I think I can now safely answer, “Yes” to the OP.
I also didn’t realize that it was a pilot for a series until about halfway through. The plot was crawling and the editing and production values screamed “pilot!” (no pun intended) at me.
Oh well…
I finally got to see this last night. Pepper Mill was wayching while catching up on the newspaper, and was constantly making MST3K-ish comments. Unfortunately, they were deserved.
“These people are stupid. Where are their brains?” she kept saying. She thought it was really dumb when the Space Shuttle pilot drops into the hold with the other prisoners on purpose! Without any safeguards!. “All they have to do is drop the lid and tie it closed,” she commented. It didn’t help when, on their “breaking out”, the guards just happen to be conveniently facing the other way. “Were the books this bad?” she asked me.
No, of course not. Farmer liked his historical research. Nero as aq superhero-like fighter and military genius?!!? Please. Hydrated Palladium as an inexhaustible power source? And Farmer’s Mark Twain wasn’t nearly as ludicrous as the one on the series. (Pepper figured out who “Sam” was supposed to be almost immediately. So much for the cute “revelation” at the end.)
What’s annoying about this series is that Farmer seems to have constructed it largely as an exercise and excuse to draw together interesting historical characters from vastly separated areas of time and space and have them interact. The show seems to have mostly dropped that – they kept Twain and brought in Nero. They changed Alice Liddel and didn’t really explain her, and the dropped Burton. They also dropped the interesting cavemen (except for that brief, embarrassing fling at the start) and all other historical characters. Why? What’s the reason for taking what is actually the whole point of the series and discarding it? A big part of the fun of Farmer’s series was encountering the folks you knew, and learning about the ones you didn’t – Cyrano de Bergerac, Aphra Behn, etc. If they’re only going to keep names people know (Nero), and be inaccurate about them, then we’re going to be like all those bad time-travel shows and movies where everyone ends up on the Titanic. There’s a hell of a lot of history out there, people! There are plenty of other Roman Emperors you could have chosen instead of the laughably inappropriate Nero! You could pull out all sorts of interesting but neglected characters from history – or even make some up! If you stick to the cloyingly familiar because you’re afraid that people will be lost you will turn out a mediocre series, and you’ll alienate your target audience. If there’s one place we don’t need “dumbing down”, it’s in science fiction.
I Hope this doesn’t piss anybody off for too long of a resurection of a thread.
I didn’t get around to seeing this show the first runs, but I just watched it an hour ago. I had heard from a lot of people that it did suck, so I had never made much of an effort to see it. And without Burton and Goering I assumed it would suck. But…
I liked it. First of all I liked the way it was directed and shot. Most made for TV movies have something about them that I dislike. But riverworld seemed professional. It also had almost the same kind of feel that Sam Raimi’s shows(Hercules, Xena) have that swings back and forth between fun and goofy, and serious and dramatic without getting disjointed and distracted(of course with Kevin Smith in the cast maybe I had Raimi on the brain). I did miss Farmer’s choice of characters a bit, but the ones they put in were okay. It’s such a fertile setting for a story that has so much room to work, that the show didn’t seem like a bastardization of the originals, but more of a different version of the story.
Now I’m kind of sad They didn’t make a series of of it. There just seems like there is so much to work with in the idea that it could be really entertaining. It is a great story, and the fun-but-serious style of the show was great entertainment in my opinion.