The New Road

Enterprise to be Cancelled

Word on the street is that Enterprise will be cancelled. I won't be shedding many tears. The show was just too conventional. The broadcast houses need to take some hints from HBO:

• The show is a serial but the episodes don't really share a sequence of events. Mini-plots don't start in one and resolve in another. Whatever Babylon 5 did, they did it right. If that means going to a single author or a small team of authors, so be it.
• Kill characters at any time during the season. Not just at the beginning or the end.
• Get out of the rut of having central characters and guest characters. Bring new people in and have other people leave all the time.
• Don't dredge up plots from earlier shows or from previous series.
• The characters are too perfect. Archer is always right. T-Pol always has "pole in butt" syndrome. They are too consistent. It's boring. And when they go out of character you know it's something stupid which is just going to resolve itself at the end of the episode. Look at the evolution of Carmela Soprano. That character has changed a lot and it was a genuine and realistic progression based in an understanding of what we all go through as we go through the stages of our lives.
• Never, ever, do clip shows.
• They need to put guns on the shuttlecraft to turn them into little fighters so that we can get an aircraft carrier in space thing going on, like Battlestar Galactica, or Andromeda.

There are more, but this would be a good start.

Stargate is also suffering from the same problems as Enterprise. Each season there are fewer and fewer reasons to watch. In the first couple of seasons they set up alliances and new enemies and really changed stuff around. Now it's just a boring character study.