What are we actually looking for? (In a scifi show)

[Eternal_Freedom]

Ghetto edit: If you want high technology, have it ubiquitous. No explanations of how it works or shit like that. Like Star Wars in that regard, or BSG (both versions). I cannot stand technobabble, except possible when it's done half-seriously like in Stargate.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

I agree with most everything you've said here, but it appears you're overly cynical on the prospect for big, epic space opera using live action and CGI. A lot of the sci-fi shows that came out in the last decade had pretty decent production values for a TV show. Where they failed is the writing. Something like nBSG or SGU had a lot of capacity for epic space opera, which was squandered as we had episode after episode about boring characters talking boring shit all the time. Farscape pretty much was an epic space opera show. So was Babylon 5.

I did love Farscape... I think I am a bit cynical, but not unreasonably so. Space Opera is an expensive format with a small audience. That's a fact we all need to deal with. I just don't necessarily believe that something like Babylon 5 is going to happen again. The fact that it lasted 5 years in the 90s was already a crazy fluke. Now, maybe I'm wrong, and after the enormous critical and popular success of Game of Thrones HBO will throw some of its infinite monies at making my dream space show about rocket ships that fight and social injustice in the FUTURE and men being pulled into the abyss by their own frailties and pew pews. But televised sci fi has been dying on the vine for a few years now. Maybe it is cyclical and some day there will be more shows about the future (the space future, of course) than there are reality shows about pawn shops, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Unless you want it to be MORE epic than either of those two shows. Considering your criticism of Babylon 5, I suspect the bigger issue you have is again, the writing. Something like B5 is let down by JMS' lame dialogue. His plotting is what is interesting about the show, as was his character arcs (particularly Londo).

something something BYRON something something

Also I wonder how much American shows suffer from having big seasons of 20+ episodes. A lot of a show's problems - mainly to do with their budget - might not be such a problem if you halved the number of episodes, or kept it to like a dozen episodes per season. That way you can focus more on the plotting and you have more of a budget to work with as far as sets and vfx go. But I don't know enough about TV production to really evaluate that.

That's definitely true. It's one of the reasons that American Cable dramas that have seasons of only 7-13 episodes have such a high average quality, and I believe it's the biggest reason why the first season of BSG was its best, tightest season.

3rd Rock From the Sun? Red Dwarf? A sci-fi comedy show is certainly possible.

Quiet with your empirically verifiable sunshine.

[Stark]

Small audiences can get shows in the strange Japanese way, where it is produced very slowly or sold an ep at a time or whatever. Of course this doesn't help people who need to watch something everr week.

I wonder if shorter seasons produce better quality even if all else is equal. I guess six months off is better than working all year, creatively speaking; so even with the same dollars per episode the actors and writers are happier.

Was B5 an 'expensive' show? It looked heap, but scifi always does.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Small audiences can get shows in the strange Japanese way, where it is produced very slowly or sold an ep at a time or whatever. Of course this doesn't help people who need to watch something everr week.

That can work, but the financing process that makes that work in Japan just doesn't really exist in the West. There's, like, a couple British period dramas that have done that, and that fan-produced Star Trek show, and that's all that I know of.

I wonder if shorter seasons produce better quality even if all else is equal. I guess six months off is better than working all year, creatively speaking; so even with the same dollars per episode the actors and writers are happier.

It has a lot of benefits. Aside from more free time for everyone involved (which also means more leniency for episodes to go over-schedule if they need to), it makes seasons much leaner, so that, taking BSG as an example, filler episodes from the later seasons that just muddy the waters by introducing MOAR SUFFERING like 'Black Market' or the one where they go through a radioactive nebula or whatever are cut and only the most important thematic and plot stuff gets explored. So every episode gets more attention, with workers with more energy, a showrunner who has less on his plate, and there's even hidden benefits like promotion for the show, since the lead actors have time enough off from the show that they can appear in movies that increase their profile at the same time (like Bryan Cranston, who's won the emmy for lead actor three years in a row now and is in like 5 big movies this year - and the commercials during episodes of Breaking Bad do not want you to forget this).

Was B5 an 'expensive' show? It looked heap, but scifi always does.

JMS has talked about he designed the show to be cheaper to make than most sci fi, but who knows if that panned out.

