For those who feel nuGalactica failed...

[Batman]

You either make it fun or you failed.

Is this nBSG specific? Because based on this and other posts you've made in this thread, I don't think you understand television very much.

One of us certainly doesn't. I'm a viewer. I couldn't care less what the writers, or the cast, or anybody else involved in the process of creating the series wanted, I want entertainment and nBSG didn't deliver. The series lasted for 4 seasons so obviously there were those that thought it did. Good on you, wherever you are. I think it sucked donkey balls and the whole premise of this thread is hearing from people who feel the series failed.

[Stark]

Yeah, and some people can talk about attributes and elements and some people just stomp their foot like a petulant child.

Maybe you just never learned how to understand fiction.

[Gandalf]

One of us certainly doesn't. I'm a viewer. I couldn't care less what the writers, or the cast, or anybody else involved in the process of creating the series wanted, I want entertainment and nBSG didn't deliver.

There's either a lot of miscommunication or you have a very narrow view of television.

Your "fun or fail" idea. In your definition, would an acclaimed but grim as fuck film like Schindler's List be fun? I ask because you seem to keep stating that all you want is fun.

Also, you state that television is all about giving people what they want. TV is about delivering people to advertisers, not about satisfying viewers.

[Stark]

Once upon a time I watched an episode of Gundam 00 and hated the hell out of it and it wasn't entertaining at all.

I watched the same episode a few days ago and it was awesome.

Much of how much we appreciate external stuff is due to how we process it. Something can objectively remain the same and out appreciation of it can change. 'Fun or fail' doesn't account for the idea that you can make anything you want not entertaining simply by how you think about it.

Does a show fail if I watch it in a bad mood and don't bother engaging with it? OBVIOUSLY.

[Batman]

You can talk about attributes and elements to your heart's content. I was asked if I thought nBSG failed, and if so, why, and I answered. That you don't like the answers is, to be blunt, not my problem. nBSG was first and foremost a SciFi TV series intended to get viewers to,well, watch it. It managed to do that apparently, else, as I said, the series wouldn't have lasted as long as it did. It did however not do so for me. I fail to see why I'm required to go 'yeah, but assuming the series didn't suck donkey balls, what would you make of it?'

[Stark]

Can you quote someone asking you to do that, please?

Regardless, now we're talking about your attitude, and while its glib and gives you the answers you want, I don't believe you've really thought it through at all. If you don't enjoy something for a reason external to the work, and use that lack of enjoyment to write off the work (and I'll add be unable to even discuss it beyond repeating yourself), isn't that a bit lame?

Perhaps the success or not of a work isn't just tied to what you had for dinner right before watching it. Unless you're saying something sucks because you had cheese for dinner and your tummy was rumbling?

The big joke, of course, is that I hate nBSG too but I'm not sticking my head in the sand and being simpleminded about it.

[Batman]

One of us certainly doesn't. I'm a viewer. I couldn't care less what the writers, or the cast, or anybody else involved in the process of creating the series wanted, I want entertainment and nBSG didn't deliver.

There's either a lot of miscommunication or you have a very narrow view of television.
Your "fun or fail" idea. In your definition, would an acclaimed but grim as fuck film like Schindler's List be fun? I ask because you seem to keep stating that all you want is fun.

Yes it absolutely was. 'Fun' doesn't just mean laughs and giggles, fun means 'I actually enjoyed viewing that'. Which can absolutely include educational programs or stuff like Schindler's List,

Also, you state that television is all about giving people what they want. TV is about delivering people to advertisers, not about satisfying viewers.

It absolutely is on my end. I couldn't care less what the people doing those TV shows want.And I very much suspect that giving the audience what they want does figure into giving the people doing those shows what they want to a not inconsiderable extent.

[Stark]

Right, and people are trying to explain to you how its possible to talk about something you don't like (beyond endlessly stomping your foot) without having to change your mind. It's almost as if you're just ignoring the point.

[Batman]

I'm not ignoring anything, but at this point I'm willing to consider the possibility I'm not getting it.

[Stark]

Okay. Art exists both objectively and subjectively. If you don't like something, that's subjective (and nobody wants to change it). However, the objective existence of the work remains, and you can still (for instance) say 'the colours were nice'.

