<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>So, Joe, are you saying you are expecting Crusade to be brought back to life a year after Rangers starts?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
No. I'm
suggesting that JMS left the door open for that possibility when he planned
Rangers, in case SFC is interested, rather than writing himself into a corner.
Workload?
I've lost track of how many series Norma Lear and Gary Marshall each had in production simultaneously in their prime.
Buffy and
Angel seem to be triving. Chris Carter has
The X-Files filming in L.A. and
The Lone Gunmen shooting in Vancouver and is breathing new life into one while the other is finding its feet. Dick Wolfe has two
Law & Order shows going and the network is looking to add a
third for next year.
I'm sure JMS could handle it, especially if he's past the first critical "shakedown" year of
Rangers before he starts on anything else. Don't forget, he expects to have the whole first season of "TWCBN" behind him before
Rangers goes to series.
Too many shows?
Each of the
Treks had its own writing staff, and most of the problems were with the scripts, so I don't see the correlation. (And the script problems were not the result of bad writing. They were the result of Rick Berman being in overall charge, and he's made it painfully clear that he isn't
interested in
Trek its history or its ethos, just in the "franchise" as a money-maker. Also the studio, with much the same mind-set, refused to let the writers do anything interesting, dangerous or edgy.
That is the at the heart of JMS's negative comments about "The Franchise" He's not opposed to doing multiple shows in the same universe, but to "play-it-safe", "don't-rock-the-boat", "if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it" attitude that Paramount took as soon as the once-despised
Trek became a reliable money-maker.
The problem with the
Trek shows was not that there was too many of them, or that people were distracted, because for the most part the same people weren't making them. The problem was studio policy.
So I don't think this would translate to the
B5 universe situation where Warner Bros. has taken a remarkably "hands-off" attitude since about
B5 season one. This is probably the positive side of the Warner Bros. semi-organization - not being a single entity with a single brain, WB television doesn't let marketing and home video dictate show content. (The
Trek uniform changes were made so that they could sell a whole new set of action figures for crying out loud.) While the lack of coordination is sometimes maddening (like The WB's refusal to even consider picking up a project associated with rival PTEN, or the struggle to get Warner Home Video to do anything with the show) in this case it may be a blessing.
It is certainly the case that
Crusade and likely the case that
Rangers will have much "looser" arcs than
B5 did (assuming that
Rangers has an arc at all, which hasn't been confirmed yet.)
Crusade had a predetermined end-point, and various incidents that had to take place along the way, but JMS left himself a lot more flexibility in telling the story. This would avoid the
B5 situation where he essentially
had to right all of S3 because the arc was cranking so hard he would have had to rewrite any freelance scripts anyway to maintain continuity. It also avoids the season 4 and 5 problems where lots of freelance stand-alone stuff had to be tossed out to wrap the show in one year, then S5 had to be adjusted on the run when it suddenly became a reality.
It was against
that background, combined with the constant battles with TNT on
Crusade itself, that so badly sapped JMS's vitality. Given two shows where he doen't
have to write every single show in a season, a pool of either staff writers of tested freelancers to draw upon and a better relationship with the network, I don't see a similar kind of "burn out" coming up again - even with the odd comic book, movie or other project.
Most freelance TV writers (which JMS used to be) get
all of their writing assingments in a single one or two month long "buying season" and then spend the better part of a year simultaneously working on scripts for a half-dozen or more totally dissimilar shows. Almost all of them are working on a spec or assigned feature script at the same time, and many write novels or short stories as well. In fact virtually every professional writer I've ever spoken to or seen interviewed is
usually juggling multiple projects. For one thing, most individual projects don't pay all that well, so a writer has to work a
lot to write full-time.
I think that it is doable
if the opportunity arises, and that JMS has just planned things to allow for that possibility.
Regards,
Joe
------------------
Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net