[Stofsk]

I agree with most everything you've said here, but it appears you're overly cynical on the prospect for big, epic space opera using live action and CGI. A lot of the sci-fi shows that came out in the last decade had pretty decent production values for a TV show. Where they failed is the writing. Something like nBSG or SGU had a lot of capacity for epic space opera, which was squandered as we had episode after episode about boring characters talking boring shit all the time. Farscape pretty much was an epic space opera show. So was Babylon 5.

I did love Farscape... I think I am a bit cynical, but not unreasonably so. Space Opera is an expensive format with a small audience. That's a fact we all need to deal with. I just don't necessarily believe that something like Babylon 5 is going to happen again. The fact that it lasted 5 years in the 90s was already a crazy fluke. Now, maybe I'm wrong, and after the enormous critical and popular success of Game of Thrones HBO will throw some of its infinite monies at making my dream space show about rocket ships that fight and social injustice in the FUTURE and men being pulled into the abyss by their own frailties and pew pews. But televised sci fi has been dying on the vine for a few years now. Maybe it is cyclical and some day there will be more shows about the future (the space future, of course) than there are reality shows about pawn shops, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Well, it would be nice if the sci-fi channel actually did its job, but I guess I have like a sense of entitlement or something.

Unless you want it to be MORE epic than either of those two shows. Considering your criticism of Babylon 5, I suspect the bigger issue you have is again, the writing. Something like B5 is let down by JMS' lame dialogue. His plotting is what is interesting about the show, as was his character arcs (particularly Londo).

something something BYRON something something

quiet you

Also I wonder how much American shows suffer from having big seasons of 20+ episodes. A lot of a show's problems - mainly to do with their budget - might not be such a problem if you halved the number of episodes, or kept it to like a dozen episodes per season. That way you can focus more on the plotting and you have more of a budget to work with as far as sets and vfx go. But I don't know enough about TV production to really evaluate that.

That's definitely true. It's one of the reasons that American Cable dramas that have seasons of only 7-13 episodes have such a high average quality, and I believe it's the biggest reason why the first season of BSG was its best, tightest season.

IIRC TV syndication is what every show wants, and to get it you need to have around 100+ episodes. That's why shows have large seasons. But I think that's probably as a result of shows being produced by networks. Cable is a different medium, and as you've observed, most tend to have small seasons. I imagine that cable operates on different priorities than network tv so they can afford to do it like that.

3rd Rock From the Sun? Red Dwarf? A sci-fi comedy show is certainly possible.

Quiet with your empirically verifiable sunshine.

:V

Small audiences can get shows in the strange Japanese way, where it is produced very slowly or sold an ep at a time or whatever. Of course this doesn't help people who need to watch something everr week.

I wonder if shorter seasons produce better quality even if all else is equal. I guess six months off is better than working all year, creatively speaking; so even with the same dollars per episode the actors and writers are happier.

Was B5 an 'expensive' show? It looked heap, but scifi always does.

From what I remember, B5's budget was a lot more tightly controlled than contemporary shows of the period, and there was some massive disparity between it and stuff like TNG or DS9. I can't remember nor do I have access to any hard numbers though, I'm going by my recollection of what JMS said on usenet during the show's production.

B5 kept costs down a variety of ways. Probably the most obvious is the use of CGI vfx, which at the time was a nascent process that was still cheaper than using models (they literally did the CGI on like amigas and with lightwave IIRC). Shows like TNG unfortunately suffered with the whole 'welp we've run out of money so we need to do a bottle episode' phenomenon. That comes from having an episodic structure but it was also just one of those things that showed how it was done back then. JMS did the unusual, and as far as I know unprecedented step of taking on the writing task solo for most of B5. He wrote all the episodes of season three and four, and the vast majority of seasons two and five (and the first as well, but the first had the most amount of 'guest writers' and staff writers). This had its strengths - for one thing, it kept plotting and character arcs tight, which is, as I alluded to above to NUA, one of B5's best qualities - but it also had its drawbacks. Lame dialogue for one. When it's just one dude writing everything it's hard to go 'is this funny?' Even if it is, it's still just one guy's perspective.

