That’s not a particularly useful working definition of “serious”.
Ya, I think the bar is lowered in my brain for this discussion due to it involving MacFarlane.
This news actually makes me more interested. I am not a fan of Macfarlane’s repetitive juvenile humor style. But if he can temper that humor in more reasonable doses and deliver a decent space series to boot? Yeah, Ill give it a shot.
Just remember 2005 or so. NBC had two shows about late-nite TV debuting. One was by their golden child, Sorkin, with all his crew from The West Wing. You know, the show that won crapton of Emmys. NBC put all their money into their surefire cant-miss prestige show.
The other was a comedy from some writer from SNL.
I’m not a fan of McFarlane, but you can at least tell that this is a passion project of his. He obviously loves science (hence Cosmos), and he’s been trying to do this show for years. There’s heart, damnit.
Meanwhile, the only feeling I get about Discovery is that CBS wants its franchise to print money again.
Even if this shaped up to be an excellent show (haw haw), the dealbreaker for me is Seth MacFarlane’s face. His weird, smug, vaguely animatronic face. I do not want to spend hours looking at that.
Captain Kirk, Jean Luc-Picard and Seth MacFarlane. The tri-fecta of great space captains.
You know, I’ll put up with a lot of crazy in people I like.
You’re pushing it Scuzz.
“Beam me up, Scotty.”
“Make it so.”
“Pull my finger.”
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Heh. So his favorite episode is Yesterday’s Enterprise, which he thinks would make a great Star Trek movie.
It is true, I mean, the episode Yesterday’s Enterprise, by itself, is better than any of the Star Trek movies. I agree with that.
Pilot was ok but could have gone for about 1/10th as much ex-wife jokes/drama.
It was actually pretty good, imho.
Yep, not too bad. Certainly going to keep on watching, although I’m glad I was warned to not expect pure comedy.
Dudes, really? Its terrible so far. Seth McFarlane may be a great producer, voice actor and show runner, but he is a TERRIBLE actor. Wooden performances from everyone, tonally flat. It was like Spaceballs but not funny. Also, aren’t the bad guy aliens the same ones from Star Trek: Insurrection?
I suppose it can get better with time but none of the characters resonated with me. Which one did you guys like?
Not at all a MacFarlane fan, so I went in with bottomed-out expectations. I actually enjoyed it. Some really nice subtle allusions to Trek at the beginning (“it’s not a heavy cruiser…”) and mildly amusing humor. Of course, a penis drawing mention in the first 10 minutes prepared me for the humor being as sophomoric as expected. It’s no Galaxy Quest, but given that it was a pilot and most SF pilots suck, I’ll definitely give it a chance.
I quite liked it. My expectations were low, but I’ll definitely watch again next week.
I enjoyed well enough but I cultivated very low expectations.
I thought the first 20 minutes we’re kind of meh, but after they landed at Epsilon 2 I was actually interested. It’s no Galaxy Quest but for a pilot it wasn’t too bad. I’ll be checking out the next few episodes.
Two things I noticed right off were how expertly the theme and incidental music evokes (and occasionally quotes brief phrases of) STTNG’s music, and how the guy doing the voice of the android dude is mimicking Brent Spiner’s Data. Also, it’s kind of mind-blowing how good CGI is these days. This isn’t on par with The Expanse in that department but it’s still pretty impressive.
Is this being streamed anywhere? I don’t watch shows on actual TV.
It’s on Hulu. Or if you don’t have an active membership right now, like me, you can watch the free version with ads on:
Yahoo View bought the web version of free Hulu or something. That’s where I plan to watch it later today.