Wow, today's podcast was a laugh a minute, one of the best so far. Though I didn't like how the Mass Effect 3 DLC thing got heavily overshadowed. I was generally interested in hearing a little debate between everybody there, like has happened in past podcasts about such decisions publishers and developers have made.
I found the discussion about TV shows rather enlightening. I'm different in that if I like a show, I want it to be on as long as possible, even to the eventual seasons where there are only handful of good episodes.
I really don't like where the industry has gone, pertaining to season length. Remember back in the day when a season even for an hour long program was usually a standard of 24 episodes, and in some cases 25 or 26. With more than 5 seasons of that, where shows were looking for and celebrating when they reached syndication level, which if I remember correctly was at 100 episodes. Back then that could be reached at the forth or fifth season, these days reaching that 100 episodes would take 9 to 10 seasons.
I miss what for me was the television hay-day with Star Trek:TNG, DS9, and Voyager. Each lasting seven seasons and having reached over 170 episodes.
Come to think of it the last shows with substantial and what I would consider real seasons, were Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. Well now that I think of it, there are other shows still running on Sci-Fi(No it isn't and never will be SyFy) that still have at least twenty episodes a season, and of course Stargate Universe had 20 a season(but it doesn't count because it was crap from the beginning, maybe 5% of that show was watchable).
What I'm getting at is that SG-1 went on for 10 seasons, 215 episodes I believe. And for me, that show only got a slightly iffy around seasons 9 and 10.
But now, the vast majority of new shows today, a season is considered to be 10 to 12 episodes. Of new shows that came out recently, one that I'm liking a lot is Terra Nova. I like the premise...and it really has shown the severe lack of dinosaurs in hour television programing.=p Okay, but it's first season was only 11 episodes.
I think what Steve said on how shows have become more "just" arching in there stories instead of having arch, but also varied stand alone episodes, is proving to be a problem with television today. I think it is why I'm more and more just going back to favorite old shows and re-watching them. Back in the day, I almost had a favorite show for every day of the week. These days, I'm lucky if I have at least one new show a year that I'm mildly interested in.
Going back to Star Trek, hilarious stand alone episodes like "Ferengi Love Songs" in season 5 of DS9, the great holodeck episodes like "A Fistful of Datas" in season 6 of TNG, and moving to Stargate SG-1, the groundhog's day style episode in season four "Window of Opportunity", if shows like Star Trek and Stargate first started airing on today's television set up, we wouldn't get awesome stand alone episodes like those.
These days there are no proper character stories, if there are character stories, it is usually devolves into a soap-opera like episodes, which was what killed Stargate Universe. They started a new series in a show franchise that was more about the sci-fi than the characters, and made it all 98% about the characters, changed the film style to boot(Grainy Battlestar Galactica style of filling does not suit Stargate). Don't buy Sci-Fi's lame excuse that the show failed because they aired it on a bad night. It failed because it was one big soap opera, and fans of the franchise were lucky if they got an episode that had 10% that dealt with stuff in a true Stargate classic sci-fi fashion.
Though that does hit the thought in the podcast on how a show that ruins long can have problems with writers running out of ideas. I think that can translate to series franchises as well, like the Stargate franchise. Though I think SGU's downfall was that it was most likely started by someone that didn't understand what made the previous series great. The show would have succeeded if they had stuck to it being about them stranded on that ship and what they encountered along the way, and down played the characters stories to about 10% of each episode.
Okay, that's enough, I've rambled on too long, and I was coming very close to falling of topic.
Gotta follow through, man! Commit!
