Buffy Reboot Cancelled

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[Gradine]

 

[nyvinter]

I, too, blame everything I don't like about Star Wars for cancelling the Buffy reboot. I'm pretty sure Kathleen Kennedy is also responsible for my phone not charging last night.

Yeah, I think it has a far better analogy with Odyssey 5. At the time it had the biggest viewers on Showtime but they cancelled it after one season because they company CEO wanted to "move away from scifi."

Now Buffy reboot didn't even get that, but the anti-science fiction bit is there.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Since Cargo Cult is used so often in this post, can I get an understanding of what that term means to you? I have seen definitions online but they don't quite fit what the context your using that in.

Cargo cult is when you try imitate something without actually understanding that thing in the hopes of bringing success/reward, essentially. In the context of Star Wars it would mean using tropes, characters, imagery, music etc that imitated Star Wars but without quite getting why those were beloved to audiences or why they worked. TFA is to me an example of this, whereas the Andor is zero cargo cult. TLJ actively avoids cargo cult too, for better or worse. I wouldn't say TFA was as bad as it gets though - Abrams at least half-grasps some of what makes SW good, whereas in Super 8 he showed he profoundly didn't get what made '80s kids movies great. With TROS it's harder to work out what happened, because it's so clumsy and messy it's not even clear if Abrams was trying to imitate stuff and it's more like it's just doing cheap references to make the audience clap like seals (the audience did not clap like seals because the cheap references mostly sucked).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think this is a pretty solid question to ask in general. When is it "appropriate" to cancel a show?


There are some shows on the air that are garbage, and they get greenlit for a second season...and its still garbage.
And there are shows like ST TNG....whose first season is honestly pretty bad, and I think on paper it would have been a very reasonable decision to cancel it. But of course imagine if they had!

Without the benefit of hindsight that makes geniuses of us all, what is the best way to tell?

I think the easiest metric is to look at why the show had problems and whether they could be corrected in a later season.

Like, if you have cast a bunch of fundamentally uncharismatic or mediocre actors, or the premise of the show is just not working for the audience, that's hard to fix (people have fixed the latter, but requires some daring), probably just cancel. Also if the show doesn't have a clear path ahead and is being just written as it goes, that's another check in the just cancel column.

But if it's something like excessively convoluted storytelling, a questionable tone/vibe, a complex setup to be established (weirdly common in sitcoms), that's probably worth another season to try and fix imho. Like, Supernatural S1 has this demented jumpscare-centric heavily colour-graded edgy deal, which was clearly not the right way to go and would have ended the show if they stuck with it, but they dumped it. Supernatural is really an interesting example of a show that was allowed to evolve, because S1 it's trying hard to be slasher-y horror with a vague metaplot but by S5/6 it's basically Buffy with male leads. It was a different era though, one where a moderately successful show was allowed to keep improving, whereas now if you aren't a huge hit out of the gate or a nepotism/employ my friends project you're unlikely to get S2 let alone S3.

 

[MarkB]

With TROS it's harder to work out what happened, because it's so clumsy and messy it's not even clear if Abrams was trying to imitate stuff and it's more like it's just doing cheap references to make the audience clap like seals (the audience did not clap like seals because the cheap references mostly sucked).

RoS is just mostly backpedaling and trying to tell the audience "No, we didn't mean it!" about everything in TLJ that got a bad reaction, padded out with the old and familiar. It's hard to like a movie that reads more like an apology than an actual story.

Plus things got kinda weird with trying to course-correct Rey's character, it feels like they were drawing more upon Avatar: The Last Airbender than existing Jedi stuff for her in that movie.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

RoS is just mostly backpedaling and trying to tell the audience "No, we didn't mean it!" about everything in TLJ that got a bad reaction, padded out with the old and familiar. It's hard to like a movie that reads more like an apology than an actual story.

Plus things got kinda weird with trying to course-correct Rey's character, it feels like they were drawing more upon Avatar: The Last Airbender than existing Jedi stuff for her in that movie.

Even viewed as an apology it's weird because I don't think most SW viewers felt they were owed one, and for those that felt they were, I don't think it hit the right points at all and even seemed insulting at times (the very end particularly). I think that's because Abrams wasn't apologising to the audience as much as soothing his own ego. But my god what a time wasting mess of a movie. You could cut it down to literally 45 minutes and only improve it.

 

[MarkB]

Even viewed as an apology it's weird because I don't think most SW viewers felt they were owed one, and for those that felt they were, I don't think it hit the right points at all and even seemed insulting at times (the very end particularly). I think that's because Abrams wasn't apologising to the audience as much as soothing his own ego. But my god what a time wasting mess of a movie. You could cut it down to literally 45 minutes and only improve it.

I didn't even get the impression that the apologist bits were in Abrams's hands, more like they were mandated in the manner of a corporate retraction. But yeah, the rest is such a mess, and neither the parts nor the whole made much sense.

 

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how about we just go back to the old stand by of blaming capitalism?