Altered carbon, the whole resleeving of a person into another body. Made it seem like they could have done loads of stories in that universe with different actors.
Shame they only made one series.
Television
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List of Best Rated TV Series as voted by the Fediverse
The books follow a similar quality arc. The first one is great but each subsequent one gets less great. He could’ve done so much more.
Have you ever watched Dollhouse? Slightly similar theme and (unlike Firefly) it had two seasons that as best I can tell were aired in the proper order.
Dollhouse is weird though. I enjoyed it a lot but i don't think it's for everyone.
Plus the ending is not well done. They got cancelled and tried to pull together an impactful ending over a few episodes, when the original plan was to take a few seasons. I respect the urge to offer a real ending, but unsurprisingly it feels cheap and sudden.
Well they made 2 lol, but S01 was done well
No, I’m pretty sure it was only one >.> <.<
This concept and many other interesting sci-fi ideas are touched on in Ghost in the Shell stand alone complex which I'm watching right now. It's pretty good! A little quirky at times, and doesn't have the same level of emotional investment as some other animes I've watched, but I'm definitely enjoying it quite a bit
Heroes. First season was great, if they kept the concept of each season being a be set of people with special powers they could have made endless seasons and stories.
By now the "loads of people have superpowers" trope had been done to death (and the best incarnation was Misfits), what more would you want to see?
Misfits was amazing. I loved that it was people you wouldn’t normally give powers to, cinematically speaking.
I've heard that Moving (Korea) is supposed to be a bit like Heroes.
There was a miniseries on the SyFy channel called "Ascension" that, ostensibly, had the premise of being a murder mystery set on a massive generation ship launched at the height of the Cold War, which sounded fun in theory. 1960s Space Race technology, generations raised on Red Scare values despite the Soviet Union being a distant memory in every sense, a bunch of already-paranoid people trapped with a murderer with safety literally decades away - seems like there's a lot of room for a story there, right? Well, if the words "miniseries on the SyFy Channel" didn't tip you off...
spoiler, not that I recommend ever watching this show
They solve the murder by the end of the second episode, or at least they think they do. The subplot is nonetheless dropped entirely.
Turns out the ship never left Earth. It's in an underground bunker. The entire thing was a ploy to trap America's greatest minds in a self-contained generational think tank and steal all the super-cool technology they invent. Which also eliminates the 1960s Space Race aesthetic because the ship is now, by design, more technologically-advanced than modern Earth, leaving... exactly none of the original hook intact.
Except two episodes later they reveal it wasn't even that, it was actually part of a top-secret government eugenics program designed to breed telepathic super-soldiers, and the show ends with a child super-soldier using her nascent psychokinetic powers to teleport all the bad guys into space for realsies. And the real murderer is some guy we'd never even heard of working for the, again, top-secret government eugenics program, and his motives were... Either never explained, or explained after the part of the show where I stopped watching.
So anyway, a show that actually stuck to that premise would probably make for a pretty compelling yarn.
God this show pissed me off with how silly it got
Probably blaspheming here, but another show like Firefly would rock. Don't try to catch that exact lighting in a bottle, just give us space cowboys. In space.
'Cowboy bebop' did it three years earlier and much better. But then I'm very partial to jazz and film noir. Then got remade by the same people much grittier as a period piece set in immediately post-feudal police state Japan.
Edit: in kind of the same way a lot of Kurosawa films got remade as westerns
Yeah I love space westerns and unfortunately they're very uncommon and rarely done well. Firefly had the huge advantages of being Whedon at his peak with a great cast (as he often had) at the right time and with the courage to commit to the genre in a way I wish more would.
I don't want more Whedon, his golden era is over and I'm now convinced that he really only excels at the overlying ideas for a show and casting. What I want is someone who loves the genre to do something similar, but better.
Rings of Power. I really wanted it to love it.
This one hurts. The potential was there, the visuals were genuinely incredible, the acting was solid, and I remember liking the music. But the writing was atrocious. It was like they went with the first draft. And also they piled on all those stupid prequel tropes like: "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to find out how this iconic character got their NAME!"
I would love to watch something like The Walking Dead, but more chill. More to do with building a community, and re-imagining society. Surviving the zombies would be a topic, of course, but without all the extra evilness of the remaining humans.
And episodes that don't force me to increase my TV's brightness to the max.
Sword art online. Drop the rape and incest beats entirely. It had potential to be a great anime about the meaning of life and instead largely ignored that possibility.
I have that show on my watchlist so thanks for the warning about themes.
The original plan for the second season of Stranger Things was supposed to be a separate story with a few connections to the first season, each season being a different story and cast. I would have loved to see that actually happen, since the second season lost my interest a couple episodes in.
I want a faithful adaptation of Asimov's Foundation, where it's the 1940s in space like in the novels.
Guy gets to planet, immediately buys a physical newspaper with physical cash. Takes a taxi cab. Everyone smokes constantly. Space soldiers are bribed with dishwashers and fridges, computers barely exist. Every desk has an integrated atomic ashtray to vaporise cigarette butts. Scientists carry bulky pocket calculators.