That's not to say the opposite, collaborative storytelling from a staff of writers, is any better. It has its problems too. I'm reminded of how the writers on season seven TNG had gotten so bored/tired of the show that one of the best examples of that year, the Gambit two-parter, was derided by Brannaon Braga as being too campy. Of course, he's an idiot and I'm continually baffled why he ever got a position of such esteem in the franchise.

[Ford Prefect]

Small audiences can get shows in the strange Japanese way, where it is produced very slowly or sold an ep at a time or whatever. Of course this doesn't help people who need to watch something everr week.

I think it's probably worth noting, because you have a reasonably limited view of the animation business in Japan, that the 'OVA boom' has been over for a long time. Like they're still being made, but generally speaking most OVAs these days are bonuses on a BD release (ie. an extra episode to encourage fans to buy BDs, which is the core of the current business model). Almost all of the Fall season OVAs are single episodes for a series from the previous couple of seasons. There are exceptions - Unicorn Gundam is the most visible success, but there are big multi-episode OVAs for Black Lagoon, Yozakura Quartet and Air Gear, but these are adaptations or have previously been on television. Back in the 80s it was normal to see big, animator driven original OVAs all the time and I mean we got Legend of the Galactic Heroes which purely in terms of production is the most self-indulgent thing ever done by a studio. The only ground-up original OVA I know of in 2011 in Sunrise's Norageki!.

That said, 2011 has shown a significant shift away from the past few years of light novel adaptations which dominated the airwaves. The business had something of a downturn so it went for safe bets, which is to say properties with established audiences. I mean there are still adaptations because they're easy, but there's a number of pretty huge original works in the pipeline. There's also something of a movement to cinema for anime currently: while there have always been animated films, the number of established series getting films is growing (the K-On! film is guaranteed to make a bazillion yen, the new Evangelion films have been ludicrously successful, the Macross Frontier movie was really successful too), and there have been multi-part cinema releases like Kara no Kyoukai, Break Blade and, most recently, Towa no Quon which suggest a changing business model for studios. Cinema releases naturally avoid some of the really big costs involved with television, such as buying a timeslot, but I don't know all the details.

words words

[Stark]

You know THINGS!

It's just good that 'want scifi' doesn't have to end with 'American studio scifi is crap or nonexistent'.

[Ford Prefect]

American networks are probably not to be trusted with these things lol. It's kind of interesting how Australian television is somewhat resource poor so it limits what we can do, which has usually turned out pretty well. Like Sea Patrol was by no means good television, but it had a short format which was known ahead of time so the plotting and production was built around this.

[Uraniun235]

IIRC TV syndication is what every show wants, and to get it you need to have around 100+ episodes. That's why shows have large seasons. But I think that's probably as a result of shows being produced by networks. Cable is a different medium, and as you've observed, most tend to have small seasons. I imagine that cable operates on different priorities than network tv so they can afford to do it like that.

My understanding is that American networks rarely produce the shows themselves (and those they do are usually reality shows or live entertainment or stuff like that). Being on cable also doesn't necessarily change the game.

Here's how a show was (still is?) produced in America for a long time:

- Creative person sells a Studio on a concept for a series.
- Studio shops the concept around to the Networks, one of which may pay for a Pilot Episode to be produced
- If the Pilot is successful (and doesn't so much reflect the final product as it does the general potential it could become), the Network agrees to pay for series production, based on how successful the show is at generating advertising revenue.

Now, it's important to realize that the network won't necessarily own the show outright. For example, the animated series The Critic started as a show airing on ABC in its first season, then aired on the Fox network in the second season. For a more contemporary example, I remember hearing some discussion that if talks between Lionsgate (studio) and AMC (cable network) had broken down, Mad Men might have been taken by Lionsgate to another network.

What every studio wants is to make money. Some shows will make money by virtue of bringing in sufficient revenue and bring sufficiently inexpensive to produce that it is profitable on first airing. Other shows will literally lose the studio money on each episode, with the studio hoping that it will make its money back in syndication; this was the case for Star Trek TOS where the studio Desilu ate a loss on each episode because NBC wouldn't pay for the full production cost of each episode. Obviously from the studio's perspective, it would be nice if every show made it into second-run syndication on other networks and continued to make the studio money years after it stopped production.

