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Straczynski/Wachowski Sense8 on Netflix


SpaceChampion

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Also, the only show to my knowledge with a pre-planned five year story arc that came after B5 was Dark Skies, which was cancelled after one season. Certainly Lost made most of it up as they went along, as did BSG (they had a rough plan which covered maybe the first two seasons and nothing after that).

I'm pretty sure Supernatural's first five seasons were planned from the start (to the point that the original showrunner left after his story was complete).

Anyway, it looks interesting, even though it's not FreakAngels.

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I'm pretty sure Supernatural's first five seasons were planned from the start (to the point that the original showrunner left after his story was complete).

Anyway, it looks interesting, even though it's not FreakAngels.

The plans were fairly loose for that show though. It's usually monster of the week with occasional arc thrown in. Not much different from the SG-1 template.

I'm sure the characters wouldn't have died/came back so often otherwise. Plus they probably didn't expect Jeffrey Dean Morgan to take off (he was at the time anyway) resulting in his character being forgotten.

Still looking forward to it. At this stage we can only hope TV is the format for the Wachoskis.

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The plans were fairly loose for that show though. It's usually monster of the week with occasional arc thrown in. Not much different from the SG-1 template.

I'm sure the characters wouldn't have died/came back so often otherwise. Plus they probably didn't expect Jeffrey Dean Morgan to take off (he was at the time anyway) resulting in his character being forgotten.

I think you're being harsh, or at least inaccurate. It's monster of the week, sure, but right from the start it's also deliberately building a long-term arc that builds within each season and from season to season.

And I don't think the characters died and came back nearly so often as you apparently remember. At least not for the first 5, I don't really know what happened after that. I stopped watching because the very final shot (clearly not part of the arc) made me so angry.

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I think you're being harsh, or at least inaccurate. It's monster of the week, sure, but right from the start it's also deliberately building a long-term arc that builds within each season and from season to season.

And I don't think the characters died and came back nearly so often as you apparently remember. At least not for the first 5, I don't really know what happened after that. I stopped watching because the very final shot (clearly not part of the arc) made me so angry.

There were episodes making jokes about it that happened somewhere between seasons 4-6. I do believe that there were several concepts for the show the creator wanted to cover eg an apocalypse but I don't think it was ever one that dictated how the show progressed/evolved. As Wert has covered it's actually a rare thing, even with the TV shows that have a reputation for it so I guess Supernatural should count for being planned. There's only really shows that are faithfully based on books that are really micro-managed long term planned.

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I'm pretty sure Supernatural's first five seasons were planned from the start (to the point that the original showrunner left after his story was complete).

Anyway, it looks interesting, even though it's not FreakAngels.

The plans were fairly loose for that show though. It's usually monster of the week with occasional arc thrown in. Not much different from the SG-1 template.

I'm sure the characters wouldn't have died/came back so often otherwise. Plus they probably didn't expect Jeffrey Dean Morgan to take off (he was at the time anyway) resulting in his character being forgotten.

Still looking forward to it. At this stage we can only hope TV is the format for the Wachoskis.

There were episodes making jokes about it that happened somewhere between seasons 4-6. I do believe that there were several concepts for the show the creator wanted to cover eg an apocalypse but I don't think it was ever one that dictated how the show progressed/evolved. As Wert has covered it's actually a rare thing, even with the TV shows that have a reputation for it so I guess Supernatural should count for being planned. There's only really shows that are faithfully based on books that are really micro-managed long term planned.

Actually the creator of the show himself confirmed he always had idea for the 5 season arc and he knew how he wanted story to develop. He did play lose in first season and so because they weren't sure if the show will be picked up for more seasons and if they will be able to do 5 season arc but he was building the story in the same direction the whole time. And only characters dying were secondary characters which is kind of the most usual thing in Supernatural. :dunno:

Re: this show

I will definitely give it a chance. I hope it doesn't become Heroes 2.0 though.

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Actually the creator of the show himself confirmed he always had idea for the 5 season arc and he knew how he wanted story to develop. He did play lose in first season and so because they weren't sure if the show will be picked up for more seasons and if they will be able to do 5 season arc but he was building the story in the same direction the whole time. And only characters dying were secondary characters which is kind of the most usual thing in Supernatural. :dunno:

Re: this show

I will definitely give it a chance. I hope it doesn't become Heroes 2.0 though.