But seriously, you can totally make yourself hate anything by how you prepare yourself and how you think about it. By stepping away you just lose any chance of actually understanding the work; I initially really hated 'Beneath the Gravity Well', and now that I've engaged with what it's saying its some of my favourite scifi ever (and reminds me of Phant. HE WANTS TO BE THE KIND OF MAN WHO CAN LIVE WITH THAT etc).

[Themightytom]

Okay. Art exists both objectively and subjectively. If you don't like something, that's subjective (and nobody wants to change it). However, the objective existence of the work remains, and you can still (for instance) say 'the colours were nice'.

But seriously, you can totally make yourself hate anything by how you prepare yourself and how you think about it. By stepping away you just lose any chance of actually understanding the work; I initially really hated 'Beneath the Gravity Well', and now that I've engaged with what it's saying its some of my favourite scifi ever (and reminds me of Phant. HE WANTS TO BE THE KIND OF MAN WHO CAN LIVE WITH THAT etc).

Conversely, certain people's tiresome overplayed devotion to a sci fi franchise can really ruin the fuck out of it.

[Spoonist]

This is rich, you specifically run away from my post due to time constraints yet find the time to discuss what you consider art while still ctitizising other posters view on what is art for them? Real classy.

And you are correct: it was wrong for me to continue the discussion without responding to your post. I skipped it for the time being because my response would take a while. You''l be surprised with the results.

Re-reading that I think that it was I who was out of line.
I specifically said I didn't mind waiting for a response and then I get my panties in a twist when you respond to others? Not classy either.
Instead I should have framed that as a question. "If you found time for X do you think you have time for Y" or somesuch.
So in retrospect it wasn't fair for me to demand that you make a big post instead of continuing a smaller dialog with the other posters, I was just prickly due to your old combative stance vs me which I really should have ignored.
My apologies, I was out of line.

You seem to be well versed in plot lines from the first time skip that were never resolved, so I figured you'd have some on your mind. Instead, you want me to put up the evidence I asked for. Does asking for evidence really work that way? It shouldn't be my duty to prove your point for you. If you decide to post some of the plots, I would be grateful if you listed them instead of pointing to a long blog post. You can use that as a reference, but I'd like to see some of them in the post so others don't have to click away.

Hmm, since you said that it got you intrigued I thought that this was a seperate interest beside our back-and-forth. But now you consider it to be some sort of evidence? Lets backtrack.
The point I made which you responded to was: "Nope, timeskips/reboots are done because the writers can't be bothered with the restraints from former episodes leaving huge weave of plot threads hanging unresolved."
To which you said "This has me intrigued. Would you mind listing which unresolved plots remained after the time skip?"
So what you were really meaning by that was "I need evidence or it didn't happen"??? That is a bit strange but lets go with that.
For me to "prove" what I claimed is easy. Check out the TVtropes list of LiveActionTV timeskips.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TimeSkip
Want to guess why all those series did their timeskips? Its easy, because after a while you have to many loose plots that the audience are expecting a resolution of that it becomes a burden. A timeskip solves that by jumping past them, instead of resolving each and every one of those plotlines you just summarize the important bits. Some series use this within their universe like Buffy that always utilize the end of a school semester to make a timeskip. That is logical and work within the setting.
Other series need to skip the old to bring out the new, rehashing old plotlines isn't always as interesting when you can instead fill in new shiny plotlines instead, look at Desperate Housewives where the writers pretty much said, either we close it down or we timeskip.
So using timeskips to not get bogged down in minutae of old plotlines is a time honored trope, since the dawn of storytelling.
However why its used as criticism for lazy writing is the same reason why its used so often in soaps etc. It shows that you didn't have a plan. If you write each episode for the episode and don't have an long term plan for plots, then what you are normally doing is throwing up more plots than needed to see which ones become popular and continue with those leaving the rest behind. In comedy and daytime soap this is expected. Who cares if Monica in Friends have obsessive compulsive disorder in some episodes but doesn't in other episodes? Its comedy such things goes with the territory. However if R2D2 suddenly uses rockets in one scene its a valid question to ask why he didn't use them in other scenes? But contrast this to shows which do have a plan for the whole season or even series, then you don't write open plotlines that you do not intend to solve. Movies are excellent examples of this, their timeskips are there for a specific effect this since they at the moment of writing knows start-middle-finish and can see plotlines that doesn't add to the film. But even movies get it wrong, hence nerdrage at plotholes etc.
So now that we have establishedd the general case lets look at nBSG and its the same thing, why they did the timeskip in 'Lay Down Your Burdens' was specifically so that they could skip all old explanations and restart with new plotlines. This also let them change/switch writers since the new writers can't be expected to know all the details of what the old writers ideas.
Its also shown when they in minis and season 1 is very strict and specific about the dates, then in season 2 onwards isn't, to the point of missing some 75 days in different dialog. It just shows that they didn't think such was important when it had already been established as important (flashing x days since every episode gives an investment).