(As an aside, Star Trek TNG and DS9 were first-run syndication - meaning that they weren't sold to any one network, they were sold to individual TV stations across the country. Some of them were network stations filling non-network time; others were local market, independent TV stations. There are distinct advantages to this model, chiefly being that there's no one man or company that can pull the plug on your show for perceived ratings shortcomings, and similarly there's no one man or company that can order you to censor your show. And if someone does get angry and drop you, it's a small fraction of the overall income. Of course, you need to be able to bankroll the show from your own coffers while it gets started, but somehow I don't think Paramount had trouble coming up with the money to front it. An advantage of having the TV and movie studios be so interrelated.)

The big change in recent years that may explain a greater willingness to accept shorter seasons is the advent of the DVD boxset. Back in the days of VHS ownership, owning a whole series on home video was prohibitively expensive - as in many hundreds of dollars even for a show that just barely made the syndication threshold. Many shows didn't even get home video releases. Nowadays it's common to own several complete collections of TV shows, and certain shows (Family Guy) have produced tremendous profit on home video sales, so presumably there's greater willingness for a studio to pace itself (and not spend quite so much money per year on a given show), knowing that even if they don't meet the magic threshold for profitable syndication, they can still make money via DVD (and now Bluray!) sales.

From what I remember, B5's budget was a lot more tightly controlled than contemporary shows of the period, and there was some massive disparity between it and stuff like TNG or DS9. I can't remember nor do I have access to any hard numbers though, I'm going by my recollection of what JMS said on usenet during the show's production.

According to this article from 1988, Paramount was budgeting an average of $1.3 million per episode of TNG. (There's also some interesting text there on the revenues Paramount was generating, and on what they could normally expect to get from a network for a one-hour slot.) I seem to recall JMS saying the per-episode on B5 was usually under a million, but I could be wrong on that.

B5 also had the advantage of using a lot of less-expensive actors. TNG had Patrick Stewart, as well as LeVar Burton and Brent Spiner, and by the third season Stewart had begun to agitate for more money to the point that Paramount was considering killing him off in BOBW.

If you do the math though, $1.3M/episode runs out to the first season of TNG costing nearly $34 million. That's 26 hours (well, not quite), granted, but that's still more than the budget of Die Hard.

B5 kept costs down a variety of ways. Probably the most obvious is the use of CGI vfx, which at the time was a nascent process that was still cheaper than using models (they literally did the CGI on like amigas and with lightwave IIRC). Shows like TNG unfortunately suffered with the whole 'welp we've run out of money so we need to do a bottle episode' phenomenon.

It's usually not a matter of "ran out" as it is "please throw us a bone and save some money". I don't think it's really a problem; if a story idea is really good, TNG certainly wouldn't have shitcanned it for want of money, they would have held onto it and produced it another year, or even just later in the season after they'd done a cheaper show or two to even out the figures. It's not as if it doesn't happen in serial shows either; I'm pretty sure both B5 and BSG worked around the really effects-heavy episodes by planning easier/cheaper episodes to compensate for them.

And to be fair, bottle shows can be real winners, too.

This had its strengths - for one thing, it kept plotting and character arcs tight, which is, as I alluded to above to NUA, one of B5's best qualities - but it also had its drawbacks. Lame dialogue for one. When it's just one dude writing everything it's hard to go 'is this funny?' Even if it is, it's still just one guy's perspective.

I don't think that's a "one writer" fault, I think that's a JMS fault. Every writer needs an editor, and JMS could easily have hired at least one other guy to be a full-time reality check. I mean shit, didn't Harlan Ellison get a credit in each episode? What was he doing?

I'm reminded of how the writers on season seven TNG had gotten so bored/tired of the show that one of the best examples of that year, the Gambit two-parter, was derided by Brannaon Braga as being too campy. Of course, he's an idiot and I'm continually baffled why he ever got a position of such esteem in the franchise.

I think boredom is part of it, but I think another big part of it is a lot of the writers had crawled up their own asses and saw a bright sunny day in there. They (and I'm thinking of one interview with Jeri Taylor) could be godawfully smug and self-congratulatory about how each week they "pushed the boundaries of television" and dealt with earth-shaking ideas or some such shit, and I think the problem there is having that unrealistic expectation of trying to produce some deep thought-provoking high-concept (and entertaining) thing 26 weeks a year.

