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Jerry enjoys science fiction, but I imagine he's mostly there to be with his wife after she's done her panels and signed her photos.

My image of Jerry from the 1990s and from Melissa Joan Hart's autobiography is that Jerry was a philanderer, so it's really weird for me to say this now, but Jerry O'Connell is head over heels in love with Rebecca Romijn. But also: he's at the cons for leisure, not for work.

Why doesn't he listen to you? Are you not good friends and lifelong companions anymore?

Eight months later, I finally finished ZOEY'S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST, which was cancelled on its Season 2 cliffhanger finale and then resolved in a feature length Roku-streamed Christmas special, ZOE'S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST.

It was really good. It provided both a climax and conclusion to the ongoing threads of the series, while simultaneously leaving some room for development should there ever be a follow up in the future.

I wonder what SLIDERS would have been like if Robert K. Weiss' 2000-era bid for a feature film had ever come to pass.

Just my opinion: aside from 102 - 109, all other SLIDERS episodes stretch to a 55 inch LCD just fine.

Back to SLIDERS:

I've found a really interesting program called ShaderGlass. https://mausimus.itch.io/shaderglass

It casts an overlay over the screen of your Windows PC, which you can move over different windows or make fullscreen. It has presets to make the overlay make your screen mimic a cathode ray tube television with the dot pattern and the screen curvature and the crushed blacks.

I set it to fullscreen on my laptop. Then I played "Luck of the Draw". With the dot pattern masking the lack of detail and the fuzzy resolution, this is the first time that "Luck of the Draw" has looked right to me in years. And it looked... like a 90s TV show on a 90s TV screen.

Maybe, for this sort of content, the future is demastering.

That's unfortunate!

To me, I think of how the Universal DVD release of SLIDERS looks shockingly poor on DVD for Episodes 102 - 109, but if played on a CRT television, I don't think anyone could tell that those episodes looked any blurrier than the pilot or the subsequent seasons. I also doubt poor DVD bit rate was a problem until HD televisions started reaching 75 percent of homes by 2013, at which point DVD was already too low a resolution for the screen, and overcompression would make it worse. However, by 2015, it was pretty clear that DVD was going to fade in favour of streaming and, if anyone really wanted physical media, blu-ray for collectors.

From Simon Rosenberg at HopiumChronicles.com on the polls:

I'm not familiar with these debates, but I can assure you that you are absolutely right to say SLIDERS was shot on film: 35mm film in Seasons 1 - 3 and 16mm film in Season 4 - 5. You don't need to 'believe' it, you're correct and it's an objective fact.

If anyone ever told you it wasn't shot on film, they are confused and mistaken. I can right away that it is film from the film grain.

When film is exposed to light, silver halide crystals in the film experience a chemical reaction with tiny particles of metallic silver which create the visible image and creates the texture of grain. This grain is clearly present in the Pilot and Seasons 2 - 3, and the grains get comparatively larger in Seasons 4 - 5, and it's very recognizably 16mm film.

Videotape does not have film grain because it records a purely electronic signal without the chemical reactions for grain.

(Most modern TV and film is shot with digital cameras, and in most cases, film grain is added afterwards to mimic the texture of chemical film, and it adds a bit of texture while being less perceptible because it's uniform and consistent as opposed to variable to the image content. And on streaming, digital files are encoded to smooth out most of the grain (reducing file size) and uniform grain is overlaid during playback.)

Grain is not as visible on episodes 102 - 109 due to the episodes having been stored on low resolution analog videotape that didn't maintain even an SD version of the original film and its grainy properties. However, 102 to 109 were also clearly shot on film: while they lack visible film grain, they have all the signs of film-to-tape conversion.

They have judder -- uneven motion -- in fast moving scenes. They also have interlacing artifacts: horizontal lines during motion and jagged edges on straight lines like chains, fences, poles and shelves. This is the result of the film to tape telecine process where the 24fps frame rate format of film was converted to the TV broadcast 30fps videotape.

