There was a big crime, that's what we have been talking about, Tera Nova.

Now, if they killed that portal, and left them high and dry, running out of ammo to kill Dino, learn how to ride a brontosaurus, loose all power and really need to survive, now you have a story, the one they have is to plush, to comfy to neat and clean, what it needed was a little dirty, uneven, panic, discord, its just to Brady Bunch.

River

I gave up on the Sci-Fi Channel (Now SyFy in cryptic and silly initials) when they actually produced a movie with the plot...

"There's an alien-possessed Wooly Mammoth rampaging down the street"

The Terra Nova 2 hour finale is moving at a good clip.

Nothing Euro about it.

1:15 left. Many of you have had the opportunity to see my episode already.

What say ye? or Yeies??

Moi

From the previews maybe they read my post that it was to Brady Bunch. Not having watched more then 10 minutes of it I can't lay claim to truly understand what it is about, but in that ten minutes I saw the Brady Bunch revisited, scared the hell out of me and I don't watch scary.

River

Having had some experience trying to do some writing I can tell you what the biggest problem is with getting a story produced.

Science fiction or not, if you pitch a story to the money people in TV or movies most of them want to immediately associate it with something else that was successful in the past ("Oh! That's like such and such story."), in other words, a formula. This keeps them in their comfort zone. This is why most things on TV and in movies seem so formulaic. Rarely, can you get someone to produce something they are not familiar with or do not fully understand. "It's going to be too expensive to produce."; "No one will pay to see that."; "The advertisers will be offended.", and so on with a myriad of similar excuses for not producing it. Usually, only the best, most influential, and financially successful, creative talents can get something new and different produced and distributed, and if they succeed with it, this becomes the new comfort zone. In short, movies and television are, in reality, run like almost any other business, they try to get as much money as they can out of the kind of stuff they are already selling until competition or declining markets force improvements.

Of course, there are always some shows, books and movies, that are so unbelievably bad, where you wonder, "How did they ever get the money to do that?" Sometimes, a bad idea seems good during the pitch. A good idea does not jell in production. (I talked with the writers of a TV series, in Britain, some years back, who told me that they wrote a great pilot and had no idea where to go with the story after that. They winged it, on a weekly basis, and managed to go two seasons. No one actually understands the story line and it has become a cult classic.) Key actors or production people can self-destruct for various reasons. (Where have we seen this lately?) And, according to media rumor and legend, some things are intended to fail from the beginning as a scam or a tax dodge. (Not that I have any evidence that the latter has ever really happened! )

>>Critics don't like TERRA NOVA

>>I didn't much watch the show as Fridays and Saturdays are too busy for me to watch much TV and make sense of it.

>>

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/2 ... 60514.html

"Terra Nova" will go down as one of the biggest misfires in television history. What a waste this expensive Fox show was, not just of money, but of potential.

Still, there's something instructive about the show's first season, which wrapped up Monday night. Dear screenwriting teachers: Use this show when trying to explain to your students what they should not do. Do your bit to ensure that future TV writers and producers don't make the mistakes that "Terra Nova" did again and again.

How could it have all gone so terribly wrong? The show had a dozen executive producers, most of them television veterans, one of them Steven Spielberg. It was filmed at great expense in the gorgeous back country of Australia and it had solid actors like Jason O'Mara and Stephen Lang playing lead roles. Like the rest of the "Terra Nova" colonists, their characters had traveled 85 million years into the past and were residents of a dinosaur-era colony.

Does all of that sound like fairly foolproof recipe for at least moderate success? Ha. Not quite.

The lesson here is, you can take all of those promising ingredients and make an unspeakably bland, gooey dish. The show's first season abjectly failed to capitalize on "Terra Nova's" promise as either a B-grade adventure serial or a back-to-the-land cautionary fable. As I watched "Terra Nova" this fall (and yes, I saw every episode), I actually began to think that the writers were purposefully toying with viewers. The show would occasionally pick up and play around with the more interesting ideas baked into its premise, then quickly back away from those intriguing concepts as if they were radioactive.

