Dean's World

I think one of the most brilliant things Moore did was take all those goofy names from the old show, make them pilot call-signs, and give them real names that they're also known by. It's little touches like that that show just how much thought they put into what they're doing.

I also can't get over how cool that flak cloud was in that battle scene.

I think what thrills me most about the show is that I remember the original, and I remember how strongly I reacted to the premier episodes- it was an incredibly good, and daring, premise. Problem was that it never had a chance to live up to expectations. Both the culture of the times and the dictates of production hampered efforts to create something with the depth and complexity of the modern incarnation. Television at that time was mostly dreck- and bear in mind that stuff we think of as dreck in today’s TV would have been damned impressive back in 1978.

That the idea of the series persisted well after its demise speaks to the basic soundness of the premise. It was just waiting for the right people to pick it up.

Now, if somebody would take another look at the 1973 series “The Starlost” I’d be a happy man. It was such a good idea and it sucked so bad…

I actually liked this first episode just great.

I'll tell you one thing - I had an awful hard time suspending my disbelief about the whole "Cylon in Baltar's head" thing, as well as the Cylon's being sentient machine creations of man desirous of their own species, until I read about the concept of "Singularity" in the off-season.

Now, it not only doesn't seem wildly fantastical, it's downright plausible.

Bill: My operant theory for a long time has been that Baltar was killed in a nuclear blast in the initial invasion of Caprica, and the current Baltar is a Cylon copy.

Several people have objected to this idea because they think it would make him seem duplicitous and evil in a different way than he's been portrayed but I merely note that what we've seen of the human-looking Cylons is that some are much closer to human (i.e. "weaker") than others; so far the Sharon cylon in fact is so human that she is obviously not even aware of her Cylon nature unless someone directly tells her and confronts her--and then, she's horrified by it.

It would be entirely possible that a Baltar-cylon would be so utterly perfectly human that the only way they can get him to do what they want is to implant a subroutine in him that wheedles, seduces, bullies and cajoles him into doing things they want--which would be Six of course. And as it turns out, sometimes even that fails because he's too willful.

This would of course leave open the possibility that the Cylons' own creations might well turn against them. Which would be a fine irony for the series.

I'm sticking with this theory for now. The human-looking Cylons are so utterly close to human that even an in-depth medical examination can't tell them from people. And it would make sense that the more human their minds worked, the less likely they could be controlled at all. Thus the "weaker" models would be the most dangerous and unpredictable to their masters....

Some of the sitcoms of the early 1960s were very good. Something horrible happened to television in the mid-60s, and as reactionary as this might sound, it was the advent of color television. Not because the technology ruined anything, but because color wsa so much more expensive to produce that the production studios had to make big cuts in other areas--and what they mostly cut was their writing talent.

I'm not making that up.

You look at a show like The Dick Van Dyke Show, or I Love Lucy, and compare it to, say, Gilligan's Island or Petticoat Junction, and the difference is remarkable.

The proof of the putting, though, is if you look at shows that started in black and white and then made the transition to color. The early episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, which were black and white, are much more witty and subtle than the later episodes of the show. Even The Andy Griffith Show/Mayberry RFD deteriorated noticeably when color came in. A lot of that was cuts in writing talent. Add that in with the fact that the directors were not used to working in color and thus the colors tended to be garish and unsophisticated, and the shows simply weren't as good as they had once been.

This seems to have ushered in an era--which lasted all through the 1970s and into the early '80s--that writing and acting talent did not sell, that color and slapstick and melodrama were what sold, so what did you need good writing, editing, and directing for?

It seems to have taken them about 20 years to figure out how to make really good television again. I put the beginning of the improvement with shows like Cheers and Hill Street Blues. I think those shows re-invented the situation comedy and the television drama series, respectively. The improvement in the quality of what's on television since then has been simply extraordinary.

I'm so reactionary that I'm sure Dean is right about colorization (and the trade-offs it entailed) helping to bring about the decline of TV. Although I still like the shows of the era circa 1967, I know that they must have been inferior to the shows prior to that era.

I love color, and when we first got a color TV, I had fun playing with the colors, making everything green, blue, or red (the additive primaries, or primaries of light in your TV or computer, as distinguished from the subtractive primaries used in printing [magenta, yellow, and cyan]). But that didn't improve the quality of the shows.

Another cause of decline was the politicization of TV. In his All In The Family, Norman Lear tried to make conservative Archie Bunker look evil, dumb, and bigoted, but all he succeeded in doing was showing that Archie had far more style than the "liberal", "enlightened" Meathead. The Smothers Brothers and Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In tried to make fun of the Viet Nam War effort while praising the hippies. M.A.S.H. tried to make fun of the Korean War and, by implication, the entire Cold War against Communism and War in general. It was very negative. I never liked that show.

A Jehovanistic-style Gnostic, I'm against the introduction of explicit discussions of sex in TV shows. Leave It To Beaver, Andy Griffith, Get Smart, My Favorite Martian, etc., etc., all the old shows, they never had any explicit discussions or mentions of sex -- and they were not only a lot better and funnier than any of today's shows, they were a lot sexier, too.

Bill,

I just finished watching the entire series(14 episodes) on DVD; I'll probably watch the shows on SciFi, too. I work with someone who had the good fortune to see an advance screening recently. He said that the movie looks pretty good. When I mentioned that I'd love to see the show picked up by SciFi-or somebody- he said that Joss Whedon had stated he would never do another TV series. My guess is that he hasn't been offered enough money yet. We'll see how the movie does at the box office. Details found here.