The Expanse

I'm pretty happy about The Expanse's showrunners but Amazon's had A LOT of duds in their original programming. With the exceptions of Mrs Maisel and Man in the High Castle (and maybe skinny pete) most of their original series have been pretty crap and Amazon has ZERO iota about cutting underperformers.

Red Oaks was cool, but it wasn't really a mainstream thing. Never did watch Patriot. That Philip K Dick anthology series they had was ok, had potential to be better though.

The Tick?

Amazon fired the dude (and all his yes man peons) who was greenlighting all the gay ass, critical darlings shit in the past few years, and surprise surprise also turned out to be a serial sexual harrasser and brought on a new woman who seems to be really into sci fi (or at least understands what the popular shit is people like). She's the one whose been cutting all the stupid shit no one watches and bringing on more popular stuff to be developed, who knows how it'll turn out but its gotta be better than before.

That Bryan Cranston/PKD thing was formalaic at best and just cringey at worst tho. It definitely wasn't underfunded, just...not good.

I dunno who I'd trust to do a prestige Culture series tho. Those books are nothing like scifi that's ever been filmed.

Good. The only prime shows I ever really watched were Man in the High Castle and The Tick. If they can expand their Sci-Fi offerings beyond just The Expanse, that will be awesome.

I still think that LOTR series is going to be a mistake, though. The Tolkien stuff is kind of played out at this point (after the Hobbit movies landed with a resounding meh)

Yeah we don't need LOTR as a TV show. It's done. Let it go.

Culture is going to be really tough to film. I'm a little surprised they'd even try.

How Amazon, Netflix, HBO or something hasn't picked up Dresden Files astounds me. I can only imagine that it is just tainted by the SyFy channel.

Yeah the problem is if you cut out all the world-building you can presumably pare The Culture into a VERY filmable skeleton plotline. But then it would be episodic stand-alone shit like many 80's sci-fi crap. That's almost certainly how someone who isn't invested into Banks' books would sell it to finance folks who only see scifi as "That-Game-of-Thrones-Market".

Harshaw said:

How Amazon, Netflix, HBO or something hasn't picked up Dresden Files astounds me. I can only imagine that it is just tainted by the SyFy channel.

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I'd imagine SyFy still has the rights, and if HBO/Netflix tried to buy them off them, would be met with a hearty 'Go fuck yourself'.

velk said:

I'd imagine SyFy still has the rights, and if HBO/Netflix tried to buy them off them, would be met with a hearty 'Go fuck yourself'.

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Butcher has the rights back. He is just unwilling to get screwed over again. He did say he was looking at options but that was like 2-3 years ago.

Adaptations like Dresden Files live or die by their casting. House would've been a disaster with anyone other than Hugh Laurie, the earlier seasons' scripts were lame cringey network shit that would've been played artlessly by another guy.

Then if they somehow DO get lucky with a great character actor, he starts negotiating for rockstar salaries a third of the way through the first season.

That video is great. Love seeing the Roci crew + Drummer that excited about it. Pretty fucking pumped about this.

Renewal aside, can we discuss just how badass Drummer is? Because she is. I love that Cara Gee manages to infuse every moment of her performance with pure raw anger. Even when Drummer is calm she is angry as fuck and it shows.

Qhue said:

Renewal aside, can we discuss just how badass Drummer is? Because she is. I love that Cara Gee manages to infuse every moment of her performance with pure raw anger. Even when Drummer is calm she is angry as fuck and it shows.

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I think she's a terrible actress. Her facial expressions alone ruin the scenes she is in. That's not even mentioning her awful accent.

Del said:

I think she's a terrible actress. Her facial expressions alone ruin the scenes she is in. That's not even mentioning her awful accent.

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I was just telling my wife that the Drummer on the show is like the Drummer from a couple books ahead... at this point in the story she was just a loyal bureaucrat. She eventually gets all bitter and hardened after living through some trauma.

Heylel said:

Yeah we don't need LOTR as a TV show. It's done. Let it go.

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If they want to do that genre why not Dragonlance? That's a much beloved series from a lot of people's childhood. Lots of material to work with there.

Del said:

I think she's a terrible actress. Her facial expressions alone ruin the scenes she is in. That's not even mentioning her awful accent.

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Maybe it's b/c I haven't read the books, so I don't know how Drummer develops there v. on the show, but I love the job she does. Don't mind the accent even.