Videotape would not have judder or interlacing artifacts; those are exclusively the result of film to tape telecine conversion.

Also, videotape has a very flat colour range and the dynamic range of SLIDERS, even in those beige rooms of Seasons 4 - 5, is beyond what videotape could record.

If there were ever any debate about whether or not SLIDERS was shot on film, it was likely due to people being misinformed about and/or misunderstanding TV editing. The pilot was shot and edited on film as a big budget TV movie to sell a subsequent series, and then it was transferred to high grade videotape with 420 lines of resolution, used for review and sales and broadcast. However, the following episodes of the show were shot on film and then transferred to videotape for post production.

Unlike film, videotape offered linear editing, immediate playback, and needed no chemical processing, providing a faster turnaround time essential for TV production. The show seems to have used standard but low resolution analog videotape format for episodes 102 to 109 which is why those episodes are blurrier.

Low resolution videotape was cheaper and, for standard definition 480i broadcast and CRT viewing, the viewer couldn't tell that it was blurrier, so it didn't matter. Only when the DVDs were played on a mid-2000s HDTV did the poor video quality become apparent.

In Season 2, there was clearly a switch to high resolution digital videotape, meaning we go from "Luck of the Draw"'s fuzziness to "Into the Mystic" looking sharper with another increase in sharpness for Season 3 and a slightly more grainy look for Seasons 4 - 5. Digital videotape with 540 lines of resolution became the affordable industry standard during the long production gap between "Luck of the Draw" and "Into The Mystic", with improvement each year in the film to digital tape telecine process.

If fans were ever debating whether or not SLIDERS was film or videotape, it's likely because SLIDERS was shot on film and, aside from the pilot, transferred to videotape for editing and special effects, and stored on videotape for broadcast and later digitized from videotape to DVD. Fans were likely confused by production references to videotape suites for editing and effects. In addition, there were isolated B-roll sequences (sports footage, etc,) that were recorded on videotape, but it's maybe 2 percent of the show.

SLIDERS on DVD has film grain and all the artifacts of a film to tape conversion: judder and interlacing artifacts. If shot on videotape, there would be neither grain nor judder nor artifacts. You don't need to believe you're right about this matter; you're making a statement of fact and you are correct.

I'm super-confused about movie ticket prices where you live. Alamo Drafthouse seemed to be charging $9.73 USD for regular admission but AMC was charging $12 USD for regular admission. I'm probably looking at the wrong pages. How much is the average movie ticket?

It looks like AMC Stubs would charge you $20 a month and allows you to see three movies a week, which means it could be worthwhile if you're someone who sees at least two movies a month. However, $20 a month, even for three movies a week, is a much bigger fee than $8 a month for one movie a month. https://www.moneydigest.com/1548760/amc … rth-price/

Tickets here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada tend to be about $15 USD if you buy them online (factoring in an online booking fee), and about $12 USD if bought in person, but who's going to do that? It's slow and it's reserved seating, so if you go to the theatre just in time for the show, all the good seats are probably gone (unless you're watching THE CROW in 2024, nobody wants to see it).

$15 USD for one movie as well as having to physically go to the theatre and park and enter and see it on their schedule makes me feel like they should be paying me for my time. I imagine a lot of people feel that way and elect to stay home and watch Netflix. $8 USD, however, feels like a reasonable price.

Thanks for sharing that, but the Pilot is not really an effective test case. The pilot episode was edited either on film or high resolution analog videotape. It already looked sharp and crisp because it was not subject to the blurriness and field mismatching issues of episodes 1.02 - 1.08 being on low resolution tape. Upscaling the pilot episode is shooting fish in a barrel for any upscaler whether AI or a simple bicubic scaler. A real test case would be a scene from the unusually hazy "Last Days" or "Luck of the Draw" with its blurriness and film judder.

How have the results been? I won't have time to try it until my EMPIRE cleanup is done.

I am not very optimistic that anything can clean up episodes that were transferred to low resolution analog videotape, but I'm always ready to change my mind.