I mean challenging yourself is one thing, but when you're taking the show so god damn seriously that an episode about Dr. Crusher's grandmother's ghost lover turns into "oh the phantasmatronic entity is releasing verbulon particles into beverly's clitoris", something's gone Wrong.

I wonder if shorter seasons produce better quality even if all else is equal. I guess six months off is better than working all year, creatively speaking; so even with the same dollars per episode the actors and writers are happier.

Taking TNG as an example, the 26 week seasons had a break of at least a couple months or so. So after BOBW pt1 got finished, it literally sat like that for a couple of months before people got back together and said "okay now how are we going to fix this".

Cinema releases naturally avoid some of the really big costs involved with television, such as buying a timeslot, but I don't know all the details.

I know I've asked before about Japanese TV but I can't remember: where do Japanese studios make their profit off TV shows? Do they get a cut of the advertising revenues, or do they rely on home video sales and other merchandising, or...?

[Stofsk]

*snip*

That's pretty interesting U, and does lend some hope to the debate. People know sci-fi fans (or fans in general) can be fastidious collectors, and they probably make up a large share of the dvd/ market for any given tv show. The difference between VHS collections and DVD collections has probably given some people in studios and networks ideas on how profitable a show can be even if say, the ratings don't necessarily reflect that.

According to this article from 1988, Paramount was budgeting an average of $1.3 million per episode of TNG. (There's also some interesting text there on the revenues Paramount was generating, and on what they could normally expect to get from a network for a one-hour slot.) I seem to recall JMS saying the per-episode on B5 was usually under a million, but I could be wrong on that.

No, that's what I remember reading. Like TNG was over a million, and JMS was saying how that would be like two episodes of B5 or something. I can't remember how he put it, but he kinda said that B5 in comparison was done in a significantly cheaper way and it didn't really affect the quality of the show (although this is debatable - see below in my response to your next point).

B5 also had the advantage of using a lot of less-expensive actors. TNG had Patrick Stewart, as well as LeVar Burton and Brent Spiner, and by the third season Stewart had begun to agitate for more money to the point that Paramount was considering killing him off in BOBW.

This is certainly a huge thing. Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner and LeVar Burton were the top three highest paid actors in TNG I am almost certainly sure about. And it shows in the quality of their acting. They're worth every penny. When you take B5, some of the actors are... well, not the best they could be. Indeed, one of the biggest criticisms of B5 I heard when it was actually out on TV was that the acting sucked. Guys like Bruce Boxleitner and Peter Jurasik, and Andreas Katsulas and Mira Furlan, are excellent actors. But some of the other actors, well... they're b-grade, maybe even lower. Jerry Doyle wasn't even an actor, he came from a completely different background IIRC (finance or investment or something) and he auditioned for Garibaldi I guess because he wanted to do something different. I don't have anything against Doyle but he's not like the greatest actor on the show (although Garibaldi is one of the best characters). Same goes for Claudia Christian, who was highly variable - she could be great, to alright to cringe-worthy performances, and usually it depended on the script.

In any case, I guess 'doing things on the cheap' can still be a detriment, but I think JMS may have been referring to stuff like simple organisation of a season's budget. Since he wrote all the scripts in some of the years, this has definite and obvious advantages. Yeah he's going to plan out the effects-heavy episodes for sure, and then follow up with low-intensity episodes. But that was due also to the drama he was writing - you can't follow up 'Severed Dreams' with an episode where even more shit goes down. You obviously need to pace the show in the right way.

It's usually not a matter of "ran out" as it is "please throw us a bone and save some money". I don't think it's really a problem; if a story idea is really good, TNG certainly wouldn't have shitcanned it for want of money, they would have held onto it and produced it another year, or even just later in the season after they'd done a cheaper show or two to even out the figures. It's not as if it doesn't happen in serial shows either; I'm pretty sure both B5 and BSG worked around the really effects-heavy episodes by planning easier/cheaper episodes to compensate for them.

See above. I agree with you of course.

And to be fair, bottle shows can be real winners, too.

Absolutely. Some of the best episodes can be bottle shows.