Which means that I only have to point out there are many, many, many viewers that considered nBSG to have lots and lots of unresolved plotlines to prove the generic point.
You asking for specifics is like a biblical apologist asking for examples of contradictions in the bible and then try to explain each one.

See, this is what I have been looking for. You put it very succinctly why the method of tracking could be needed for some viewers. I will concede that others shouldn't find the lack of explanation daunting. It now makes sense why they feel this way. The complaint isn't bogus and thank you for your clarification on the matter.

No worries, but it would have been a much more productive dialog if you had said that you didn't understand the complaint instead of saying that it was wrong to complain about it.

Its about being consistent and true to your creation.

Actually, this is not about being true to your creation. What I just read is that you think the writers should bend to the will of the audience because they lost them. If they lost them because of the direction they took, why would they sacrifice their artistic integrity to placate those who left? It's their show, not the audiences'. They do what they want to get their various points across in the medium medium. You want fan service. Your words illustrate this.

Nope, you are reading things in that aren't there.
Being consistent to the premise isn't fanservice. And what do you mean by artistic integrity?
Lets make another simple example, serials. You had the success of the first movie so you decide to make another one, or even a bunch.
This is a proven concept which relies on expectations, which is the same thing as being consistent to the premise. If you go to a bond movie you have specific expectations. Within those expectations the creators have their artistic freedom. But if that Bond movie turns out to be a romcom then it doesn't matter if it was a artistic or thought provoking romcom, it didn't live up to the expextations ie failed to be consistent to its premise.
That is different from fanservice which is to listen to specific interests of certain vocal viewers and add extra of that. Examples of fanservice in nBSG are numerous like the casting of Lucy Lawless. Or rewriting the arcs because people liked boomer.
Lets make an analogy of what you are trying to accuse me of here:
OP - Which season of Buffy was the worst?
Me - Season 4, whats up with the GI Joe's? I expect a show that says Buffy-the vampire slayer, to be about you know - vampires, demons and mysteries and stuff.
You - No no no, the military guys in season 4 was totally awesome.
Me - WTF season 4 was crappy lazy writing all over its like they didn't care about being consistent to the premise or true to their universe.
You - You just want fanservice, what about Wheedon's artistic integrity?

Why do you think that other people should have to defend their view? Especially when its shared with the majority of posters, viewers, reviewers, etc?
If I said that "pornos usually have sucky acting" would you insist that I defend opinions like "most porn actresses suck"?

If they don't defend their views, then the discussion becomes boring. You learn from defending your opinions and sometimes the opposing view can cause you to think about yours. You just did that with "33." I conceded.

Boring to you, sure. Boring to others, hell no. If the OP wants to discuss what the OP says then it is very presumptious of you to claim that people already enjoying such discourse have to defend their views because you find their discussion boring.

I also hope that you realize ratings and viewpoints held by a majority of people doesn't mean that the viewpoint is accurate and doesn't need defending. I could say that The Sopranos is the best television series ever made because it is critically acclaimed (I think it approaches that honor but not because of ratings, critic reviews, and love from viewers). Yet, I wouldn't say Thanas' views on the show being quite bad is wrong. Popularity doesn't denote quality.

The point was that you being the minority view should start by being a bit more humble about asking why people think X when they are clearly in the majority. So if Sopranos is claimed to be the best whatever by most, and in a topic about how great the Sopranos are Thanas pops in and says that everyone needs to defend why they think its good because Thanas thinks it sucked. Then I wouldn't expect him to become defensive if I called him an asshole.