The fan-produced 4K80 release is now out on specialist fan preservation sites. It's a 4K digital scan of the theatrical cut of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, made from a 35mm print and a 16mm print, cleaned up by fans to assemble the best versions of both prints and address the faded colour and recreate how it looked in cinemas in 1980.  https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k80/

I've looked at the first version and it looks just like the non-special VHS version I remember in the 90s, authentic but dirty and with grain so high in some scenes it's like static baked into the frame. Other scenes have a natural level of grain. It looks like a medium quality 720p image (because a theatrical film print is several generations removed from the original negative).

While this is a theatrical print scan, the movie did not actually look this grainy in movie theatres in 1980. I wasn't there in 1980, but I know that the movie theatres of the era created a softer film image due to the film protector light being scattered when passing through film and then impacting the screen. This would have added a sheen that diminished the grain. In contrast, modern backlit displays on home HDTVs form a pixel-based image with black borders around each pixel that have the result of sharpening any and all grain.

I think 4K80 would be releasable on Disney+ if the video were downscaled to a sharper 1080p image and then run through AI grain filtering to tone down the grain. Then an AI algorithm could add a modest amount of grain back to each shot. The entire movie would then have a consistent level of AI-overlaid but natural looking film grain. If it's consistent, it's easy to get used to whereas the noise becomes distracting if some scenes look static-coated and others look clear.

Admittedly, for streaming services, grain is the first thing to be removed from digital files and then a grain texture is added back on during playback as an overlay.

I've downscaled the file to 1080p and I'm going to run it through Topaz AI grain refinement just to get the grain consistent. Then I will pass it along to my niece as the version of EMPIRE that her father probably saw in theatres. I had previously passed along to her a version of the DESPECIALIZED EDTION for EMPIRE (a fan-created hybrid of blu-ray footage and upscaled DVDs).

DESPECIALIZED looked okay at 720p, but on modern 4K TVs, it was looking very low-resolution for a lot of the DVD-sourced footage. I ran it through a Topaz AI upscale to boost it to a somewhat sharper 1080p, but 4K80 will look more consistent. Where DESPECIALIZED looks super-sharp in the blu-ray sourced scenes and slightly blurry in the DVD-sourced scenes, 4K80 looks moderately sharp throughout the entire film and the AI cleanup will also make it moderately grainy throughout as well. That said, I'm sure the film editors at Disney could do an even better job by going at it shot by shot.

The sabotage of Georgia's process for vote counting is scaring me.
https://www.salon.com/2024/08/31/organi … ing-chaos/

The polls cannot be trusted. They couldn't be trusted when Biden was spiraling because slanted Republican polls were throwing off the averages, making a very close election seem like Trump was in the lead. They can't be trusted now because the enthusiasm of Kamala Harris reception and campaign means Democrats are more inclined to respond to polls and Trump supporters are less inclined to do so.

The likely situation is that the race remains close and competitive, and Democratic pollsters have warned that Kamala (as she prefers voters call her) has a lot of work to do.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/2 … s-00176065

That said, Trump clearly thinks he's losing. He's given up on impactful campaign events. He's stopped trying to build a coalition. His hope is to overturn or stall election results in court and with supporters in electoral offices.

I think you are confused. The James Carville Jr. you mentioned and quoted is the same person I quoted. Carville Jr. is not a Republican. However, Carville Jr. is also strongly opposed to the social justice focus of a number of Democrats, in particular Bernie Sanders.

I'm sorry it wasn't good for Grizzlor. I'd be curious to know what Slider_Quinn21 thought and if he feels the series is incomplete now cancelled.

I've sometimes wondered if STAR WARS will pull a bit of a retcon on the prequel-Jedi the way ENTERPRISE featured Vulcans as unpleasant, dour, miserable, unsupportive, and kind of useless, declaring the superiority and supremacy of their logic and increasingly isolationist attitudes-- only for a new showrunner in the fourth season to reveal that the Vulcans of Seasons 1 - 3 had been dealing with generational trauma and a pandemic with a mentally transmitted disease.