I don't think that's a "one writer" fault, I think that's a JMS fault. Every writer needs an editor, and JMS could easily have hired at least one other guy to be a full-time reality check. I mean shit, didn't Harlan Ellison get a credit in each episode? What was he doing?

Probably yelling at someone.

And while every writer needs a good editor, the thing about editing is you can't really go 'ok JMS this is shit you should cut it' because... well, I don't think editors actually do that. Editing is more about 'okay you're over by 10K words so you need to cut x pages out of this'. In TV, I think that sort of role is usually where producers enter into it? Or maybe the lead writer in a staff? Someone like Michael Piller looking over a script by Ron Moore and going 'ok this is fine but you also need to do x, y, z' etc. When it's just JMS, who is ALSO the producer, who's above him to go 'cut out this weird bit here Joe'? Doug Netter? In any case, I don't think the B5 model is necessarily one to follow anyway, and to my knowledge it hasn't really been done since (nor had been done before for that matter).

*snip*

I mean challenging yourself is one thing, but when you're taking the show so god damn seriously that an episode about Dr. Crusher's grandmother's ghost lover turns into "oh the phantasmatronic entity is releasing verbulon particles into beverly's clitoris", something's gone Wrong.

And yeah, part of it is they were certainly believing their own hype. As much as the new Trek film was brainless and too actiony, there is something to be said for making a drama fun and adventurous and then trying to be deep and meaningful. There is obviously a balancing act to be made here - too much in one direction and the story topples into either mindlessness or overwrought themes that fail in the execution. I guess the moral of the story is writers should strive to maintain a sense of perspective about the show?

[Ford Prefect]

I know I've asked before about Japanese TV but I can't remember: where do Japanese studios make their profit off TV shows? Do they get a cut of the advertising revenues, or do they rely on home video sales and other merchandising, or...?

DVD/BD sales. I don't really know where the revenue from those goofy ads go, but I don't think much, if anything, gets back to the studio. Certainly the cost of a timeslot is so huge that you could never expect to make any of your money just airing it, so airing is just to try and entice fans into purchasing it on (expensive) disk. Secondary merchandising can be helpful as well - everyone wants to pull a Gainax and get property together which is so popular that you can essentially make do on selling diner plates until the heat death. This is why special editions are so common in Japan: if you provide your otaku base with the opportunity to get exclusive stuff like figures or posters or genga or pillow cases or whatever then they're more likely to purchase a more expensive than normal blu-ray, which is where the cash is. The Macross Frontier film, for example, shipped an actual animation cel with the first run BD release, which was huuuuuge. People were frothing for the opportunity to get a really good cel from the film.

Pretty much every TV series starts at a huge loss and is going to trying hard to break even. That's why 1-cour light novel adaptations have been so popular with studios recently, because they're relatively cheap and come with an installed audience who are more likely to get involved in the show (To Aru Majutsu no Index is like the torchbearer of this and was so successful that a third 2-cour series is inevitable in the near future).

Mind you, Gainax didn't turn a profit for like 10 years - Evangelion was their first production which made any money.

[Stofsk]

Music in general is something that can make or break a show. Look at the persistent complaints that the music in late TNG was awful in comparison to stuff that was in early TNG (season three mainly with Ron Jones and the whole kerfluffle surrounding his departure from the show). The music in Voyager was utterly yawn-inducing.

Despite the way that it ended, nBSG had pretty great music. It's probably the only nice thing I will say about that show now.

[Uraniun235]

I know I've asked before about Japanese TV but I can't remember: where do Japanese studios make their profit off TV shows? Do they get a cut of the advertising revenues, or do they rely on home video sales and other merchandising, or...?

DVD/BD sales. I don't really know where the revenue from those goofy ads go, but I don't think much, if anything, gets back to the studio. Certainly the cost of a timeslot is so huge that you could never expect to make any of your money just airing it, so airing is just to try and entice fans into purchasing it on (expensive) disk. Secondary merchandising can be helpful as well - everyone wants to pull a Gainax and get property together which is so popular that you can essentially make do on selling diner plates until the heat death. This is why special editions are so common in Japan: if you provide your otaku base with the opportunity to get exclusive stuff like figures or posters or genga or pillow cases or whatever then they're more likely to purchase a more expensive than normal blu-ray, which is where the cash is. The Macross Frontier film, for example, shipped an actual animation cel with the first run BD release, which was huuuuuge. People were frothing for the opportunity to get a really good cel from the film.

