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Television Media Sci-Fi

Warren Ellis's Global Frequency May Not Air 90

Posted by michael from the experiencing-technical-difficulties dept.
ajs writes "According to Ain't It Cool News, the WB network has cancelled Warren Ellis's Global Frequency, a wonderfully twisted modern-day SF TV series which may yet air, but the company that owns the series will now have to shop it around to other networks. If you're a fan of the comic series or you have just been starving for good non-space SF since the X-Files went away, you might want to send words of support to your favorite non-WB network. Slashdot has previously interviewed Ellis."
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Warren Ellis's Global Frequency May Not Air More

Warren Ellis's Global Frequency May Not Air

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  • Ensign Ro? (Score:4, Funny)

    by October_30th ( 531777 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @03:03PM (#10742582) Homepage Journal
    still fondly remembered as Ensign Ro

    Uh... no.

    • Re:Ensign Ro? (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by saden1 ( 581102 )
      The big question is does it understand "I surrender" in with an Iraqi accent or do I have to say it in proper southern accent?
  • American TV has become riddled with reality shows. It's quite discusting:
    * Wife Swap - Who watches this!? Some sick, twisted indiciduals, that's who.
    * Survivor - Isn't this like the 80th episode or something? How many different spins can they put on the challenges?
    * Big Brother - People tune in to this waiting, just anticipating two of the people boarded to have sex.
    * Extreme Makeover - The epitome of our obsession with aesthetic qualities.
    * Much, much more crap...

    Please, turn it off!
    LOST, Adult Swim, and various Comedy Central programs are the only reason I watch TV anymore. They're the only reason I haven't lost all hope in American entertainment.
    • Adult swim is your reason for watching TV? *shudder*
    • I'd say the worst is a tie between Wife Swap [go.com] and He's a Lady [tbssuperstation.com]. Both make me want to commit genocide equally.

    • Re:This is getting absolutely rediculous... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's great fun watching pretentious elitists talk about the USian public being mindless sheep when they can't even spell simple words like 'ridiculous'.
      • It's great fun watching pretentious elitists talk about the USian public being mindless sheep when they can't even spell simple words like 'ridiculous'. It's just as much fun to see the mindless sheep misspell "American".

    • It's not really so bad or misspelled. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It also seems a quintessentially American trait to worry about what OTHER people are watching. Turn it off if you don't like it. You list 4 examples of American horror and 3 reasons to be proud. I agree with you on CC and AS, and I might add The Sopranos, Curb your enthusiasm, Nova and more reasons not to be worried as to the state of American entertainment. I even admit to being intrigued by the current Survivor. To each his own. One thing seems clear to me, on most nights of the week, something good can b

      • Re:It's not really so bad or misspelled. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by LiquidHAL ( 801263 ) <LiquidHAL&gmail,com> on Saturday November 06, 2004 @03:42PM (#10742756)
        It's beyond hating it because other people are watching it. The networks are airing more and more of this crap, people are watching more and more, and good shows get canceled or not picked up to make room for more mindless reality shows. That's what pisses people off about them.
        • As soneone summarized one of my other posts: Sturgen's Law.

          Specficially, you are looking at everything that is on television today and comparing it only to the television that you remember because it was good enough to maintain a niche in our culture. Go look at Knight Rider and consider that for the time it came out it was reasonably well filmed television and slightly above average SF. It hurts just to say that, but it's true.

          Reality TV got you down? Go watch some Candid Camera or America's Funniest Hom
    • So-called reality shows are a huge success for the television networks. The reason?

      They cost jack shit to produce.

      Reality TV is simply a demonstration of marketing genius. The masses have, yet again, been convinced that something is worth watching through exposure to the media hype machine. It's really an incredible marketing victory... people have been completely willing to help the networks along with the largest profit margins they have ever known.

      • So-called reality shows are a huge success for the television networks. The reason?

        They cost jack shit to produce.

