Thinking of last week’s post and the general notion of sharing creative work that excites, I stumbled across an interview with Rockne S. O’Bannon about Farscape, the sprawling space opera that ran on TV from 1999 to 2003. How much do I like Farscape? Let me put it this way: I’ve introduced many, many people to Firefly: lent them the DVDs, pestered them via social media when it’s been streaming on Netflix. If I learned…
So now that summer is over, including that show with the dragons, you may be wondering, “What shows are actually coming back this year?” Jen Trolio and Caroline Framke over at Vox have answers. This is one of those perennial Vox pieces I’m glad they do every year, because there’s a lot of shows. In fact, some might say there’s a glut of shows out there, which has led to occasional questions of whether we’re…
On my Twitter feed, I frequently use the hashtag “#futureTV,” because I’m borderline obsessed with how TV is transforming, both in terms of how it’s getting made and how it’s being viewed (or “consumed” if you want to be extra biz-speaky). So this past holiday weekend, while our Netflix connection seemed to strain under the weight people travelling to Stars Hollow, I re-read Todd VanDerWerff’s piece in Vox about how Netflix –and cord cutting in…
I tweeted out Vox’s rundown of shows that were renewed, canceled, or ended via the Team J twitter a couple weeks ago, though it’s since been updated further. Last Tuesday, they not only updated that list, but Todd VanDerWerff did a great rundown of the various reasons a show might get canceled. Within that explanation comes a great overview about how TV shows make money. For those of us looking to understand the economics of making…
I’ve been thinking about “Peak TV” and such from a couple of articles I talked about back in January. Of course, one of the issues with TV or any cinematic development is that you need something of a development pipeline. As Walt Hickey’s article on FiveThirtyEight last week goes into, that might be one of the biggest issues facing HBO right now. Apparently, Game of Thrones may be shorter lived than some of us hoped.
I love to learn more about the nuts and bolts of how productions get made as it teaches me what I should do (and can conceivably do) for the indie productions I work on. So I found this feature article by Caroline Framke in Vox about how an episode of The Americans gets on the air quite absorbing. And I don’t even watch the series (yet).
In honor of the impending Season 2 of Daredevil on Netflix this Friday, I’m going to re-posting a list I put on Facebook after my wife and I finally got around to seeing it last Summer. For those of you wondering if you should jump in, you should definitely start with Season 1… and I stand by all these observations. Warning: Potential Spoilers for people who want to go in with no expectations… Daredevil on…
This is the sixth entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. No worrisome things today, just more information on the new Star Trek series, set to arrive at CBS’s new “All Access” channel in January 2017. Over at a site called Trek Core they’ve summarized a speech CBS president Les Moonves gave to CBS investors recently at a conference. (For those interested,…
This is the fourth entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. “A new hope?!?,” you Trek partisans cry. Yes, I went there. But stay with me, because although the tomfoolery (Garth-foolery?) of the Axanar lawsuit continues, CBS went ahead and announced the showrunner for their new Star Trek TV series: Bryan Fuller. Yes, someone who has both written for Star Trek and led…
Last week, I made passing reference to Television’s “Golden Age,” an often-invoked, but still rather unofficial designation for the TV-viewing time we find ourselves in. Yes, I know some people still want to cling to the 50s being a golden age, but while my adoration for some skits of Your Show of Shows and episodes of I Love Lucy is second to none, please. TV is currently rocking. One of the side effects of this embarrassment…