Nov 23 | Chuckreturns to NBC with a special two-hour show on Sunday, Jan 10, 2010, before returning to its regular time slot, Mondays at 8pm on the following night. It's return to prime time television can be attributed to a successful fan renewnal campaign last year. CHUCK is a one-hour, action-comedy series that follows Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi, "Less Than Perfect") -- a computer geek who is catapulted into a new career as the government's most vital secret agent. This upcoming season will include some special guest stars, including Brandon Routh of "Superman Returns" who will play CIA agent Daniel Shaw in an episode, and the addition of SUBWAY restaurant as a major advertiser to the show. Chuck averaged a 4.0/6 rating last season, about eight percent better than the recently cancelled "Trauma". Ratings-challenged Heroes moves back an hour when Chuck returns on Monday nights. STAR TREK VOYAGER's Robert Duncan McNeill serves Chuckas a supervising producer and director.
Nov 17 | Originally hired as co-executive producer to help with the second half of the show's first season, Kevin Murphy has now taken the reins of Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica prequel on Syfy, according to The Hollywood Reporter. He now serves as an executive producer along with Ronald D. Moore, David Eick and Jane Espenson and oversees the day-to-day functions of the show.
Nov 12 | Star Trek star Zachary Quinto is loosely attached to star in the romantic dramedy Whirligig, reports Risky Business.Quinto would play the lead role in the independent Canadian film, which is aiming to shoot early next year. The movie centers on a man who, in a misguided attempt to woo an older woman, befriends the woman's adopted son.Chaz Thorne is directing the pic, based on a screenplay by Michael Amo, creator of the Canadian supernatural series "The Listener."
Nov 11 | The CNS Foundation, is hosting an on-line charity auction at www.charitybuzz.com. One of the items they are auctioning is a signed movie poster of the new Star Trek movie which has all the cast members and writers. The president of our organization is Carol Abrams, JJ's mother, and she arranged for the donation from Bad Robot Production Company. J.J. Abrams is also a major donor to their organization. The funds raised will go to help find a cure to neurological disorders in children. The auction link is here.
Nov 10 | Candice Bergen, Charles Lisanby, Don Pardo, Gene Roddenberry, Tom and Dick Smothers and Bob Stewart have been selected as the next inductees into the Television Academy's Hall of Fame. They will be honored at a Jan. 20 ceremony at the Beverly Hills Hotel. "This year's inductees have challenged and shaped popular culture, changed television for the better and entertained us royally while doing so," TV Academy Chairman-CEO John Shaffner said. More info at the Hollywood Reporter
STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE co-creators and executive producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga spoke with TrekWeb and several other media outlets this morning as part of a UPN conference call to discuss the final episode of the series. Both producers offered appreciation to fans for their years of support and said they hoped that "These Are The Voyages..." will pay homage not only to ENTERPRISE but the last eighteen years of the STAR TREK franchise.
"We were looking for a way to pay homage to these characters," Berman explained about developing the final episode, which will air on UPN May 13th. "We needed 'Jonathan Archer' to segue into being an epic STAR TREK hero and we felt the best way to do it was to find a perspective to look back. The idea of 'Commander Riker' having a big decision to make in his life and deciding to go onto the holodeck of the 24th century Enterprise-D and study certain events that happened at a very crucial time near the end of the mission of Jonathan Archer would be a good way to pay the homage to these characters that we wanted to."
"We also wanted to come up with a concept that was different and special and was able to straddle two generations of STAR TREK; something interesting and not just do a straight-ahead episode," offered Braga. "We kind of looked at the final three episodes as a sort of finale because the two prior to the final episode are a two-part story and do tap into very ENTERPRISE-oriented themes and character arcs and if these episodes had aired as the final episode we would've been very happy and it would've felt very good and epic to us. But then when it came to the very last episode we knew we wanted to get out of a totally plot-driven story and do something that was really character-oriented and centered on the internal dynamics of Enterprise and the people onboard. That's why we came up with this concept of Riker on the holodeck looking back at history of old heroes, in this case the Enterprise crew."
Not everybody was pleased with the finale script, notably Jolene Blalock, who made her dissatisfaction very public earlier this spring. Braga admits there was some resistence to the idea but that the final episode reaches beyond just this latest series.
"There were a couple of people who were slightly uncomfortable with the fact that we have NEXT GENERATION characters in the show and it is a different kind of episode, but there were no serious complaints. None of the actors have seen the episode so they can't be dissatisfied with how it came out [yet]. You have to remember that under normal circumstances most people probably would've thought this was a very cool episode because it has a great concept and is quite unique, but as the final episode of the series, emotions are running very high."
"There were some grumblings about bringing in [Jonathan] Frakes and [Marina] Sirtis in from another series," Berman continued. "The feeling that if this was going to be the finale of ENTERPRISE then why bring in characters from another series, but I think when people see the episode and realize that to be able to truly pay the respect to our characters the way we have, we've couched it in unique fashion to be able to look back on them. It's going to be a very positive response toward the ENTERPRISE crew."
Braga says the episode is a "thank you" to the fans of not just ENTERPRISE but STAR TREK as a whole.
"One of the reasons we did it is we wanted to say kind of a 'thank you' to people who watched not only ENTERPRISE but some of the other shows and did something that told us something about the ENTERPRISE crew but [also] about STAR TREK as a whole and this eighteen year-era of STAR TREK."
Season four has seen a complete love affair with existing STAR TREK lore, but could more strict adherence to continuity earlier in the show's run have saved it?
