Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

Anyone ever hear (of) the podcast drama series BLACKOUT with rami malek?

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

I haven't.  Is it any good?  I like Rami Malek from what I've heard.

I just came here to say (probably for the fifth time) that Robert Floyd is really good on Bar Rescue.  He doesn't really come off as an actor, but he comes off as a genuine guy with a passion for this stuff.

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For me, Floyd's performance on BAR RESCUE shows precisely what a great actor he is. Acting is about pretending to be naturalistic in highly unnatural situations. There is absolutely nothing onscreen in what I've seen of BAR RESCUE that is not staged, rehearsed, recreated and dramatized for the camera. But Floyd convinces me that what's happening is a perfectly plausible situation that just happens to be unfolding in front of a camera with precisely the right angle and lighting and sound recording needed to show a bar in a dire situation being saved from itself -- and he convinces that being in this scenario with these people and this subject matter at hand is exactly where he wants to be.

In contrast, I find Jon Taffer on the same show to be overly performative, mugging for the camera, overenunciating his shock or surprise. You'll recall, as a viewer of LIE TO ME, that Dr. Lightman comments on how real emotions aren't stretched or frozen on the face. They flash briefly and transition to resting positions of similar but diminished positions. Jon Taffer overperforms his facial expressions. In contrast, Floyd masks his performance so that it doesn't come off as a performance. He couldn't always do this on SLIDERS; he had the camera angle to fit into, marks to hit, props to handle, timing to meet, but on BAR RESCUE, he uses the reality TV situation to perform unperformatively. Floyd is a thespian genius.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

I haven't.  Is it any good?  I like Rami Malek from what I've heard.

I just came here to say (probably for the fifth time) that Robert Floyd is really good on Bar Rescue.  He doesn't really come off as an actor, but he comes off as a genuine guy with a passion for this stuff.

it was put out in 2019 and i only heard about it the other day. i've listened to a couple episodes.  i'm super impressed, the sound design is incredible, rami is good, writing is good.

i mentioned it because it's one of the first times i've seen a project that would normally be brought to tv instead by done in podcast audio drama format.   that's relevant because i think it's something syfy or peacock should be doing with torme's sliders if they are gunshy about spending the money on a pilot or series.

what's interesting is BLACKOUT not only got a "second" season but it also now is being rolled out for tv.  Audio dramas in podcast format can be something of a test environment.

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So as I continue watching too much TV, my journey has taken me to Firefly and Serenity.

I'm almost done with Firefly and will watch Serenity after that.  But the question is...are the Firefly comics worth reading afterwards?

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I've really liked all the Dark Horse published SERENITY comics that I've read. "Those Left Behind" is a good start that bridges the gap between the final episode of FIREFLY and the SERENITY feature film. The sequel, "Better Days" is also very strong, also set before SERENITY -- although it reintroduces a plot point / situation from the pilot episode where Inara was seen holding a syringe for reasons unknown. "Better Days" has Simon having secret meetings with Inara in her shuttle and Inara refuses to explain why; this was clearly meant to continue the intended character arc where Inara was self-medicating for a terminal disease. Her illness and impending death is why she wanted to see more of the 'verse before she passed away. It was a storyline that FIREFLY would have elaborated on if not for the cancellation. This plot was subsequently dropped in the later comics and the comics later a completely different explanation for her travels.

We have a series of one-shots: "Downtime" is set during the show and is also a very good story. "The Shepherd's Tale" reveals the truth about Shepherd Book and is very strong. "Float Out" is a one shot by Patton Oswalt and also the first story set after SERENITY.

After that comes the six issue series "Leaves on the Wind" with writer Zack Whedon providing an extended follow-up on the post-SERENITY situation for the crew. The sequel is "No Power in the Verse" by Chris Roberson (a great writer) and I just realized I never got around to reading it, only finishing "Leaves on the Wind."

After that, the license transferred from Dark Horse to Boom Studios. The title also reverted to FIREFLY instead of SERENITY. Since  2018, there have apparently been 31 issues (and counting) of the comic, but I haven't read them either. However, they're written by Greg Pak and I've really enjoyed his work on various X-Men comics including PHOENIX: ENDSONG and his Magneto mini-series.

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I have been rewatching ALIAS on Disney Plus. It's a JJ Abrams project (LOST fans should check it out) and it's streaming in high definition. Interestingly, the image, while detailed and clear, is extremely grainy. It looks like it was filmed on 16mm film. The grain likely didn't register on the CRT televisions that everyone would have been watching ALIAS on (2001 - 2006), but on an HDTV, the higher resolution scan of the film inflates the grain as well.

It's interesting, ALIAS is a big budget JJ Abrams project on ABC -- and yet, it has a final image that looks closer to Seasons 4 and 5 of SLIDERS. It looks like 16mm film (again, due to the increased grain level). The grain of Seasons 4 - 5 doesn't really register due to DVD compression, and I wouldn't want the ALIAS grain totally stripped out as everything would look like a wax dummy, but a mild reduction of 10 - 15 per cent be less distracting on an HDTV.

Another show that was filmed on 16mm film was NBC's CHUCK, a series that is extremely, extremely grainy on high definition blu-ray and also resembles Seasons 4 - 5 of SLIDERS in that respect. Modern TV shows are shot digitally but have film grain added in post -- but only to the degree of resembling 35mm film as opposed to 16mm.

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ireactions wrote:

I've really liked all the Dark Horse published SERENITY comics that I've read. "Those Left Behind" is a good start that bridges the gap between the final episode of FIREFLY and the SERENITY feature film. The sequel, "Better Days" is also very strong, also set before SERENITY -- although it reintroduces a plot point / situation from the pilot episode where Inara was seen holding a syringe for reasons unknown. "Better Days" has Simon having secret meetings with Inara in her shuttle and Inara refuses to explain why; this was clearly meant to continue the intended character arc where Inara was self-medicating for a terminal disease. Her illness and impending death is why she wanted to see more of the 'verse before she passed away. It was a storyline that FIREFLY would have elaborated on if not for the cancellation. This plot was subsequently dropped in the later comics and the comics later a completely different explanation for her travels.

We have a series of one-shots: "Downtime" is set during the show and is also a very good story. "The Shepherd's Tale" reveals the truth about Shepherd Book and is very strong. "Float Out" is a one shot by Patton Oswalt and also the first story set after SERENITY.

After that comes the six issue series "Leaves on the Wind" with writer Zack Whedon providing an extended follow-up on the post-SERENITY situation for the crew. The sequel is "No Power in the Verse" by Chris Roberson (a great writer) and I just realized I never got around to reading it, only finishing "Leaves on the Wind."

After that, the license transferred from Dark Horse to Boom Studios. The title also reverted to FIREFLY instead of SERENITY. Since  2018, there have apparently been 31 issues (and counting) of the comic, but I haven't read them either. However, they're written by Greg Pak and I've really enjoyed his work on various X-Men comics including PHOENIX: ENDSONG and his Magneto mini-series.


This is awesome.  I started reading the first book and just finished Those Left Behind and started Better Days.

Incidentally, I've also been reading the 2015 Star Wars comics.  I finished all the Vader stuff prior to the current run, and I'm making my way through the regular Star Wars run.  I loved all the Vader stuff, and I think the Star Wars stuff is up and down (but mostly good).

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I've been watching LOIS AND CLARK: THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (1993 - 1997) on HBO Max. It's been remastered to high definition -- mostly. It looks like Warner Bros. took the original film on which LOIS AND CLARK was shot, rescanned the film to 1080p (in 4:3) and rebuilt every episode digitally. However, any time a shot has any kind of post production effect, a composite, a greenscreen background -- those shots are clearly taken from the master tapes (480p video) and stretched to 1080p.

As a result, Lois and Clark walking the streets of Metropolis or through the Daily Planet bullpen is rendered in crisp, hyperdetailed clarity, but Superman flying through the sky or firing heat vision suddenly looks like a fuzzy, dull, faded VHS cassette stretched to a larger screen. I've tried running these shots through an AI upscaler and the results look... ah, pretty much the same.

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Did some more small experiments with upscaling DVD release of LOIS AND CLARK (just the pilot episode's special effects sequences) to 720p. It's interesting. When I AI upscale 480p video to 720p, it looks presentable on a widescreen 55 inch HDTV, but it doesn't look like 720p. It looks like a DVD that has had all of the flaws of stretching the video to 1080p somehow toned down and removed: there is no blockiness, jagged edges are smoothed out, the image is clear even if it isn't perfectly crisp. There's a quality to the video that could be considered a glossy sheen or a hazy fog, depending on how charitable you want to be.

In the HBO Max version of LOIS AND CLARK, all the non-special effects sequences are devoid of this fog; they are crisp and sharp until Superman has to fly or fire heat vision at which point the video develops that hazy fog along with some blurry blockiness (which an AI upscale would have removed). An upscaled version of LOIS AND CLARK (and SLIDERS) doesn't compare to a 1080p scan of the original film -- but the waxy quality of the video is consistent in both non-effects and effects shots, so it isn't jarring to go back and forth whereas the genuine HD versions of these shows do have that incoherence.

BABYLON 5 got the same upscale job as LOIS AND CLARK: a rescan of the original film, but the special effects were taken off the master tapes and stretched to 1080p. However, B5's effects even when originally broadcast looked like videogame graphics representing spaceships in battle. They were computer generated animations with limited texture. They didn't look like physical objects; they looked like animatics. The special effects always had a different visual tone from the shots of the actors. When the special effects shots are stretched to 1080p size and lightly sharpened, they maintain pretty much the same quality they originally had.

In contrast, LOIS AND CLARK's special effects needed to combine practical shots of Dean Cain in the Superman costume with effects that had to be produced on video (background recompositions, laser effects, superimposed fog for freeze breath, etc.), so Dean Cain goes from being a sharply rendered 1080p image to a fuzzy DVD image every time Superman uses any superpowers. If SLIDERS is ever remastered this way, it means that any time the sliders come in and out of the vortex or trigger the timer, the image will go from sharp to blurry.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

I was rewatching some of the LOIS AND CLARK episodes on DVD and I noticed -- the video quality also drops whenever there is a special effect. The DVD transfer is pretty solid, a decent 7/10 as an upscaled DVD. But when Superman flies or when there's any effect that requires recomposition or wire removal or any sort of overlay, the video quality suddenly goes to about 5.5/10.

I think what happened is that LOIS AND CLARK was shot on film and, like most TV shows in 1993, transferred to videotape for editing and visual effects. However, it looks like any shots requiring special effects was transferred to a different video suite than the one used for editing, and the special effects video suite's image quality seems a significant step down from the editing-only video suite. As a result, on HBO Max, the video quality will switch from 10/10 to 5.5/10.

If the videotape-stored effects shot had maintained the same 7/10 quality as the non-effects shots, it's likely that the effects could have been upscaled to 7/10 to 8/10 and the loss of video quality could have been... well, honestly, it would still be pretty jarring.

Ultimately, he loss of video quality when using a special effects shot is present in the original broadcast versions of LOIS AND CLARK, so the HBO Max version has in some ways preserved the original schizophrenia of what aired on ABC.

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I watched the first part of MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE: REVELATION.  The second part is complete and expected before the end of the year.  Each part is five episodes.


By the power of Grayskull, there will be SPOILERS


I really liked it.  Killing off He-Man and Skeletor in the first episode and making Teela the protagonist in the quest to restore magic to Eternia was an inspired choice.  Skeletor's lameness as the primary villain was always a weak point of the show and comics.  Of course they both come back in episode five, with Skeletor finally revealing his motivation for constantly attacking He-Man and Castle Grayskull.  I applaud the show for finding something that makes Skeletor even more unlikeable and pitiful than he already was.  The second half will undoubtedly shove Teela, Andra, and Evil-Lyn back to the background to placate the fanboys and will be the worse for it.

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Do I need to watch all 130 episodes of the original series to understand REVELATION?

I am a big Kevin Smith fan's podcasts and articles, but I find his movies to be good scripts that are very poorly directed (although his work on THE FLASH has been fine).

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ireactions wrote:

Do I need to watch all 130 episodes of the original series to understand REVELATION?

