Not necessarily a reimagining, but a premise. A concept.
There was a miniseries on the SyFy channel called “Ascension” that, ostensibly, had the premise of being a murder mystery set on a massive generation ship launched at the height of the Cold War, which sounded fun in theory. 1960s Space Race technology, generations raised on Red Scare values despite the Soviet Union being a distant memory in every sense, a bunch of already-paranoid people trapped with a murderer with safety literally decades away - seems like there’s a lot of room for a story there, right? Well, if the words “miniseries on the SyFy Channel” didn’t tip you off…
spoiler, not that I recommend ever watching this show
They solve the murder by the end of the second episode, or at least they think they do. The subplot is nonetheless dropped entirely.
Turns out the ship never left Earth. It’s in an underground bunker. The entire thing was a ploy to trap America’s greatest minds in a self-contained generational think tank and steal all the super-cool technology they invent. Which also eliminates the 1960s Space Race aesthetic because the ship is now, by design, more technologically-advanced than modern Earth, leaving… exactly none of the original hook intact.
Except two episodes later they reveal it wasn’t even that, it was actually part of a top-secret government eugenics program designed to breed telepathic super-soldiers, and the show ends with a child super-soldier using her nascent psychokinetic powers to teleport all the bad guys into space for realsies. And the real murderer is some guy we’d never even heard of working for the, again, top-secret government eugenics program, and his motives were… Either never explained, or explained after the part of the show where I stopped watching.
So anyway, a show that actually stuck to that premise would probably make for a pretty compelling yarn.
God this show pissed me off with how silly it got
I don’t want to read your spoiler because I have pretty low standards and enjoy things I probably shouldn’t just for the sake of it being novel; why do you not recommend it? Like is it at all any good and just disappointing how the plot was handled or bad generally?
It’s a show that relies a lot more on plot twists than actual plot, and they’re the sort of twists that heavily recontextualize the story in such a way that everything that happened prior is rendered kinda irrelevant and thus never followed up on, which kills a lot of the narrative momentum before it even really has a chance to build. There’s maybe one halfway-decent “oh shit” reveal followed by a long series of "huh?"s and a big final “where the fuck did that come from?”. And by the time it’s two or three twists in, anything that seemed unique about the concept gets sidelined in favor of some increasingly credibility-straining political intrigue with token sci-fi elements.
And in general I kinda thought they did a poor job of making the spaceship feel like a spaceship, making the descendants of the Red Scare people feel like descendants of Red Scare people, and making the 1960s Space Race technology feel like 1960s Space Race technology, but in that annoying way where it’s clearly not from a lack of budget, just from a lack of imagination. It’s all just some very generic people with generic sci-fi technology living in a generic sci-fi city that just so happens to be shaped like a spaceship. And it’s one of those shows where the main plot (term used generously) grinds to a halt every couple act breaks so everyone can fuck and backstab each other for no reason other than the characters that aren’t part of the plot right now need something to do. And then the whole thing kinda just… stops.
All in all I found the whole thing dull, generic, more than a little frustrating to watch and harder to get invested in the longer it went on. The main characters weren’t all that relatable, barely likeable and not particularly memorable; the mystery at the very heart of the premise was handled in a way that made it very uncompelling, and the ending fails to justify about 70% of the story that preceded it.
It kinda sounds like the same overall problems that 1899 had… I watched that knowing the “big reveals every episode that makes everything pointless” problems (from comments much like yours) and was just as disappointed as I expected to be by that aspect, but it was still pretty good imo (probably blessed by lowered expectations), and I’m curious what another few seasons could have done after the big end reveal… I’d probably have given it another season of my time. It was actually pretty well done, imho, all things considered. But then I have admittedly pretty low standards.
Although maybe this has lower production quality, by the sound of it. Any show that has to shoehorn multiple sex scenes when they don’t need them is just… mmrf… uncomfortable. So I expect to be uncomfortable.
I’m gunna give it a go with open eyes, I hope to be as disappointed as you were! Thanks for the detailed reply! I can’t wait to know exactly what you mean! :D
I would love to watch something like The Walking Dead, but more chill. More to do with building a community, and re-imagining society. Surviving the zombies would be a topic, of course, but without all the extra evilness of the remaining humans.
And episodes that don’t force me to increase my TV’s brightness to the max.
Modern Family with Zombies
Applies to lots of anime. I’ve been really disappointed by Dragon Maid. Lots of LGBT+-themed anime in general, I’d want to see them remade in an environment that lets them be more explicit about the LGBT+ themes instead of dancing around the issue with that “just really really good friends” stuff (or just cancelled before the story gets there).
Dancing around queer romance is a problem in Japanese games as well, and it’s so very disappointing. It’s plain as day to everyone’s what’s going on but they won’t go there.
Tangentially, sanitizing romance in general is also a problem with Japanese games (and games developed abroad that borrow their concepts). Some studios are outright afraid of offending men by having a woman character express a love interest in anyone, so it’s just absent entirely from swathes of the cast, if not everyone.