"We did feel we were utilizing continuity from TOS, we were doing it in smaller doses," Braga says. "But we were definitely doing it beginning with the pilot with references to Captain Kirk's original log and Zephram Cochran and many others. But it definitely was in smaller doses and it wasn't until season four when we consciously decided to go deeper and stronger with that."
"A lot of fans have stressed the fact that Brannon and I have ignored the continuity of STAR TREK and ignored the canon, and that could not be farther from the truth," Berman responded. "We live and breathe this continuity and we're dealing with every element to try and get this continuity going but at the same time [we're] on a weekly basis trying to create an entertaining television series. I remember the first season of TNG, we got 200 letters because by mistake there was an optical where a photon torpedo came out of a phaser port. We had to bend the rules a little bit, but a lot of the continuity that people talk about is not necessarily part of the legitimate canon of STAR TREK. There's a lot of stuff that people think are part of the rules that are fan-based creations, and there are rules within the continuity of STAR TREK that contradict themselves. We found ourselves in treacherous ground in that way and we tried to do the best that we could."
Braga added that he and Berman understand the value of the hardcore fanbase to STAR TREK and their show and that some of the more personal criticism has to be taken in stride.
"We have nothing but respect and admiration for these fans and obviously we need the fans - we wouldn't have a show if it weren't for the fans," Braga said. "The only times when it becomes irksome are when there are postings on the Internet - which is a relatively new phenomenon in terms of STAR TREK's longevity - that become really personal and vitriolic, but we try to take all that with a grain of salt."
Both expressed the feeling that ENTERPRISE accomplished a lot of what it set out to do and could have done more.
"We felt there was more potential to come, the series could've continued and we had a lot more that we would've liked to do.," Braga said. "However, we are very happy with ENTERPRISE. We set out to do a different kind of show that was more character-oriented and that's what we did and we're very proud of the first couple of seasons of the show. We took some course corrections in the third season and we were very happy with the way they paid off, and the fourth season has been a real barn-burner. If I have any regret it's that it didn't go on any longer. But I am very happy with the show for no other reason then that it was a great group of actors playing a great group of fully realized characters."
"We hired seven wonderful actors and the characters - in a sense as you produce TV each season the characters develop 25-odd episodes of back story each year - you get to peel the onion back a lot more and I think that our characters were growing and that it's a shame that they didn't get a chance to continue," Berman added. "I think that we would've had a lot of wonderful ammunition to develop the show further. I think it needs to be said that UPN has changed a great deal over the last few years, it has become a network that is skewed in a totally different direction than STAR TREK, and I think that's caused as much of the problem with our erosion as anything else."
Fan groups claimed to have raised more than $3 million to try and win the show a fifth season and while that may have been surprising, Berman and Braga say the fans' outpouring of support was not.
"We're not surprised by the reaction, we've always had a very passionate fan base," Braga said. "I think we've discussed a couple times if we were to go off the air what would the reaction be, and I think the fact that they've raised substantial sums of money - no one could have predicted that, that was a real eyebrow raiser - but we were not surprised at the passion. It's always been very vocal."
"Unfortunately the way television production works and the expense involved in producing a television series, a group raising even an impressive sum like $3+ million, it doesn't really make the kind of impact to try and put together a year's worth of television shows," Berman said.
Braga says the fan campaigns prove at least one thing, however.
"On a positive note, their efforts are not for nothing because it probably does on some level send a signal that there are people out there that still want STAR TREK, so this is probably not the final frontier for STAR TREK."
Does the demise of STAR TREK signal some kind of overall decline in the popularity of science fiction?
"It's never been unpopular, it's always been around," Braga said. "If you look at the top ten grossing films you'll probably find that most of them are sci-fi films. The science fiction genre has been around since the dawn of filmmaking; one of the first films ever made as a sci-fi film. It's always been popular. The subject matter changes and yesterday's STAR WARS may be today's MATRIX or may be tomorrow's STAR TREK, but it's always been around."
Berman reiterated that franchise fatigue played a factor, however unpopular the opinion is.
"Lots of television shows good and bad don't go right and it's hard to tell," he said. "There are a lot of people who criticize us for saying what I'm about to say but I do believe that there was some degree of fatigue with the franchise. I think that we found ourselves in competition with ourselves. I think that after eighteen years and 624 hours of STAR TREK the audience began to have a little bit of overkill with STAR TREK and I think that had a lot to do with it. If you take a look at the last feature film we did, NEMESIS, which I still think was a fine movie, it did two-thirds the business of the previous movie."
Braga agreed, saying the slide began long before ENTERPRISE.
"STAR TREK hit its apex during NEXT GENERATION, in fact when NEXT GENERATION was transitioning to DS9 and VOYAGER and since that time there has been an erosion in the fan base and it did not start with ENTERPRISE," he said.
Despite this, he says, ENTERPRISE was embarked upon with the utmost confidence.
"To be fair, we felt we were taking greater chances with the show all along the way," Braga said. "Not to say every one of them hit, [but] we never set out to do ENTERPRISE in any kind of 'rest on your laurels' fashion."
ENTERPRISE Mission Schedule | Logs by Season: 1234
Oh yeah, and the rest of Trek was a consistent paragon of acting and storying telling. I agree that ENT had a fair number of cheesy episodes, but no more so than any of the other series.
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'It was beautiful, we were selling rich women their fat asses back to them' - Tylor Durden
That must be a matter of tastes. You say I've got a bad taste, and I say you've got a bad taste. I liked ENT all the way. Unbelievable, eh? But actually, I find people like you unbelievable.
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