Great interview. Thanks so much. It's worrying that Ron Moore's incommunicado, though, because BSG's quality was in direct proportion to the degree of his involvement; that's why Season 4 was the weakest among non-Ronald D. Moore eps. Aside from the odd episode here and there, especially by Mark Verheiden and Micheal Angeli, the show really suffered from Ron Moore not rewriting other people's work. That's why I was thrilled that Verheiden and Angeli were able to at least do the first 2 eps after the pilot and that Ron Moore directed an early episode. It's bad enough that the indispensable Michael Rymer isn't around.
A couple of things.
1. David Eick says that production will wrap in 7 days -- before the start of the Olympics. Yet, we were told that the reason for the season being split up into 2 (8 eps now and the other 11, starting in October 2010) was that the show still needed time to film, which was interfered with by the Olympics. If filming will end in 7 days, there's ample time to edit, etc, and have the episodes ready for a full run all at once now.
2. I worry about David Eick alluding to wanting an audience as dumb as the one that loved "The Shield" and "Grey's Anatomy". While "Grey"'s might be the more obvious candidate as shameless commercial trash -- with its cheesy pop music and constant affairs between interns and their supervisors to supposedly add excitement in addition to some lame humor -- "The Shield" deserves greater repudiation for its pretensions to be about exploring the political dilemma between security and freedom; all its bad guys are minorities, whose motives are never explored with any depth; the show lauds its sc*mbag macho lead and his ability to win over stand-up attractive women with his "bad boy" behavior; lastly, I'll never forgive the show for having "Dutch-Boy" claim that serial killers are the product of children being loved too much -- that it feeds into their narcissism; this was an extremely irresponsible plot point that could lead parents with no access to psychologists to being cruel to their kids, lest they turn into serial killers. Shame on you, Shawn Ryan!
Anyway, these are not very character driven, are they? And these shows have always aimed for the sleazy, low-brow solution and tried to avoid moral ambiguity? Despite my fears, Caprica will surely be better than them.
A couple of things.
1. David Eick says that production will wrap in 7 days -- before the start of the Olympics. Yet, we were told that the reason for the season being split up into 2 (8 eps now and the other 11, starting in October 2010) was that the show still needed time to film, which was interfered with by the Olympics. If filming will end in 7 days, there's ample time to edit, etc, and have the episodes ready for a full run all at once now.
2. I worry about David Eick alluding to wanting an audience as dumb as the one that loved "The Shield" and "Grey's Anatomy". While "Grey"'s might be the more obvious candidate as shameless commercial trash -- with its cheesy pop music and constant affairs between interns and their supervisors to supposedly add excitement in addition to some lame humor -- "The Shield" deserves greater repudiation for its pretensions to be about exploring the political dilemma between security and freedom; all its bad guys are minorities, whose motives are never explored with any depth; the show lauds its sc*mbag macho lead and his ability to win over stand-up attractive women with his "bad boy" behavior; lastly, I'll never forgive the show for having "Dutch-Boy" claim that serial killers are the product of children being loved too much -- that it feeds into their narcissism; this was an extremely irresponsible plot point that could lead parents with no access to psychologists to being cruel to their kids, lest they turn into serial killers. Shame on you, Shawn Ryan!
Anyway, these are not very character driven, are they? And these shows have always aimed for the sleazy, low-brow solution and tried to avoid moral ambiguity? Despite my fears, Caprica will surely be better than them.