Can you give some examples of character choices that were out of character? I will not Google it.

What difference would it make? You will only do an apologist spin on it whatever I say, so you are not really interested in that anyway.
Let me show you:

One of the biggest, well, kind of practical jokes was, there was an episode written for Dirk [Benedict], and I got the episode and I…I was a little upset. I felt they were, you know, knocking Captain Apollo. I felt they were really pushing him aside and I said, I think it’s time that HE had a story, that you did something for this character rather than just letting him give orders and go march around the ship. So he, Glen [Larson] said, you’re right, we really should, we need a story with Captain Apollo going down to HIS planet. So, about two hours later, the script I’d had, featuring Dirk, arrived at my house, and it had been…the two characters of Captain Apollo and Starbuck were simply interchanged, they’d put my name where Starbuck was and put Starbuck where Apollo was. And I immediately got into the car and was seeking out Dirk to apologize, because I simply had no idea, I thought, down the road, the next story, maybe a couple of stories later he’d write one for Captain Apollo. He didn’t do that, he just took the very story that had probably been in Dirk’s hands, he’d been going “what a wonderful script I have here!” and two hours later he gets a script where he was now Captain Apollo and I’m Starbuck and literally he has not changed any lines. In any case I was very embarrassed and I found him at a party and I explained the whole situation to him and how sorry I was and he said, well, I understand, I just think you should go to Glen Larson and ask him to reverse it, put it back the other way. So I tried to find Glen Larson, and I told him, I appreciate the gesture, but the next time will you be a little more subtle? Sometimes you want to expand your character, you want to bring in new dimensions to the character and they gave Captain Apollo the chance to do a few things that he didn’t normally do on that show because, as you all know, Starbuck got to run around and have fun with the ladies and Captain Apollo…kind of had fun with himself…and from that time on they actually began to change, not change the characters, but to give Starbuck a little bit of the Captain Apollo quality and Captain Apollo a little bit of the Starbuck qualities, and they started to make the characters more well-rounded, and I appreciated that.

Do you really think that people who could do that would be super consistent with how the characters behave?

[Channel72]

I lost track of the show around Season 3. Season 1 was amazing, I think - the weird "shaky cam" footage of the space battles was pretty original, and it contributed a lot to the desperate atmosphere of the show. The characters were great - I loved the President, Baltar, Adama, etc.

But even from day one, I never really liked the religious angle. I know Moore loves this shit (i.e. Bajoran orb nonsense), and it's great to explore religious issues in a fictional society, but I hate the constant "oh shit - are the prophecies real??!" teasing.

The show really lost it for me in the latter seasons when it started exploring Cylon culture in depth. The "skinjob" Cylons were portrayed as way too human. There were scenes that showed the various skinjob Cylons among themselves discussing things, and they're so indistinguishable from the way normal humans behave that the show is basically about two factions of humans (one of them with an army of killer robots) fighting each other. It's also a bit much to believe that Cylons have glowing spines and access ports, and yet are undetectable as infiltrators.

And then the show just went off the deep end when it turned out that some of the main characters were actually Cylons the whole time, through some convoluted backstory. Maybe the show should have ended when they found the devastated Earth. That would give it a nice, Twilight Zone/Bradbury-esque science-fiction ending.

[Terralthra]

I didn't mind the DS9 wormhole aliens nearly as much as nBSG's god nonsense. DS9 handled them in a fairly reasonable manner: there are some entities who exist there, and they're really there: even nonbelievers can interact with them. They have certain attributes about them (nonlinear temporal existence) which means that in some ways, they can predict the future. Some of those who note this about them choose to worship them for it, while others see an interesting scientific phenomenon to research.

nBSG's Head-6 was great when it was simply trying to figure out if it was a hallucination caused by a Baltar undergoing a psychotic break or caused by a Cylon chip in his head. The "angel from God guiding you on your journey" was way less interesting.

[Stark]

Conversely, certain people's tiresome overplayed devotion to a sci fi franchise can really ruin the fuck out of it.

