I mean Kurtzman is profoundly interested in things like worldbuilding, so dilithium crystals can be anything he wants.
The problem with Discovery is that it’s made by people who love Star Trek, but have no clue what makes Star Trek work.

It’s absurd to me that we’re getting a new Battlestar Galactica reboot, while Babylon 5 just sits there.

Definitely the best role John Goodman has had this past decade.
I do wonder how the show would have fared in the age of Trump. Alpha House was a reaction to the Tea Party, and basically was 2 years behind the times when it started. I imagine Trudeau would have had some trouble catching up with the times.

The thing that everyone forgets about The West Wing these days, including a few of its actors, is that Sorkin has been quite open about saying that he wrote the characters’ dialogue as how he imagined smart people would talk. The show’s relation to actual politics is basically the same as that of Star Trek to actual…

Peralta seems like a contradictory character until you realise he embodies the show’s creators attitudes about making a cop show. Part of them wants to revel in Die Hard bravura, while the other half of them knows that the policing in America is deeply dysfunctional and broken (like so much else in the US).
I don’t…

On The Good Wife Alicia used to watch this terrible show that was a parody of dark, serious, anti-hero dramas. The Good Fight feels like that but for The Good Wife, all that show’s distinctive characteristics have been exaggerated into this weird mess. 

I have him filed under self-loathing liberal who feels a need to please an imagined audience of heartland simpletons.

The problem with the sequels is that they never really managed (or even attempted) the same tonal balancing act of the first series/film. In between the preening and impressions, there was a genuine strain of melancholy, as well as a look at contemporary Britain going on in the margins that rather contrasted with…

What a waste of Cassell though, he’s capable of so much more viciousness and weirdness. Instead he just stood around smarmily looking like a silicon valley Bernard-Henri Levy, before turning out to be nothing more than a puppet.

I doubt Abrams has much to do with the actual running of the show, but Abrams is Zack Snyder for people who listen to NPR.
Snyder is a hack as well, but at least his career isn’t defined by trying to find the exact midway point between Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay.

This is the problem with West World, it has the trappings of a much better show than it really is. It’s slow, takes itself way too seriously, has famous actors and fancy effects and set pieces, but the writing is basically just syfy-channel slock dressed up as prestige tv.
A thing that stood out to me in that regard…

Part of it is that Westworld pretty much said what it wanted to say about ‘HUMANITY’ and ‘FREE WILL’ etc in the first season, elaborated on it in season two, and this season turning its eye on the real world, so to speak, came up with ‘it’s bad if one big computer controls everything and people can’t make choices’.…

I’m guessing Desplat made the mistake of writing a good score for a Marvel movie.

I was thinking an anthology series where each episode would be given to a different writer/director to make their own thing. A classic Star Trek moral dilemma one week, a political thriller about the Federation council the next, then a nasty little horror story at a remote outpost. The possibilities are endless.

I’m not sure I would have been entirely on board for a show in which the highest the tension got was solving who stole the church bell (Q obviously),
personally I’d have liked something along the lines of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, or Mitch Cullin’s book A Slight Trick of the Mind (adapted into that old man Sherlock…

I don’t think Generations specified how big the fire was, so I don’t have a problem with the way they depicted that considering that was over 20 years ago in the show’s timeline.

I can’t disagree with you, and it’s a shame that there is this pressure from CBS, or Kurtzman, or wherever to make these shows so overstuffed and EPIC and DRAMATIC.
Especially since they already have Discovery for all that, they could have let Picard be its own thing.

Strong argument there for an anthology series.

I mean yes, that was definitely the way they sold it. But they also sold Discovery as a continuation of all the values of Star Trek, etc, etc.
That’s the problem with hype and marketing, few shows actually deliver what they promise to be.
Star Trek having been gone from our screens for so long makes this divide so much…

Yeah, it’s just an absolutely strange decision. It’s obvious that the show has limited time, but that the guy the show is named after isn’t going to croak.
It’s symptomatic of the kind of lazy hackiness that continually lessened this show from being what it could be.
Reading Chabon’s interview I get a sense that with…