Can I talk about this modern trend in "diversity casting in TV shows?"

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Kyrian007

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I always gave a shit.

And indeed, in recent times things got better. I heard that is mostly due to advent of streaming and viewers being more often expected to watch whole seasons and in order where decades ago much more focus was laid on each apisode being able to stand alone and networks being able to reorder or shorten seasons on a whim.
Well, maybe its my age. But I don't see that as an improvement. I thought shows were much better back when written episodically. Each episode being able to stand on its own; each with a beginning, middle, and end... just way better than what we have now. Where shows are so much shonen filler episode garbage for 60% of every season just to pad out an arc that could have passed for a 2-parter into an entire season. Really, something has to have a nearly fully written story before even making the first casting choice to even have a chance with the "long story arc" format that is so common today. And since Babylon 5, few have done a show that way. And so its all really decent shows getting a good 1st season, then writers not knowing where to go and writing themselves into a corner, and shows all going downhill and flaming out until only the fanboys remain.
 
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Trunkage

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Well, maybe its my age. But I don't see that as an improvement. I thought shows were much better back when written episodically. Each episode being able to stand on its own; each with a beginning, middle, and end... just way better than what we have now. Where shows are so much shonen filler episode garbage for 60% of every season just to pad out an arc that could have passed for a 2-parter into an entire season. Really, something has to have a nearly fully written story before even making the first casting choice to even have a chance with the "long story arc" format that is so common today. And since Babylon 5, few have done a show that way. And so its all really decent shows getting a good 1st season, then writers not knowing where to go and writing themselves into a corner, and shows all going downhill and flaming out until only the fanboys remain.
This is contingent on whether you like stories on character or with cardboard cut outs

Old shows like CSI or Law and Order just had cardboard cut outs that sometimes turned into characters in an episode per season. People already spoke of Janeway being schizophrenic, and this happened for a lot of TNG characters too. It's not schizophrenic, Janeway is a cardboard cut out that meant to movie along a story, Her character wasn't relevant, and needed to change to fit the narrative. You could switch out Janeway for any character on Voyager and it wouldn't really change the story much. You could put in a character from CSI and it wouldn't really matter, because the character isn't important. I'm going to point to an example of where this doesn't happen in TNG - look at a Crusher solo episodes like Remember Me. She went around being a doctor and tried to analyse everything through that lens. The character actually mattered to the story.
 
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Hawki

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It’s not me who took the approach, it was the (many) writers of most of serialised television for the past sixty years who did. And until very recently, the audiences didn’t give much of a shit either.
Is it that they didn't give a shit, or that they didn't have the means to?

More exactly, it's a given that TV today is more serialized than it was when stuff like Doctor Who and Star Trek first came out. But part of the shift is that with stuff like the Internet, streaming, etc., it's far easier to stay up to date with continuous storylines. So with that in mind, I don't know that it's the case that people from decades ago didn't care about continuity, since they'd probably understand that it was harder to maintain continuity.

But even then, there's a separate issue to consider. Stand-alone episodes is fine, discrepencies between those episodes are still discrepencies. Using TOS as an example, if in one episode Spock says "I'm from Vulcan," and in another says "I'm from Heaphestus," then that's still a discrepency that anyone with reasonable interest in the series is going to pick up. The fault would still lie with the writers.

Rowling is kind of notorious for continuously tweaking the lore of Harry Potter outside of what's been established in the novels.
Yes, Rowling's recontextualized/added stuff, sometimes clumsily (e.g. Dumbledore), those aren't discrepencies ipso facto.

Off the top of my head, I know McGonagall's in a weird place right now thanks to 'The Crimes of Grindlewald', but not much else. Yeah, Cursed Child has some weird shit in it, but it's not outright a breaking of the setting.

"Fair" is something of a subjective value.