        Didn't reality TV shows become popular around the time the Writers Guild of America was threatening to strike [time.com] around 2001? These shows don't need writers, so I kind of assumed it was a way of undermining the leverage of the Writers Guild's influence by propagating these kind of shows. Both Survivor [wikipedia.org] and the US version of Big Brother [wikipedia.org] started in 2000. The networks were probably aware a problem

    • The scariest one is The Swan [fox.com]. Taking "ugly" people and performing plastic surgery to make them "beautiful." Talk about issues!
    • * Wife Swap - Who watches this!? Some sick, twisted indiciduals, that's who.

      There is a vast number of sick and twisted individuals out there! It's a giant market!

    • You know, it really just says something about the way (most) people watch TV now. The reason these shows do well is because people are busy, and you don't have to make plans around being in front of the television at a particular time to catch an interesting show. Lots of the new reality shows are self contained, just like the Law&Order/CSI shows. You can flick through the channels, find one, and sit down and watch it, and understand what's happening without a recap or having ever seen the show before.

  • WB releases pilot (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sonny Yatsen ( 603655 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @03:13PM (#10742623) Journal
    Thankfully, though, the WB has released the pilot back to the company that produced it instead of holding onto it like some networks to prevent it from ever being made.

    Right now, Ellis and the folks are negotiating with other television stations with the pilot, which Ellis remarked as impressive. There's still hopes yet, folks. You might still be on the Global Frequency.
    • This is excactly my thinking. So many pilots these days are owned by the networks. Meaning that the only way to view shows that may or may not have been good is to buy them at the booths at Dragon*Con. Let's be thankful that it can be picked up by someone.

      I was really excited about the potential in this show. I am a big fan of Warren Ellis' work and had high hopes.

  • X-Files = Non-Space? (Score:3)

    by datastalker ( 775227 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @03:17PM (#10742643) Homepage
    Granted, it didn't happen IN outer space per se, but I'm pretty sure the entire plot revolved around the concept of aliens from outer space. I seem to remember several UFOs as well... ;)

    • Actually, you're wrong. The plot likes to deal with man-made problems to show that not every threat is external. The pilot dealt with an old Soviet EM channeler that was implanted in the head of a sleeper Soviet agent who defected, never realizing that the bomb in his skull will eventually detonate as it decomposed in brain tissue.

      The closest the series ever got to aliens was when an Alien meme took over a couple blocks of the city, turning them into mindless animals.
      • "The pilot dealt with an old Soviet EM channeler that was implanted in the head of a sleeper Soviet agent who defected, never realizing that the bomb in his skull will eventually detonate as it decomposed in brain tissue."

        Are you talking about *X-FILES* here? The pilot episode (01x01) was about a group of kids who were being abducted.

        "The closest the series ever got to aliens..." was when hmm, let's see, one of them attacks Mulder in the X-Files movie? I'm only up to season 7, but I'm thinking that's

      • Errr.. not quite.

        There was one episode (Jump the shark) in which a virus was implanted inside two terrorists in a biological container. This container decomposed at a fixed rate and was set to release at a convention. The Lone Gunmen manage to contain the threat. Not much else that can be said without spoiling the episode.
    • It was the SF part that made me choke on my beer. Vampires and ghosts are SF?
    • I'm spending too much time on the X-Files here... suffice it to say that almost none of the show had anything to do with space, spacecraft or aliens, even though there was a thread running through the show that involved all of the above.

  • Doomed from the start (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ToddML ( 590924 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @03:34PM (#10742720)
    It was to be overseen by screenwriter John Rogers ("American Outlaws," "The Core").
    What makes someone see those two writing credits and think "Hey, I've GOT to have that guy!"???

  • X-Files, "non-space SF"? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by whitroth ( 9367 ) <whitroth@5-cen t . us> on Saturday November 06, 2004 @04:03PM (#10742834) Homepage
    Not a bloody chance.

    SF has *science* in it - one definition is that it must obey all known scientific laws, unless breaking one is required for the story, and then even the handwaving explantion must be reasonable.