The situational, cultural and political strife had been worsened by how the original teachings of Surak, the Vulcan philosopher whose teachings of logic over emotion became the driving force of Vulcan society, had been distorted and misunderstood due to the loss of his guiding principle of infinite diversity in infinite combinations, a key tenet that balances logic with compassion and respect for all living things and cultures even if they do not devote themselves to logic.

Captain Archer restores Surak's full teachings to Vulcan society, setting the path for the Vulcans to become the open-minded and caring but emotionally aloof friends of the original STAR TREK series. I wonder if the Rey movie can maybe delve into how the failed, useless Jedi of the prequels were operating on a distorted foundation and rediscover the actual origins of the Jedi and the true role they can play in the galaxy.

My personal opinion on why the Jedi failed from an in-universe perspective: the Old Republic era Council and Luke's Jedi school were way too militarized. When you teach people that the Force is all about hacking and slashing away at armies to win wars, it creates a breeding ground for dark side tendencies because combat-first emphasizes power and dominance over compassion and empathy.

Ideally, Jedi training would be about Force sensitivity and applying that Force sensitivity to a profession or passion which does not have to be combat. In AIRBENDER, not every earth/fire/air/earth bender is a soldier: some of them run restaurants or build dams or transport or plumbing. The Jedi Council and Luke's approach to Jedi was to create supersoldiers, never creating any super-therapists or super-construction workers or super-doctors.

I recognize that as the franchise is called STAR WARS, screenwriters and directors will gravitate to combat, but if STAR WARS wants to present the Jedi as competent, then one path may be that the Jedi become less of an army and portrayed as an unintrusive religion where Jedi apply the Force in many areas of life and fighting is just one profession among many for Force users and maybe the term Jedi is broadened so it's not just warriors.

Rian Johnson offered a bit of a path to that in THE LAST JEDI: "The Force does not belong to the Jedi. To say that if the Jedi die, the light dies -- it's vanity, can't you feel that?" I might suggest we say that the Force does not belong to Jedi soldiers.

The Bulwark: Trump will probably lose.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-is-g … e-probably

They point out that Trump has given up on trying to win more votes. His team is focused on winning the Electoral College, winning specific areas by a handful of votes, overturning specific areas where they lost in court. It's a narrow play and a lousy strategy. They emphasize that Trump will probably lose, but of course can't guarantee it.

I haven't really been in the mood to watch STAR WARS on TV, but I'm sorry that any show gets cancelled. The reviews for THE ACOLYTE on Den of Geek, a review site I enjoy, were poor to middling.

**

The Jedi being incompetent failures didn't originate in the Disney era, but in the prequel era, and George Lucas is absolutely responsible for that. I'm not sure if Lucas' authorial intent was to present them so, but note that in THE PHANTOM MENACE, Qui-Gon Jinn doesn't think it's his job to free slaves; in ATTACK OF THE CLONES, the Jedi somehow miss the Republic becoming a fascist empire and Anakin didn't bother to free his enslaved mother for at least a decade (and he still left the slave trade intact). In REVENGE OF THE SITH, Anakin becomes evil because... something or other about how he loved his wife and Jedi aren't supposed to have feelings.

If Jedi can't free slaves, they are useless. I don't know if that's the take Lucas intended, but he wrote it and he filmed it.

In THE LAST JEDI, Luke notes: "Now that they're extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if your strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy, hubris. At the height of their powers, they allowed Darth Sidious to rise, create the Empire, and wipe them out. It was a Jedi Master who was responsible for the training and creation of Darth Vader." He's not wrong.

The entire arc seems subconscious on Lucas' part: the great love of Lucas' life was Marcia Lou Griffin, whom he met in film school and adored and married. She was a film editor and script consultant; Lucas was a good director and awkward screenwriter, and STAR WARS came alive with Marcia (and uncredited screenwriters Gloria and Willard Hyuck) adding life and joy to Lucas' plot and setpieces.