That's actually a really good example of what I was talking about. A lot of things that get hyped out by hordes of screaming nerdfans rub me the wrong way, so if I watch it I'm already predisposed to not like it. If I'd just watched it in a vacuum, my response would be different. In this way, I am bringing my own expectations to a work and they are changing how I feel about it (or how entertaining I find it), but this is not fixed.

This is certainly what was behind my Gundam 00 example from earlier, because years ago I was ready to dismiss anything that had young men yelling at each other in robits as 'lame' and possibly 'dumb'. Now that I'm open-minded enough to actually engage with the content instead of knee-jerk at the top of my soap-boxes, I can appreciate it differently.

[Havok]

In my mind nBSG was a raving success.

It accomplished the one thing that is most important to successful sci-fi, it caused nerds to argue about it endlessly. Shit, even I spent hours typing shit up about it analyzing the cycle and such.

I'm serious. Sci-Fi that isn't successful, whether good or bad, doesn't generate conversation or thought. Like, I could be off base, but something like Firefly wasn't successful as sci-fi to me, not because it got cancelled or because people hate it, it is because when people start talking about it, one side says "OMG! BEST EVER! MAL AND JANE AND RIVER!!!!111!11 " and the other side is all "lol meh." It doesn't seem to generate any thought or discourse on it's ideas or how it was carried out.

It falls under what it seems Batman wants: "It's fun!" nBSG goes beyond that.

[AndroAsc]

It broke down somewhere between Season 2 and Season 3. Too much hype over "The Cylons or their God has a plan" in Season 1-2 which quietly died out by Season 3. If you can't live up to the hype, DON'T HYPE IT. That was BSG mistakes... too much hype, no substance in the end. By Season 3 it was obvious the writers were just writing up hype for the sake of it, without any idea of how the story should end.

And the movie that was released to talk about the "Cylon's plan" was a big WTF. The explanation of the Cylon God was WTF. In science fiction, if you need to bring in mysticism bullshit, make sure there is a RATIONAL SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION, e.g. B5 Valen character (good example), DS9 wormhole alien prophets (not my favorite, but at least a plausible reason).

This is science fiction not fucking fantasy!!!!! Take some writing lessons from JMS, he's the dude who HAS A PLAN. B5 is gold. All other sci-fi series are shit compared to it.

[jollyreaper]

Firefly died after one season and one movie. If BSG did the same I doubt you'd find much more than yay and meh. The most rabid fan reaction usually comes from fans of where the show started who are bitter at where it went. Does most of the criticism of the Star Wars prequels come from fans of the originals or people who didn't care about any of the six films?

There's a lot of bad scifi I don't really feel worked up about because there was little going for it. I feel more passionate about material that was almost great or was great and suffered a decline.

In terms of commercial success, the show made bank so you are correct that whether the nerds are happy or pissed, they certainly spent their money. I never watched Caprica or followed the behind the scenes so I'm not sure what the problem was aside from not making the money the channel wanted. Haven't followed the details on Blood and Chrome. I assume they must have thought they could capture the original audience and their internal polling didn't indicate it was strong enough.

I do know Caprica was pitched as a not-BSG show and then somehow got revamped. At the time I thought it would be a really tough genre shift to pull off, probably about as radical as Georgr Lucas proposing that Star Wars spinoff that would be gangsters on Coruscant and all film noir. I don't know if the situation with Caprica was a good show not finding an audience or the usual suspects burning more fan goodwill or just bad timing and bad network decisions. Was there a consensus or are people still debating?

[Vendetta]

And the movie that was released to talk about the "Cylon's plan" was a big WTF. The explanation of the Cylon God was WTF. In science fiction, if you need to bring in mysticism bullshit, make sure there is a RATIONAL SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION, e.g. B5 Valen character (good example), DS9 wormhole alien prophets (not my favorite, but at least a plausible reason).

This is science fiction not fucking fantasy!!!!! Take some writing lessons from JMS, he's the dude who HAS A PLAN. B5 is gold. All other sci-fi series are shit compared to it.

That actually doesn't matter as much as you think it does. Science Fiction is still fiction. You can write an SF work, have an entity in it which you call a god, is worshipped as a god, and which you give no indication that it might be anything other than as advertised and that's fine, as long as it's actions, directly observed or purported, are internally consistent with the rest of the narrative. It literally doesn't matter, if there's still a speculative science making a drastic change to the life of a human or humanity as a whole, you're still writing SF.

