NBC wanted The Walking Dead, but without the zombies

Liked futurama but could you redo it all in the 1939s worlds fair.

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I’m telling ya, it’s the hopeful atmosphere and how the show messes with it;
Sometimes the audience gets validation, sometimes our hearts get crushed.

And it does so in ways that ordinary television doesn’t prepare us for.

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CBS has applied that idea to our political landscape already, albeit with alien insects rather than prions:

I don’t think the execution is all that swift, though I’ve only seen the first couple of episodes. And I can’t help but think that more than a few people associated with that show must have been sorely tempted to aim their sights at studio and network execs as much as politicians.

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Or even iZombie

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So I worked on a short film a few years ago called Fortune Hunters. It was a cute love story staring an Asian man, Kelven Yu and his white Girlfriend, Jessica Skerrit. It was a cute story with the Asian lead getting to kiss the girl in the end. We had a lot of support from the Seattle Asian community as the point of he whole show was to break some casting stereotypes.

After it’s release they used it to pitch a feature length version of the story. Like you do. The producers they talked to thought it was a great story, But does he have to be Asian?

S I G H

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Yeah, some sort of sped-up prion disease that takes minutes instead of decades. My favorite (or least favorite, I guess) example was JM Straczynski’s “Crusade,” the follow-on to Bab5. IIRC the suits said “we like it but we want more sex and violence.” JMS said “no” and the suits apparently didn’t understand what the word meant. I think it ended after a dozen episodes.

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Funny enough my experiences of watching Manimal and Automan are very colored, they were late night re-runs on some less popular TV channel when i was young and growing up in Venezuela. So i’ve seen these two crappy shows… and in spanish… and this amuses me more than it reasonably should. Automan though… even as i kid i knew that it was just not good, but it was so crappy and campy i couldn’t look away. Then again it was the same for Manimal :smile:

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I might have been retconning without knowing it, but I always assumed the Borg Queen was just a mouthpiece for the collective, not a distinct individual with her own thoughts, motivations, etc. A homegrown Locutus, if you will.

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Oh no. Network television is for the over 60 crowd. And procedurals are reliable ratings builder for that demo. It’s why CBS, at 110% procedurals, is the top network by a large margin. Despite losing the 18-34 demo that’s considered most important. No-one but the olds watches network TV the “right” way anymore. The way advertisers pay the most for.

But networks shit the bed by doing this. Their big successful demos are ever closer to death. “make it a procedural” drives off the young (and middle aged). And the big successful, ratings driving, prestige, conversation driving shows are never procedurals. And almost entirely live on cable or streaming.

I guess the thinking is “kids want this game of thrones thing, but if we make it a procedural we can hang onto our existing audience. And get all the audience!” but it pretty clearly doesn’t work that way.

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Yeah but reportedly the AMC tv execs basically asked that same question during the second season of the show, as a cost-cutting measure. :confused:

“Well Rick, looks like our victim was killed by zombies. Again.”
But seriously…

And Sleepy Hollow

This is the thing - I realized almost every single sci-fi and fantasy show on network television in the last couple of years is some kind of police procedural. Notably iZombie, Lucifer and Limitless are adaptations of existing comics and a movie, where you can see how the police procedural bit was forced in, and they still remained (or became, in adaptation) rather charming. The iZombie television show in particular is actually better than the comic book, which has nothing like a police procedural element - it’s basically a “Buffy as a zombie” narrative (with a supernatural universe), but with a little less monster slaying on her part and no crime solving. The adaptation has almost nothing in common with it, much like I imagine a police procedural version of Walking Dead would with its source material. So it’s hard to imagine what “police procedural Walking Dead” would actually be. I suspect it would have been a lot less depressing than the comic & the show we got.
But it all shows just how fixated television execs are with police procedurals right now - clearly this is something they know people will watch and they know how to make them, so it’s safe and reassuring to force shows into that mold (no matter what breaks off when they do).

A police procedural about looking in the fridges of television execs? Greenlit!

Ironically, that’s exactly how real zombies work - the Haitian Voudoun kind. They’re aware but without will, forced to become a slave unable to rebel (in a society founded on a slave rebellion, the fate worse than death). The mythology is that this is due to magic, the reality is rather fuzzy but probably the combination of drugs and brainwashing, but the reality is the same horror.

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Incidentally, feel that screenshot needs some background info…

I’d just barely survived an incredible beating to force progress on some DLC i really wasn’t levelled for, lvl22 for 30+ enemies.
The right arm of the power-suit was destroyed, the left arm was at 5% and no remaining component had higher than 40% durability. I’d chugged 20x stimpacks in that mission and should really have some addiction aspect by now…

This screenshot was taken after i’d successfully ran away to safety :smiley:

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I recall a similar show where said ethnic backgrounds were reversed, though sans the kiss.

They hunted treasures and got into all sorts of trouble, and the asian female lead was fantastic and strong. The relationship between the two main characters was actually pretty good, too, though not what could have been.

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I actually like the sci-fi/crime drama mash up. But I don’t like crime dramas on their own.

So what they wanted was iZombie, which basically doesn’t have zombies and is a procedural. And which everybody praises for some reason that escapes me.

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Relic hunter?

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The Fallout fanboys have a strong adverse reaction to the colour green.

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Indeed, part of the reason the modding community is so awesome, you can fix such things…

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How there hasn’t been totally amazing movies/tv made out of Discworld material is beyond me. Hits a lot of notes- fantasy for the kids, wink-winks for the adults, and underneath all the humor are sincere truths.

Speaking of post-apocalyptic depictions on TV, this was one of my favorite show as a little kid:

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For Star Trek mythology, the Queen was silly and superfluous. OTOH, I hadn’t known that Alice Krige as a borg was something I needed to see, and I am happy that I did.

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I think that’s the one, yeah

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