For a show like Doctor Who with dozens of writers across hundreds of episodes and decades of show lifespan, I would argue actually no it isn't fair to expect an encyclopaedic knowledge of everything that has gone before from writers. I think you could however consider degrees of inconsistency: few if any in TV series are big ones, they're more the lore equivalent of someone accidentally wearing a wristwatch in the shot of a medieval epic. (If that's the sort of thing bothering some people, these people need to go out and get a life.) Never mind that most writers think they don't think consistency should get in the way of a good story.
To reiterate, I wouldn't expect a writer to know everything off by heart within their head. I WOULD, however, expect them to remain consistent with what's come before, whether it be through consulting the Doctor Who wiki, past episodes, whatever internal story bible the BBC might maintain, etc. Even if Doctor Who is a setting where discrepencies can be explained due to how elastic the timeline is, some discrepencies are more...discrepenful than others. To use your example, a watch on someone's wrist isn't a deal breaker. On the flipside, take Flux, which among other things, destroys (or at least devastates) the entire universe bar Earth in the 2020s, so how does that affect everything that occurs in-universe after that point? Don't know, I doubt Chibnall knows, I doubt he particuarly cares either, and in case you're wondering, I think Chibnall's run has been mostly terrible, and that's part of the reason why.

As to the question of what's "fair," or the notion of writers not letting continuity get in the way of story...okay, I'm going to use a personal example here. I've tried to avoid examples like this, but this thread's already got quite personal, so I can go the extra mile. So here it is.

The last multi-chaptered story I wrote on FFN was a Starship Troopers story that by my count, is around 70,000 words. Since the Starship Troopers wiki is pretty sparse and poorly sourced, it wasn't something I could rely on. So, to ensure that I kept to canon as much as possible, among everything else, I did the following:

-(Re)watched the five movies.
-Read the movie comic adaptation, plus Insect Touch, plus Dominant Species.
-Read the script and took notes of Terran Ascendendancy, plus scans of its game manual.
-The same for the manual of the 2005 Starship Troopers game.
-Skim-read the original Heinlein novel
-Kept a codex of sorts for the story, cobbling the stuff together into something as cohesive as possible - key dates, technology, characters, chain of command, etc.

You might point out, among other things, that I could have done more. And that's true. You might also point out that those pieces of media aren't always in the same continuity and that's also true (for instance, skim-reading the novel was mainly about quote mining, so the same quotes could be given as a form of subversion, since the story's set in the films continuity). But the point is that if I can do all of that on my own time, for free (similar to wiki editing), then it's not unreasonable to expect people who write/produce for a living to put in something resembling the same effort, and frankly, more.

For instance, before directing Wrath of Khan, Meyers watched every prior TOS episode, whereas Baird refused to watch any of TNG before directing Nemesis. The quality/lack of both films probably wasn't contingent on that, but ask anyone which film turned out better, and you'll get only one answer. At the very least, Meyers was putting effort in, whereas Baird wasn't. Nothing in Khan really clashes with TOS, while people have picked apart the insanities of Nemesis from a lore standpoint. And that's still before you get to the story aspects.

Congratulations on being exceptional in this way.
That's hardly exceptional. If anything, in my experience, NOT caring about continuity is the exception.
 

Terminal Blue

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I read someone's PhD on Doctor Who years ago - specifically, why it declined in the 80s and was eventually ceased. A major plank of this was that the show ended up written and produced by fans from the 60s and 70s, who drove it into a demand for continuity and thus self-reference that shut out potential new watchers, and so the viewing figures started to decline. There are legendary stories of Dr. Who conventions where poor actors are asked to explain lore inconsistencies between episodes 89 and 267 or whatever.
I agree that there definitely is, or at least was, a subset of really hardcore fans of shows like Doctor Who and Star Trek whose primary engagement with the show stemmed from a kind of ingroup identity. For those people, trivia and a manufactured sense of continuity served as a way to distinguish the "true fans" like them, real fans who have watched all the episodes a dozen times and memorized all the details, from everyone else.

One thing I strongly suspect is that the people making NuTrek have such an insulting view of Star Trek as a property that they think the fanbase only consists of those people, because some of the references really make no sense otherwise.

I'd add that I think Discovery focuses on one character too much. I don't think Star Trek ever was, or ever should be a one person show. It probably is closest to TOS in that respect
I agree, and I think it's also symptomatic of another problem, which is that Discovery in particular doesn't really give any of its characters opportunities to show a clear identity through the way they relate to the plot. Characters in older Star Trek often represent a perspective, and the goal is often to explore the strengths and weaknesses of their perspectives in terms of how it relates to whatever situation the writers have contrived that week. Discovery doesn't really work this way. All the characters essentially agree on everything important, instead the character drama has to be supplemented with sheer angst.