Please remake and give proper endings to warehouse 13 and utopia
Applies to lots of anime. I've been really disappointed by Dragon Maid. Lots of LGBT+-themed anime in general, I'd want to see them remade in an environment that lets them be more explicit about the LGBT+ themes instead of dancing around the issue with that "just really really good friends" stuff (or just cancelled before the story gets there).
Dancing around queer romance is a problem in Japanese games as well, and it's so very disappointing. It's plain as day to everyone's what's going on but they won't go there.
Tangentially, sanitizing romance in general is also a problem with Japanese games (and games developed abroad that borrow their concepts). Some studios are outright afraid of offending men by having a woman character express a love interest in anyone, so it's just absent entirely from swathes of the cast, if not everyone.
With gaming having become such a big footprint in entertainment, I worry that sort of thing is going to feed back into TV.
Almost Human
I liked that show a lot as is. But it definitely had a lot of potential with more season.
I object, they didn't 'Bungle' that series. Fox out and out murdered it. The show was great and if Fox had any faith at all it would have run for seven seasons and movie.
Revolution.
For those wondering, premise was what if all electricity just stopped working. What would happen to our society.
Yeah, the premise was awesome, world building was decent, but just too teen drama imo
Heroes had so much going for it before the writers strike, the premise of that show felt so good then it just got bad.
The Expanse. Or at least an ending to the Expanse that we have. I loved those books so much and they did the series so dirty.
I do accept that the last (I think it was) 2 books don't translate to film very well but at least they could have tried!
The Starlost needs a remake. Great premise, dollar store execution.
What they wanted:
Foreseeing the destruction of Earth, humanity builds a multi-generational starship called Earthship Ark, 50 miles (80 km) wide and 200 miles (320 km) long. The ship contains dozens of biospheres, each kilometres across and housing people of different cultures. Their goal is to find and seed a new world of a distant star.
In 2385, more than 100 years into the voyage, an unexplained accident occurs, and the ship goes into emergency mode in which each biosphere is sealed off from the others.
Centuries after its original launch, most of the descendants of the original crew and colonists are unaware that they are even aboard a spaceship.
How it went:
Unable to sell The Starlost for prime time, [20th Century Fox television producer Robert] Kline decided to pursue a low budget approach and produce it for syndication. By May, Kline had sold the idea to 48 NBC stations and the Canadian CTV network.
Originally, the show was to be filmed with a special effects camera system developed by Doug Trumbull called Magicam. ... The technology did not work reliably, however. In the end, simple blue screen effects were used, which forced static camera shots. ... The failure of the Magicam system was a major blow, as the Canadian studio space that had been rented was too small to build the required sets. In the end, partial sets were built, but the lack of space hampered production.
As the filming went on, [the writer Harlan] Ellison grew disenchanted with the budget cuts, details that were changed, and what he characterized as a progressive dumbing down of the story. ... Ellison broke with the project before the airing of its first episode.
Space Force, really good cast and concept but I wish they better writing.
Of course they had to end the second season in a cliffhanger so we'll never get to see its resolution thanks to Netflix canceling it. There should be a law about that.
Star Trek Voyager. I don't think I need to explain further, we all have the same ideas.
Looks like the upcoming game will do the fixing though, so that's good.
Altered Carbon.
Season 1 was GREAT. Season 2 wasnt.
They fucked up the most important thing possible with a series changing actors for the same character. YOU NEED TO MAKE US LOVE THE CHARACTER NOT THE ACTOR. They didnt lay in a bunch of physical gestures, catchphrases, signature moves, character traits. Nothing that made be believe Anthony Mackie was the same guy as Joel Kinnaman.
Wayward Pines. Great concept but then they basically explained everything in a handful of episodes and took the whole mystery out of it. Also, some of the acting was terrible.
In some ways, Silo is its spiritual successor but without
Tap for spoiler
monsters.
Another one I’d like to see redone or relaunched, West World. Incredible first season. Nothing left in the writer’s tank after that. That first season was so good though that I don’t think it can be rebooted.
Lost Girl. I was so in for a succubus themed mystery drama type affair, but I couldn't maintain interest through the second season. It was slow and awkwardly written, but I think the subject is solid and it could have been done a lot better.
Give me Lucifer with a Succubus lead, come on TV execs
I'd love to see an un-bungled True Detective again.
night country was pretty good.
Battlestar Galactica. How can anyone mess up a 70's disco sci fi?
You know what, I already did one but I'm gonna do another one: Lovecraft Country.
First episode did just about everything you'd want out of a Jim Crow-era supernatural horror road trip mystery. Felt like they really had a handle on the whole "fear of the unknown and incomprehensible" vibe that you don't see done well very often, the cast had great chemistry, and the whole theme of "the real incomprehensible eldritch abomination threatening human sanity is racism" was executed flawlessly. They walked a very fine tightrope between homage and condemnation of Lovecraft's whole... deal and nailed it in one.
And then the main mystery is resolved by the second episode and the whole thing devolves into a very uneven anthology of psychic snakes and angry ghosts and like, Nazi wizards worshipping what I think was just the regular devil and overall very known and comprehensible horrors that didn't really hold my attention for long enough to see if they even tried to tie them all together.
Man, all I wanted was a long-form cosmic horror story wrapped in a character-driven prestige TV period drama with some biting social commentary that doesn't suck. They don't make a lot of those!