Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storm Raven" data-source="post: 4113848" data-attributes="member: 307">Network meddling had a major part in killing Crusade - there is an infamous points letter in which, among other things, a network executive stated that JMS should look to professional wrestling as a guide for how to write action scenes and develop characters through conflict. The network also did something that greatly affected Firefly - in a show that had a story progression and characters that changed as the series went on, they decided to show the series episodes out of order.Legend of the Rangers was just awful. I don't know what happened there.The original B5 series was developed as a self-contained 5-year story, and was executed as such. Crusade was a different story set in the same universe, but suffered as a result, because it wasn't simply a close of B5 and was mishandled the network. The B5 novels are all pretty good, and take on various aspects of the story, fleshing out areas that the series itself alluded to but didn't explore - the Telepath War, the liberation of Centauri Prime, what the heck the Techno-mages were up to and so on.But Legend of the Rangers was awful. It is a shame that that was G'Kar's last performance. JMS moved on and did some other work, notably Jeremiah, but ran into conflict with network executives there too. I doubt JMS will do many more projects without being certain he is free of newtork interference.I have most of his script books, and the commentary he wrote in them gives a clear idea of the sort of idiocy he faced on a regular basis from television exceutives. It is clear that being a television executive doesn't require you to actually understand what makes shows work, you just have to mouth certain platitudes about how people want sex and violence and action all the time, and make sure you push for every character in the show to be between the ages of 17 and 25 and you will be named vice-president of programming.</blockquote>

Verification