Michael Burnham is an interesting character concept. The idea of a human, for whom emotional expression is healthy and necessary, being raised among Vulcans for whom it is not could have been a cool vehicle for character growth. She absolutely could have worked in a more traditional Star Trek format. The problem is, her emotional conflicts aren't in any way tied to the plot, they're tied to disconnected, decontextualized trauma and interpersonal drama that doesn't really connect to the plot at all. It constantly pulls attention away from the big picture of who this person is and how they feel about stuff that matters to focus on things that are relatively insignificant.
 

Kyrian007

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This is contingent on whether you like stories on character or with cardboard cut outs

Old shows like CSI or Law and Order just had cardboard cut outs that sometimes turned into characters in an episode per season. People already spoke of Janeway being schizophrenic, and this happened for a lot of TNG characters too. It's not schizophrenic, Janeway is a cardboard cut out that meant to movie along a story, Her character wasn't relevant, and needed to change to fit the narrative. You could switch out Janeway for any character on Voyager and it wouldn't really change the story much. You could put in a character from CSI and it wouldn't really matter, because the character isn't important. I'm going to point to an example of where this doesn't happen in TNG - look at a Crusher solo episodes like Remember Me. She went around being a doctor and tried to analyse everything through that lens. The character actually mattered to the story.
Actually, you can generally do better character studies of fully formed characters in more episodic works that were more common years ago. The serialized shows of today work, if everyone is basically a juvenile or written like one. You can grow with and watch a character grow if they start out written like a high or middle-schooler. In a more classic anthology style you have fully formed characters, and the situations you throw at them changes week to week. You get to see how characters you know, react to the situations around them... with better story structure because you are writing single stories with a beginning and end and aren't constantly being constricted by other writers whims. I always liken it to a show that spanned the gap of styles, The X-Files. The award winning, memorable episodes... all anthology "monster of the week" episodes. Humbug, Jose Chung, Ice, Die Hand Die Verletzt, Clyde Bruckman, War of the Coprophages. Without looking it up it is really hard to remember the more serialized episodes; and the alien hybrid, dead sister, story arcs... are widely considered the weakest parts of the series. That much is true of most television as far as I'm concerned, with my previously mentioned "Babylon 5" exception kind of proving the rule considered the weakest part of it... the unplanned 5th season.

There's exceptions, but for me just in general tv had to be better to get anywhere prior to the proliferation of streaming services and the binge-watching present. I'll admit really creative excellent shows get good starts these days. But very few get to finish... and even fewer actually stick the landing.
 
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dreng3

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There's exceptions, but for me just in general tv had to be better to get anywhere prior to the proliferation of streaming services and the binge-watching present. I'll admit really creative excellent shows get good starts these days. But very few get to finish... and even fewer actually stick the landing.
I concur on the last part, modern tv-series seem designed to either continue in perpituitiy or they're an attempt to revive a series.
And if you want your series to go on you need to somehow restore the status quo or risk you characters changing so much that it would be logical for the series to end.

In terms of modern series I particularly enjoyed The Good Place, and the ending seemed fairly well-planned and though out, as opposed to things like Supernatural, Flash or Arrow, which just slogs on.
 

Drathnoxis

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Yes, Rowling's recontextualized/added stuff, sometimes clumsily (e.g. Dumbledore), those aren't discrepencies ipso facto.

Off the top of my head, I know McGonagall's in a weird place right now thanks to 'The Crimes of Grindlewald', but not much else. Yeah, Cursed Child has some weird shit in it, but it's not outright a breaking of the setting.
I don't think we're quite connecting here. What I'm trying to say is that the text is the text and any explanations that the author makes after the fact does not count if it is not present in the text. It doesn't have to be an explanation for a plothole, but it can be. Therefore if there's a plothole and the author is asked for an explanation, whatever answer they come up with is irrelevant because the fact that they needed to be asked is already a failure of the text. I don't care what the author says, if I can't come to the same answer by reading the text it's not canon. Any work needs to stand on its own, human beings are constantly shifting and changing due to so many factors like age, memory, life experiences, etc. that if you allow an author to further clarify the work years down the road you could never have a place of stability from which to analyse it. Word of the Author is not really any better than fanon in my opinion.
 
