television!

[jazzfish]

I have a vague desire to drown myself in television. Which of these, o lazyweb, would you recommend? (ETA: I've seen none of these except the BSG pilot)

• Babylon 5
  
• Farscape
  
• Battlestar Galactica
  
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
  
• Something else entirely

(No poll because I'm more interested in the Whys.)

Not that this will be happening anytime soon: the next four months or so are kinda busy. But once we get settled I may do something like 'i made my wordcount for the week so i get another episode of X.'

Comments

[ndkid.livejournal.com]

Of the bunch, I consider the overarching plot of B5 to be the least problematic; JMS had an overarching plot he wanted to achieve, and he did so, with one or two major twitches here and there. The fifth season is a bit tacked on, and I don't consider it particularly valuable, and it has the same transcendental ending problems as pretty much every serial sci-fi show, but it also has the benefit of having a bunch of plot pieces you've seen written onto cards before. :-)

[jazzfish]

heh. That /is/ one of the motivators behind including B5 in the list.

[jsciv.livejournal.com]

Honestly, Avatar has better plot coherency than B5. For better or worse, S5 is part and parcel of the show and it just didn't work: not only was the story compressed into S4 and then unpacked weirdly back out into S5, but the pride in its scientific accuracy just went totally downhill when the FX company changed in S5.

Avatar was beginning to end the story conceived and expressed by its two creators. It doesn't break production ground like B5 did behind the scenes, but what gets told onscreen beginning to end is exactly what they intended to tell.