The Ready Room interviews seem really scripted to me. Wil Wheaton really doesn’t stray off his index cards.

No it’s not the length per se, it’s the fact the story is padded out. It doesn’t have enough material to warrent the 1 hour length. That’s what we’re talking about (well I at least). I have no problem when episodes are 1 hour long (I even prefer it), but only when there’s enough material to keep it going/interesting for that long. You know, keep the pace up. Some of the scenes in episode 3 and 4 were just halting the story, in a place where it should’ve kept going. The scenes started to become repetative.

I’m kinda surprised they didn’t brand the TOMORROW episode as a (god I hate this word now, ever since AVATAR) gamechanger, given how it is being used as a get out of jail free card for canon violators.

Maybe you could do this newfangled blogging thing — I think you might have a talent for it, but I don’t know if there is any money in it unless you marry a Cardas-Kardassian.

I haven’t seen any of the Diane eps, maybe I should, that was pretty funny reading!

I don’t see how any of this is the fault of the episode’s length; these were core thematic writing and directing decisions, and they’d almost certainly still be there even if it lasted 45 minutes.

No. I’m glad they’re lasting an hour; things feel a lot more fleshed out than 45 minute installments.

I think PICARD season 3 would have been a lot better had all its episodes lasted a full hour; we could have spent more time understanding Vadic’s backstory.

Yes, it’s all marketing. They must be told by the higher-ups to say that. It’s like when a producer or show-runner says they’re excited about this or that… you know it’s BS.

Thanks! Hopefully I won’t starve.

I would have thought your favorite “Cheers” moment would have been in the episode where Woody Harrelson’s country bumpkin parents order him to return home to the farm as they’re concerned that he’s being corrupted by his exposure to big city life. Diane (naturally) makes a thoroughly pretentious art house faux-Bergman black-and-white film extolling the virtues of Cheers and Boston to let them know that their son is in good hands, but they’re unconvinced, writing Woody that they thought the movie was stupid. Diane takes umbrage, implying that the parents were too unsophisticated to understand what she was trying to get across, and Woody agrees, adding “They also said it was very derivative of Godard.”

Many thanks for the kind words on my retirement. Don’t know if my finances will hold up, but we’ll see.

Congratulations!

I like my TV series to hit the 40-45 minute mark, just like in the old days. 58+ minutes is unnecessary week to week unless we’re doing a big or special episode.

The courtroom episode was sooo long, and the drug induced Klingon punch fest from the first episode felt interminable, like minutes and minutes of slow motion beat the piss out of people, completely glorifying the violence and probably the least Star Trek Star Trek has been in a while. I really hate that they teased the war with the Gorn at the end of it too, like the only way to tell Star Trek stories is about war, war war war, restart the Klingon war, war with the Gorn, let’s fight, it’s all so dumb and, like you said, can pad out episodes needlessly when all we’re watching is dumb action.

Agreed. Half the season has already aired, and there has yet to be a “big swing.” Good episodes? Yes. Big swings? Not in the slightest–it’s all been stuff we’ve seen before.

First off: Congratulations, you made it!

I really gave CHEERS a pretty good try. My first exposure to it was when the ST. ELSEWHERE characters get verbally abused by Carla on a brief crossover on the doctor show, which set me up to hate her character right off and for all time. I didn’t even own a TV when CHEERS started (a trend I sometimes wish I’d continued for a longer stretch, because I got a ton of reading and writing done in the early 80s, along with all the attempts at zero-budget filmmaking), but I saw a lot of the later run during afternoon syndication in the 90s when I would wake up while mired in a five-year stint of grave shift production. (that was also when I fell in love with CHINA BEACH, decided Robert Picardo was a helluva good actor and got to catch up on the MOONLIGHTING eps I missed first run, all thanks to LIFETIME network of all things.)

And there were moments when CHEERS really worked … there was a show where the characters started humming something, probably the Bernstein theme from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, as they left or entered the bar, and it was PER-FECT. And when Kelsey Grammar’s character launches into a dramatic recital of THE PICKWICK PAPERS after doing an off-the-cuff rewriting of the end of TALE OF TWO CITIES, that was inspired. But I think the prob for me was that I just didn’t like very many of the people. I recognized them from life, so the material was true, but staying with them for dozens of shows would be like watching NASCAR for me (to paraphrase the dry cleaning guy in the 78 BODY SNATCHERS, “that not my thing.”)