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Drathnoxis

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I concur on the last part, modern tv-series seem designed to either continue in perpituitiy or they're an attempt to revive a series.
...What's your definition of 'modern'? Because as far as I can tell tv shows have always been designed to continue in perpetuity.
This is why I read books. You don't get a good story from something that is expected to go on and on until everyone is sick of it and stops watching, after which it just fizzles out.
 
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Dalisclock

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One of the dumbest complaints of Trek fandoms, really.

That comment about how many torpedoes they had was made at the start of their journey ( episode 5 ), in an unknown region of space, with little to no knowledge of what materials there were to find, outside the ones in their own storage.

It stands to reason that as they cruised through the delta quadrant that they came across the raw materials to make new photon torpedoes.
Yeah, but it doesn't feel like they ever realiy establish this. If there had been episodes about them making alliances to get more materials to make more torpedos, that'd be one thing, but they just always seemed to have extras. Same with the shuttles, where the most they really ever acknowledged it was when they build the delta flier. BSG, on the contrary, actually had them address they had one of the ships working as an ad-hoc munitions factory but that was also stirring up resentment in the fleet.

That's kinda one of my big issues with Voyager in general. They set up this cool premise: No friends, limited supplies, long way from home, former enemies in the crew, and then they pretty much ignore all of it so they can do TNG but on a different ship. Why even bother to set up the premise at all if they're not going to bother to do anything with it?

The "Year of Hell" arc where they were barely holding the ship together over the course of a year felt like a much better execution of this actual premise, but of course that got retconned out of existence because TImey Whimey Capt Nemo.
 
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Gordon_4

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Actually, you can generally do better character studies of fully formed characters in more episodic works that were more common years ago. The serialized shows of today work, if everyone is basically a juvenile or written like one. You can grow with and watch a character grow if they start out written like a high or middle-schooler. In a more classic anthology style you have fully formed characters, and the situations you throw at them changes week to week. You get to see how characters you know, react to the situations around them... with better story structure because you are writing single stories with a beginning and end and aren't constantly being constricted by other writers whims. I always liken it to a show that spanned the gap of styles, The X-Files. The award winning, memorable episodes... all anthology "monster of the week" episodes. Humbug, Jose Chung, Ice, Die Hand Die Verletzt, Clyde Bruckman, War of the Coprophages. Without looking it up it is really hard to remember the more serialized episodes; and the alien hybrid, dead sister, story arcs... are widely considered the weakest parts of the series. That much is true of most television as far as I'm concerned, with my previously mentioned "Babylon 5" exception kind of proving the rule considered the weakest part of it... the unplanned 5th season.

There's exceptions, but for me just in general tv had to be better to get anywhere prior to the proliferation of streaming services and the binge-watching present. I'll admit really creative excellent shows get good starts these days. But very few get to finish... and even fewer actually stick the landing.
Babylon 5’s fifth season wasn’t so much unplanned as it was a victim of circumstance. JMS had a shitload of material - mainly concerning a telepath civil war if I recall - but a hotel worker threw the notes out while cleaning his room and he had to rely on memory and we got the fairly weak season as presented.
 

Drathnoxis

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I mean, you can't tell me that Sherlock Holmes or Colombo didn't have character just because they were heavily episodic plot driven shows instead of interlinked character driven shows
Admittedly, I haven't watch any Sherlock Holmes shows, but isn't his character usually just "Gosh, he's so smart, I can't believe how smart he is!"?
Try watching British TV: it's got loads of shows never intended to get a second season.
Recommendations?
 
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Dalisclock

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Admittedly, I haven't watch any Sherlock Holmes shows, but isn't his character usually just "Gosh, he's so smart, I can't believe how smart he is!"?
Recommendations?
Pretty much. The original stories in particular were famous for Sherlock laying out the entire case using details and clues that aren't given the reader at all. It's handwaved because Watson is the narrator and Watson just isn't as Smart as Sherlock(though not the bumbling oaf some adaptations make him out to be, the man is a Doctor and a combat vet, for gods sake).

The BBC Sherlock show was really bad about making him an insufferable genius who also saw everyone else as a complete dullard. I liked it for a while but it eventually turned into Dr. Who at the end(not coincidentally, one of the Dr. Who Showrunners did Sherlock)

Also fun fact: Arthur Conan Doyle famously killed Holmes off in the books to be done with them, and then brought him back from the dead later because fans were really, really mad about it and it was handwaved that he didn't REALLY die. Apparently Doyle got pestered about it quite a lot.
 

thebobmaster

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Pretty much. The original stories in particular were famous for Sherlock laying out the entire case using details and clues that aren't given the reader at all. It's handwaved because Watson is the narrator and Watson just isn't as Smart as Sherlock(though not the bumbling oaf some adaptations make him out to be, the man is a Doctor and a combat vet, for gods sake).

