Not necessarily a reimagining, but a premise. A concept.
Altered Carbon.
Season 1 was GREAT. Season 2 wasnt.
They fucked up the most important thing possible with a series changing actors for the same character. YOU NEED TO MAKE US LOVE THE CHARACTER NOT THE ACTOR. They didnt lay in a bunch of physical gestures, catchphrases, signature moves, character traits. Nothing that made be believe Anthony Mackie was the same guy as Joel Kinnaman.
Altered Carbon had trouble keeping their premise straight too. When anyone can swap their body, you can’t recognize people by sight any more. They used this to the MC’s advantage a few times, but you’d think that people in that society would be more aware of the possibility.
Like they had the subplot with the MC’s sister(?) where he spills all his secrets to the person in his sister’s body. I’m sure he really needed someone to trust, but at least verify someone’s identity before you share life-or-death information!
Oh definitely, there were flaws. The absolute disbelief that Mackie was Kovacs was what made S2 almost unwatchable.
Heroes had so much going for it before the writers strike, the premise of that show felt so good then it just got bad.
Severance. Season 2 was a money grab and an artistically fraught endeavour from conception. They shouldn’t have tried to write it, let alone record and release it.
The original plan for the second season of Stranger Things was supposed to be a separate story with a few connections to the first season, each season being a different story and cast. I would have loved to see that actually happen, since the second season lost my interest a couple episodes in.
Heroes, too. Same deal.
Is it too early to say Wheel of Time?
Is Wheel of Time even viable to be adapted into a TV series? Isn’t it just flatout far too long realistically.
Unless there are budget constrain, why not? You can always make longer seasons.
I do realize that 14 seasons x 20 episodes seems unrealistic and will probably be cancelled, though.Supernatural got 15 seasons of 20+ episodes each so I feel like the only thing holding us back is that it’s not 2005 anymore.
Everything is 10 episodes per season and inconsistent release schedules now.
Eh, you could condense books 7-9 into a single season imo
Unless there are budget constrain, why not? You can always make longer seasons.
I do realize that 14 seasons x 20 episodes seems unrealistic and will probably be cancelled, though.
Yeah, that’s what I mean. Amazon has the money to throw at it. But many actors would not stick around for that length of time.
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
Santa Clarita Diet?
You know, I’ve never really fucked with that show. I watched it a couple times n it’s just fine-ish. Idk why tho, it should be up my wheelhouse but it doesn’t do it for me.
Sword art online. Drop the rape and incest beats entirely. It had potential to be a great anime about the meaning of life and instead largely ignored that possibility.
I have that show on my watchlist so thanks for the warning about themes.
My recommendation for SAO is watch the first season and pretend like the rest doesn’t exist.
Mine is legitimately just watch SAO abridged. It reworks story beats for a smoother story in addition to adding gags
Better character writing too.
Is that rework anything like full metal alchemist Vs. FMA brotherhood? Like starts the same but then goes somewhere else?
I already have a copy of the whole SAO so I’ll probably still watch it (I’ve watched some pretty questionable stuff all the way through just because I started it…) but if it’s genuinely worth watching both, even if just for the sake of comparison, I’ll try to find a copy.
SAO abridged is a fan parody that you can find on YouTube, but as said before me, it has a way better storyline than the original and the production quality is incredible for a fan project.
The only downside is that the team can make approximately one episode per year.
Brotherhood is an official anime. SAO abridged is a fan made parody on YouTube. it recuts and redubs but that’s it. And its purpose isn’t to tell the whole SAO story, it’s to make gags. It just inadvertently made a better story than SAO itself, mostly by changing certain characters motivations
Edit: oh and if you’re intent on watching the full version at all, watch it before the abridged
None of the cringe happens until the end of the first season.
Heroes. First season was great, if they kept the concept of each season being a be set of people with special powers they could have made endless seasons and stories.
writers strike killed heroes.
They had insane power creep that wasn’t sustainable and they wrote themselves into a corner anyway.
By now the “loads of people have superpowers” trope had been done to death (and the best incarnation was Misfits), what more would you want to see?
Misfits was amazing. I loved that it was people you wouldn’t normally give powers to, cinematically speaking.
Asbo X-Men was a lot of fun
Had to look up that acronym/abbreviation, but that’s the best description of it I’ve ever seen, yes.
(Antisocial behavioral disorder, if one else needs to know)
I’ve heard that Moving (Korea) is supposed to be a bit like Heroes.