    Fantasy is *NOT* SF - the two are related, but not the same. However, as Lord Dunsay said, fantasy is *very* hard to do right: you have to make all the rules...and then *NEVER* break any of them, or the reader's suspenders of disbelief go "snap", and you've lost it.

    X-Files was inconsistant conspiracy theory. This is about one step short of, say, Bush's energy policy, or his fight against accepting that global warming exists, and is human-caused - that is, the Hollywood idea that a "theory" is what you come up with in the nightmare after you've had too much bheer and pizza.

    Non-space sf on tv? Max Headroom. Non-space fantasy on tv? The Chronicle.

    None of the above? Cattlecar Galaxative (22 planets strafed to death, and a flamable covered wagon, er, spaceship in the hard vacuum of space).

    mark "s'ppose a movie of Charles de Lint
    would be too much to ask for"

    • SF has *science* in it - one definition is that it must obey all known scientific laws, unless breaking one is required for the story, and then even the handwaving explantion must be reasonable.

      That's a very restrictive definition of Science-fiction, and one which rules out one hell of a lot of literature and programming otherwise considered science-fiction. I can't think of any Sci-Fi which would qualify based on that definition.

      A much better set of definitions includes:

      A literary or cinematic genre

      • both clark and asimov draw very clear lines between SF and SciFi. what the parent is talking about is their distinction.
        • I can't recall which one but the first arthur c clarke book i started to read had a line describing space as being cold at least -400 degrees C... any credit he had as any kind of authority evaporated at that point.
        • Fandom in general has drawn this arbitrary "Skiffy" vs "Science Fiction" (preferably said with nose up and with a faint hint of a bad impersonation of a Brittish accent... if you're Brittish this might take some practice) line down the middle of the genre, but it's not only abritrary; it's also incosistent.

          We look at The Nine Billion Names of God whose only claim to "science" is the fact that a computer is used to print out words on paper. The story is entirely about the mix of eastern mysticism with weste
          • Exactly.

            People who think there's a hard line between sci-fi and fantasy need to glance at Pern. I, personally, don't think that's an example of good writing, but defining that as either sci-fi or fantasy is absurd. It's fantasy following sci-fi rules.

            Or compare, say, Discworld and HHGttG. They've both saterical societies as a reflection on the real world. HHGttG has 'magic' in it, with improbablity fields floating around, ghosts, total perspective vortexes, etc, and Discworld has of technology hitting it

  • Has anyone considered the possibility that the show was not picked up because the pilot sucked? I understand Slashdot's efforts to champion this kind of programming, but you know there is such a thing as shitty Sci Fi.
    • yes , and paramount has did promise us no more Star Trek franchise..... nope wait a moment ... buggerville, there it is ... another Enterpise season......... how the heck did this beat firefly for renewal..

    • Re:Some things may not be worth saving (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah, I remember all the hype over Rob Zombie's movie House of 1000 Corpses. The implication was that it couldn't get a distributor because it was "too shocking". Instead, it was just direct-to-video-quality sewage with a better soundtrack than most. I'm a big fan of Ellis' work, but anything can go wrong taking comic material to another medium. Just ask Alan Moore.
  • ... good 'in space' series? The New Star Trek sucks, stopped watching it after episode 2. Stargate Atlantis isn't too bad, but it really doesn't count as 'in space' it's really just 'vampires in space'.

  • hbo (Score:1)

    by zxflash ( 773348 )
    if wb doesn't want it they need just add rediculous amounts of profanity to the pilot and run it over to hbo
  • The WB has passed on the pilot. However, they've also been real gentlemen and released it back to the studio to be taken elsewhere. Many networks hold onto pilots out of spite, fearing that if it succeeds elsewhere, they'll look bad.

    This sounds disturbingly like what happened in The Making of 'And God Spoke' [yahoo.com] -- a mockumentary about two eternally optimistic indie filmmakers shooting a cheesy biblical epic. "Very unusual!" they gloat, when the big studio drops the project but lets them keep it. As if this

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