Y'see, if you look at an SF work and all you take from it is the science, you're basically doing it wrong. The point of science in Science Fiction is to provide a means to speculate on how people and societies might be changed by science, either a specific science like robots, or just general progress towards an imagined future. It's what science means for the human condition that's the important thing to take from Science Fiction, not whether the technical details adhere strictly to the design specification.

Of course, usually SF writers get it wrong. Even 20-30 years ago SF of the "near future" underestimated the ubiquity of mass communication and computation we have available now, and mobile phones even existed then. But even getting it wrong doesn't matter, as long as the story said something interesting about what might have been.

[jollyreaper]

That's the question of "If x, then what?"

What if we invented a perfect lie detector machine? What if we could invent a machine to talk with the dead? What if someone could tell you the exact date of your death and the nature, would you pay him to not tell you? What if life insurance companies could create perfect clones to back people up down to the last second of their natural existence and restore the clones?

Some people might miss the mark of the speculative question by getting hung up on how the imaginary technology works but others might find flaws with the premise of the question by asking the very same questions.

With this kind of speculation you usually run into what I call the Star Trek problem where a spectacular thing is invented to solve a common problem and nobody on the writing team considers the consequences, aka the Transporter. The original series transporter was invented by the production team to prevent them from having to create a complicated special effect for landing the ship every week. The second order consequence of that invention is that atom-level matter manipulation would now be possible, hence the replicator in the Next Generation. But you also have the case of them figuring out a way to use the transporter to reverse aging in people and it subsequently has no disruptive effects in the rest of the Federation culture. Wait, what?

The simplest comparison I can come up with for this sort of myopia is asking a barbarian what he would want for a better weapon and he says the only thing better than a sword would be a sharper sword while not yet comprehending what could be done with a bow, let alone a firearm. At the dawn of the era of air power, he's still looking for the bigger battleship.

As for mass communication and storage, scifi still sets my teeth on edge when archives are impressively described in terms of size and total count of physical media.

[jollyreaper]

Final thought for the thread. Moore wrote an essay encapsulating his vision for the show back before it aired. The amazing thing? I can really get behind what he's talking about.

