much hurt the overall pacing of the book to a large degree.

But that was also 3 or 4 books in. Not the first chapter of the first book (which was a child burning to death horribly... Yup. Connolly definitely got a hold of some incriminating photos or something).

This is how I've always felt about it too. All of Whedon's other shows had twists that made the audience hate entire seasons; there's no reason to believe Firefly would have escaped that pattern.

So instead of being sad it died early, we can be glad we can still imagine where it could have gone in the best case scenario. The vision in our minds will likely be better than what we would have got if it'd continued.

No need to worry about Jayne's inevitable face-heel turn, or whatever other terrible subplots could potentially have cropped up in later seasons like River developing explicit (rather than merely suggested) incestuous feelings for Simon, or Inara betraying the crew for a cure to her disease (before being welcomed back a season later), or Kaylee getting killed off out of nowhere because Whedon loves doing that to characters of her archetype, or YoSaffBridge becoming a core crew member after we learn her tragic backstory even though her awful personality hasn't changed at all.

And that's not even getting into what the network execs, who hated the show, would have done with their meddling. Things could have been so much worse. Fans should console themselves with the fact that the show at least died with its dignity intact, and we even got a movie that resolved a few of the major hanging threads.

No one talks about famous actor James Dean becoming an ultraconservative asshole, being closeted racist, or a serial abuser of women. He died before anything like that could happen. Firefly is the same way.

Something like this would have happened even if Joss Whedon wasn't revealed to be a scumbag. Adam Baldwin, the actor who played Jayne, went on to become a major mouthpiece for the alt-right and a mainstay of conservative Twitter. IIRC he's even the one who named GamerGate (not that the name required even a modicum of creativity).

If you want to know how the series would've been if it had stayed on, you can read the comics.

Yeah, but half a season?

Filler can be good, it can also be bad, and perhaps most strangely it can be "bad" but also "fuck you I want to see Goku scream 'give me your energy' for four episodes before he releases the spirit bomb. Again."

I think your opinion is by far the more popular view right now. I completely disagree though. Almost every mini-series I see I'm left dumbstruck as I feel like any decent editor could have gotten the same story across just as well with a 2 or 2.5h movie instead. I feel like they are just wasting my time.

i mean i haven't rewatched xfiles since the 90s but isn't that more of a victim of being a transition between monster of the week episodic and season long story arcs?

just an endless slog through Chris Carter’s poorly planned mythology

Exactly. Watching just those episodes on a binge is going to be... okay, at best. You really need the time in-between those plot beats to let it marinade a bit. Let the conspiracy and shadow-government machinations grow in your head. It lets you get real hungry for the next morsel of "the truth" that eventually comes your way. Then you savor it while you watch Mulder out-think a Genie or whatever.

Which one was filler?

Between that and how much cheaper everything was

I mean, here's an article from 1992 complaining that TV costs too much to produce.

I'm sure a proper Marxist could say something about the stead decline of profit. But if TV studios are strapped for cash, you'd never know from that validations of their parent companies.

it’s no wonder no film actors would be caught dead in a TV show until prestige television broke out of that mold.

There was definitely a jump from TV to Movies that people didn't want to come back from. But there's also only so many hours in the day, and half of making a movie was the market you did after filming was completed.

But at the end of the day... People remember Cheers and Cosby Show much more vividly than The Critic or Joey.

If it's on Netflix, don't expect them to finish the show.

Yes, it was a guaranteed paycheck... until the show ended. And doing a movie in the off months basically only worked for a Clooney level talent where anyone who ever interacted with him realized he was a generational talent that guys and gals would swoon for. Everyone else MAYBE could get a bit part if they knew the production crew (see: The Schwim on Band of Brothers). And then, if you were lucky, you were basically typecast by the time the show ended and stuck either playing the same character or needing to find a company that wanted to take a chance on you reinventing yourself... which lined up with the weinsteins of the world.

And all of that assumes that you aren't in a role that requires you to spend most of your off time staying in shape and having more or less the same appearance in case pick-ups are required. Otherwise you have entire VFX teams working to... remove a mustache.

That is why there is increasing pushback to Marvel Movie contracts from a lot of actors. Yes, it is a guaranteed paycheck (although those get smaller and smaller with each geneartion) but it is also the only thing you can really do for however many years in case you get called up that you just got one of your appearances added to a TV show everyone will hate.

Which is more or less where we are at. Sure you sometimes have something like a Zendaya where the Disney Channel actress you got for your lead suddenly becomes the most popular actress on the planet and you have to work around her schedule AND all the supporting actors who became high B listers. But mostly you are just dealing with talent who care more about their careers than making sure they are available for the one episode you want them to come back next year.

Its why so much of the Game of Thrones fandom (and original creator...) clearly don't have much production experience. Yes, it would have been cool to have arcs like Lady Stoneheart. But the chances of Michelle Fairley being interested in coming back four years later for two episodes is nigh zero AND would have given her way more negotiating power than studios want. Same for all the other one off characters who come back two books later.

Dude id be fine with like 3 per week... if they do 13-14 episodes then they guaranteed two months streaming income. As it is... yes im gonna just keep rotating streaming services.

I spread it out regardless, I just don’t want to pick up a show without a conclusion.

There's so many shows that I watch one episode of something with the wife every night, and we haven’t run out of stuff to watch in years. We like to watch one show at a time till we finish the season before we move on to something else, so we just wait till the show or season is over

Also see Life on Mars, Journeyman, Freaks and Geeks, Pushing Daisies, and Freaking Firefly.

None of this is new.

You just have to forget that it's Graham Linehan who wrote that because it never quite hits the same when you realise who it was. It's the same with IT Crowd and Father Ted.

Have you seen the third season? Came out in 2017. I think it's some of the best TV that's ever been made.

Especially episode 8. Just pure David Lynch surreal perfection, right in my veins.