This afternoon I re-watched the "Voyager" episode "Flashback". I'm not a fan of "Voyager" by any means, but this is very definitely one of the best episodes, though it does suffer, once again, from showing hints of the show I would much rather have seen - Captain Sulu commanding the Excelsior. Oh well.
But it did occur to me that, given the state of "Star Trek" at that time, a full seven-season, 154-episode show may well have become very tired, very quickly. And that's assuming they could even afford to recruit the key actors required.
But it does occur to me that not every show needs, or indeed benefits from, that sort of massive multi-season approach. And, indeed, there are some cases where the show would have been improved by committing to a smaller, fixed run - "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Picard" immediately leap to mind as examples.
Of course, that's where a somewhat-underused format comes into play. A seven-season "Sulu" show was probably never going to fly. But what about a four-episode mini-series? (Likewise, I would very much like to see a "Doctor Who" mini-series starring the Eighth Doctor...)
For some reason, the mini-series seems to be deployed for adaptations of novels and not much else. (I entirely understand why it's used for novels, of course, given the limited source material. It's the "not much else" that surprises me.)
Anyway, that's what has been on my mind today. Or at least for the past couple of hours.
#30: The Stone Angel, by Margaret Laurence (a book from The List)
No comments:
Post a Comment