Pretty much every TV series starts at a huge loss and is going to trying hard to break even. That's why 1-cour light novel adaptations have been so popular with studios recently, because they're relatively cheap and come with an installed audience who are more likely to get involved in the show (To Aru Majutsu no Index is like the torchbearer of this and was so successful that a third 2-cour series is inevitable in the near future).

Mind you, Gainax didn't turn a profit for like 10 years - Evangelion was their first production which made any money.

That's interesting. I can't imagine it's always been this way, since there was anime before home video - did the Japanese TV market change at some point? What about (not necessarily anime) shows that don't really lend themselves to collectibles and merchandising... or are those mostly produced by the networks, and what we're seeing is studios basically buying time from the networks that would otherwise have been filled in by network-produced programming? (I realize this might be getting a bit esoteric here. I'm fascinated since the more I learn the more it becomes apparent that American television is a very odd duck compared to most anywhere else. )

EDIT: If Gainax lost money for ten years, who was footing the bill for it all?


It seems to me like a system where only merchandisable series can get produced could distort the market somewhat. Do you think that's the case, or am I underestimating the ability to hawk collectibles?

[Ford Prefect]

That's interesting. I can't imagine it's always been this way, since there was anime before home video - did the Japanese TV market change at some point? What about (not necessarily anime) shows that don't really lend themselves to collectibles and merchandising... or are those mostly produced by the networks, and what we're seeing is studios basically buying time from the networks that would otherwise have been filled in by network-produced programming? (I realize this might be getting a bit esoteric here. I'm fascinated since the more I learn the more it becomes apparent that American television is a very odd duck compared to most anywhere else. )

EDIT: If Gainax lost money for ten years, who was footing the bill for it all?


It seems to me like a system where only merchandisable series can get produced could distort the market somewhat. Do you think that's the case, or am I underestimating the ability to hawk collectibles?

I'm not totally sure what it used to be like and to be honest I'm not sure how far back this business model goes. It might have been precipitated by the crash in the late 80s, but that's just speculation. I mean, Mobile Suit Gundam only really took off once the models started getting released. I'm not really sure how live action stuff works in Japan, though my impression is that television dramas are typically produced in-house by broadcasters, rather than by independent studios like with anime. Densha Otoko was produced by Fuji TV, for example. Something like Kamen Rider isn't though, so it would rely heavily on toy sales; but if a given drama is produced by a broadcaster it skips some of the costs in regards to timeslots. A decent timeslot can cost tens of millions of yen, which is pretty significant chunk of a budget - Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood was a huge, 5-cour series with a budget of 500 million and had to pay like 30-40 million for its timeslot. I hear that ratings are really important for tv dramas though, which is why programs no longer start exactly on the hour or half hour - it's a part of this ratings war that I'm not really familiar with. Regardless, merchandising isn't as huge a deal for dramas as it is for anime, though OSTs can sell really well.

There have been some concerns with regards to the current business model. I mean, when it comes down to it, anime is a niche market and you're trying to appeal to a niche within that niche. Matsumoto Koji, producer for the anime focused noitaminA programming block on Fuji TV, warned a while back that the industry could face 'death by moe'. Sato Dai, one of the top writers in the industry, described anime as being stifled for creativity with the medium increasingly swinging towards the ultra-marketable. For a while I felt like that too, with a bunch of shows being built around its cutesy heroines and any number of shows relying on being uncensored on BD to sell. However, 2011 has been the best year since 2004-2005, with a lot of standout stuff, including a large number of original shows.

EDIT: I don't know what was going on with Gainax before 95. Honneamise was a flop, but it could be that they were breaking even on other stuff. I only really found about this when they had a big staff shakeup last month.

[VF5SS]

It seems to me like a system where only merchandisable series can get produced could distort the market somewhat. Do you think that's the case, or am I underestimating the ability to hawk collectibles?

