I quit watching after several episodes because it devolved into High School level drama of who is fucking you and totally unwarrented flip-flops every episode of people being loyal, betraying, hating someone then in love with them etc. And (mostly) starbuck screaming, crying then totally forgetting she was overacting in the next scene. It was simplistic, base, boring and not sci-fi. It was "drama" aka soap-opera.
("Lost" was an extremely promising SF show that claimed to have a plan, but was revealed not to. Which is unforgivable when the attraction of the show was figuring out the mystery. My own theory is that the wildly successful first season led to the writers purchasing too much celebratory cocaine, and subsequently just phoning it in, while the business people were happy to milk it like a soap opera.)
Frankly, I find him to be the most overrated writer and director in Hollywood because of this. I find everything he does to be borderline unwatchable. Though with his recent criticisms for Star Wars and Star Trek, it does feel like his audiences are starting to lose their love for him too.
The Star Wars sequels definitely suffered from the fact that Abrams just threw a lot of shit at the wall to see what stuck, then Johnson saw it was all shit and took the story into a different direction, and then Abrams lost his shit in the final installment.
Can we please just get back to writing proper stories again?
It's actually astounding that they would treat one of the most lucrative properties in history the way they did. Maybe they just assumed Star Wars was so big it couldn't fail.
It didn't come out well, was muddled in other crap, and the whole trilogy was crippled by two arguing directors, but that basic idea was solid. If that was indeed the intention.
I also liked the first half of The Force Awakens, when it was still about the Search for Skywalker, before it turned into Death Star 3.
Combine the first half of TFA with the good bits of TLJ, and you've got a good story.
They planned a trilogy without writing it? They just shot ⅓ of a trilogy with no plan whatsoever of what should happen next?
Lucas then compounded things by selling the rights to Disney, a company famed for milking their IP.
Much as I enjoy the occasional Star Wars saga, I never really considered Lucas to be a great steward of the franchise either.
The kelvin timeline from when he rebooted Star Trek is sort of mystery box but then we learn who Nero is in a coherent way early on as well. I did not like that JJ destroyed Vulcan and frankly made a confusing alternate, darker timeline at all. The reboots are good movies but they were not good Star Trek movies. Missed opportunities to explore the Roddenberry style themes of humanity and deep moral questions under a backdrop of optimism.
Yeah those things are great, but spending 15 minutes showing every member of the bridge crew standing up, and repeating "we are Starfleet" every episode kinda starts to get old after a little while. The shows have been great otherwise, but I'm wondering if they are making this over the top on purpose, or if they are just missing the point a little bit.
I couldn't stand all the unbelivable behavior. When you don't know anything about someone yet, then you can be forgiven for falling for deception from them. But once you do catch them doing something inexcusable, why the f have you forgotten all about that an episode or two later? And then act all devastated when the already known bad guy is bad again later... Seemed to be happening in all different directions with all different characters at different times. I never watched more than a handful of episodes before I wrote it off as pointless contrived drama resulting mostly from inexplicable behavior from the victim(s)-of-the-day.
Just to be clear, X Files was never my favorite show, just another show that ended up having no plan, but mostly didn't piss you off for being stupid, so much so that it could get away with being aimless for a long time.
Another way to say it, X Files ended up being pointless, but it didn't feel pointless all along the way. Lost felt pointless immediately and never didn't (for the admittedly short time I gave it).
I recall liking Lost early on, when it seemed that they were all in purgatory, and, one by one, we'd learn their backstories, as they found redemption on the Island.
There has been plenty of hit shows prior to Lost, but I think it was one of the forerunners of the modern TV show, where the producers were planning on making something complete rather than just an infinite ratings monster.
Kinda like how GoT fell off in the last season.
Martin is famously slow at writing the books, but that lead to some really deep and complex storylines. However when you try to compress that process into < 1 year and with different writers at the helm as well, then you’re inevitably going to end up with something that feels rushed and stripped of any substance.
I.e. the TV series looks bad compared to the books because they had to tackle the hard part and Martin hasn't yet shown he'll do better.
(One of the main reasons a side startup of mine fizzled a few years ago was because neither of us wanted to be the CEO, and we didn't know how to find one we'd trust not to kill the magic that would get us the users in the first place.)
Lost was obviously in this category.
A five year mission is a much better premise.
This is what I hate about most TV series these days, the writers value conflict over character. This basically prevents any actual character development, or even any character identity at all, as the character changes from episode to episode. This is what makes a series forgettable.
Roddenberry forbade intra crew conflict as a plot device, so Star Trek has identifiable character that people still remember. BSGs characters are already forgotten, because they lacked identity.
I only watched bits and pieces and it never quite connected with me.