In the US: Thursdays, CBS All Access In the UK: Fridays, Amazon
What do you want in a revival show – new stories or old stories? It’s a question particularly relevant to science fiction TV, which often has legions of fans particularly keen on deciding what’s good and what’s bad according to a set of rules they’ve devised that normally involve the word ‘canon’.
We’ve seen it repeatedly with the likes of Doctor Who, which chose initially to be as mainstream as possible when it was revived in 2005, by avoiding mentioning anything much to do with the show’s past in case it was perceived as being too nerdy.
Jamie McShane, Patrick Stewart and Orla Brady in Star Trek: Picard
Let’s look that up
Star Trek: Picard, on the other hand, is going straight in with the nerd fodder. The show resurrects Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s most popular character, 14 years after he’s retired from Starfleet because he believes it’s become morally bankrupt – thanks to events that happened asa result of the movie that killed the franchise roughly 18 years ago, Star Trek: Nemesis.
Retired to his family’s French vineyard where he can speak bad French to his dog and have some migrant Romulans with Irish accents as live-in staff/egalitarian help-mates, Picard is nevertheless dreaming about Commander Data still. Or maybe it’s B4.
Then up pops a girl (Isa Briones) with superpowers (of a sort) who has been dreaming of Picard, but doesn’t know why (or even who he is), and whom various dark suited people with guns have been trying to abduct or kill – but doesn’t know why. And then it turns out that Data was painting pictures of her 30 years previously.
What’s going on? Will it be enough to lure Picard back into action? And how much of it will need hyperlinks to Wikipedia for normal people to understand what’s going on?
In the US: Wednesdays, 8.30/7:30c, Fox In the UK: Not yet acquired
The trouble with not being a genius – at least if you’re a writer writing about genius – is by definition, you’re not smart enough to work out what it must be like. Sherlock Holmes can imagine himself into the minds of lesser people; lesser people cannot imagine the thoughts of Sherlock Holmes.
Hence Elementary.
Interestingly, what seems to happen as a result is that the lesser people – let’s call them writers – imagine there must be a fundamental problem with the genius that renders them in some way lesser to the writers. The writers become the geniuses, as do their audiences.
This common failure of imagination usually manifests itself in the idea of inferior social understanding. Gosh, smart people must be really bad with other people who aren’t as smart as them, hey? Men, women, boys, girls – they may know one end of a microscope from another but can they tell when someone’s upset with them? No, of course not. Not like us regular, writer types.
Witness Numb3rs and Scorpion, for example. And now Outmatched.