Well that was never anything new. Especially with regards robots shows. Everything on TV was made to sell toys and models up until around the early 2000's with the end of Machine Robo Mugenbine and Amdriver. Gundam kits are still the big thing in the market but everything else has kind of fallen by the wayside. With the shrinking children's toy market due to things like declining birthrate, rise of video games, the sheer inanity of Japanese society, etc, the toys went to the collectors who are still in love with Japan's amazing craftsmanship with toys and figures. Anime in general started to focus a little more on the specific fetishes that drive fans, with robots being one of them.

If you want to see how tough it is for anything unique to get a grip on the Japanese market, just read into the story of the movie Redline (not based on the movie where Rutger Hauer gets dry humped by women half his age). You should see Redline. I don't have to tell you how :d

[Eternal_Freedom]

All shows need awesome openings.

Didn't SG-1 take the piss outta this idea with their "200" episode. As I recall, Mitchell says to the producer guy the first thing they need is a strong opening sequence, and the producer replies:

"Don't be stupid, nobody does that anymore. You just flash up the title and go." - followed by "Stargate SG-1" appearing and that was it

On a serious note, music is essential. As Stofsk said, nBSG had some cracking music (good enough that I bought the soundtracks for some of it and have it on my phone).

[Eternal_Freedom]

I'd second that. Avoid long plot arcs, at least for the first few seasons. If you want to introduce a big arc later, like the Dominion War, fine, but not at first.

[Stark]

Anyone who says you can't enjoy individual episodes of a show with 'plot arcs' is an idiot. Shit, Home and Away has plot arcs! They don't create obstacles because they don't dominate the narrative.

Don't confuse 'overblown, pretentious' with 'everyday and normal'. Frankly, I dont value the stand-alone accessibility of individual episodes at all - heaps of shows would be fucking shit if they changed them to cater to nerds in 20 years watching on cable. Shows are to tell a story, and some stories are longer than 45m.

Doctor DW Who is crap because it's poorly written, self-indulgent garbage, not because it retains plot states across episodes.

[VF5SS]

Yeah but Legend of the Galactic Heroes is great. It's just one long story.

[ChosenOne54]

Doctor DW Who is crap because it's poorly written, self-indulgent garbage, not because it retains plot states across episodes.

You shouldn't generalize like that. Sure, it has it's fair share of poorly written, self-indulgent episodes, but at the same time there are a lot of really creative, well-written, and interesting episodes. For a series that's been around since the 60s, you can't expect it to not take a wrong step here or there.

[Crazedwraith]

Doctor DW Who is crap because it's poorly written, self-indulgent garbage, not because it retains plot states across episodes.

You shouldn't generalize like that. Sure, it has it's fair share of poorly written, self-indulgent episodes, but at the same time there are a lot of really creative, well-written, and interesting episodes. For a series that's been around since the 60s, you can't expect it to not take a wrong step here or there.

Given the way he's written the title I assume he's only referring to NuWho under Moffat.

Ironically people aren't complain that it retains plot states across episodes but because it doesn't and The doctor doesn't spend every episode hunting down the big bad of the season.

[ChosenOne54]

Doctor DW Who? Anyway, I've actually enjoyed the past season so far, same with the fifth. The weakest NuWho seasons in my opinion were 3 and 4.

[Stark]

Nobody cares about your off-topic wailing.

Crazed wraith, D13 was reading a DW thread and this prompted him to talk about his preference for stand-alone drama. Whether or not the plot arcs are good or doesn't really matter. DW will always be more episodic than, say, Zeta Gundam or Rome, which are explicitly a single story.

Maybe that's a difference worth noting. Some shows are episodic in nature but cloud accessibility by trying to have broader plots within that framework (to greater or lesser success) while others are fundamentally a single story and not episodic at all. Scifi is generally the former; even B5 was basically episodic, which is why you can't just ignore the crap episodes - they all contain important arc stuff.

[ChosenOne54]

How was what I said off topic? I was responding to your post about the quality of Doctor Who.

[Stark]

Sigh. Being off topic is fine if it's not your entire post. You can bang on about how much you love Doctor DW Who all you want if you can contribute to the general discussion.

Aside from SGU (which I didnt watch) I can't think of any explicitly year-long story scifi shows. Maybe Farscape? Other genres are often much stronger on ongoing stories stronger than 'I hope you remember this guy from 3 episodes ago or this ep will make no sense'.

See? It's that easy.