I am a big Kevin Smith fan's podcasts and articles, but I find his movies to be good scripts that are very poorly directed (although his work on THE FLASH has been fine).

Smith only wrote one episode and didn't direct any of them.

You don't need to see every episode of the original series or read the comics to understand it.  There are Easter Eggs for those with a deep familiarity with the series.

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I really enjoyed "The Trial of the Chicago 7" on Netflix.  I know I'm really late to the party, but I thought it was really engaging and interesting.  I didn't know anything about it going in, and I think it's touching on some issues that are just as relevant right now.

It also inspired me to watch "The Social Network" again, which I also really enjoyed.  I hadn't seen it since it came out, and it's also really powerful and has grown in relevance now that we know what Facebook ended up being (and what Zuckerberg ended up being).

I know Sorkin has issues, but the man can write a movie.

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This show "Upload" on Amazon Prime is a lot better / more interesting than I expected.  I'm only on the second episode but it has some of the intelligence and quirkiness that the best of sliders had.

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Earlier, Temporal Flux remarked that television and film offer escapism, a window into a life where the viewer can enjoy what it'd be like to be surrounded by funny friends or to be an influential lawyer or to be fabulous wealthy or to be a superhero adventuring across the cosmos or even just the neighbourhood. http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=10003#p10003

I protested that I want my fantasies to confront real life. I presented BROOKLYN NINE NINE as an example where the Nine Nine are good cops facing all the ugly realities of policing and perpetually at war with the corruption of the New York Police Department. They take a stand against the evils of the world and they tell the audience to fight the good fight and that it's possible to win. Victory isn't assured or certain, but it's possible.

However, I recently watched SUPERSTORE, a half hour sitcom about floor workers at a (legally dissimilar) Walmart. The show is very funny in showing ridiculous demands from customers, impossible assignments from Walmart's aloof and distant corporate overlords cutting hours and increasing tasks and the hilariously damaged personalities that gravitate to or result from retail work.

And yet -- SUPERSTORE is a deeply upsetting situation comedy that is highly confrontational with real life except all of SUPERSTORE's characters tend to lose. The store workers are outraged when a woman gives birth and is expected to go back to work the very next day; physically ravaged when corporate demands that all curbside pickup orders be ready in 30 minutes regardless of physical distance between items and the quanitites of the orders; constantly denied a living wage through reductions to part time; borderline homeless and sometimes living in the store; injured by store assignments and punished for being unable to work.

The show plays it all for laughs and ensures that the characters are never too damaged to show up for work in the next episode, but it's painful.

Eventually, the store workers decide to form a union. Their efforts seem successful until the store is bought by another corporation which renders their union agreement null and void. The workers are further alarmed when a robot is brought in to replace the cleaners and when the robot proves impervious to being thrown off the roof.

Like BROOKLYN NINE NINE, SUPERSTORE is a workplace comedy where the cast confront real world injustices. Unlike BROOKLYN NINE NINE, SUPERSTORE is a workplace comedy where the cast are always defeated by the injustices of reality. At one point, after a failed effort to unionize and the robot is brought in, a character remarks that unionizing has become pointless: in-person retail is being replaced by online shopping, floor workers are being replaced by robots that can do their jobs faster and cheaper.

When the pandemic hits, the store workers have to buy their own masks and hand sanitizer and devise their own safety protocols; all corporate does is provide riot gear to repel looters.

The series finale of SUPERSTORE has pretty much everyone laid off as the store is converted into a mail order warehouse staffed by new hires and of the likely 225 employees that work at a store like this, only six are retained.

Like BROOKLYN NINE NINE, SUPERSTORE meets my wish for comedy to avoid escapism and confront reality. Unlike BROOKLYN NINE NINE, SUPERSTORE devastated me because SUPERSTORE's writers had the Walmart workers try to unionize and fail, try to acquire better working conditions and fail, try to save their store from being shuttered in the series finale and also fail.

SUPERSTORE's creators talked about how they often wished they could let their characters find some way to take the store to a co-op/employee-owned model or succeed in unionizing, but they felt that if it didn't happen for Walmart employees in real life, it couldn't happen on SUPERSTORE.

BROOKLYN NINE NINE's characters are police officers with power. SUPERSTORE's Walmart workers are powerless and SUPERSTORE offers laughs but no escape from capitalism's indifferent cruelty and ultimately no escapism. SUPERSTORE's sense of reality crushed me.

Temporal Flux may have had a point.

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THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS is coming on Christmas. Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cPTYy0tOy4

Hmm. While I enjoyed the first MATRIX film and the ANAMATRIX animated features, everything else after that struck me as a clumsy cash-in. THE MATRIX RELOADED was a fundamentally empty film with slow pacing, dull conversations, lengthy chase sequences and key hunts that could have been deleted with little effect on a very thin plot and Neo being invincible meant there was no sense of danger. THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS had significantly more energy and was satisfactory, but neither RELOADED nor REVOLUTIONS really added that much to the original.

The original movie was a rumination on the subjective nature of reality whereas the two feature film sequels lost all of that and focused largely on questions of predestination and free will and prophecy, delivering these theological discussions in a tediously lecturing tone. It's strange: the ANAMATRIX shorts do a great job of focusing on the subjectivity of reality and it makes me wonder if the Wachowskis exhausted their ideas and themes in those short animated films.

I don't know if RESURRECTIONS will add to that, but it seems to me that Neo is once again depowered and Trinity is somehow alive with both characters having aged in 'real-time' while Morpheus has been de-aged into a younger actor. I hope it's good and that it expands on what made the original film special and that it reappropriates the MATRIX concept from men's rights activists who have co-opted the term "red pill" in their hate campaigns against women.

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I have a strange relationship with the Matrix.  I didn't see the movie in theaters (I don't know if it was because it wasn't a big deal or because I wasn't 17 when it came out), but it was a pretty cool movie after I finally saw it.  I was in college when the sequels came out, and I was about as excited for Reloaded as I've ever been for any movie.  I remember watching it and then after I was done seeing it (at a midnight showing), I was talking about the movie with my friends and realized that none of us seemed to love it.  We were excited in the moment but when breaking it down, we didn't seem to love it as much as we felt when the movie was showing.

Revolutions was fine, but my excitement had worn off and the movie wasn't good enough to salvage the experience.

I think the Matrix sequels suffer from an expectation gap.  I think people expected, based on the end of the first movie, the movie to go in a direction and wrote a sequel in their heads.  I do this a lot.  And when the movie ended up going in its own, unique direction, people were disappointed.  I think, on the whole, the movies are good.  I think they're a bit too philosophical and spiritual than most would've liked, and there wasn't any way the sequels could've been as innovative as the original.

I liked Animatrix, and I had a ton of fun with Enter the Matrix.  I think I would've liked the Matrix Online if I had any idea how to join such a thing.

The new movie will hopefully be a way for Lana Wachowski to tell a better story but work in the themes she really cares about.  There's a lot of opportunity to tell trans stories in the Matrix universe, and I think that's something that she might lean into with this movie.

******

Just a guess but I wonder if Neo and Trinity have aged because they died, and Morpheus is younger because he didn't?  So maybe the Matrix they're in is some sort of "afterlife" program, and Neo and Trinity died, they're older.  Morpheus died sometime later so he's younger?  I don't know if you'd join at a certain age or if you'd be completely reborn, but I guess the timeline doesn't really matter in this universe.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

Jeff Winger in "GI Jeff":
I am Neo in the third act of THE MATRIX. I'm also Neo in the first act of the second MATRIX. I didn't get around to seeing the third one."

THE MATRIX RELOADED is, in terms of incident and set pieces, filled with onscreen activity. However, by the end of RELOADED, the story hasn't made very much progress. It's established early in RELOADED that the machines are advancing on the human city, that the Smith program is still taking over the Matrix -- and by the end, the story is still in pretty much the same place except that Neo is unconscious and the Smith program has made it into the real world.

The revelations about Neo being only the latest iteration of many 'ones' to keep the human race occupied with a token resistance -- it's intriguing, but it doesn't affect the situation as the machines are still advancing on the human city and the Smith program is still taking over the Matrix. I think that's why most people came out of RELOADED feeling no enthusiasm for a third film and that's why REVOLUTIONS made only 58 per cent of RELOADED's ticket sales.

Neo didn't die in REVOLUTIONS. While Smith overrode Neo's in-Matrix code and replaced him, Neo and the Matrix machine core set a trap where Smith overwriting Neo allowed the Matrix machines to send a deletion command through Neo's physical body that would delete the Smith program along with all the viral copies.

The first MATRIX movie establishes that an in-Matrix death will cause the real world body to die as well. ("The body cannot survive without the mind.") The second MATRIX movie has Smith overwrite the Bane character within the Matrix and then occupy his body outside the Matrix. However, it's not specified if Bane's mind remains intact somewhere in the Matrix or in his own body (until Neo was forced to kill him in the real world).

In REVOLUTIONS, Smith's erasure after supposedly erasing Neo would (theoretically) kill Neo's body as well. However, after Smith is deleted, the machines are shown maintaining Neo's body which remains at least physically alive, meaning Neo's mind remains intact once the Smith possession is cleared. This is further underlined when the machines leave Neo 'jacked in' to the Matrix and move his body deeper into the machine city. Neo's is consciousness is left in the (digital) hands of the machines.

My guess would be that, not wanting to spur the creation of another Matrix-manipulator, the machines kept Neo alive but rolled back his memories to the point before the first MATRIX movie, allowing Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo to live the lives they'd have lived had Quinn never created sliding. I mean -- the machines must have reset Neo to live the life he would have lived as "Thomas Anderson" had Morpheus never found him.

Morpheus actually died in THE MATRIX ONLINE. I'm not sure if RESURRECTIONS will take it into account or not; the Wachowskis considered THE MATRIX ONLINE canon at the time, but that time was 2005 - 2009 and nobody can experience it outside of YouTube videos and podcast recollections. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=simXgMvl-bc

While I love spinoff media, even I will concede that it's a bad idea to write a sequel to material that the general audience can't access. Laurence Fishburne claims he isn't in RESURRECTIONS, but perhaps he is and is under a non-disclosure agreement.

Trinity is definitely dead as of REVOLUTIONS.

I wonder if the Morpheus and Trinity in RESURRECTIONS are saved files that were redeployed at different points. Perhaps Morpheus, when held prisoner by the agents in the first MATRIX, had his consciousness copied and saved but his data was impossible to read until the time of RESURRECTIONS when the machines finally developed the means to build an in-Matrix version based on their copy and put it to use for reasons unknown.

Perhaps Morpheus is a copy but not of the machines' making, but a saved version stored in the data banks of the Nebuchadnezzar ship and Trinity is a saved version as well, with the technology to create Matrix versions of them only developed in the present day of RESURRECTIONS. Perhaps an earlier version of Morpheus has been uploaded to the Matrix while a version of the Trinity code has been retroactively added to be chronologically connected to the reset Thomas Anderson code and permitted to age alongside him.

I think the first MATRIX film, in retrospect, has always been a metaphor for transgenderism. I'm not sure what RELOADED is about at all. REVOLUTIONS is a film about free will. I feel both sequels lost the metaphor of the first one, and I hope that RESURRECTIONS will get it back.

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Switch was supposed to be female in the Matrix and male outside of it (or vice versa).  It's why they're called "Switch" but it was either dropped for being confusing or being controversial.

I would expect something like that to happen in the new movie.

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While I wait for SLIDERS: THE COMPLETE SERIES to arrive from German (!) on standard definition blu-ray (!!?) for another run at AI upscaling Season 1, I'm attempting another upscale on the single season WB series BIRDS OF PREY. Bizarrely, the show was released in non-anamorphic widescreen on DVD. By this, I mean that the show was broadcast in 16:9. However, the DVD releases the episodes in 4:3 -- with the 16:9 image within that 4:3 box. So it's even more low resolution than a normal widescreen DVD should be.

I've used MakeMKV to rip the discs, and used Handbrake to decomb and crop the video to the 16:9 image in the 4:3 box. I wonder what Topaz can make of it.