Shortly before THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, Lucas became obsessed with building up his own film studio and business. Lucas' devotion to Skywalker Ranch, Industrial Light and Magic, THX, Skywalker Sound while producing EMPIRE, RETURN OF THE JEDI and the Indiana Jones movies created entire industries -- but his interaction with his wife became near non-existent, and he dismissed her pleas that they spend more time together.

Despite this, Lucas claims he was shocked when Marcia told him she wanted a divorce and that she had fallen in love with someone else... and he responded by asking Marcia to wait until after the release of RETURN before proceeding with the divorce.

After Marcia left him, Lucas went on a long hiatus from filmmaking, obsessing over filmmaking technology over actually making films. THE PHANTOM MENACE is a pretty clear display of how Lucas creates when his ex-wife isn't there as a creative partner. ATTACK OF THE CLONES and REVENGE OF THE SITH show Anakin Skywalker foolishly daring to fall in love and destroyed by having feelings at which point he becomes a technological monster.

Lucas portrays Jedi in the prequels as distant, disengaged, oblivious, defeated by emotions, betrayed by romance, and the most prominent Jedi becomes a destroyed man in a shell of sci-fi armour. That strikes me as an accidental yet incredibly telling self-portrait.

Who would the Jedi be if Lucas had decided to drop THX and ILM from his repertoire and devote that time to his marriage, and if he'd written the prequels with Marcia Lucas as his creative partner and the heart of STAR WARS?

Hillary Clinton is an extremely controversial figure even among Democrats especially with her voting record on war and her fervent support of Wall Street and big banks. Anyone should be allowed to question her supposed commitment to democracy without being attacked.

Grizzlor is allowed to find speeches boring regardless of who is delivering them; that in itself is not racist or sexist. I think to call it that without more evidence is an escalation and a leap. I mean, nobody called you or me racist for hoping President Biden would stay in the race and not feeling ready for the very qualified PoC Kamala Harris to take the lead.

I don't think every show needs to run 100 episodes -- but every TV series should have at least 100 stories to tell or it's not a TV series. If a show can only last three seasons, it shouldn't be a show, at least not to me. (Mini serieses, I think of as a separate category.) To say LOST should only have run three seasons would be, to me, an indictment of LOST as a TV show. I think it probably had around five years in it, and they seem to have done well enough with six seasons if Slider_Quinn21 enjoyed it.

I wonder what Slider_Quinn21 thought of the DVD epilogue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMjPzV2RvO8

I would say: my criteria for a favourite show is a highly personal list of attributes and others may disagree. I formed the list by looking at how LOST is Slider_Quinn21's favourite show. LOST was, judging from Slider_Quinn21's posts, a good product. It lasted long enough to become a part of his life; it didn't degrade or devolve to the point where it couldn't tell its stories or complete its narrative goals; it had a conclusion.

I recall watching LOST up to the point when Jack returns to the island and is met by Jin, at which point, I was looking for something more life-affirming out of TV shows and less... unnerving.

While I didn't watch LOST past Jack's return to the Island, it might be argued: LOST was an ensemble show touching on various lives and rotating through them, and LOST was about unknowable mysteries that might have no answer. Therefore, dropping or losing characters, blind alleys, and an emphasis on characterization over mystery is not necessarily the show becoming subfunctional/dysfunctional but rather an avoidable part of exploring its core themes, some less rewarding than others.

I can't speak to this definitively, but around the point I stopped watching LOST, I did feel that the mysteries of the Island would not become more meaningful if we learned that it's the site of a crashed alien spaceship that warps time and space and manifests anomalies based on the internal conflicts of the humans in proximity. That strikes me as reducing the unknowable to sci-fi technobabble terms, when the show does better by using the paranormal nature of the island to illustrate the character conflicts -- while leaving the exact means of manifestation unknown.