Ok, I'll concede this show had an arc but even in your quote to the showrunner saying so you admit it didn't play out that way for at least the first season. I'd also want to see some original documents showing that JD Morgan's character wasn't a part of said arc as I suspect he would have been.

But yes it has more of an overall arc than many shows do - although I'm sure when genre shows are pitched most of them have to come with ideas of how it would run for more than a season. Otherwise the money people would be more reluctant to give them money. Although it appears there are plenty of shows that do get commissioned on a single season premise.

I'm probably being overly argumentative but I'm in post British general election mode :)

Onto this show. I hope if there is an overall arc that they break it down into satisfying season arcs too. It's reckless to assume you can get multiple seasons and also really annoying if a show gets canned before there's any resolution. This is even moreso for netflix because if it is canned, all the episodes are filmed. At least with 22 episode "weekly" shows they usually know if they are getting cancelled a few episodes beforehand so they can try and give as satisfying an ending as possible with the time available.

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"We pitched it as a five-year story. We've mapped out five seasons of this thing, our actor deals are being made for five seasons, five or six depending on the breaks," said Straczynski.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I like the look of it. Was Somni from Cloud Atlas one of the people?

Yes.

Very good interview with JMS here.

He says watching it in 4-episode binges would work, if a person doesn't have time to watch it all 12 in one binge, like he'd prefer.

Anybody want to watch and comment here on the show, doing it in 4-episode binges per week?

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A proper widescreen, HD version would have been a lot easier if the CGI files hadn't been lost; the intention was always to re-render the CGI for widescreen at a later date. As far as I'm aware B5 in HD isn't impossible, just expensive.

Remastering the pilot apparently is now impossible, because the storage facility where the pilot film was kept was flooded (!) and then invaded by rats (!!). The rest of the series may be doable, if the original film survived intact.

Re-doing the CGI would be insanely expensive. Some episodes (Severed Dreams, Into the Fire, The Fall of Night, Shadow Dancing, War Without End, Endgame and a lot more) had 100-120 shots in them with some kind of CG element present. For comparison, a movie like The Fellowship of the Ring had 480 (and The Return of the King had close to 1,400). Re-rendering the thousands and thousands of shots from the entire series to a HD quality would require something like the CG budget of a reasonably-sized action film, and the return on that has to be questionable, especially since ST:TNG apparently underperformed (although that was more a failure of marketing and timing, such as not releasing a full-series box set yet, which is crazy).

I also get the impression that WB regard B5 as being awesome but of its time. Even if you redid all the CGI you'd still have problems with how the old-school sets (wood pretending to be metal) hold up in HD, which I suspect would be not very well (some of them look a bit iffy on DVD, to be honest). There's a reason why WB are actively exploring simply remaking the whole show from scratch, and why JMS has played his movie rights card to potentially put the kibosh on that.

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Review from Grantland's Andy Greenwald.







But while I don’t come to praise Sense8 — clearly! — I have no interest in burying it. Sense8 is bad in a way that feels entirely fresh. Its untamed ego is inseparable from its wild imagination. This distinction matters. Rather than look at Netflix’s considerable investment in Sense8 as an act of arrogance (“We can make anything!”) or folly (“With anyone!”), I choose to consider it through a much more optimistic lens. If Netflix and its cash-rich peers, including Amazon and Hulu, truly want to upend 75 years of television business as usual, then why have they spent so much time slavishly re-creating it? Extending Longmire, rebooting Full House, investing money in old hands and shaky ideas — all of this may be reassuring to investors, but it’s hardly inspiring to viewers. There’s a reason why many of the biggest critical successes to emerge from television 2.0 — like Amazon’s Transparent and Vimeo’s High Maintenance — feel completely distinct from anything on broadcast or cable. And Sense8 feels completely distinct, full stop. There’s a raw, wheedling humanity just beneath the show’s demented surface that deserves our respect, if not our acclaim. It has no spoon. Consuming it is messy, but not at all familiar.



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