I'm also taking the opportunity to fix the opening titles. The show originally broadcast with Aimee Allen's "Revolution" for the opening title song, an excellent girl power song matching the show's content in which Ashley Scott as the Huntress beats up criminals with her bare hands every week while Dina Meyer's Barbara guides her from the Clocktower HQ and Rachel Skarsten's Dinah learns from both of them. The DVD replaced "Revolution" with a track that has no identified author or performer that's a little too sweet when "Revolution" was perfect for the angry energy of the Huntress. I'm going to edit "Revolution" back into my upscale.

This one time, I was watching it with my niece, a massive SUPERNATURAL fan:

LAUREN: "So... the girl in the black leather is Batman's daughter and her mother was Catwoman who's dead and the girl with red hair used to be Batgirl but now she's Oracle and the blonde girl is Black Canary's daughter?"

IB: " ... Lauren. The woman in black leather punches villains! Honestly, I think I might be overexplaining it."

LAUREN: "The entire show is overexplained!"

IB: "Ashley Scott. Fists! Villain's faces."

LAUREN: "I am seriously only watching when Rob Benedict is onscreen."

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

The upscale of BIRDS OF PREY's pilot was pretty impressive. Topaz did a great job of taking an image that was only 380 pixels high and expanding it to 720p and making it HDTV presentable. The second episode, however, is the first one with the opening titles with a replacement theme song and that was a bit troublesome.

BIRDS OF PREY had a neat and somewhat unusual approach: the first 4 - 6 seconds of Aimee Allen's "Revolution" would play for the last 4 - 6 seconds of the teaser -- followed by a bursting transition into the song and the opening titles. DAWSON'S CREEK often had the theme song start in the teaser too. I haven't seen it anywhere else, but I'm sure these aren't the only two shows to do it.

The BIRDS OF PREY DVD release has been clumsily edited to mute the sound on the teaser (to remove the notes of "Revolution") and play the replacement music.

I spent 10 minutes trying to re-edit the sound, and I think if I had more time, I could have probably matched the original episodes, but I had packages to mail, reports to write and carpets to vacuum, so I just re-edited the teasers to end 2 - 3 seconds earlier and fade to black before fading into the credits -- like a more conventional TV show.

A bit of a shame. However, I'm taking a break from upscaling BIRDS OF PREY to upscale another series -- THE SECRET WORLD OF ALEX MACK.

Curiously, this is another DVD release from our old enemies at Mill Creek who released the low bit-rate COMPLETE SLIDERS. Also curiously, the results on this ALEX MACK are looking good so far, much like Seasons 4 - 5 in the MILL CREEK version of SLIDERS. It looks like both ALEX MACK and Seasons 4 - 5 of SLIDERS were filmed on 16mm film which even on compressed DVD is very upscalable.

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ireactions wrote:

I'd like to learn more about the Australian release too!

I had a nightmare last night that my grandfather rose from his grave to slap me for buying a standard definition blu-ray set that conceivably has the same problems as the Universal set.

It's unclear which episodes the German site reviewed to compare the blu-ray to the DVDs, so we don't know if the video quality is better or worse or equal.

I recently stumbled upon this and thought it was interesting...

https://originaltrilogy.com/discussion/ … ties/id/18

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

I moved your post to Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media because I wanted to reply to it.

I think the entire fan preservationist culture is amazing, incredibly cool from both a technological standpoint and a historical standpoint. The wish to take old materials that were not stored and preserved properly and restore them to be presentable on modern audio-visual equipment is incredible. The first time I really encountered this was when Petr Harmácek took laserdiscs of the and blu-rays of original STAR WARS trilogy and began combining them so that the original effects would cover up the Special Edition effects. Over time, people contributed rescans of matte paintings, scans of the theatrical negatives, and now Harmácek has successfully rebuilt the original versions of STAR WARS, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RETURN OF THE JEDI and they're in high definition.

There was, awhile ago, a fan editor who had somehow managed to acquire original master tapes of a bunch of shows: XENA, LOIS AND CLARK, WONDERFALLS and he was running through his own personally created upscaling algorithms with multiple passes to create fake-HD versions of all these shows. I sent him a message once and never heard back from him and he later took his site offline, probably because he was soliciting donations in exchange for providing upscaled versions of copyrighted materials. I was sorry not to interact more with him, and I won't name him because he clearly wished to go dark on his project, but it's still interesting.

His process was neat: he'd first acquire the original video masters of shows he liked. He'd convert them to a digital format and save them, not as video files, but as soundtracks and each frame as a PNG file. He'd then run each PNG file -- each frame -- through multiple passes of various upscaling processes to get them to 1080p. Then he'd recombine the frames and soundtracks into an MKV video file. This was, he said on his now offline website, very expensive, and his equipment and acquiring video masters had apparently run to about $60,000 USD, some of which had come from crowdsourcing donations.

I assume Warner Bros. or some other studio went after him. Harmácek hasn't gotten in any legal trouble because he never accepted any money, just materials, assistance, and later, a job in film restoration.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

Quantum Leap return in talks?

https://bleedingcool.com/tv/quantum-lea … es-return/

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

In shocking news, an actor is interested in working. :-)

I always think highly of actors who talk about potential revivals of shows they did decades ago. It's a way to tell fans that they appreciate their patronage. But QUANTUM LEAP has had a revival mulled since the late-90s, and if every instance of "talks" led to a revival, we would by now have had a SLIDERS sequel revival and a reboot and a children's CG animated cartoon and a breakfast cereal and a podcast drama. I mean, awhile ago, Temporal Flux was super-keen on this TV show called ZOEY'S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST, a costly San Francisco based musical drama starring the splendid Jane Levy and after its cancellation this past year, there has been "talk" of a revival, maybe some sort of feature film, and I can assure everyone that ZOEY'S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST has about as much chance of coming back to broadcast as AIRWOLF.

Oh, wait. My mistake. There apparently will be a ZOEY movie after all.
https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainmen … g-we-know/

Okay. Things have clearly changed. This is not the world I knew. If Zoey can sing once more, surely Sam Beckett will leap again!! :-D

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

At some point, everything is questioned for a revival. Years ago, there were talks to bring back The Fresh Prince of Bell-Air, a sitcom from the 90s, but Will Smith rightfully said "yeah when hell freezes over."

It all depends on whether a story can be told, if the creators involved would like to do it and if there is room for it in the market place.

Time travel stories have been told from the dawn of time, so no doubt there's room for a Quantum Leap revival. That is if the actors and creators are interested in making one. A story can definitly be told as well as Sam Beckett never made it home at the end and is still out there leaping. Can we get them to cross over with the inevitibal Sliders reboot? Probably not, but hey, worth a shot lol.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

And the Fresh Prince is getting a reboot! It will be Serious.
https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/fresh- … 235052847/

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

I've recently become interested in upscaling myself.... Not really within my capabilities given my disabilities and health, but I enjoy learning new things even if I cannot physically do so.

I have long been a fan of Alternate Universes and Timelines etc, Sliders Fan so a rather obvious thing, but before Sliders came to my attention, my first introduction to such premises was literature.

Visually though, my first experience of this in Media was a PC Game.

Command & Conquer by Westwood Studios.

Shortly followed by

Command & Conquer: Red Alert

EA eventually bought out Westwood and treated the Franchise as badly as Fox and Sci-Fi treated Sliders....

That said, these two Games were recently Remastered by EA working with former Westwood Creators in doing so.

I don't think EA have exactly changed their ways, but just saw an opportunity to cash in.

Even so.... The Game Graphics are improved. The Cut Scene FMV's.... Less so.

They are an improvement sure, but not optimally done.

A Youtube Channel I follow though has been working on Upscaling these FMV's in a more complete and thorough manner.

In case any of this interests you guys I will link below.

No Strings PRD

https://youtu.be/i-E1YJRMwMM

https://youtu.be/SMnqW4sU5Q4

I've also really been enjoying some Film Reviews on a Youtube Channel by Critical Drinker

https://youtu.be/wmOZgSyQjtA

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

Tucker wrote:

At some point, everything is questioned for a revival. Years ago, there were talks to bring back The Fresh Prince of Bell-Air, a sitcom from the 90s, but Will Smith rightfully said "yeah when hell freezes over."

It all depends on whether a story can be told, if the creators involved would like to do it and if there is room for it in the market place.

Time travel stories have been told from the dawn of time, so no doubt there's room for a Quantum Leap revival. That is if the actors and creators are interested in making one. A story can definitly be told as well as Sam Beckett never made it home at the end and is still out there leaping. Can we get them to cross over with the inevitibal Sliders reboot? Probably not, but hey, worth a shot lol.

I still think Universal just doesn't see any value in the Sliders brand.  I think Quantum Leap's name has value.  The Fresh Prince's name has value.  I don't think most people remember Sliders. 

With a lot of "original ideas", they try and slap an existing property's name on it and call it a sequel/remake/etc.  It happened twice with Cloverfield (almost three times).  It's an original story about a woman being held hostage during what she's been told is an alien invasion.  It could've been released as 10 Butterfly Lane and been well received and maybe a minor hit.  They throw Cloverfield into the name with almost no connection to the first movie, and it now has name recognition.  You take a story about cyberterrorists attacking the country, throw John McClane in it, and it's a Die Hard sequel with name recognition.

If someone brought a story to Universal about a group of people who stumble on interdimensional travel, I don't know if they'd see enough value in the Sliders name to do the same thing.  There certainly hasn't been enough serious interest to get a Sliders project moving even though Jerry O'Connell seems game for it.

I'm not saying it won't happen.  I just don't think Universal values it that much.

But here's a question.  I wonder if a studio would ever sell the rights to a franchise to a group of fans that crowdsource it.  I know it would be super expensive to purchase the rights to something relevant, but it fans and cast/crew/creators wanted to reboot/sequel a TV show (let's say JOHN DOE) and fans were willing to put the money up, would a studio sell the rights so a project can move forward?

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

Ugh. Mill Creek. I have no idea why, but on their DVD set of THE SECRET WORLD OF ALEX MACK, Season 1 is upscalable and looks great in faux HD, but Season 2 is so fuzzy that the AI has absolutely nothing to work with and the video quality looks more like a watercolour animation than an episode of ALEX MACK. The upscale doesn't make it look any better at all.

I wonder if Mill Creek accidentally set the bit rate too high for Season 1 and overcompressed the rest on their discs.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

But here's a question.  I wonder if a studio would ever sell the rights to a franchise to a group of fans that crowdsource it.  I know it would be super expensive to purchase the rights to something relevant, but it fans and cast/crew/creators wanted to reboot/sequel a TV show (let's say JOHN DOE) and fans were willing to put the money up, would a studio sell the rights so a project can move forward?

Anything’s possible if the money is there; and we’re seeing more and more innovative ways of revisiting old franchises too:

https://bleedingcool.com/movies/13-fanb … r-october/

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

I could be WRONG about this, but I seriously doubt that a multinational corporation would ever sell one of its own franchises outside of one corporation purchasing another the way Disney bought Marvel and then bought Lucasfilm and then bought FOX and will conceivably someday buy Sony.

Just by owning SLIDERS, NBCUniversal can claim that the franchise is worth 500,000 - 1.5 million and add that to their 'value' should they someday wish to put their corporation up for sale to another corporation. I can't see them selling it piecemeal.

I can see NBCUniversal licensing SLIDERS the way FOX licensed THE X-FILES to the company IDW which enabled IDW to produce a highly successful comic book series (THE X-FILES: SEASON 10, THE X-FILES: SEASON 11, MILLLENNIUM, THE X-FILES: YEAR ZERO, THE X-FILES: ORIGINS) as well as an anthology series and a board game, all of which was tremendously profitable until Chris Carter was able to bring a TV version of Seasons 10 - 11 to broadcast which was so poorly received that it killed the entire IDW tie-in line and the TV show as well.

But, I mean, I could be wrong. :-)

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

ireactions wrote:

Ugh. Mill Creek. I have no idea why, but on their DVD set of THE SECRET WORLD OF ALEX MACK, Season 1 is upscalable and looks great in faux HD, but Season 2 is so fuzzy that the AI has absolutely nothing to work with and the video quality looks more like a watercolour animation than an episode of ALEX MACK. The upscale doesn't make it look any better at all.

