News Star Trek Prodigy Cancelled, Season 2 to be shopped around
- Thread starter EnderAKH
- Start date
Being the "bosses." And they did a bang-up job of it, too. 
Aaron Waltke lately has been posting a string of textless tweets like those: https://twitter.com/GoodAaron/status/1698354387004100633?s=20
This has raised hopes that, maybe, good news has been given privately and that something may be announced in the relatively near future. I hope so, but of course such cryptic messages can be misread (as fans of "A song of ice and fire" can attest too).
Rick Berman was by all accounts kind of a jerk, and absolutely plain sexist to some of the female cast members. But it's well-known that he ran interference, stopping higher-ups in Paramount from instituting some really, really terrible ideas in regards to both VOY and ENT. So even if he had some bad ideas (and didn't really originate many good ideas at all), the shows would likely have been worse off without him.
The Suits at UPN behaved really stupidly when it came to Enterprise. Basically they had no faith in the prequel concept, but when it became clear Berman wasn't going to be dissuaded from doing it they really went all in to try to minimize the amount of prequel elements that were in the show. Among them, there had to be transporters and they had to work perfectly because that's what you expect in "real Star Trek." And remember, they actually wanted the show to be set on an Akira class. Berman had to pull teeth just to get them to agree to allowing "retro modifications" to the Akira so it would look like something from pre-TOS.
And that's before we get into the story notes they offered on the scripts. Upon reading the plot description for the episode Minefield describe it as "a mine is attached to the ship's hull" one of the Suits sent a memo to Berman asking "what is the 'ship's hull?' You need to make that much clearer."
And of course, Berman's refusal to include the boy band actually resulted in the show's budget being dramatically slashed in response. Enterprise could have been a much worse show if UPN had its way.
I think it's a stretch to say the budget was cut due to that one thing. Season four got a slashed budget mostly because the show was going to be cancelled after three, and it barely scraped out a fourth thanks to some in-studio politicking.
I still can’t believe that the boy band was actually real. But it is. That may be one of the dumbest suggestions by a network suit ever.
It's not just dumb, it's offensively dumb.
No argument, it is an incredibly silly suggestion but… I wish they had done it. Not for real. Not aired. I would never wish that on my beloved and beleaguered Enterprise and the actors who carried that show on their hardworking shoulders sometimes on charisma and sheer emotional investment alone! I just wish it had been attempted and filmed so that now, in 2023, if you attended the right convention or watched the right behind the scenes documentary, you could get a glimpse of the Enterprise cast giving it a go.
How would they even have attempted it? Would they just be discussing the plot as they walked into the (much bigger, right? wouldn’t it have to be much bigger?) mess hall and then just pause, admire the musical talent on display for the length of a song, and then continue the conversation?
I know, the narrative logistics are a nightmare. How does a new band every week get to a starship that is literally going where no human has gone before? How do they return home? Where do they sleep while they’re there? Why does popular music in the 2150s sound just like popular music in the 2000s? It’s such a wild idea to shove into a show of this nature.
I still think it would be an absolute riot to watch an attempt being made.
How would they even have attempted it? Would they just be discussing the plot as they walked into the (much bigger, right? wouldn’t it have to be much bigger?) mess hall and then just pause, admire the musical talent on display for the length of a song, and then continue the conversation?
I know, the narrative logistics are a nightmare. How does a new band every week get to a starship that is literally going where no human has gone before? How do they return home? Where do they sleep while they’re there? Why does popular music in the 2150s sound just like popular music in the 2000s? It’s such a wild idea to shove into a show of this nature.
I still think it would be an absolute riot to watch an attempt being made.
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No wonder that today's suits now want to replace writers with "AI" (really a very advanced search engine working from an extremely large database). They haven't gotten any smarter, except in how to make themselves even richer.
Does this surprise anyone? Executives live in an insular world, primarily drive by meetings, data points and balance sheets. What are they supposed to learn, especially since the general public keeps on rewarding their efforts? They've learned out to increase profits and we keep giving it to them.
Selfish behavior doesn't just change with out a measure of motivation. Fans don't change and executives don't change.
Lots of people not-in-the-know like to blame Berman and Braga for the downfall of ENT and Trek on TV in general, but what most don't understand is that UPN was far, far more to blame for that than they were. B&B weren't innocent angels, but as you say, most of the dumb ideas for the show came from the UPN suits, primarily Dawn Ostroff, who most fans have never even heard of. She was the president of UPN (which most people erroneously thought was Les Moonves), and she was the one who wanted ENT to constantly be 'sexier,' despite the fact that fans were not tuning in to watch the show to see half-naked people lathering gel on each other, or watching a Vulcan female turn into a masseuse. Ostroff and UPN had no fucking idea what the show was supposed to be about, and decisions such as having boy bands play on the ship every week was a symptom of how out-of-touch they were with the Star Trek fanbase.
UPN was a dumpster fire of a broadcast network that was doomed to self-immolate and we were lucky to get ten years' worth of new Star Trek content out of the network before it folded. Seven seasons of VOY and four for ENT were more than that place deserved to host.
The way it's been described in interviews was the boy band would be background extras for most of the episode until the appointed time when they bust into their musical number then recede into the background again. The idea was to use an up and coming band who would be that desperate for any kind of publicity they wouldn't mind spending an entire episode doing essentially nothing until their three or four minutes in the spotlight.
Of course, it wasn't just Enterprise, all UPN shows in the early 2000s were under a mandate to be as "sexy" as possible. 2001, the year Enterprise premiered was also the year Buffy the Vampire Slayer moved to UPN, and indeed the UPN years of that show had a greater emphasis on sex appeal than the WB years did. Though this all came to a screeching halt in early 2004 after Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl which resulted in sex appeal being vilified in the US. You can see the impact from this in the Enterprise episode where Trip and T'Pol had sex. In the scene as filmed, T'Pol's bare ass is visible, though because of the backlash after the Super Bowl, there were some hasty last minute attempts made to crop her ass out of the frame. Though the broadcast in other countries kept her ass in the scene.
I’ve seen screencaps of said ass, and there’s some buttcrack visible but not the whole ass. And it was also a stand-in’s ass, not Jolene Blalock’s.
Of course all of that is beside the point. The fact that we saw any ass at all, even just buttcrack, showed how low UPN sunk with pandering to the lowest common denominator of audience.
(Also remembers CBSAA showing a woman’s full bare ass in a thong in DSC season 1…)
Of course all of that is beside the point. The fact that we saw any ass at all, even just buttcrack, showed how low UPN sunk with pandering to the lowest common denominator of audience.
(Also remembers CBSAA showing a woman’s full bare ass in a thong in DSC season 1…)
I was under the impression we all had one...
I feel like you can't get more common then that.
I feel like you can't get more common then that.
No cracks, please. Let's keep this sober and very serious.
It was a symptom of a much bigger problem. And this is from a self-proclaimed assman.
I can get behind this statement.
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