It was a drama with occasional comic scenes and situations (i.e., a dramedy even though the term didn’t exist at the time). Also, given the setting, much of the comedy was gallows humor. In contrast, “Hogan’s Heroes” was a broadly humored sitcom with a laugh track.
Crossposted from the “failed pilot” thread:
There are a lot of ridiculous ideas in popular entertainments people don’t even stop to think about. I’m not even talking about movies like Sharknado, but popular, successful award-winning entertainment.
On a slight tangent, there’s a podcast called Dead Pilot’s society, in which scripts that didn’t make it to the pilot phase are read in front of an audience. There’ve been some that would have made entertaining shows. Episodes generally include interviews with the writers, and they’ll often talk about the process and why certain shows get made and others don’t.
I thought "ok… maybe that’s one way to interact with a sophisticated weapons system in space"and then she started freaking out and I couldn’t watch any more.
“A young woman is transported to a strange, new land, where she kills the first person she meets, then teams up with three strangers and goes off to kill again.” A TV listing I once found for The Wizard of Oz.
That’s the one! 
There was another one I saw in the newspaper for Beginning of the End, a 50s sci-fi movie about giant locusts overrunning Chicago.
“Giant green grasshoppers terrorize a tiny town and pulverize its puny people.”
I’ve always wanted to see some space opera where the targeting and fire control are actually as computerized as they assuredly would be in such an era. Or even is these days; what we get most of the time is warmed-over WWII submarine fire control tropes.
It seems like it would be a great opportunity for some really tense CIC (yes, they’d need a CIC, not just a bridge) scenes where there’d be very little talking or overt drama- the captain/fire control officer would designate and/or prioritize targets, and you’d get the point-defense systems firing automatically and the main weaponry firing when the solution was right, and you’d get the occasional AI override notifications and damage control reports… but no flaming keyboards, or anything like that. Just a bunch of guys buttoned up in spacesuits calmly going about their business, interposed with external shots of the battle and other interior shots of the ship and damage.
If done right, it could be truly harrowing. Sort of like the sub scenes in “Hunt for Red October” were.
As for SNL movies… they have about a 40-50% hit rate; there aren’t a significant number of worse ones than good ones. I’d think for a studio, that’s a pretty good gamble to take.
And… I always felt like Coupling was essentially a British version of Friends. Not a direct clone, but more inspired by Friends, which had been on the air like 4-5 years by the time *Coupling *came around.
What made it so terribly stupid is that whoever pitched it and whoever greenlighted it didn’t get why Coupling was good in the UK, and why it wouldn’t be good in the US. Namely, they were both ensemble comedies centered around young single people, with the concerns and humor surrounding them (within the censorship limits of the respective countries). There wasn’t anything **special **about *Coupling *that didn’t mark it as a Friends type show, or worse, what it was, a US remake of a British Friends-inspired show.
Coupling would have NEVER worked in the US- we already had Friends, and at that point, we’d had 10 years of it. Introducing the same thing with a very slightly different spin wasn’t going to fly in 2003-2004.
I’ve always wanted to see some space opera where the targeting and fire control are actually as computerized as they assuredly would be in such an era. Or even is these days; what we get most of the time is warmed-over WWII submarine fire control tropes.
It seems like it would be a great opportunity for some really tense CIC (yes, they’d need a CIC, not just a bridge) scenes where there’d be very little talking or overt drama- the captain/fire control officer would designate and/or prioritize targets, and you’d get the point-defense systems firing automatically and the main weaponry firing when the solution was right, and you’d get the occasional AI override notifications and damage control reports… but no flaming keyboards, or anything like that. Just a bunch of guys buttoned up in spacesuits calmly going about their business, interposed with external shots of the battle and other interior shots of the ship and damage.
If done right, it could be truly harrowing. Sort of like the sub scenes in “Hunt for Red October” were.
As for SNL movies… they have about a 40-50% hit rate; there aren’t a significant number of worse ones than good ones. I’d think for a studio, that’s a pretty good gamble to take.
And… I always felt like Coupling was essentially a British version of Friends. Not a direct clone, but more inspired by Friends, which had been on the air like 4-5 years by the time *Coupling *came around.
What made it so terribly stupid is that whoever pitched it and whoever greenlighted it didn’t get why Coupling was good in the UK, and why it wouldn’t be good in the US. Namely, they were both ensemble comedies centered around young single people, with the concerns and humor surrounding them (within the censorship limits of the respective countries). There wasn’t anything **special **about *Coupling *that didn’t mark it as a Friends type show, or worse, what it was, a US remake of a British Friends-inspired show.
Coupling would have NEVER worked in the US- we already had Friends, and at that point, we’d had 10 years of it. Introducing the same thing with a very slightly different spin wasn’t going to fly in 2003-2004.