I wonder if Mill Creek accidentally set the bit rate too high for Season 1 and overcompressed the rest on their discs.

Had another idea that I'm trying -- I'm running the Season 2 premiere of ALEX MACK through Topaz, but I'm not increasing the resolution. I'm leaving it at 640 x 480 pixels. I'm just using Topaz to remove the blurry blockiness of the standard definition image. It's possible the image will scale better to an HDTV screen even at this cleaned up 480p level.

It's also possible that Topaz can bring the cleaned up version to 720p better -- although I doubt that will be effective. From what I can tell, the AI requires film grain to extract and expand on detail and Topaz tends to remove grain.

Recently, I took the DAWSON'S CREEK extended series finale DVD and upscaled it to 720p. The entire show was recently re-released on Netflix in high definition with the original film rescanned to 4K. It's a beautiful image, but extremely grainy due to the 16mm film. Also, the high definition release doesn't include the extended series finale, only the televised, shorter version. I upscaled the extended finale DVD and it looks good in AI-rebuilt 720p. However, the 16mm film graininess on the DVD is completely gone after the upscale; the AI requires film grain to work, but it also smooths it out completely in its final result.

I may take another run at SLIDERS' Season 1 episodes after this -- not upscaling, just running Topaz to produce deblocked/cleaned up 480p video files. Unless the blu-ray set shows up before I'm ready.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

Why is Mill Creek's Season 1 of ALEX MACK decent enough to upscale while Season 2 (and possibly 3) is hopeless? Why are Mill Creek's versions of SLIDERS in Seasons 1 - 3 too fuzzy to upscale while Seasons 4 - 5 are solid?

It looks to me like both ALEX MACK and Seasons 4 - 5 of SLIDERS were filmed in 16mm film, a grainy format. Grain holds the detail. Grain is the raw material that an AI upscaler uses to improve a video image, extrapolating and expanding on what detail is there. Mill Creek overcompresses video to fit more episodes onto more discs, but Season 1 of ALEX MACK and Seasons 4 - 5 of SLIDERS were able to retain the grain for upscaling. Why them and not Seasons 2 - 3 of ALEX MACK?

It looks like Mill Creek put 6 hours of ALEX MACK episodes on one disc each. In contrast, Mill Creek put 4.5 hours of SLIDERS episodes on each disc. ALEX MACK is 33 per cent more compressed than SLIDERS which hit the breaking point for retaining anything of 16mm film for an AI to identify as detail.

Why does Season 1 survive being overcompressed? It looks to me like Mill Creek lifted the assets from a previous ALEX MACK DVD release, a two disc release from a different company, Genius Entertainment, that put 13 episodes on two discs. Genius did a pretty good job, it seems, of maintaining the maximum bit rate on their files, and Mill Creek managed to cram those 13 episodes (5.2 hours) onto one with a mild 15 per cent reduction, so it looks like for 16mm film, going past 5.2 hours is when 16mm film becomes impossible to rebuild at least with current algorithms.

However, it looks like Season 4 of ALEX MACK is split with 10 episodes (4 hours) per disc, so those episodes will be upscalable. Seasons 2 - 3, however, I'm just going to leave in standard definition, but with all of the compression artifacts removed via Topaz AI cleaning up the file but leaving the pixel count the same.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

And now Babylon 5 returns:

https://gizmodo.com/babylon-5-is-gettin … 1847752907

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

ireactions wrote:

I could be WRONG about this, but I seriously doubt that a multinational corporation would ever sell one of its own franchises outside of one corporation purchasing another the way Disney bought Marvel and then bought Lucasfilm and then bought FOX and will conceivably someday buy Sony.

Just by owning SLIDERS, NBCUniversal can claim that the franchise is worth 500,000 - 1.5 million and add that to their 'value' should they someday wish to put their corporation up for sale to another corporation. I can't see them selling it piecemeal.

I can see NBCUniversal licensing SLIDERS the way FOX licensed THE X-FILES to the company IDW which enabled IDW to produce a highly successful comic book series (THE X-FILES: SEASON 10, THE X-FILES: SEASON 11, MILLLENNIUM, THE X-FILES: YEAR ZERO, THE X-FILES: ORIGINS) as well as an anthology series and a board game, all of which was tremendously profitable until Chris Carter was able to bring a TV version of Seasons 10 - 11 to broadcast which was so poorly received that it killed the entire IDW tie-in line and the TV show as well.

But, I mean, I could be wrong. :-)

I doubt you're wrong.  And Sliders might have more value.  But pick a show that will never come back or one that maybe never made it to the air.  Would Universal rather have a line item that's worth $500,000 or would they rather have $500,000?

I imagine if a fanbase actually raised $500,000, Universal would refuse to sell and would instead just make whatever the fans wanted them to make.  So instead of selling the rights to Heat Vision and Jack, they'd just make something with the Heat Vision and Jack rights.  Everyone wins.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

I've been watching Y: The Last Man on Hulu, and I'm having trouble understanding the state of the world.  I get that the message of the show, as specifically noted by the comic, is that men still control several sectors so that, if they all died, would leave a shortage of qualified (and also inexperienced) women to handle things.  I know they've talked about power grid failures and riots and all that.

But why are the cities empty?  Why are blocks full of suburban houses completely abandoned?  Boston has 675,000, 52% of which are women.  And the only ones that stayed in the city are rioters and military?  They moved 300,000 women into camps?  Wouldn't it be easier and safer to have people remain in their homes instead of transporting them and having them live in, what, tents somewhere?

Endgame had a similar premise - half of a population disappears.  And while I'm sure there was chaos and rioting and power failures, it seems like society continued.  The Leftovers worked on a similar premise, although on a much smaller scale.  I'm sure there would be confusion and fear and violence, but I don't feel like the world would look like the zombie apocalypse.  Probably martial law and food shortages and power outages, but I figure it'd look more like a post-hurricane city than the Walking Dead.

Am I crazy here?

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

I don’t think it’s presented this way, but one reason to abandon the largely populated areas would be the mess.  With all of the other problems created, would it be easier to clean up 300,000 dead men in Boston or just go somewhere else?

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

And now the original “Law & Order” returns:

https://bleedingcool.com/tv/law-order-o … season-21/

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

I think it was maybe shown that way in New York?  So that's possible.  At least with Endgame, they were all vaporized.

Is it a lack of military personnel?  From some lazy research, the military is about 20% women.  It'd be higher in some countries and much lower in others.  I'm assuming martial law could keep order, but maybe there isn't enough military to keep order?

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

TemporalFlux wrote:

I don’t think it’s presented this way, but one reason to abandon the largely populated areas would be the mess.  With all of the other problems created, would it be easier to clean up 300,000 dead men in Boston or just go somewhere else?

There's lots of infrastructure in the cities.  Why rebuild all that?

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

I started and finished "Umbrella Academy" from Netflix.  I thought it was pretty fun, and I'm looking forward to another season.  Has anyone else seen it?

I finished the first season and the first episode of the second.  I'm a little hesitant to proceed, as the over-glorification of the 60's and making the Kennedy assassination the lynchpin of all history are tropes I despise.

I found the lack of cell phones in 2019 in season one to be distracting.  I realize the whole plot would have ended by the third episode if the characters had them, but that's an indictment of the writers rather than the technology.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

Unfortunately I find myself in agreement with you both.

Universal don't really even seem keen on any spending at all, regarding most of it's IP's as just a form of passive income and a potential asset value in the event of a sale or merger.

I think that unless Torme succeeds in his endeavours, then the future of Sliders remains with us the Fandom to create new content and remind people that the Setting and Franchise exist.

The Lego Sliders that IB mentioned that @Cez had made intrigues me, I was unaware it existed so will definitely check it out.

On that note though....

I watched some of an animation called RWBY by Rooster Teeth. The Animation is striking, but not really all that impressive in terms of detail. It reminds me a lot of the visuals from the early Noughties PS2 Games "Star Ocean: Until the End of Time" & "Rogue Galaxy".

An Artist friend of mine explained to me that it is or was actually made using something called "Miku Miku Dance" aka "MMD".

So I was thinking.... We could put aside our SOD (Suspension Of Disbelief) to enjoy Lego renditions of Sliders, with an entire Fanbase arising with RWBY that was made with Dated Graphics/Visuals....

So maybe we as Fans of Sliders could work with something like MMD?

Sure it is imperfect, but could offer possibilities that may not otherwise be possible.

If nothing else it shows that Cel Shading using MMD is a viable form of Animation that can be consumed.

It also makes me think of the Amateur Fan of Zelda that used the Game "Total War" to make his own RTS Game composed of the many Races and Factions from the Legend of Zelda series of Games.... He since progressed beyond "Total War" as a Game Engine and even creates his own Cut Scenes with much better Visuals.

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

My recent purchase of the German SLIDERS standard definition blu-ray set has me wondering if all upscaling options might be a complete and total waste of time for home video distributors. AI upscaling is great for fans trying to improve poor home media. But surely studios could simply re-scan their existing video masters at the highest possible level of fidelity and put them on blu-ray / HD streaming services without the compression that was once needed to release this content on 8GB DVDs.

If the video masters are a good quality standard definition file, the uncompressed rescans won't look like full fledged high definition, but they will look above and beyond the limits of DVD storage. Seasons 2 - 5 of SLIDERS benefitted from excellent video quality when their 35mm and 16mm film were transferred to videotape for editing and effects. They look great in uncompressed standard definition blu-ray files. Season 1, sadly, got a fuzzy film to tape transfer and looks a bit dull.

For the most part, I think it is very likely that most 90s shows that were shot on film and edited on video exist on videotapes that look as good or better than the uncompressed Seasons 2 - 5 of SLIDERS. Paramount doesn't want to rescan all the film for DEEP SPACE NINE or VOYAGER and rebuild all the effects because THE NEXT GENERATION had poor blu-ray sales. That makes sense, but why not rescan the completed episodes from videotape at maximum bitrate and put them on streaming? They wouldn't be HD, but they would be more on the HD side than on the SD side.

We all have a common impression of the upper limits of DVD video quality and of poor VHS quality, but it's clear from the Season 2 - 5 blu-ray of SLIDERS that these video masters, despite being on tape, have excellent visual depth, detail, sharpness and clarity that home video distributors had to downscale to fit onto DVD discs. Master tapes are not high definition videos, but they can exceed DVD and reach within striking range of HD.

My God, I just watched "The Guardian" in 640x480 on the blu-ray and I can see the blades of grass beneath young Quinn's feet as he defeats his bullies. Resolution is just the container for the video and with SLIDERS after Season 1, that container is filled to the brim.

THE SECRET WORLD OF ALEX MACK is a terrible Mill Creek DVD release that crunched down the video files to at times 200 MB per episode; a blu-ray release could have let the standard definition files be rendered at 1GB per episode and with a fairly modest price increase, even with Mill Creek's bargain basement approach to blu-rays.

BABYLON 5 and LOIS AND CLARK are two shows that might have been better off with rescanned videotapes rather than rescanning the original film. Both shows feature effects that exist only on videotape and not on film. As a result, any time there is a special effects shot in the HD releases of these shows, the video quality becomes jarringly blurry in contrast to the sharpness of the film sequences. A videotape rescan would have been cheaper and the video quality would be consistent throughout.

Recently, STARGATE SG-1 was released to blu-ray in something resembling HD. The show was, like SLIDERS, shot on film and edited on videotape for the first seven seasons, and the blu-ray is apparently the 480i STARGATE SG-1 DVD releases, AI upscaled to 1080p in resolution. It's also been subjected to various filters to reduce film grain, screen out compression, increase pixel contrast, etc.. https://www.gateworld.net/news/2021/03/ … than-dvds/

Reviews indicate that it's fine, acceptable, enjoyable and consistent. But it might have looked even better if they'd scanned the tapes, made full use of 44GB discs to leave the episodes as uncompressed as possible -- and then left them alone.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

I'm starting to wonder if in this world of releasing TV shows from the 1960s - 2000s in new formats, we need some more categories besides SD (standard definition) and HD (high definition).