The finale held out some hope that the show might make radical changes that could enliven a possible Season 2 (which Fox has not yet ordered). Commander Taylor (Lang), the colony's iron-fisted leader, and Jim Shannon (O'Mara), the disturbingly credulous former cop helping Taylor keep the peace, managed to fight off an invasion by greedy corporate types who wanted to pillage and destroy their pristine new world. Jim sprinted through a series of plot holes straight back to 2149, where he destroyed the link between the show's two time frames.

Good idea, right? Well, maybe, if the show didn't give off strong hints that there's another time fracture somewhere close to the colony, and that other time portal, I'm guessing, would keep the colony stocked with all the modern conveniences if the show gets another season. Also halfway undone is the "death" of Taylor's son, who was shot twice but appeared to have dragged himself off into the woods to plot another day. But that's "Terra Nova" for you -- it constantly gave itself lazy escape hatches rather than attempt anything interesting with its character and story.

The irony is, parts of the "Terra Nova" finale would have made for a pretty good pilot. What would it be like for a citizen of 2149 to be cut off from all the things that made their lives easier? What would it be like to live without tech, bullets and medical supplies in a brutish and unforgiving world? I'd like to watch that show, but "Terra Nova" very clearly did not want to be that show. It wanted to be so unsophisticated and unchallenging that a comatose human could still follow it. (The one reason I was glad I stuck with the show was that it allowed me keep reading my podcast partner Ryan McGee's hilarious and adept weekly "Terra Nova" reviews, one of which was written from the perspective of a dinosaur.)

I understand that Fox is not in the business of making "Breaking Bad" of the Cretaceous Era. That's fine. But "Terra Nova" didn't assume that audiences wanted only a small dose of ambition amid the sturdy genre standbys. The show assumed that audiences wanted no complexity at all, ever. That's not only silly and condescending, but it flies in the face of all evidence.

Exhibit A: "House," in its early years, did not become a hit by assuming its audience was dumb. Even the popcorn-flavored "24" tried hard to be unpredictable and to supply interesting characters, at least in its first five years. And the argument that kids can't follow smartly written adventure fare is a non-starter: My 9-year-old son is a devotee of "Doctor Who," "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter," which are staunchly populist, but full of emotional nuances and thematic richness.

The interesting thing is, audiences of all ages seemed to sense the show's general contempt for them and failed to make the show a hit. In fairness, my son was a "Terra Nova" fan, which is why we watched every episode. But in the interest of full disclosure, he often paused the show to say, "Why are they doing that? That's dumb." (A mid-finale direct quote from my son: "This is so obviously a set-up!") All I could do is say, "I know, son, I know," and pray for some quality dino action. That's what we both signed on for, but the show gave us precious little of even that.

So, assuming "Terra Nova" never comes back, what are the object lessons of this show? Here are just a few of the things "Terra Nova" did wrong:

It never made me care about the Shannon family, or anyone else, for that matter. In last week's episode of the show, Taylor gave the speech that's familiar to any devotee of war films or underdog sports movies: It was the big "We're all in this together" oration designed to get the community fired up about the coming fight with the bad guys. As the camera panned around the faces looking up at Taylor, it was more apparent than ever that "Terra Nova" had done an awful job of creating any sense of community. I barely knew any of these people, except for the Shannon family, and from Day 1 until the end of the finale, spending time with Jim and his wife and kids was as boring as watching paint dry.

It neutralized the violence and danger inherent in the show's premise. Dinosaurs are awesome -- and dangerous, except on "Terra Nova," where they would only be dangerous when the plot required them to be (and 90 percent of the time, you could see the danger coming about a mile away). Characters stood around outside the compound all the time, and when they did so, they appeared to be in little to no danger for the most part. Inside the compound, the Shannons lived in a nice house, had sufficient food, rarely interacted with or faced danger from the local beasties, had access to plentiful weapons and medical technology, and in general, appeared to be kicking back at a Club Med resort. Even when danger did lurk, the show rarely had the gleeful B-movie energy of the occasional dinosaur vs. human scenes. How do you take dinosaurs and Stephen Lang and mostly defang both of those entities? I don't know, but "Terra Nova" frequently managed it.