As much as I appreciate pre-Coon TOS for its daring, the eps still feel kind of arid. Then again, I’m really a season 2 guy, one who sees S3 nearly as interesting owing to the exceptional exceptions like THE EMPATH and moments in DAY OF THE DOVE like the ‘ship out, freak!’ exchange between Spock and Scott which features some stark lighting that I often tried to emulate.

Now that I think about it, they could do a lot worse with the current shows (and they are) than to emulate early TOS s1, where you get a real sense that there’s just cold hard space outside the hull. And in theory, they should be able to put that across visually now, since they have all that money and those resources, even though I usually can’t see it onscreen. Maybe making space scary, even wonderful and scary, is more achievable than getting the magical chemistry right with the actors and characters, especially given the limitations of the writing.

Ever since the end of TSFS, I wanted to see the TOS folk go and stay renegade, spending their lives together on a ship outside the regs and limitations of ‘fleet and Fed. Production could have spent the limited funds on some strange new worlds integral to the storytelling instead of having to always show Earth and spacedock in act 1, and that would have afforded a ton more screentime for all the cast, too (the feel of one early post-TSFS comic book — the only stretch I think I ever read and/or enjoyed — is kind of what I was hoping for.) FIREFLY kind of fulfilled that for me, and also showed me that the anti-Trek series notion I spent a lot of the late80s and early 90s working on was very valid, so I kind of had the ‘wish I’d gotten to do that’ jealousy, even while admiring hell out of the thing.

Yes, the last 2 episodes for sure. I was getting Doctor Who series 11 vibes, where the episode would start out intriguing and then slow down too much in the middle, with a very simple conclusion. It’s never a good moment when I’m starting to check my phone LOL.

Yeah, it seems like everyone is going out of their way to use that term ‘big swings’ in their interviews, which is getting tiresome. To me, most of the swings this season are unfortunately misses.

The one with the werewolf. Loved that episode, still watch it from time to time.

Agree. The ready room has become quite insufferable lately. I feel embarrassed for the guests, I see them literally squirming in their seats with the questions they get asked. It gets quiet uncomfortable.

They really (REALLY) need to stop talking about ‘taking big swings’, because A: haven’t seen any yet, and B: makes me cringe like there’s no tomorrow. It makes basically any interview feel produced and not real. Some of The Ready Room episodes feel overly produced as well. More like marketing than sincere interviews and bts.

Very busy at work, as I’m retiring next Friday. Plus, I haven’t seen the latest SNW ep yet (probably tomorrow night) so any opinions from me would be even more value-free than usual.

I guess it’s fair to say that longtime fans, myself included, came to think of the TOS crew as a surrogate family, but the series doesn’t actually much give off that kind of vibe during its first and best year. The Firefly crew actually comes much closer, in the sense that they’re hardcore scrabblers on the fringes of society, bound together by the business of survival even if some of them don’t much like each other. And hey, I love Cheers.

It’s the whole ‘family you choose’ thing, I guess. Except for CHEERS, which rarely spoke to me, I always seem to favor shows that have that as a core basis.

Have you been away? Haven’t seen posts from you this week.

Man, really?! There are a number of things I like about “Firefly,” but I can hardly think of a genre property less likely to give me my TOS fix.

Until I was into my 40s, I was convinced that later Trek could never measure up to my TOS expectations, even with as many DS9s as I liked. But then I saw FIREFLY, and even though the science was putrid / horrible, it felt like ‘home.’ So I know getting that loving trek feel back is possible … just that I don’t think it’ll happen with anything sporting the official TREK brand (though DS9 comes damned close.)

Now that Prodigy has been removed, SNW is the only thing keeping me subscribed. I’m not really into the other shows and already own the Berman era shows.

I wish I could say there was something to please everyone, but I know that isn’t the case.

I think the helmsman melting down in quarters was a well-made bit, but the rest just laid there. Not sure I’m even gonna keep P+ for the duration of SNW at this point (am thinking of calling it PMinus.)

I really like this show and have made no secret about that, but why does it seem like in every interview they have to say the show is “taking big swings”? I can almost picture a suit standing to the side miming the swinging of a baseball bat to remind them to say it.

Sounds like it wasn’t originally the aim but they leaned into it a bit. A good choice in this situation, I think.