posted
I've been really enjoying the new book, and the more I read it the more I think it would make an interesting TV series (or at least mini-series). I'm only halfway through it, though, so perhaps it wouldn't work as I envision it, but I think maybe it would.
The great thing about television, the thing that makes it the ideal medium for telling a story, is the space it gives the writer to develop characters and have the audience grow to care for them. Many more plot threads can be expored on a TV show as well, and the characters we already know can be seen in a variety of situations.
I don't know if OSC's considered doing anything through this medium, but it seems a natural thing to me. If you love characters, developing them, watching them grow and change, the best way to do it is through TV, and given a lot of the junk on TV now, I think it'd be a service to the country if OSC put a decent show out there.
posted
I haven't finished the book yet but I think that is a fabulous idea. I think with the relative sucess of Buffy and Angel it just might have a chance. How nice it would be to see young black actors in dignified, heroic roles.
Posts: 32 | Registered: Mar 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
You know the real barrier? All the characters are black. Such a series would be viewed as a "black series" and would be marginalized. DESPITE the fact that there have been breakout series before with all-black casts.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
| IP: Logged |
posted
Yeah, UPN or BET would pick it up, since no other networks would want to take a chance on a "black" series.
Then BET and UPN would realize it's not "black" enough. Although that would be good, if they actually produced it as it was written, it might be enough to show mainstream television that as long as a show has a powerful story and characters people care about, it doesn't matter what color the characters are.
The sooner we reach that point, the happier I'll be.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
It's probable that the networks wouldn't pick it up, but I don't think that's a good reason not to do it. Perhaps a good reason not to invest time in a project that may not interest you, but the only way a show like that will ever make it on TV would be if someone decided they cared enough to fight for it.
I still think Orson Scott Card + TV is a good idea. TV is a unique medium for exploring characters. It can do things books can't.
Even if Magic Street won't work, perhaps something new just for TV?
Though, nothing beats a good book...
Posts: 4 | Registered: Jul 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote: DESPITE the fact that there have been breakout series before with all-black casts.
Quite correct, Mr. Card, but there has never been to my knowledge a breakout all-black cast series with a fantasy/sci-fi theme woven into the storyline. I reserve the right to be wrong of course, but a TV series or a movie based on Magic Street would thankfully tread new ground. When I attended one of your book signings, earlier this year, you had mentioned having Queen Latifah interested in bringing Magic Street to the big screen. Is that still a possibilty?
posted
"a TV series or a movie based on Magic Street would thankfully tread new ground."
Problem is TV networks don't like new ground they like to stick to the formula. And even if they did put it on the air they'd likely cancel it even if it was a great show simply because it wouldn't draw their target advertising demographic. Personally my opinions on TV in general are very low. Maybee they could make Magic Street a new reality series and at the end of every episode they could vote someone out of the neighborhood....no thanks i'll pass.
Posts: 29 | Registered: May 2002
| IP: Logged |
quote: The great thing about television, the thing that makes it the ideal medium for telling a story, is the space it gives the writer to develop characters and have the audience grow to care for them. Many more plot threads can be expored on a TV show as well, and the characters we already know can be seen in a variety of situations.
posted
Networks generally put on "black shows" when they have such low mainstream ratings that they're grateful to get one or two percent. The pattern was followed by a couple of the startup networks - black shows until they can get a good white hit; then the black shows languish and fade.
It sounds cynical and racist, but here's why it makes sense: Black audiences do great word of mouth. Since a network can only promote its own shows on its own shows, it has to bootstrap itself out of oblivion into existence. How? Well, if you put on a decent black sitcom, the black audience will TELL each other about it and it will get a good "floor" - enough of a core demographic that you can sell SOME advertising. Budgets stay ludicrously low, but they can make a profit and stay alive.
Sci-fi CAN work that way - but it's not as quick and it's not as big an audience. That's why UPN, which used the sci-fi strategy, didn't do as well as the networks that used the black sit-com entry point.
It's all about promoting a network that nobody's watching because it didn't exist before. Cable helps a lot in this, because of channel surfing plus local must-carry laws - if you can get a local channel, however feeble, to carry the new network's shows, then you will have a presence in all the basic-cable homes in a media market.
You COULD say that a Magic Street series would get the sci-fi audience AND the black audience.
But marketers would assume it would get the sci-fi subset of the black audience, or the black subset of the sci-fi audience, so it's a much SMALLER demographic.
Look, if Firefly can fail to get a big enough audience, what chance would there be, really, for Magic Street?
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
| IP: Logged |
posted
Firefly failed because of stupidity on the part of the network. Episodes were shown out-of-order (never a good idea in a serial series), airings were often pre-empted for sports, episodes were shown full-frame (4:3) instead of widescreen, and the show got almost no promotion that I can recall.
Somewhere at Fox, these decisions made sense. Sports were guaranteed ratings-earners, there was no easy way to advertise the actual content of the show (I seem to remember advertisements focusing on "From the creators of Buffy the Vampire Slayer" rather than showing us what the show would actually be like, for the good reasons that Buffy was a well-known success and the show was so different from anything else out there that it was difficult to describe in a thirty-second promo), and they weren't broadcasting in high-def, so airing the episodes in widescreen meant obscuring a significant portion of the image with black bars at the top and bottom.
The episode re-ordering I can't justify; my best guess is that they used focus groups, which never really reflect the audience that any given television show will actually pick up.
The end result of all of this is that Firefly was never given the chance it needed to catch on in the first place. The oerwhelming success of the DVD sets (enough to justify the financing of of Serenity) is proof enough to me that the show really did have legs; pity they were amputated.
There are two tests of this coming up:
1) The Sci-Fi Channel starts airing Firefly on Friday, July 22. They will be showing every episode, in order, in widescreen (even though they don't broadcast in HD), every Friday at least until they've run out of episodes. This is the treatment that the show should have gotten from the beginning. Obviously, there's much higher awareness of the show now than there was when it first aired, but the ratings should still prove informative.
2) Serenity is due out at the end of September. Every preview showing (and there have been lots of these) has sold out. It should be interesting to see what the reaction is from the uninitiaded.
Posts: 293 | Registered: Jun 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
I remember some promotion of Firefly, but only before they aired it at all. All I remember was them talking about the "intergalactic prostitute" and "naked girl in a box". Sex was the only way they were selling it.
Surprisingly, I watched it anyway.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I miss Buffy... Oh, and if you hire Will Smith and Chris Rock to be extras in the first episode in "The Magic Street Show", there should be just enough publicity to get it started well. Posts: 60 | Registered: Jun 2005
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