SD: This is standard definition video and primarily refers to 480i video as found in interlaced DVD releases. Within the SD category would be:

SD-LF: Standard Definition Low Fidelity. This is video like the Mill Creek DVD releases of pretty much anything where adequate video files have been hypercompressed to fit on the smallest and cheapest DVDs to fit entire shows onto a small number of discs to hit an extremely low, direct-to-bargain bin price point. SD-LF video is covered in compression artifacts under which is a blurry image that looks more like a dull approximation of a TV show than the show itself.

SD-MF: Standard Definition Medium Fidelity. This is standard definition 480i video that has been moderately compressed, standard across most DVD releases of the late 90s and early 2000s where the video has been compressed to an extremely middling level of quality. Most DVD box sets of entire seasons had a middling level of video quality because each disc had to hold slightly more than a two hour movie and the files had to be compressed, but were still of sufficient quality to be watchable and even mildly upscalable on an HDTV. GILMORE GIRLS, BUFFY and ANGEL would be considered SD-MF. SLIDERS from Universal would barely make the grade.

SD-HF: Standard Definition High Fidelity is where a DVD only needs to hold 1.5 to 2 hours of video and can therefore have bit rate higher than DVDs needing to hold 4 episodes of a TV show. SD-HF reaches the limit of what video quality a file could hold while still fitting onto a standard definition video medium and being decodable by a DVD player as a DVD. Any single film release on DVD fits into this category.

SD-UF: Standard Definition Ultra Fidelity is where standard definition video files are encoded with a higher file size than what could actually fit onto DVDs or standard definition storage media and beyond what could actually be decoded by a DVD player. While still a standard definition image in terms of resolution, SD-UF video has a level of video quality in sharpness, detail and clarity that exceeds what is possible on a DVD. To qualify as SD-UF, such video must be scalable from 480 pixels high to 1080 pixels high without any perceptible loss of quality when viewed at sofa to TV distance. The only example I've seen of this is, um, the German blu-ray set of SLIDERS.

HD: High definition video, refers to video that is 720 or 1080 pixels high. Within this category is:

HD-A: High Definition Approximate. This is standard definition video that has been upscaled to 720 or 1080 pixels high via machine-learning developed algorithms that are trained to recognize any conceivable form of texture that might appear in a video (grass, skin, clothing, sky, etc.) and remove any blur, distortions or artifacts over these textures that result from compression or scaling the video to a larger size. This is an attempt to make a standard definition video seem closer to high definition through upscaling rather than rescanning the original film elements. The STARGATE SG-1 blu-ray release of Seasons 1 - 7 were produced this way.

HDF-SDFX: High Definition Film and Standard Definition Effects. These are video files where the live action sequences have been rescanned from film for a high definition image. However, any sequences involving special effects applied in post are taken from the standard definition master tapes. The distinction between high definition live action and standard definition may be jarring to some viewers and algorithmically upscaling the effects does not change this categorization. LOIS AND CLARK and BABYLON 5 are HDF-SDFX.

HD-S: High Definition Scan is when a video file is high definition through a high definition scan of the original elements. Examples include the HD versions of DAWSON'S CREEK, QUANTUM LEAP and CHARLIE'S ANGELS.

HD-FXR: High Definition with Effects Reconstruction is when a show is rebuilt from rescanning the original elements, but all the special effects are recreated for high definition as opposed to being retransferred from the original elements. HD-FXR shows include STAR TREK and STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION in which the original film was rescanned to HD, but all the effects were remade and the original effects merely served as reference.

HD-DG: High Definition Digital in which the video is HD because it was shot digitally in the first place. Examples include the post-Season 7 seasons of STARGATE SG-1 and most modern TV shows.

408 (edited by RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan 2021-10-03 09:10:52)

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

ireactions wrote:

My recent purchase of the German SLIDERS standard definition blu-ray set has me wondering if all upscaling options might be a complete and total waste of time for home video distributors. AI upscaling is great for fans trying to improve poor home media. But surely studios could simply re-scan their existing video masters at the highest possible level of fidelity and put them on blu-ray / HD streaming services without the compression that was once needed to release this content on 8GB DVDs.

If the video masters are a good quality standard definition file, the uncompressed rescans won't look like full fledged high definition, but they will look above and beyond the limits of DVD storage. Seasons 2 - 5 of SLIDERS benefitted from excellent video quality when their 35mm and 16mm film were transferred to videotape for editing and effects. They look great in uncompressed standard definition blu-ray files. Season 1, sadly, got a fuzzy film to tape transfer and looks a bit dull.

For the most part, I think it is very likely that most 90s shows that were shot on film and edited on video exist on videotapes that look as good or better than the uncompressed Seasons 2 - 5 of SLIDERS. Paramount doesn't want to rescan all the film for DEEP SPACE NINE or VOYAGER and rebuild all the effects because THE NEXT GENERATION had poor blu-ray sales. That makes sense, but why not rescan the completed episodes from videotape at maximum bitrate and put them on streaming? They wouldn't be HD, but they would be more on the HD side than on the SD side.

We all have a common impression of the upper limits of DVD video quality and of poor VHS quality, but it's clear from the Season 2 - 5 blu-ray of SLIDERS that these video masters, despite being on tape, have excellent visual depth, detail, sharpness and clarity that home video distributors had to downscale to fit onto DVD discs. Master tapes are not high definition videos, but they can exceed DVD and reach within striking range of HD.

My God, I just watched "The Guardian" in 640x480 on the blu-ray and I can see the blades of grass beneath young Quinn's feet as he defeats his bullies. Resolution is just the container for the video and with SLIDERS after Season 1, that container is filled to the brim.

THE SECRET WORLD OF ALEX MACK is a terrible Mill Creek DVD release that crunched down the video files to at times 200 MB per episode; a blu-ray release could have let the standard definition files be rendered at 1GB per episode and with a fairly modest price increase, even with Mill Creek's bargain basement approach to blu-rays.

BABYLON 5 and LOIS AND CLARK are two shows that might have been better off with rescanned videotapes rather than rescanning the original film. Both shows feature effects that exist only on videotape and not on film. As a result, any time there is a special effects shot in the HD releases of these shows, the video quality becomes jarringly blurry in contrast to the sharpness of the film sequences. A videotape rescan would have been cheaper and the video quality would be consistent throughout.

Recently, STARGATE SG-1 was released to blu-ray in something resembling HD. The show was, like SLIDERS, shot on film and edited on videotape for the first seven seasons, and the blu-ray is apparently the 480i STARGATE SG-1 DVD releases, AI upscaled to 1080p in resolution. It's also been subjected to various filters to reduce film grain, screen out compression, increase pixel contrast, etc.. https://www.gateworld.net/news/2021/03/ … than-dvds/

Reviews indicate that it's fine, acceptable, enjoyable and consistent. But it might have looked even better if they'd scanned the tapes, made full use of 44GB discs to leave the episodes as uncompressed as possible -- and then left them alone.

Regarding the reduced compression of the video assests on the german release, and your post in general, do you think the 1.6 gigs per episode really is showing the full capacity of what is possible, or is there still some image loss?  Because these blu-ray distributors still are trying to reduce the number of discs they have to put in the package, to maintain some profit margin.  Discs may be 30 or 40 cent cost.  And I wonder if we are still losing what would be noticable quality difference because of this compromise?

Not sure what the process is like for rescanning tapes.  But I really wonder how well organized some of the studios are.  Do they have all the tapes?  Is it a hassle to find them?  Did film stock get lost in fires?  Pretty sure any special effect files are GONE.

I think the studios have limited machines, limited people and limited time.  Rescanning or upconversion, or video processing, or all the other things that come w/ these projects became not worth their time if the title is not significant enough.  Maybe in some cases their is some profit to be made, but it's not big enough vs. what else they could be working on, using machines for etc.

And they don't tend to be willing to outsource this work readily to smaller operations, or they give potential licensing partners a hard time on licensing fees.  Take someone like Shout Factory.  They could do a great job on a sliders blu-ray but Universal in negotations probably won't price the license reasonable enough to make it worth Shout's while.  And Universal, out of habit, doesn't want to do super small deals... as it sets a bad precedent.  I bet even Mill Creek may have lost money on their DVD release.  I doubt it quite sold what they may have expected.  It wasn't aimed at hardcore fans, who already owned it. But the everday person shopping at wal-mart, who may have remembered the series and were OK  with a twenty dollar spend.  I just doubt it hit that market particularly as well as maybe Mill Creek may have expected.  But that's off topic.

I think what studios are missing, in not working w. smaller players to upgrade content, is in the streaming era, your library matters.  And if it looks like shit, how do you expect it to perform?

From what I understand, the production facilitites at the studios get territorial about this work being outsources, because they want the money, budget and work for the content at their studio and its IP.  So smaller actors who can do this work dont get the jobs, and the title is too small, and it gets lost in the fray.

Re-scanning the tapes might be an excellent idea though.  I do think a re-scan of the negatives w/ upconversion on effects shots should be done on anything you want to put on streaming nowadays.  And then find a way to make the content "new".  Get the actors to provide commentary tracks etc.  Support podcast rewatch series.  And bake it into your streaming service.  Make it relevant.  Let people have a conversation around the content.  Similar to what Gil is doing with The Prisoner, that tracy has appeared in episodes of.  Just make an ecosystem out of it.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

Not sure what the process is like for rescanning tapes.  But I really wonder how well organized some of the studios are.  Do they have all the tapes?  Is it a hassle to find them?  Did film stock get lost in fires?  Pretty sure any special effect files are GONE.

Well, there was the Universal backlot fire of 2008 which destroyed the Chandler Hotel facade:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/VPV7-IqrXhgnznYD1gM1Lm2-oOen6v_Av3yd4bQ8gBJaspBaxFfYvn9DeRHookABbMKIN-MEACOvXihPH2fD4RALHpcZ-LMLDIPlO4deuYYUQL3CHB7EYwh5PDqw-ofubtI

You can see The Chandler in flames beside that truck.

The fire spread from there to the King Kong attraction and the non-descript building next to it - the film vault.  You’ve actually seen the Universal film vault and may not realize it.  In season five’s “The Great Work”, the great work itself, consisting of a large corridor of shelves, is in fact the interior of the Universal film vault.

We’re told that no film was destroyed in the backlot fire, but they gloss over what happened to the original music masters of the Universal Music Group which were stored in the area of the film vault.  The masters (encompassing material from some 500,000 titles) were destroyed:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/maga … dings.html

According to UMG documents, the vault held analog tape masters dating back as far as the late 1940s, as well as digital masters of more recent vintage. It held multitrack recordings, the raw recorded materials — each part still isolated, the drums and keyboards and strings on separate but adjacent areas of tape — from which mixed or “flat” analog masters are usually assembled. And it held session masters, recordings that were never commercially released.

The collection included a wide range of artists including Louis Armstrong, Buddy Holly, Bing Crosby and Chuck Berry all the way to more modern artists like Eminem, Aerosmith, Snoop Dogg and Gwen Stefani.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

So many valuable cultural treasures just gone..... Painful is what that is.

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

omnimercurial wrote:

So many valuable cultural treasures just gone..... Painful is what that is.

It was a shame, but it's also like mehhhh.  Basically every musical artist's Wikipedia page has the same entry, so and so was among those who lost their master tapes.  For 98% of these artists, the masters were never going to be used again.  The music has been remastered up, down, left, right, over and over again.  There's nothing left to do.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

Grizzlor wrote:
omnimercurial wrote:

So many valuable cultural treasures just gone..... Painful is what that is.

It was a shame, but it's also like mehhhh.  Basically every musical artist's Wikipedia page has the same entry, so and so was among those who lost their master tapes.  For 98% of these artists, the masters were never going to be used again.  The music has been remastered up, down, left, right, over and over again.  There's nothing left to do.

I was more thinking of things like cut content, unreleased tracks etc.

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

This is... interesting
https://nerdist.com/article/stargate-re … antis/?amp

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

One show that seemed to suffer a lot of SLIDERS' problems: THE DEAD ZONE. This 2002 - 2007 TV series was an adaptation of a novel by Stephen King that had been previously adapted to film in 1983.