http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Natur ... ce_fiction

Battlestar Galactica: Naturalistic Science Fiction or Taking the Opera out of Space Opera
Our goal is nothing less than the reinvention of the science fiction television series. We take as a given the idea that the traditional space opera, with its stock characters, techno-double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian histrionics, and empty heroics has run its course and a new approach is required. That approach is to introduce realism into what has heretofore been an aggressively unrealistic genre.
Call it "Naturalistic Science Fiction."
This idea, the presentation of a fantastical situation in naturalistic terms, will permeate every aspect of our series:
Visual. The first thing that will leap out at viewers is the dynamic use of the documentary or cinema verite style. Through the extensive use of hand-held cameras, practical lighting, and functional set design, the battlestar Galactica will feel on every level like a real place.
This shift in tone and look cannot be overemphasized. It is our intention to deliver a show that does not look like any other science fiction series ever produced. A casual viewer should for a moment feel like he or she has accidentally surfed onto a "60 Minutes" documentary piece about life aboard an aircraft carrier until someone starts talking about Cylons and battlestars.
That is not to say we're shooting on videotape under fluorescent lights, but we will be striving for a verisimilitude that is sorely lacking in virtually every other science fiction series ever attempted. We're looking for filmic truth, not manufactured "pretty pictures" or the "way cool" factor.
Perhaps nowhere will this be more surprising than in our visual effects shots. Our ships will be treated like real ships that someone had to go out and film with a real camera. That means no 3-D "hero" shots panning and zooming wildly with the touch of a mousepad. The questions we will ask before every VFX shot are things like: "How did we get this shot? Where is the camera? Who's holding it? Is the cameraman in another spacecraft? Is the camera mounted on the wing?" This philosophy will generate images that will present an audience jaded and bored with the same old "Wow -- it's a CGI shot!" with a different texture and a different cinematic language that will force them to re-evaluate their notions of science fiction.
Another way to challenge the audience visually will be our extensive use of the multi-split screen format. By combining multiple angles during dogfights, for example, we will be able to present an entirely new take on what has become a tired and familiar sequence that has not changed materially since George Lucas established it in the mid 1970s.
Finally, our visual style will also capitalize on the possibilities inherent in the series concept itself to deliver unusual imagery not typically seen in this genre. That is, the inclusion of a variety of civilian ships each of which will have unique properties and visual references that can be in stark contrast to the military life aboard Galactica. For example, we have a vessel in our rag-tag fleet which was designed to be a space-going marketplace or "City Walk" environment. The juxtaposition of this high-gloss, sexy atmosphere against the gritty reality of a story for survival will give us more textures and levels to play than in typical genre fare.
Editorial. Our style will avoid the now clichéd MTV fast-cutting while at the same time foregoing Star Trek's somewhat ponderous and lugubrious "master, two-shot, close-up, close-up, two-shot, back to master" pattern. If there is a model here, it would be vaguely Hitchcockian -- that is, a sense of building suspense and dramatic tension through the use of extending takes and long masters which pull the audience into the reality of the action rather than the distract through the use of ostentatious cutting patterns.
Story. We will eschew the usual stories about parallel universes, time-travel, mind-control, evil twins, God-like powers and all the other clichés of the genre. Our show is first and foremost a drama. It is about people. Real people that the audience can identify with and become engaged in. It is not a show about hardware or bizarre alien cultures. It is a show about us. It is an allegory for our own society, our own people and it should be immediately recognizable to any member of the audience.
Science. Our spaceships don't make noise because there is no noise in space. Sound will be provided from sources inside the ships -- the whine of an engine audible to the pilot for instance. Our fighters are not airplanes and they will not be shackled by the conventions of WWII dogfights. The speed of light is a law and there will be no moving violations.
And finally, Character. This is perhaps, the biggest departure from the science fiction norm. We do not have "the cocky guy" "the fast-talker" "the brain" "the wacky alien sidekick" or any of the other usual characters who populate a space series. Our characters are living, breathing people with all the emotional complexity and contradictions present in quality dramas like "The West Wing" or "The Sopranos." In this way, we hope to challenge our audience in ways that other genre pieces do not. We want the audience to connect with the characters of Galactica as people. Our characters are not super-heroes. They are not an elite. They are everyday people caught up in a enormous cataclysm and trying to survive it as best they can.
They are you and me.

There's a mess of discussion at the link as to just how well this vision was accomplished in the show. But I'll leave with a humorous bit instead.

Simon and Garfunkel sing "Sound of Cylons."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMUezhpuEoE

[Scrib]

In my mind nBSG was a raving success.

It accomplished the one thing that is most important to successful sci-fi, it caused nerds to argue about it endlessly. Shit, even I spent hours typing shit up about it analyzing the cycle and such.

I'm serious. Sci-Fi that isn't successful, whether good or bad, doesn't generate conversation or thought. Like, I could be off base, but something like Firefly wasn't successful as sci-fi to me, not because it got cancelled or because people hate it, it is because when people start talking about it, one side says "OMG! BEST EVER! MAL AND JANE AND RIVER!!!!111!11 " and the other side is all "lol meh." It doesn't seem to generate any thought or discourse on it's ideas or how it was carried out.

It falls under what it seems Batman wants: "It's fun!" nBSG goes beyond that.

What thought did the show generate? IIRC the main "moral" questions were either cases where the opponent was so irredeemable that their good points were drowned in a sea of douchiness(see:Cain) or cases where the moral question was something no one gave a shit about or was just there to make you bang your head against the wall (the whole Helo "genocide plotline). Perhaps the best example of thought is the question of religion vs. agnosticism, but that got resolved fast.

I'm currently rewatching the series and the "thought" it generates is probably made up mostly of wondering what the fuck the angels are, something no one could have figured out. I dunno, I expect thought to be...constructive I guess? Baseless speculation on opaque mysteries is just wide mass guessing.

[Themightytom]

Oh god damnit this clusterfuck won't die, is there anyway to remove this from "view your posts"?

[jollyreaper]

There's a little unsubscribe button up top.

[Themightytom]

There's a little unsubscribe button up top.

No. no there isn't. but you just taught me a better way by accident.