uraniun235 wrote:Well, even without budget concerns, there are actors who don't like or want to do television work because it's a very grueling production schedule. Even in the modern era of *sniff* refined television sensibilities where we might see 13 (or seven, or whatever) episodes a year, it's still much more demanding than movie work.
Yeah this is true. I wonder though, whether TV work (or the right kind of TV work) is actually more rewarding. Especially nowadays with 'refined' sensibilities and big cable shows that have almost motion picture level production values.
I think - well, I
hope - that if Star Trek came back to the small screen again it would be in that kind of format. Shorter seasons with the best production values you can put in to an individual episode. Enterprise had good production values, probably the best of any Star Trek show IMO, but it still had that 'more than 20 episodes a season' thing. I think RDM in the TNG blu-ray special feature that had him, Brannon Braga, Naren Shankar and Rene Echevarria (and Seth MacFarlane... spot the odd man out?) get together and talk shop for an hour, pointed out how TNG (and DS9 and Voyager) had 26 episodes a season, and how that just seems huge nowadays. He wasn't sure how you could do that amount of work now, especially when people are becoming more accustomed to arc storylines.
EDIT Another thought occurs, and that is how do you get new writers involved in shows that have that kind of tight plotting requirement? Guys like Moore et al above were really lucky in how they got involved in TNG. Moore almost literally got his foot in the door and dropped off an unsolicited script (something which was frowned upon even when he did it), and it was only because Piller was desperate IIRC that his script got noticed. Braga got an internship.
I think "poisoned the well" will depend a lot on what Paramount does after Chris Pine eventually leaves. If they decide to immediately re-reboot and do another movie within three or four years, CBS might find it unpalatable to pitch their TV-budget show against SUMMER HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER.
I think that's one of the reasons why CBS has held off making a new TV show at all, and are just content to remaster TNG and possibly DS9 and VOY later. But eventually, they'll want to put it on the air again, if only to actually use the rights they have for the property.
I also think CBS would likely prefer to set any new show in the prime universe, rather than the reboot one, because working with the latter would potentially mean diluting their rights to their side of the property. On the other hand, I am unsure of just how the rights work in this case. CBS seems to own everything that exists prior to the 2009 film, while Paramount seems to own that, plus Into Darkness, plus anything motion picture related. The old films seem to be 'shared' between them. I'd love to actually go through the copyrights documentation to see not only who owns what but just what the other side can do with what they own. It might mean that CBS literally can't make a
new TV show, or do so by themselves. But I honestly don't know much about this area.
EDIT A good example of what I'm talking about comes from both reboot films. They're their own thing right, but they still make use of the Prime universe - the 2009 film's backstory takes place in the prime universe and has prime Spock cross over. Into Darkness mentions Section 31. It strikes me that they couldn't make these kind of references if the rights were strict. Which leads me to believe that if CBS wanted to make a new TV show, Bad Robot would want to be involved in some fashion, perhaps as low as simply being consulted so that they don't work at cross-purposes, but more likely they would want to be active participants. And CBS may not want to do that, or have a TV show under that basis.
It's like, this is where movies are expected to be now. 