I've always wondered why THE DEAD ZONE, a brilliant, visionary TV show fell apart so badly. Seeing lead actor Anthony Michael Hall in a supporting role in HALLOWEEN KILLS last week made me look back.

Examining THE DEAD ZONE's history now, it seems to come down two specific areas. First, the original showrunner reduced his involvement to almost nothing and wasn't there to maintain his vision due to a mild case of death. And second, the show went from a major(ish) broadcast network in UPN to a cable TV channel (USA Network), and a cable TV network had great difficulty in funding a show created for a much more expensive business model.

Star Trek Staffers
THE DEAD ZONE was brought to TV by two STAR TREK: NEXT GEN and VOYAGER writer-producers: Michael Piller and Joe Menosky. Piller had a reputation for highly detailed characterization, Menosky made a name for himself writing bizarre high concept science fiction. This partnership made DEAD ZONE a bizarre procedural drama-comedy in which schoolteacher Johnny Smith (Anthony Michael Hall) develops tactile psychic abilities where touching any object or person brings visions of the past and the future.

Bold Enterprise
Season 1 debuted on USA Network in June 2002. These first 13 episodes were a lavish visual banquet as Johnny's visions were rendered in stunning special effects sequences: frozen landscapes, morphing, slow motion surroundings with Johnny moving at normal speed, showing Johnny peering backwards and forwards in time and using his knowledge in the present to prevent harm, violence, injury, loss and other horrific events that would almost happen but would be averted by a good-hearted psychic.

THE DEAD ZONE could be a cop show, a romcom, an espionage thriller, a disaster film, a high school drama, a hockey movie -- all filtered through the lens of the psychic. The show was a ratings hit and renewed for a second season of 13 episodes on USA Network that began in January 2003, eagerly capitalizing on the popularity of the first season. The show seemed to be stepping towards a very bright future.

Season 1 had been so successful that USA Network ordered another 13 episodes for Season 2. Judging from Season 2, the budget was the same and likely even a little higher to accommodate the cast salary increases that would have come with a second season. And this January to April 2003 season was so successful that UPN ordered another six episodes for Season 2 to air in the summer from July to August 2003.

A New Captain
At this point, THE DEAD ZONE hit personnel problems. Joe Menosky had moved on. And worse: visionary showrunner Michael Piller was extremely sick.

Piller had been diagnosed with head and neck cancer years ago but kept working on VOYAGER and launching new shows like THE DEAD ZONE and rewriting every DEAD ZONE script before filming. But he was apparently too sick to run the writers' room anymore; the thirteenth episode of Season 2 was his last.

Writer Karl Schaefer, creator of hyper-eccentric shows like EERIE INDIANA and STRANGE LUCK, was brought in as Piller's replacement. It was kept quiet; Piller retained his executive producer credit and was promoting the show, but Schaefer was now in charge of THE DEAD ZONE's writers' room with some consultation from Piller.

Turbulence
The extra six episodes under Schaefer were hit and miss: there were three episodes that delved deeply into the strangeness of Johnny's powers romantically, in terms of espionage, and in visions of the distant future. However, there were also three standalone episodes that were entirely standalone containing no running arcs and no ongoing character elements.

The three on-brand episodes seemed like THE DEAD ZONE as its usual self. But the three standalones seemed like what one would expect for a cable TV show: inexpensive, assuming a casual summer audience that might not be inclined to follow the show too closely and avoiding any elements that would carry into another episode. They were oddly conventional for the creator of EERIE INDIANA.

The First Budget Cut
USA Network ordered a third season of THE DEAD ZONE for summer 2004, but these 13 episodes under Karl Schaefer showed further changes to the series format and production model. While they aired in the summer like Season 1 and the additional six of Season 2, the budget had been cut. The second female lead of the show had been dropped, her character disappearing without explanation. In addition, the lavish special effects for Johnny's visions were absent from five of the episodes, a budget-saving measure that wasn't present in the show's first 26 episodes.

Episodic Isolation
The format also shifted. Season 1 and 2 had started many arcs: Johnny's gradual discovery of his powers and new applications of his abilities, visions of a distant and apocalyptic future, investigating a deranged politician who became a recurring character and was the catalyst to the future Armageddon that Johnny had foreseen. While Armageddon was only the focus of two episodes in Season 2, Johnny's investigation into the matter was featured prominently throughout Season 2.

Season 3 abandoned this ongoing approach: the Season 3 premiere and finale two parters would focus on Armageddon; the episodes in between would not address it outside of one mention. Ongoing arcs like Johnny's rising fame, his need for a security system to protect him from stalkers, his increasing relevance to US intelligence agencies, his increasing control and widening application of his psychic powers -- all this vanished. The show switched to crimes of the week with little to no personal development for Johnny's character or the Armageddon arc.

The change was jarring and frustrating; Season 2 had kept working at the Armageddon arc; Season 3 refused to acknowledge it for the bulk of its episodes. Season 3 was now structured episodically with standalones -- much like most cable TV shows that aired in the summers.

Crime Prevention Becomes Crime Solving
Season 3 also featured a peculiar shift in the writing. Seasons 1 - 2 had featured Johnny Smith foreseeing some terrible event and trying to prevent it. Season 3 changed to Johnny trying to solve crimes after they had happened.

Numerous writers from Seasons 1 - 2 were still working on the show; it seems evident in retrospect that this preventative approach in plots had come from Michael Piller rewriting his staff's scripts for the first 26 episodes of the show. Piller was no longer able to do so and Schaefer's approach could not maintain Piller's sensibilities nor did USA Network wish him to.

Why was USA Network refusing to fund THE DEAD ZONE at its full budget when it was so successful? And why did they force THE DEAD ZONE into a rigidly standalone format?

Cable vs. Broadcast
Looking at the show now, THE DEAD ZONE was too expensive for a cable channel like USA Network.

Seasons 1 - 2 had stunning special effects, extensive location filming, large numbers of extras -- vastly exceeding the low budget procedurals and dramedies usually on basic cable like USA Network. It was shot on 35mm film except for special effects sequences which were shot digitally. What was such a lavishly produced TV show doing on a cable network?

The answer: THE DEAD ZONE had originally been ordered by UPN, a major broadcaster that went into financial and structural turmoil as it shifted from Paramount Television to CBS in 2002; THE DEAD ZONE was likely approved by the outgoing Paramount team but unwanted by the incoming CBS regime. But it was too late for CBS to get their money back. THE DEAD ZONE had been ordered, funded and 13 episodes had been filmed.

Glass Ceiling
USA Network picked it up. USA Network broadcast the first season of a show that was much more costly than the usual USA Network fare. Ratings were strong at 6 million viewers in Season 1, so USA Network renewed it for a second season at the same financial scale, hoping for even greater ratings and ad revenue.

But THE DEAD ZONE's audience didn't grow in Season 2; it remained in the 5 - 6 million range, hitting the upper limits of how many viewers it could reach on cable. USA Network didn't cancel it, but they slashed its budget for Season 3 and mandated that THE DEAD ZONE be more episodic like their other shows, allowing them to move episode orders around for ads and marketing.

Summer vs. Fall
And creatively, THE DEAD ZONE had been an odd fit for USA Network which generally aired short seasons of original content in the summer, outside the shadow of the fall debuts of major network shows.

USA Network's summer programs were oriented towards casual audiences; audiences who might watch an episode now and then if summer activities weren't in the way. USA Network's pool of potential viewers was smaller than major networks, so they wanted their original shows to require little to no familiarity with previous episodes.

Season 1's ongoing format couldn't be changed because the 13 episodes had already been finished when USA Network picked them up after UPN had discarded them. Season 2 had been funded with the hope that THE DEAD ZONE's unique qualities and unexpected success would grow.

The audience didn't grow for Season 2. For Season 3, USA Network decided to make THE DEAD ZONE more standalone (generic) and with its budget retailored to cable TV (by being cheaper).

Flickers of Life
However, Michael Piller was still involved in the season premieres and finales. For the Season 3 finale, episodes 12 - 13, Piller collaborated with Karl Schaefer on setting up a Season 4 storyline: Johnny Smith's psychic powers were killing him.

Season 3's twelfth episode had Johnny experiencing blackouts and headaches that rendered him unconscious. A doctor revealed: without brain surgery that would likely remove his psychic abilities, Johnny would die. The thirteenth episode was scripted and filmed to have Johnny suffer a gunshot wound to the head; he would survive, but brain surgery would now be impossible, meaning Season 4 would have Johnny trying to prevent his visions of Armageddon before his psychic visions killed him.

Piller drafted a Season 4 series bible to lay out the direction.

Truncation and Retooling
USA Network allowed the Season 3 finale to be filmed but then abruptly interfered; they refused to air the finale. Instead, THE DEAD ZONE's third season ended with only 12 of the 13 episodes broadcast, stalling the intended cliffhanger of Season 3.

The network renewed THE DEAD ZONE again, but with another round of financial changes. First, they ordered 23 episodes to be filmed, but it would be Season 4&5 and with another budget cut. USA Network would air the first 12 episodes in 2005 as Season 4 and the next 11 in 2006 as Season 5, getting two seasons but only paying for one, meaning they would only have to cover one year of cast salary increases instead of two.

This new budget cut also meant Johnny's psychic visions would be rendered with even fewer effects and even more infrequently.

USA Network also ordered creative changes. In 2005, USA Network had decided to focus its original programming on lighthearted, casual viewing rather than serious drama with running arcs. The term for this was "blue skies programming." USA Network dictated that the next 23 episodes of THE DEAD ZONE would match the light tone of all their other shows; they declared that Piller's intended arc for Season 4 -- Johnny racing against his failing body and impending death to prevent Armageddon -- would not be allowed.

USA Network decreed that the unbroadcast Episode 13 of Season 3 would be reshot as the Season 4 premiere -- and that Johnny's fatal medical condition was to be removed from the storyline entirely so that Season 4/5 would have only standalone episodes.

Surrender
Piller acquiesced; he oversaw the re-scripting Episode 13 of Season 3 as the Season 4 premiere. The rescripting was sloppy and clumsy and shockingly beneath Piller's usual standard, likely due to his illness.

The truncated Season 3 had ended with Johnny being diagnosed with a fatal neurological disorder that could only be treated with surgery, constantly collapsing with debilitating headaches and being hit with another headache that knocked him out at the end of the shortened Season 3.

Season 4 opened with Johnny waking up in the hospital, checking himself out, and never referring to his neurological disorder again. Johnny being on the verge of death due to his psychic visions was the (de-facto) Season 3 cliffhanger. He would die without brain surgery. This was completely forgotten and went unaddressed for the remainder of THE DEAD ZONE; the second episode of Season 4 had Johnny solving crimes in perfect physical condition with no explanation.

Strictly Standalone
The failure to address Johnny's illness was a massive, gaping hole in the series' narrative. But USA Network had demanded it. Under their rule, THE DEAD ZONE's fourth and fifth seasons were comprised of standalone episodes. There was no running characterization and no ongoing arcs.

For Season 4&5, there would be two premieres, two finales and two mid-season episodes that would address the Armageddon threat. But there would be no progression to the threat, just a reminder that it was coming at some unspecified future date. The episodes between premiere and finale had no continuity links and could air in any order.

From Creator to Consultant
Perhaps Michael Piller could have found away around USA Network's mandates; they'd likely wanted such changes as early as Season 2. He had found ways to keep the myth-arc subtle in Season 2, to have ongoing characterization across standalone episodes. But Piller had been too sick to run his show in Season 3 and was even sicker for Season 4&5.

Karl Schaefer had left after Season 3 and a new executive producer, Tommy Thompson, supposedly took charge of the writers' room Season 4&5, presumably consulting with Piller. Yet, despite Piller's name being on all the episodes of Seasons 4&5 as executive producer, Piller was barely involved.

Phoning In
According to production diaries shared with fans, Piller was so sick for Season 4&5 that he could no longer travel to the writers' room; he gave his feedback on instant messenger and video calls, and his health required that these consultations be short.

In production notes and audio commentaries, Piller's direct involvement was only cited in the Season 4 premiere and one Season 5 episode. Of the 23 episodes, only eight seem to contain Piller's touch. Only eight featured Johnny Smith trying to prevent something terrible before it happened; the rest had him crime solving afterwards.

