Ding ding ding - we have a winner!
Write a really great ‘intro’ book, with good characters and a good plot. Rope people in. Get them all excited and interested.
And then don’t write the rest of it.
:mad:
GRRRRRR.
Although the little comment about George Lucas writing I, Shogun is going to give me nightmares.
Spin off a few charcters into a new storyline - add a few more interesting folk, new enemies, new envirnments, etc.; happily go along like this for a few years, then create a story arc that takes a whole season to tell, and forget all about character developement and all the other quirky things that made us like Star Trek to begin with (IMHO DS9 and Enterprise (albeit with all new characters) did this)
I’m whooshed. Is it Angel, Buffy, or Prison Break she ruined?
I did not see Angel or Buffy get ruined.
Buffy. I lay every possible bad thing that happened in Season 6 at her feet. Irrational, maybe. But there are hordes who would agree with me. “Seeing Red”, anyone?
Hey, I liked Season 6. It was my first season of Buffy. I mean, sure, it was dreary and depressing, with lots of in-fighting amongst the Scoobs, but I just figured that was the logical result of them not having an actual Big Bad to fight against that season, nothing serious to rally together to deal with, so they were able to concentrate on all their various personal greviances. But as with all things (geekdom especially), YMMV.
At the time I was pretty new to Buffy (I started with season 6 as well and then caught up with season 1-3 during that time)…but even I knew that Marti didn’t GET Buffy. She’s a competent producer. She’s incompetent at the nuance and metaphor that Buffy relied on.
I found everything from when Buffy’s mother died to maybe the last half of season 7 an unbearable downer; while I enjoyed the show greatly, I have to say that I don’t think it was necessary for the show to be quite so depressing. I guess I look to TV for a bit of escapism.
Season 6 was actually my favorite season of Buffy. It was when I realized that they were not afraid of almost letting go of their tried and true formula and making the almost cheap return of Buffy have severe consequences for the relationships and tone of the show. I loved how they let it evolve to where they took the plot, instead of keeping it on a tired treadmill. I loved how painful the whole season was; very few of the cheap outs you see on a given season of series television.
And back to the main topic, one tried and true way to ruin a series is to have characters forget their development over the past 6 seasons (Buffy Season 7, I’m looking at you, kid) or to have random plot twists that don’t make any sense come out of nowhere and have severe consequences for the plot/characters (hi Alias).
Stuck for ideas on a TV show? Babies! Everyone loves babies, don’t they?
Make sure the thirty episodes that follow the baby being born is about the new parents worrying about the baby.
This sounds suspiciously like Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.
That was it. As I said, I wish I had just stopped with The Waste Lands or maybe the first couple chapters of Wizard and Glass.
Some might argue that my synoposis is unfair and perhaps it is. But that’s how I remember it more than a year after reading it.
Oh, I entirely agree. But the first three, especially The Drawing of the Three and The Wastelands, are so damned good. Grrr!
Oh. Sorry. I meant Orson Scott Card, whom I love as an author, collaborating with Kathryn Kidd to write Lovelock in 1994 - and then apparently never going back to it again.
Perhaps he’ll stil write it. I don’t hold out much hope though.
Take any good TV series and spin off a new show featuring all of the main characters as infants or young children. Who wouldn’t want to watch
[ul]
[li] My Name is Earl and I’m in the 3rd Grade, or [/li][li]CSI - Potty Training, or [/li][li]Cheers - The Lemonade Stand (Where Everybody Knows Your Name), or [/li][li]Young Darth Vader - oops, that one’s actually been done.[/li][/ul]
Make an X-Men story, right? A big major event, a multi-crossover if it’s the comics. Make it a new twist on the series long-running, powerful, interesting outlook on the nature of prejudice against a growing minority, and then, at the end…
Take almost every mutant’s powers away, thus sidestepping the entire issue! It’ll be awesome :rolleyes:
…Oh, wait, it’s already happened :smack:
PS. Sorry, just had to say it
Are you honestly trying to say that Star Trek or *The Next Generation *had more character development than Deep Space Nine? That Geordi was fleshed out more than Jake? Or that Chekov was more fully realized than Nog, Rom, Leeta, Zek, Ishka, Brunt, Damar, Weyoun, the female founder, Dukat, Winn, Shakar, Bareil, Martok, Vic, or any of the the other semi-regulars that were given more lines than anyone on the original series not named Kirk, Spock, or McCoy combined? Even Morn, a character that never speaks a word during the entire series, has a backstory to rival Uhura’s.
And five episodes after THAT, the child is facing the trama of starting first grade. Ten episodes later, child is either going on his first date or coming out of the closet.
Have a major character discover he (or she) either has a child they know nothing about, or maybe a half-sibling.
Make your television series very good and very funny, but also make it very quick-witted, deadpan and subtle, so that the Small-Canid Network that runs it will cancel it after the 2nd season because the public just doesn’t get it.