The BBC Sherlock show was really bad about making him an insufferable genius who also saw everyone else as a complete dullard. I liked it for a while but it eventually turned into Dr. Who at the end(not coincidentally, one of the Dr. Who Showrunners did Sherlock)

Also fun fact: Arthur Conan Doyle famously killed Holmes off in the books to be done with them, and then brought him back from the dead later because fans were really, really mad about it and it was handwaved that he didn't REALLY die. Apparently Doyle got pestered about it quite a lot.
That, and Doyle had bills to pay. Also, Colombo>Holmes, and I will die on that hill.
 

Agema

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Ha! Well, there are quite a lot of them - it can be a struggle to remember when prodded.

British TV tends to work with single scriptwriters rather than scriptwriter teams: even shows with multiple scriptwriters, there only tends to be one per episode. Because it's just one person's creativity, this means is seasons of any show often tend to be short (usually a maximum around 4 hours, e.g. 8 x 30mins or 4 x 60). What it also often results in are what the USA would call "mini-series", where a scriptwriter has made a little personal project, released it to the world, and then moves on to a new fun project. Some can also be quite theatrical: almost like they've written a TV play. I would strongly suggest shows like Fleabag, Killing Eve and Broadchurch were clearly intended as single season, but commercial pressure intruded.

Probably the most respected guy would be Stephen Poliakoff, although his work is distinctly highbrow. It depends what you're into, but as a cross-section of well-regarded shows, mostly recent and strictly one season only: the recent Dracula (Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss), Taboo (Stephen Knight), I May Destroy You (Michaela Coel), A Very British Scandal (Russell T. Davies), Normal People (Sally Rooney / Alice Birch), Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (Matthew Holness & Richard Ayoade), Red Riding (David Peace / Tony Grisoni; you will see few things more utterly grim). There's a ton of other less notable stuff I've enjoyed, though.
 
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Kwak

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Ha! Well, there are quite a lot of them - it can be a struggle to remember when prodded.

British TV tends to work with single scriptwriters rather than scriptwriter teams: even shows with multiple scriptwriters, there only tends to be one per episode. Because it's just one person's creativity, this means is seasons of any show often tend to be short (usually a maximum around 4 hours, e.g. 8 x 30mins or 4 x 60). What it also often results in are what the USA would call "mini-series", where a scriptwriter has made a little personal project, released it to the world, and then moves on to a new fun project. Some can also be quite theatrical: almost like they've written a TV play. I would strongly suggest shows like Fleabag, Killing Eve and Broadchurch were clearly intended as single season, but commercial pressure intruded.

Probably the most respected guy would be Stephen Poliakoff, although his work is distinctly highbrow. It depends what you're into, but as a cross-section of well-regarded shows, mostly recent and strictly one season only: the recent Dracula (Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss), Taboo (Stephen Knight), I May Destroy You (Michaela Coel), A Very British Scandal (Russell T. Davies), Normal People (Sally Rooney / Alice Birch), Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (Matthew Holness & Richard Ayoade), Red Riding (David Peace / Tony Grisoni; you will see few things more utterly grim). There's a ton of other less notable stuff I've enjoyed, though.
Dennis potter's work is also outstanding. Lipstick on your collar, cold Lazarus.
 

Hawki

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I don't think we're quite connecting here. What I'm trying to say is that the text is the text and any explanations that the author makes after the fact does not count if it is not present in the text. It doesn't have to be an explanation for a plothole, but it can be. Therefore if there's a plothole and the author is asked for an explanation, whatever answer they come up with is irrelevant because the fact that they needed to be asked is already a failure of the text. I don't care what the author says, if I can't come to the same answer by reading the text it's not canon. Any work needs to stand on its own, human beings are constantly shifting and changing due to so many factors like age, memory, life experiences, etc. that if you allow an author to further clarify the work years down the road you could never have a place of stability from which to analyse it. Word of the Author is not really any better than fanon in my opinion.
Guess all I can say is that I completely disagree.
 
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