The emphasis on treacly family moments at the expense of almost everything else was a lead weight that dragged the entire show down. Here's the emblematic memory I will have of "Terra Nova" going forward: Two boring characters exchange wooden dialogue as music that is meant to be heart-stirring plays on the soundtrack, very loudly. It's a bad sign when a soundtrack is continually asked to evoke emotions that a show has in no way earned. And when the gloopy music accompanies a scene of a little girl setting free her pet dino, well, that's just painful. Still, I'd be willing to live with a few schmaltzy scenes like that in exchange for some challenging explorations of what it's like to live in such an odd, dangerous and even glorious environment. But we didn't get those. Instead, we got scenes of teen romance from the middle and older Shannon kids, who managed the feat of becoming less interesting over time.

The dialogue was full of anvils, bricks and other painful objects. The show unsuccessfully tried to paint Taylor's tech-wizard son, Lucas, as a damaged psychopath. On his way to becoming one of the show's mustache-twirling, comically-cliched villains, Lucas favored us with a line of dialogue that noted that he and his father "suffered from a Shakespearean relationship that borders on Greek tragedy." Thanks, "Terra Nova," for bailing on actually depicting the dynamics of that relationship and instead, just hitting us over the head with clunky exposition. Subtlety is overrated, anyway.

The villains were one-dimensional and cartoonish, and the "good guys" were often dumber than a box of rocks. It was hard for me to care much about the final conflict when it appeared to be a conflict between a dictatorial regime led by Taylor and a greedy bunch of invaders headed up by a pack of bad guys. How was the colony organized? Who headed up the legal system? How were decisions made about civilian life? Who made the choices about the colony's defense? A moderately intelligent show would have taught us a lot about the community in the course of answering those complex questions. World building is one of the things sci-fi does best, damn it! Here it was just, "Taylor's in charge of everything, and that's that." Why did everyone just accept his autocratic leadership, which included imprisonment without charge and torture? Because they just did, and that made everyone (including Jim) seem like credulous, unintelligent sheep. In any event, Taylor's foes, the breakaway Sixers, were quickly revealed to be one-dimensional villains who were in league with the bad guys, who, again, were predicable and silly. And you know what? Just about all of the cliches and anvils above would have been tolerable, almost, but…

"Terra Nova" blew its chance to be an enjoyable action-adventure hour. One scene in the finale -- in which a dinosaur chomped some baddies and then chased Jim back through the time portal to the "Terra Nova" colony -- was a whole lot of fun. Even if "Terra Nova" couldn't afford too many scenes like that in every episode -- even muddy CGI costs money -- more sequences like that would have done a fair amount to win this turgid show some good will. If it wasn't going to try to be intelligent or challenging, it could have been a pretty good comic book, full of melodramatic developments and gleeful action. "Terra Nova" couldn't even do that.

You know, genre fare like this can be done well. The first half-dozen years of "Stargate SG-1" got a lot of mileage out of familiar character archetypes, solid acting and a time portal that led to weekly adventures. But "Terra Nova" gave audiences nothing to care about: not the people as individuals, not the colony as a whole, not even the strange world beyond Taylor's claustrophobic compound. At this point, to win me back, the show would have to kill off most of the Shannon family and promise me hand-to-hand combat between Taylor and an extremely angry dinosaur every single week.

Even then? I think I'd leave this show in the past.

Okay. I just watched the season finale myself. It was waiting for me on my PVR.

Ugh.

That is all I can say.

I know I badmouthed the show, but I did admit that I liked it. How the hell do I continue to like it after that wasteful, boring ending.

It was full of good ideas that weren't realized very well.

The first of these moments for me came when Taylor and the rest were guarding the portal, and the thing that links it to one spot on their world. I thought, why don't they just move the portal to the middle of that lake Taylor had talked about the previous episode? We know it is within three kilometers of the portal. Security wise, it would have made a lot more sense. Float the portal out onto a platform in the middle of the lake. As colonists come through, use a boat to go get them, or have them walk along a narrow walkway to shore. This way, colonists will be okay, but people driving tanks, and such will go into the drink. Even that guy with the bomb strapped to his chest could have been knocked into the water, or the portal would have been blown into the water, bringing the soldier army with it. On land that explosion had nowhere to go, except to destroy the portal, and have it open up randomly somewhere else.