With gaming having become such a big footprint in entertainment, I worry that sort of thing is going to feed back into TV.
Almost Human
I object, they didn’t ‘Bungle’ that series. Fox out and out murdered it. The show was great and if Fox had any faith at all it would have run for seven seasons and movie.
Fantastic show intentionally destroyed by Fox.
👆
Was that the one with the supernatural roommates? What went wrong with it? I loved the show for as long as I watched it.
I think the one you are thinking of is Being Human, and there’s both a US and a UK version of that.
Sounds right. It definitely wasn’t sentient robots.
If you haven’t seen the UK version, I recommend it over the US version, since it was the original :) I like foreign tv though, fewer nonsense romance plots in general.
Oh, I didn’t even watch the american version. Like the office (and other shows) showed, americans just take something, dumb it down, make it bad, and then call it the height of comedy.
I want a faithful adaptation of Asimov’s Foundation, where it’s the 1940s in space like in the novels.
Guy gets to planet, immediately buys a physical newspaper with physical cash. Takes a taxi cab. Everyone smokes constantly. Space soldiers are bribed with dishwashers and fridges, computers barely exist. Every desk has an integrated atomic ashtray to vaporise cigarette butts. Scientists carry bulky pocket calculators.
Heroes had so much going for it before the writers strike, the premise of that show felt so good then it just got bad.
Space Force, really good cast and concept but I wish they better writing.
Of course they had to end the second season in a cliffhanger so we’ll never get to see its resolution thanks to Netflix canceling it. There should be a law about that.
Star Trek Voyager. I don’t think I need to explain further, we all have the same ideas.
Looks like the upcoming game will do the fixing though, so that’s good.
Please remake and give proper endings to warehouse 13 and utopia
The Expanse. Or at least an ending to the Expanse that we have. I loved those books so much and they did the series so dirty.
I do accept that the last (I think it was) 2 books don’t translate to film very well but at least they could have tried!
The Starlost needs a remake. Great premise, dollar store execution.
What they wanted:
Foreseeing the destruction of Earth, humanity builds a multi-generational starship called Earthship Ark, 50 miles (80 km) wide and 200 miles (320 km) long. The ship contains dozens of biospheres, each kilometres across and housing people of different cultures. Their goal is to find and seed a new world of a distant star.
In 2385, more than 100 years into the voyage, an unexplained accident occurs, and the ship goes into emergency mode in which each biosphere is sealed off from the others.
Centuries after its original launch, most of the descendants of the original crew and colonists are unaware that they are even aboard a spaceship.
How it went:
Unable to sell The Starlost for prime time, [20th Century Fox television producer Robert] Kline decided to pursue a low budget approach and produce it for syndication. By May, Kline had sold the idea to 48 NBC stations and the Canadian CTV network.
Originally, the show was to be filmed with a special effects camera system developed by Doug Trumbull called Magicam. … The technology did not work reliably, however. In the end, simple blue screen effects were used, which forced static camera shots. … The failure of the Magicam system was a major blow, as the Canadian studio space that had been rented was too small to build the required sets. In the end, partial sets were built, but the lack of space hampered production.
As the filming went on, [the writer Harlan] Ellison grew disenchanted with the budget cuts, details that were changed, and what he characterized as a progressive dumbing down of the story. … Ellison broke with the project before the airing of its first episode.
You know what, I already did one but I’m gonna do another one: Lovecraft Country.
First episode did just about everything you’d want out of a Jim Crow-era supernatural horror road trip mystery. Felt like they really had a handle on the whole “fear of the unknown and incomprehensible” vibe that you don’t see done well very often, the cast had great chemistry, and the whole theme of “the real incomprehensible eldritch abomination threatening human sanity is racism” was executed flawlessly. They walked a very fine tightrope between homage and condemnation of Lovecraft’s whole… deal and nailed it in one.
And then the main mystery is resolved by the second episode and the whole thing devolves into a very uneven anthology of psychic snakes and angry ghosts and like, Nazi wizards worshipping what I think was just the regular devil and overall very known and comprehensible horrors that didn’t really hold my attention for long enough to see if they even tried to tie them all together.
Man, all I wanted was a long-form cosmic horror story wrapped in a character-driven prestige TV period drama with some biting social commentary that doesn’t suck. They don’t make a lot of those!
You might like Watchmen. The TV show on HBO not the movie. It’s actually a sequel to the original run of comics and original ending.
Lost Girl. I was so in for a succubus themed mystery drama type affair, but I couldn’t maintain interest through the second season. It was slow and awkwardly written, but I think the subject is solid and it could have been done a lot better.
Give me Lucifer with a Succubus lead, come on TV execs
The show actually had a great ending, but season 4 was really bad
I’d love to see an un-bungled True Detective again.
Dead Like Me And the Dark Crystal show needed the ending it deserved.