That said, isn't there some sort of DVD/Blu-ray short film that 'explains' 'everything'? Knowing LOST, I assume the explanations are as confounding as the mysteries.
https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/lost-epilo … -questions

**

I think, for me, ONCE UPON A TIME is my equivalent of LOST: a complex set of arcs and plots alternating between flashbacks and present day scenes, except ONCE UPON A TIME had the benefit of its mythology -- Disney versions of fairy tales -- already being established long before the show premiered. In contrast, LOST had to create its own mythology and had a much longer ladder to climb. I think ONCE UPON A TIME's whimsical, gentle, sweet tone proved a better match to my tastes and longings and insecurities and neuroses than LOST.

At the end of the day, what I want out of TV (and life) is BROOKLYN NINE-NINE: lighthearted hijinks from highly competent people working to make the world a little nicer one day at a time. (See also: PARKS AND RECREATION, ANIMAL CONTROL, THE ORVILLE.)

My niece would also point out that I have an obsession with TV shows about troubled women fighting crime (WYNONNA EARP, THE BLACKLIST, BLINDSPOT, CORONER, AGENT CARTER), but aside from WYNONNA EARP, I would have to call each one of them flawed favourites. I would have a separate category for flawed favourites, some of which are only flawed in minor ways and some which are catastrophic disasters. (I need to rewatch WYNONNA EARP to decide if it is a favourite.)

**

Why do I say a show needs to last four years to qualify as a favourite show? I think four years is the point where the show has become a part of my life. The Arrowverse was a part of my life. At three years, I'm still thinking that the show is a temporary situation; at four years, it feels long-term.

**

I didn't think about THE SIMPSONS, or SOUTH PARK, but I guess I think of those as being in a class of their own, separate from live action TV shows.

Well, as the article notes: AI is pretty overhyped. The artificial intelligence we have now isn't actually that intelligent, its outputs are inaccurate and unreliable and unstable, its capabilities are exaggerated, its use is limited, its applications are narrow, its productivity increases are small, it's hitting a plateau of advancement, it's dependent on human generated data that can be cut off.
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-mon … telligence

The AI in our upscaling programs might be AI in terms of matching the algorithm to the image or video, but the actual algorithms for each element or texture in the image strike me as human made and human tested. AI still can't wrangle a decent version of the Season 1 episodes of SLIDERS.

I deliberately use low power AI models because (a) they're free and (b) they don't use as much electricity. I'm primarily using GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4o Mini and Gemini 1.5 Flash right now.

GPT-4 was originally offered for free via Microsoft Bing (renamed Copilot), but due to the electricity cost of 0.0005 kWh per message, Microsoft had to put it behind a paywall and eventually discontinue it in favour of the cheaper GPT-4 Turbo at 0.00005 kWh per message.

Copilot has about 140 million users and each free tier user gets 100 messages per day, so Copilot on GPT-4 at 0.0005 kWh per message was using 7,000 MWh daily, enough electricity to power over 200,000 homes in America for one day.

GPT-4 Turbo was not as capable or powerful as GPT-4, but Turbo was faster and the fact that it only needed around 10 percent of the electricity used by GPT-4 (with 140 million users using the equivalent of powering around 20,000 homes in America per day) made it a sustainable free model.

From what I can tell, the current GPT-4o model uses around 0.000025 kW per message, but I use the free GPT-4o Mini which I think uses 0.00000214286 kW per message and also Gemini 1.5 Flash which I think uses 0.000000714286 kW per message.

If those models had 140 million daily active users, GPT-4o would be using enough electricity to power about 10,000 American homes per day, GPT-4o Mini would be using the equivalent power of 1,000 American homes per day, and Gemini 1.5 Flash would be using the power of about 300 homes per day.

I'm pretty happy with GPT-4 Turbo for searches, Gemini 1.5 Flash for analysis and GPT-4o Mini for more creative outputs.

Please note: aside from GPT-4, the power usage of the other models is not known, and these estimates above are drawn from noting that on Poe.com, resource usage is measured in "compute points" with GPT-4 at 3,500 points per message. GPT-4 Turbo uses 350 points, GPT-4o uses 175, GPT-4o Mini uses 15 and Gemini 1.5 Flash uses 5. The estimates are assuming a linear relation between points and electricity usage that may not be the case and is a simplification for discussion.

