My own self

Morridini writes:

Wow, Sean Bean even! Did not expect something like that. And Mark Addy isn't bad either.

Nope, he really isn't. He is, in fact, quite good. (And Bean is obviously Awesome). So I'm starting to feel quite optimistic to the quality of this pilot.

I will watch this! Naturally, I'll be unable to watch it on a TV near me unless a torrent site is involved.

But then, it wouldn't _be_ an interesting show if it wasn't continually threatened by cancellation and aired at weird times and habitually put aside for sports events ("Let's just put a handball game on, it's not like anyone watches Babylon 5 anyway").

My theory about this state of things is two-fold.

1) Genuinely Stupid People buy stuff they see on TV. They are predictable creatures, and easy to excite. They are the Dream Audience for anyone who wants to make a buck, and they are catered to. Why take a risk with more fickle, demanding audiences? You don't! You could buy a cheap show and air it in the middle of the night when you have nothing else to air, though. But you don't try to please the crowd that complains about your treatment of a show they adore, but refuse to support by falling for the advertising that goes with it. Liek, hell-o!

2) The Moneyhats That Be aren't invested enough in the genre to distinguish good SF/fantasy shows from bad ones. They only know that swords = geekery and spaceships = geekery IN SPACE. Thus they air swill and reinforce the preconceptions of the Dream Audicence that you've got to have a few loose bolts to enjoy this kind of thing. Liek, duh.

But yeah, I wish I could support shows like these, even though I will probably be kept from watching it legally, as it were. There really should be some kind of fund for SF/fantasy shows where those of a guilty conscience could support what they enjoy. Perhaps a Hedge Knight fund. THINK about it.

Well, HBO's other big recent fantasy-attempt, True Blood, is doing surprisingly well. (It's even quite good at this point, as the writing is quite great despite many of the characters being morons). Of course, that's a vampire-show, that's probably riding on the Twilight-wave. Still, I wouldn't discount this right off the bat, especially not with a big name like Bean involved in front of the camera. Quite honestly, I expect this pilot to have a sizeably better chance at getting picked up and going on for more than one season than most shows I fall for. The one big problem is that it'll have to have a huge budget, and we all know how it went the last time HBO produced a sickly expensive show that got tons of positive press. (They planned on ending Rome after one season, realised it got a lot more viewers than they thought, and said, ok, one more, but holy mother of God, that's it, this show's way too expensive and will never hold up as well now that The Sopranos is done and is no longer the lead-in. So they did season 2 and tore down the sets, which then turned out to go even better despite the lack of The Sopranos before it. Now they're fledgling to try to get a follow-up movie together.) So the fact that a show like this is going to be insanely expensive compared to basically any other show imaginable is a strong impediment. But other than that, I think its odds are reasonable at this point.

Interesting. I can almost picture the studio execs... "O noes, it keeps getting more popular! Quick, torch the sets and blame it on Nero!"

"And then let us build a huge new office building on top of the ruins - in solid gold!"

That explains the budget, then.