After Season 4 aired, Piller passed away from head and neck cancer.

8/23
For the most part, Season 4&5's 23 episodes confined all emotional development and characterization to the guest-stars while Johnny and his supporting cast would receive little if any character progression at all. And with the Season 4&5 budget cut, Johnny's once lavish visions were now reduced to editing tricks and Johnny describing off-camera visions in dialogue.

Seasons 4&5 were such bland, empty, lifeless procedurals; it was a shock to see how a vividly unique show in Seasons 1 - 2 had become, by Season 4&5, so generic, so conventional, so predictable and so vacant.

Season 3 had somewhat diminished the unique aspects of THE DEAD ZONE; with Seasons 4&5, they were gone completely. Johnny's celebrity status was never referred to. Johnny's visions were no longer immersive, so there was no sense of how they affected his daily life. Johnny's professional life vanished; he was simply a psychic detective. Johnny's ongoing family issues were flattened out for the standalone. Johnny's powers were now an expository device that didn't affect him psychologically and had no impact on his relationships.

Filming First Drafts
It became clear that the original strengths of THE DEAD ZONE's writing had come from Michael Piller rewriting all the scripts in Seasons 1 - 2. And in Piller's absence, USA Network had taken their continuity-equipped, special effects spectacular show, and made it look as episodic and as cheap as their other cable shows.

It's unclear how much Seasons 3 - 5 of THE DEAD ZONE were due to incompetence or uncaring. Certainly, Piller had a gift for handling budgetary issues and mandates from above with cleverness, grace and ingenuity; it's possible that the Season 3 - 5 team had hoped for Piller's guidance only for him to be unable to give it except to a very limited extent.

Leaderless
Throughout Seasons 3 - 5, there was poor script editing leading to ongoing character threads and arcs disappearing. There was a lack of focus on the lead characters and a loss of the show's in-house style. This indicated a serious lack of leadership, suggesting that in Piller's absence, only his administrative functions had been reassigned.

It also suggested that despite Piller being too sick to work on the show anymore, no one had been tasked or empowered to take over Piller's creative role in stewarding, managing and rewriting all scripts. Instead, THE DEAD ZONE's only leader became the network's mandates.

While every show has to deal with the network, it's up to the showrunner to meet these requirements with charm, zeal, cleverness and wit. THE DEAD ZONE's third season seemed to have its actual showrunner, Piller, coming into work only for the premiere and finale. And Season 4&5 seemed to have no showrunner at all.

There was also, at least in the press, a marked unwillingness to even mention Piller's lack of involvement or illness. He was credited as executive producer for Season 3 and Season 4&5 and presented as leading the show. Producers Karl Schaefer and Tommy Thompson had their names and titles confined to the post-opening credits; every episode faded to black and to put Michael Piller's executive producer title first.

Only after Piller died was it revealed that he had been sick for years and that his work on Season 4&5 had been confined to individual episodes and via instant messaging and video calls from home.

Another New Captain
With Season 6, THE DEAD ZONE saw another budget cut for its 2007 season: filming was moved from the already inexpensive Vancouver to the cheaper Montreal. Season 3 had already laid off one regular actor; Season 6 laid off another three. Location filming became near non-existent after the halfway point of the season; entire episodes were filmed indoors on standing sets.

However, the writing took an upswing for the first six episodes. A new showrunner, Scott Shepherd, had been hired. Shepherd was empowered to lead the writers' room. The studio had been trying to hire him since Season 4, apparently, but he'd been unavailable until Season 6. Shepherd had been a staff writer on the FOX show TRU CALLING which featured Eliza Dushku as a woman who could relive the same day twice; Shepherd was an excellent choice to assume Michael Piller's position.

A New-Old Course
Shepherd's talents were instantly obvious; Season 6 opened with respectful exits for the departing cast members and a return to Johnny Smith as a crime preventer rather than a crime solver. The Season 6 premiere also disposed of the Armageddon arc in fashion that, while perfunctory, acknowledged that it had stretched on too long and wouldn't be allowed to flourish on a cable network that wanted standalone episodes.

Shepherd was able to meet USA Network's demands for episodic adventures while still incorporating ongoing character development. He steered the show back to stories with compelling applications of Johnny's psychic abilities. While he didn't have Piller's gift for characterization or Joe Menosky's inventiveness, Shepherd understood the direction and aimed towards the same goals as the originators of the show.

Out of Gas
But halfway through the season, the show went off the rails again from a production standpoint. With the seventh episode of the year, Johnny's visions were suddenly limited to editing tricks, filming was confined to as few locations as possible with no extras, location filming went from limited to non-existent and every episode became a bottle episode. The season finale was filmed almost entirely on the standing sets.

It looked like the initial six episodes had depleted the budget and left the show with almost nothing; scripts now had to struggle to write stories for a psychic without showing his psychic visions except in the limited fashion possible or to avoid requiring any onscreen visions at all. Despite valiant efforts from the writers, the lack of budget created an onscreen visual tedium.

But with the budget so low and the ratings fairly solid, the DEAD ZONE team expected a seventh season and ended their sixth year with a cliffhanger.

Dead Zone Dies
USA Network cancelled THE DEAD ZONE after the sixth season. Their brief explanation was that the show was too expensive to renew.

This meant: despite USA Network laying off four actors, moving to a filming location cheaper than Vancouver, reducing the effects budget to nearly nothing and having the show filming almost all of its last six installments as bottle episodes, THE DEAD ZONE was still too expensive for cable TV.

Why did USA Network struggle with THE DEAD ZONE's budget so much?

It was probably due to cast contracts that were signed when THE DEAD ZONE was budgeted to air on UPN. The cast salaries were likely set at a pay rate for a high UPN budget instead of a lower cable budget. These increases wouldn't have been very negotiable for the lifespan of the series; USA Network was paying surviving THE DEAD ZONE cast members more every year while trying to make THE DEAD ZONE's episodes for less.

Laying off a cast member for Season 3 and three cast members for Season 6 had allowed USA Network to keep cutting the budget for cable while still renewing the show. But after Season 6, the ad revenue was not increasing and the show was down to two original leads. There was nothing left to cut.

Fit and Finish
THE DEAD ZONE is perhaps an example of how: for a TV show to be successful and sustainable, it must be matched correctly to its broadcaster. THE DEAD ZONE was a major network show with a major network budget that proved difficult to sustain when it ended up airing on cable TV.

THE DEAD ZONE is also, perhaps, an example of how a showrunner needs to steward his staff. Michael Piller was a brilliant screenwriter and he ran his show beautifully. However, once he wasn't running it any more, the quality crashed; his approach had been to rewrite every staff script with his own sensibilities; he didn't train his subordinates to appreciate the strengths of the show and to maintain them in his absence and for three seasons, the show had no leader.

To be fair, Piller was ill even when working on Seasons 1 and 2 and may not have had the health to be a teacher, but there was also Joe Menosky who has been producing STAR TREK: DISCOVERY and THE ORVILLE as of late. A showrunner must tutor their staff so that the staff understand how to keep the show going.

It's a deep shame that THE DEAD ZONE really only has two good seasons and a scattered handful of gems across its 80 episode run. The TV show was the second adaptation of the property.

Maybe there will someday be a third.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

Sliders related, the creator of the People's Court, died.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/a … ge-85.html

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

Trigger Warning: In this installment of Random Thoughts, I make fun of people who use tanning beds.

One of the weirdest things about THE DEAD ZONE is how across six seasons filmed over six years, lead actor Anthony Michael Hall seems to age about 15 years. In Season 1, Hall has a lengthy mop of hair and a smooth, clear face that seems untouched by sunlight. By Season 6, Hall's face is rough and worn and lined, his complexion has darkened, his hair is trimmed short and has lost about half its colour -- which emphasizes how deep the lines on his face have become and how ragged his complexion is even with camera makeup.

The reason for this is not age, not fitness, not health: the reason is that during the fourth/fifth seasons of THE DEAD ZONE, Hall developed a peculiar addiction to tanning beds and a determination to have his skin look as tanned as possible; he also had his hair bleached to look blonder. It looked creepily unnatural. Tanning beds attack the skin with UV light to scorch the epidermal layer (which risks skin cancer); this and Hall's choice of bronzer meant that he went through Seasons 4 & 5 looking like a giant peach on legs. He looked absurd; he looked like he'd deliberately set out to burn his own skin, acid-wash his own hair and paint himself in Sunkist-hued dye.

By Season 6, the colour had mercifully faded, but the strain on Hall's complexion remained. The tanning had left Hall's face burned and weathered with the self-inflicted damage seemingly etched into his face.

I dunno why he did this to himself. This isn't like Jerry O'Connell having his hair cut and gelled and frosted at the behest of FOX; this isn't like David Boreanaz on ANGEL looking different because his knee surgery made it impossible for him to exercise; Anthony Michael Hall wanted to look orange. In the Season 4 & 5 audio commentaries on DVD, Hall will not shut up about how "my tan looks really good in this shot." It does not.

It was a bizarre choice for the character, too; Johnny Smith on THE DEAD ZONE was a minimalist. Despite being a ridiculously wealthy grown-ass man, he worked as a schoolteacher and lived with his mother. After he developed psychic powers, he was driven out of teaching and became a full time, unpaid psychic detective. Johnny Smith was a fabulously rich man who cooked his own meals (no takeout) and did his own grocery runs (no shopper) and washed his own clothes (no maid or butler) and fixed his own car (no mechanic).

Johnny was born rich and yet, he lived like his schoolteacher's salary was all he had. Johnny thought status symbols were stupid and the only things that truly made him happy were his mother and her charity work, his fiancee, teaching high school science and saving lives. Johnny never spent his time (or money) on anything outside those pursuits. Johnny Smith would never lie in a tanning bed between episodes. It made no sense. It will never make sense.

Anyway. Hall's face seems restored in HALLOWEEN KILLS; he's aged some more, but the UV-scarred look is gone. I assume that between 2008 - 2021, he drank a few glasses of water and started using sunscreen. Thank God.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

One of my favourite shows in recent years is MOM on CBS about a girl gang of recovering alcoholics. One standout character is Jaime Pressly's Jill, a high society Texan. In Season 6, Jill meets a blue collar guy, a cop, Andy. And Jill simply adores Andy. Andy is an affable, down to Earth, sincere man who looks like a pro wrestler and has the street smarts of Mallory and speaks with the gentle humour of Season 1 Rembrandt. Will Sasso plays Andy. He's great.

https://i.ibb.co/pxtqKcK/IMG-0626-1024x683.jpg

418 (edited by ireactions 2021-11-07 09:40:19)

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

On myth-arcs and masterpieces:

I'm trying to work out what episodes of THE DEAD ZONE (2002 - 2008) deserve to be upgraded from standard definition to high definition via the magic of AI upscaling. The thing is, the DVDs are in very good state thanks to the episodes being shot on 16mm film, edited on high definition videotape for the first three seasons -- then shot on HD digital and edited digitally for Seasons 4 - 6. Some episodes deserve to be shown in the splendor of 1080p. A lot of them... don't. I definitely want to upscale the episodes with high levels of special effects. The rest... I dunno.

Unfinished: THE DEAD ZONE is in some ways like THE X-FILES (1994 - 2002, 2016, 2018). Both shows teased an impending apocalypse. Both shows were largely standalone episodes. Both shows had specific myth-arc episodes dedicated to the apocalypse. Both shows had a lot of excellent mythology episodes. And both shows failed to bring the mythology to a climax and conclusion, making the myth-arc episodes seem disappointing and pointless in retrospect. The frustrating thing is that all of the mythology episodes of THE DEAD ZONE were really really really good -- but they were ultimately prologues and middle chapters without a conclusion.

Awakening: THE DEAD ZONE, coming into the world just as THE X-FILES was fading off the air in 2002, was an incremental improvement on THE X-FILES (to start) before falling into all of THE X-FILES' worst habits, and its only saving grace in that respect is that THE DEAD ZONE wasn't on the air long enough to  be as exasperating and disappointing as THE X-FILES. DEAD ZONE's first season starts with schoolteacher Johnny Smith waking up from a five year coma to discover that he has psychic powers; one touch of a person or an object handled by a person and Johnny sees that person's past, present and future in hallucinogenic (and special effects heavy) psychic visions.