It was just bad strategy.

Then all the important fighting was kept off screen. Why? I wanted to see the fighting, and some real stakes involved.

Every time they had an opportunity to make something really daring they failed. Why not have Shannon trapped on the other side of the portal when it gets destroyed? I might tune in if I thought, he'd just promised his wife he'll always find a way back to here, but now he is trapped on the wrong side of the portal.

Why not use this opportunity to have all the main characters driven out of the Terra Nova settlement permanently? I'd like this show more if they had to live in the trees and contend with violent dinos every week. Keep the baddies in Terra Nova, then the show could be about technology versus the will to survive. That too is a show I would watch. Instead the baddies just up and leave? WHY?

The conflict between Taylor and his son was just plain hackneyed. I didn't buy it for a second.

When Lucas had Shannon and his son in the brig, he just lets the son go. Ugh. If you want Lucas to be a bad guy, have him say something like this, "The son is of no use to me. However the Shannon daughters... Well why don't you start talking, or I'll rip the fingernails off your little girl, and leave her beyond the fence for the Niko-raptors to feed on. I know from experience they are attracted to the smell of blood and the mewling of the young. Now tell me where Taylor is, or do I send these guards for your little girls and a set of pliers?"

Once again, just bad strategy.

So now their big ending comes. Where is my cliffhanger ending? Is it supposed to be that there is another portal in the badlands? Are they going to link the show with the Bermuda Triangle? Honestly I don't care.

This entire show was an exercise in how to take good ideas and just ruin them.

I very much doubt this show will be renewed. There is just not enough to keep me tuning in. I wish I could say this show jumped the shark, but even jumping a shark in a leather jacket ala the Fonze in Happy Days would be a more exciting thing to watch than this.

Stick a fork in it. It's done.

It is better then Gallactica, Stargate franchises, Firefly, and many more.

It is obviously finding its' feet. The latter episodes were better then the first.

To its' credit it is not overly dinosaured and the dinosaur in a box to eat the bad guy was a good twist. Not gratuitous CGI'ing. It has plot lines that overlap episodes and episode specific plots. Taylor is isolated. Stone face broke down a bit when the little girl gave him a hug, and offered future hugs. The scene with the son was predictable but at least was associated with the other hug in Taylor's recent hug history. And the son lives to antagonize another day.

Is there a natural portal in "the Wastelands"?

Why is it always those evil mining interests?

Some series are instant winners packed with unexpected twists such as Lost and American Horror Story.

Some if given time have potential to develop over disappointing first year ratings. Seinfeld, Terra Nova.

Some that became legends were never appreciated in their time. Twilight Zone. Star Trek (original)

Moi

Child of Hollywood

knows best

Still over the cancellation of "V". They brought back Marc Singer of the first "V".

I miss Anna.

Dave (imported) wrote: Wed Dec 14, 2011 4:54 pm I gave up on the Sci-Fi Channel (Now SyFy in cryptic and silly initials) .

. .

The SyFy channel now has two good series. The best one in Haven. It started out slowly but it has gotten much more interesting. Audrey Parker is not who she seems to be in the first episodes.

The other good one in Alphas. The autistic character is annoying in the first few episodes but he gets less annoying.

:realpisse Cancelled :realpisse

They don't give a show a chance to find its' feet.

It should have been given a chance to develop a second season better then the first.

Where did that old ships prow come from?

The Original Star Trek was cancelled, re-up by popular demand, cancelled but allowed to switch networks (unheard of) and cancelled again. We all know how that ended up. The Trekkies grew up, took control and produced more Trek.

Seinfeld was almost cancelled in its' first season. Think of all the reruns. Yada yada yada

Moi

Child of Hollywood

Uphill from SFV & beautiful downtown Burbank