Halo.
Just make it animated, and don’t add anything.
It’s almost impressive how bad they fucked this up…
Tbh I never needed a “Halo” series, I already have one and it’s perfect (though I heard it came back, I stopped watching at the OG “end” and didn’t know until way late that it had returned):
Altered carbon, the whole resleeving of a person into another body. Made it seem like they could have done loads of stories in that universe with different actors.
Shame they only made one series.I loved the first series so much. With the exception of a bit of weakness transitioning to the second half, it was incredible, beautiful, poignant, smart, almost perfect. Then they made more, and it was clearly written by someone who understood nothing of the first series and approached a character driven exploration of philosophical questions of identity, ontology, and social responsibility with the intelligence and subtlety of Wile E Coyote vs Roadrunner produced by the Hallmark Channel.
The books follow a similar quality arc. The first one is great but each subsequent one gets less great. He could’ve done so much more.
Have you ever watched Dollhouse? Slightly similar theme and (unlike Firefly) it had two seasons that as best I can tell were aired in the proper order.
Dollhouse is weird though. I enjoyed it a lot but i don’t think it’s for everyone.
Plus the ending is not well done. They got cancelled and tried to pull together an impactful ending over a few episodes, when the original plan was to take a few seasons. I respect the urge to offer a real ending, but unsurprisingly it feels cheap and sudden.
This concept and many other interesting sci-fi ideas are touched on in Ghost in the Shell stand alone complex which I’m watching right now. It’s pretty good! A little quirky at times, and doesn’t have the same level of emotional investment as some other animes I’ve watched, but I’m definitely enjoying it quite a bit
Well they made 2 lol, but S01 was done well
No, I’m pretty sure it was only one >.> <.<
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.
I’d love a proper retro-futuristic TV series. The latest Fantastic Four film showed that people will swallow a retro-futuristic vibe. Just something unironic with rayguns.
Probably blaspheming here, but another show like Firefly would rock. Don’t try to catch that exact lighting in a bottle, just give us space cowboys. In space.
‘Cowboy bebop’ did it three years earlier and much better. But then I’m very partial to jazz and film noir. Then got remade by the same people much grittier as a period piece set in immediately post-feudal police state Japan.
Edit: in kind of the same way a lot of Kurosawa films got remade as westerns
Bebop is very different from Firefly imo. They’re both good, but I wouldn’t say to watch one over the other. I can’t directly compare them like that.
Bebop is smooth and classy, more focused on music and choreography. Firefly is way more grounded and physical; lots of greebled grimy tools, machinery, carts.
You can see a similar divide in the themes. Firefly is way more rural, frontier type western. They get rid of small-town despots and help trading outposts under siege, because they’re the only help around. Bebop is the end of the wild west: they all have stories about the real west, but that era is over. Cities are growing, the government starts playing a role, outlaws are on the run. The heroes are struggling to let go of the past and find their place in this new world.
I also want to shout out Outlaw Star, released in the shadow of Bebop. It’s not western at all, a bit messier in its theme, but still a lot of fun.
What’s the remade show? Samurai champloo?
Yep. Same characters, secondary characters shuffled slightly.
space cowboys
Haven’t watched ‘Firefly’, but that description sounds like 50s-60s Western sci-fi literature, which was criticized by Stanisław Lem with these exact words.
When Star Trek: The Next Generation was announced, everybody was pissed. “You can’t have Star Trek without Captain Kirk!” “The first officer is a soap opera supporting actor!” “The captain is bald??!”
And then, lo and behold, it was the best Star Trek, almost entirely absent of rehashing, paying slavish tribute to, or shamelessly trading on nostalgia for The Original Series.
So, have someone go to the used spaceship dealer, buy a rusty old Firefly class light freighter, and go off on their own adventures. Nothing wrong with new crew, same universe.
Yeah I love space westerns and unfortunately they’re very uncommon and rarely done well. Firefly had the huge advantages of being Whedon at his peak with a great cast (as he often had) at the right time and with the courage to commit to the genre in a way I wish more would.
I don’t want more Whedon, his golden era is over and I’m now convinced that he really only excels at the overlying ideas for a show and casting. What I want is someone who loves the genre to do something similar, but better.
What about dandy guys? In space.
Have you watched Killjoys? Very similar vibes
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.
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
Dead Like Me And the Dark Crystal show needed the ending it deserved.