Standalone (But Connected): The first season was largely standalone with running subplots. Each episode had a beginning, middle and end with its A plot while B-plots would run through the background and become an A-plot in a subsequent episode.

The B-plots were all personal elements; Johnny trying to rebuild a relationship with his fiancee who had married another man while Johnny was in his half a decade coma, Johnny dealing with his son, born during the coma and raised by his fiancee and her husband as their own. Johnny investigating his mother's death during his coma. Johnny discovering that his family estate was now in the control of a sinister televangelist preacher. Johnny discovering that the preacher whom he disliked and suspected of murder was actually a staunch and loyal ally who could be trusted.

Season 1's finale had Johnny encounter a rising politician, Greg Stillson. When Johnny shook his hand, Johnny saw America ravaged by nuclear hellfire with Stillson, a secretly violent, savage, psychotic man, at the center of this armageddon.

Standalone A-Plots, Running B-Plots: In Season 2, it's a running B-plot that Johnny is investigating Stillson's past and learning that Stillson's political success is due to bribery, threats, blackmail, violence, and likely outsourcing various murders, all of which will, according to Johnny's visions, somehow turn Stillson into President of the United States and lead to nuclear war. However, the Stillson arc was only the focus of two episodes in Season 2; the rest of the time, it was a B plot in standalone episodes with Johnny researching Stillson but setting it aside 'temporarily' to deal with the latest mine collapse or kidnapping or whatnot. USA Network wanted standalones; showrunner Michael Piller wrote the myth-arc as a subplot into otherwise standalone episodes.

Broken Silos: This was a mild distinction from how THE X-FILES handed its myth-arc where, despite an alien invasion coming in the future, Mulder and Scully never discussed it during their monsters of the week cases, only in the season premieres, the season finales, and the 1 - 3 myth-arc episodes in the middle of each season. THE X-FILES' monster of the week stories seemed to be taking place in a totally different TV show from the alien invasion episodes. In contrast, THE DEAD ZONE kept the myth-arc present throughout Season 2 even if it wasn't prominent.

Silos Rebuilt: Season 3 seemed to dial back the myth-arc's presence. Season 3 opens with Johnny chasing down a lead on Stillson and the nuclear apocalypse, but the three part season premiere shifted the plot away from Armageddon by the end of Part 1. Part 1 ended with Johnny being falsely accused of murder, Part 2 had him clearing his name (and being too busy to deal with Armageddon). Part 3 had Johnny dealing with the fallout of his accusation but didn't turn back to Armageddon. Episodes 4 - 10 of the third season then ceased to address Armageddon in any way, creating the siloed effect of THE X-FILES.

Ignoring Armageddon: It was bizarre that the end of the world was coming and Johnny Smith was not prioritizing it at all. We see a lot of this today with people shrugging at climate change and ignoring COVID-19, but Johnny Smith was supposed to be the hero. It was something I'd never seen before where in mid-storyline, a myth-arc episode shifted to a standalone arc and didn't go back to the myth-arc.

Standalones Win Out: Season 3's Episode 11 mentioned Armageddon briefly. Then the Season 3 finale, episode 12, revealed how the Season 3's first three episodes had tied into Armageddon after all -- only for Season 4's premiere to abruptly jettison and set aside the Armageddon plot again for another run of standalone episodes.

With Seasons 4 - 5, THE DEAD ZONE went into full X-FILES mode with the myth-arc; outside of the season premieres, finales and one middle episode, the Armageddon arc was not addressed or mentioned. It was bizarre; the premieres, finales and middle myth-arc episodes had Johnny stressed and worried about Armageddon; the episodes outside that had Johnny leisurely, lighthearted -- which diminished myth-arc episodes.

No Rewrites: All this happened because original showrunner Michael Piller had cancer, and in Season 3, became too sick to keep rewriting scripts. He had rewritten all the Season 1 - 2 episodes, and rewritten Season 2 episodes specifically to integrate the myth-arc, but his contributions to the show were limited in Season 3, near non-existent for Seasons 4 - 5, and he contributed nothing to Season 6 due to a mild case of death.

There seemed to be some peculiar situation where the studio didn't want to publicize that Piller was sick and therefore avoided hiring a replacement showrunner; only Piller seemed to be rewriting scripts to have arcs and running plots and he was rewriting less and less and then not at all. Only after Piller's death was his long illness and lack of involvement in his own show made public.

Anti-Climax: In Season 6, a new showrunner, Scott Shepherd, came aboard. In his premiere episode, THE DEAD ZONE concluded the Armageddon arc and in an offhandedly dismissive fashion. A key player in the Armageddon arc was killed off (off camera, then the death shown in a flashback) and Johnny's visions of Armageddon ceased. It was in some ways another insult to the mythology -- but it seemed unavoidable and necessary. USA Network was clearly not going to let THE DEAD ZONE focus on the Armageddon arc; the bulk of the show was going to be standalone, so Shepherd ended the arc. It was anti-climactic and disappointing; it was for the best as the subsequent standalone episodes were no longer viewed with the shadow of Armageddon haunting lightweight fun.

Last Gasp: The Season 6 finale was written to anticipate a Season 7, so the episode brought Armageddon back -- except the show got cancelled. However, given how easily Armageddon was cancelled in Season 6's premiere, the finale bringing it back didn't really seem like a big deal, like doomsday would always be infinitely delayed and kicked down the road.

Anyway. The result is that even though almost every single DEAD ZONE mythology episode is excellent, they're not really worth rewatching because they were ultimately pointless; the storyline received a hasty and unceremonious burial in the Season 6 premiere and a half-done exhumation in the Season 6 finale.

And sadly, most of the standalones in Seasons 3 - 5 are pretty garbage. Season 6 has a lot of good ones, though.

Diamonds in Dirt: I guess this has been a pretty good argument for not bothering to upscale the mythology episodes of THE DEAD ZONE to HD. I'll just upscale the special effects and/or character heavy episodes to HD. I shouldn't be using CPU and GPU cycles to refinish episodes of a TV arc that the TV show itself did not finish.

It's frustrating because so many individual episodes of THE DEAD ZONE were not only good, but great; not only great, but revolutionary; not only revolutionary, but truly masterful to the point of being a high benchmark of creative quality and technical achievement among television shows. The point of a television show is to create situations and characters with which the viewer can empathize. Johnny's powers were ultimately empathic and THE DEAD ZONE's finest hours let you feel what it meant to be Johnny Smith and those hours are masterpieces.

I suppose that to qualify as a masterpiece episode of THE DEAD ZONE, the episode must demonstrate astonishing creative and technical achievement either in terms of writing and performance and/or special effects, and it must be enjoyable as a standalone product. Despite so many excellent myth-arc episodes, they aren't standalone and didn't have a proper finale, so those are immediately discounted.

My personal masterpiece collection of THE DEAD ZONE in HD will be:

Season 1

  • "Wheel of Life" and "What it Seems": The masterful two part pilot episode which has Johnny discovering his psychic powers.

  • "Netherworld": Johnny is trapped in a vision of doom.

  • "The House": Johnny is haunted by visions of his dead mother.

  • "The Siege": Johnny must use his powers when held hostage in a bank robbery.

  • "Dinner with Dana": Johnny having sex leads to visions of every man his new girlfriend has ever been with.

  • "Shaman": Johnny discovers his visions can lead to conversations with other psychics who died centuries ago.

Seven masterpieces out of 13 episodes to upscale. The others were really good too, just not masterpieces.

Season 2

  • "Descent": Johnny must use his powers to save teenagers in a collapsed mine.

  • "Ascent": Johnny must use his powers to enter the mind of Sheriff Walt Bannerman, the husband of Johnny's fiancee who was injured saving the teenagers in the mine.

  • "Precipitate": Johnny receives blood transfusions from six different donors and starts having visions of six lives.

  • "Misbegotten": Johnny is kidnapped by three 'fans' of his psychic exploits.

  • "Cabin Pressure": Aboard a plane, Johnny has visions of a crash.

  • "The Man Who Never Was": Johnny has visions of a retired spy in a bad situation.

  • "Playing God": Johnny must choose who will live or die when his visions allow him to control who will get an organ transplant.

  • "Zion": Johnny's friend Bruce experiences a psychic vision of his own.

  • "The Storm": On a roadtrip, Johnny has a vision of a destructive storm and must save everyone he can.

  • "The Hunt": The CIA recruits Johnny to hunt Osama Bin Laden (yeah, really!).

  • "Deja Voodoo": Another date night for Johnny Smith with much trouble along the way.

11 masterpiece episodes out of a season of 19. Of the other eight... I would say five were good and three were rather weak.

Season 3

  • "Speak Now": At a wedding, Johnny must confront how his fiancee didn't wait for him and married another man.

  • "Shadows": Johnny has a vision of himself committing a murder and must find out what could drive him to kill. Admittedly, there is a reference to Armageddon, but not plot development.

My God. Season 3 only has two masterpiece episodes that aren't affected by the myth-arc? Just two!!!? Out of a season of 12!?

Season 4

  • "Double Vision": Johnny meets a lady psychic.

  • "Still Life": Johnny investigates a painter and has hallucinogenic visions of art.

  • "Babble On": Johnny has visions of his dead father in a hauntingly eerie episode.

  • "A Very Dead Zone Christmas": This episode is garbage, but the lady psychic comes back and Jennifer Finnigan is great.

Honestly, only "Babble On" is a masterpiece. The rest are just 'okay,' but the visions are impressive and technically qualify as letting you feel what it's like to be Johnny Smith. Well, truthfully, the Christmas episode has no worthwhile special effects, but Jennifer Finnigan's performance should be considered a special effect.

Pretty sad that only one -- one -- out of 12 is truly good and standalone.

Season 5

  • "Symmetry": Johnny is trapped in a set of overlapping visions. Possibly the greatest episode of THE DEAD ZONE ever made.

Oh my God. One non-myth arc episode worth watching out of a season of 11 episodes! THE DEAD ZONE was certainly in a dire situation. Notably, "Symmetry" was one of the few Season 4 & 5 episodes Michael Piller worked on (by sending in his notes and suggestions through AOL Instant Messenger).

Season 6

  • "Ego": Johnny must save a psychiatrist being hunted by a crazy person who could be any one of her patients

  • "Re-Entry": Johnny is recruited by NASA to save a space shuttle from destruction

  • "Big Top": Johnny investigates a murder at a circus

  • "Interred": Johnny has visions of being buried alive

  • "Switch": Johnny is trapped aboard a train with a femme fatale and danger all around

  • "Outcome": Johnny has visions of a bus station exploding

Only six out of 13 episodes worth upscaling! Hunnh. And I would only consider "Switch" and "Outcome" to be "masterpieces." They rest are above average and have points of greatness, but they aren't visionary works of television. Scott Shepherd was no Michael Piller. (Who is? I'm not knocking Shepherd, but if Michael Piller had lived, Shepherd would not have been running THE DEAD ZONE.)

After "Outcome," the show seemed to run out of money for any special effects or location shooting and the (myth-arc oriented) series finale was confined almost entirely to the standing sets. Jennifer Finnigan is in one of these Season 6 episodes and it was so boring I can't actually remember which one it was.

It's a shame. THE DEAD ZONE should have been a great show for all six seasons; instead, it only had a great two seasons and then fell badly into below average filler for Seasons 3 - 5. Season 6 should have been a great year, but it had obvious budget issues and despite half of the season being excellent, the other half of Season 6 has good scripts that made it to air as dull and boring hours of underbudgeted tedium.

Well, let this be a lesson to all of us: for a TV show to be good, the showrunner has to not die. All showrunners from now on must be contractually obligated to live with severe penalties incurred should they die.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

RIP to the great Dean Stockwell, who played the lovable Al Calavicci on Quantum Leap.  QL was for many people, me included the spiritual predecessor to Sliders.

Re: Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media

I am deeply invested in whether or not Slider_Quinn21 likes the new DEXTER.

(Never seen a single episode of it myself.)