Honestly, a lot of this reads like magical thinking, just the assumption that AI technology advances effortlessly and exponentially. I'm not saying it couldn't, but it's still an assumption.

An interesting article about how Kamala Harris isn't at the mercy of the press in the same way Biden so often was: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 … vance.html

And the Hindenburg was a bit of a mishap.

I'm pretty impressed that the second half of PRODIGY's first season sets up a situation where Admiral Janeway is going to be hunting down the kids as terrorists, only to quickly ascertain that the kids are all survivors of slavery and child labour who have blundered into a bad situation and are in desperate need of help.

I don't remember Janeway being written this well on VOYAGER, but she should have been.

(I have set aside $5 for Greg as I have lost the bet.)

**

Why wasn't STAR TREK: PRODIGY presented as the flagship show it deserved to be? It certainly had the quality and mainstream appeal and entry-level storytelling to work for a general audience instead of only STAR TREK fans and only children. But it somehow became an unwanted artifact that became an easy target for a tax writeoff.

Divisions of Labour
The problem, from what I can tell: PRODIGY was divided between many separate parts of Paramount Global, necessary for a CG animated TV show of this nature: it was produced by Nickelodeon Animation Studio, Brothers Hageman Productions, and CBS Eye Animation Productions, it was streaming on Paramount+ in October 2021 and then airing on Nickelodeon in December 2021.

This combination of money, resources and talent was vital for producing a high quality animated show of this nature. The need to have streaming alongside broadcast was part of situating PRODIGY as a children's show funded in part by a children's programming studio. It's what enabled PRODIGY to look as wonderful as it did.

Divisions of Marketing
But the result is that all profit is therefore split across all these highly involved companies, and there is no single corporate branch with primary control of PRODIGY. And with ownership and leadership split across Paramount+ for streaming, the Nickelodeon channel for broadcasting, Nickelodeon Animation Studio and CBS Eye Animation Productions, the marketing decisions were also split.

There was no corporate structure that would enable Paramount+ to see how great PRODIGY was and present it as their flagship streaming show: it was Nickelodeon's show too, and to be broadcast on their kid's channel while filling out the Paramount+ streaming catalog. Ultimately, the things that made PRODIGY achievable, the teamwork and collaborations that enabled PRODIGY to exist at all and look as great as it does -- they were also the factors that meant Paramount+ was in no position to market it as their flagship STAR TREK show even if the content would have justified it

Divisions of Profit
Due to the involvement of the Paramount+, Nickelodeon channel, Nickelodeon Animation, Brothers Hageman Productions and CBC Eye Animation, profit from PRODIGY would likely be divided among all five as well as with Roddenberry Entertainment.

This is in contrast to DISCOVERY, PICARD or STRANGE NEW WORLDS where the profit division is likely just between Paramount+, CBS Studios and Roddenberry Entertainment. PRODIGY's divided origins, despite being creatively spectacular, also meant divided profit -- and it could be that Paramount+ received a much smaller share of PRODIGY's revenue compared to their other shows.

Divided and Expendable
My hypothesis is: since PRODIGY was the TREK show where Paramount+ had the least control over marketing and distribution, the least ownership of the property and had the least claim to the profits, it was deemed most expendable for a tax writeoff.

Usually, too many cooks leads to a lousy meal. It looks to me like with PRODIGY, all the talents and companies involved produced an amazing show, but it also produced a tangled web of ownership, marketing and profit sharing that ultimately led to PRODIGY being orphaned as no specific branch could fully take the lead in selling the show to a wider audience for mainstream success.

Perhaps under different circumstances, Paramount+ could have seen how PRODIGY was something special and bought a greater level of interest in it to sell it to the world as a flagship show. Unfortunately, with streaming revenue hitting a ceiling, the stars simply weren't aligned for PRODIGY.