Yeah, some stories only make sense if you take the time to tell them right. And it is about creating an alternate reality where people want to spend some time ( Twin Peaks a good example - much better than Lynch movies IMO)

There's a 6 hour Dune that isn't bad but I agree, that is one that it would be hard to translate to 2 hour movie.

My understanding is that a lot of people like Mehmet are now looking at TV first. And look at the actors - Holly Hunter, Glenn Close, Forrest Whittaker, Kyra Sedgewick, Alec Baldwin - that are all looking for TV roles that give them a chance to actually develop a character and do some intelligently written stuff.


Didn't know backstory on Mira Furlan. Interesting. Completely agree about the stiffs that were the officers - the first guy - season one - was incredibly bad. But from day one you knew the aliens were worth watch (especially Furlan, Katsulas and Jurasik ... even the nephew who played Flounder in Animal House <s> )

>>>But that's the background, which you only see in flash-forwardses. What you see onscreen is a combination of road movie - chase - shoot our way through the lines. Ahnuld's influenced the thing by his very existence, it seems they kept adding stuff only to make room for him.
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>>Exactly, and that is why this kind of stuff is more interesting as a TV series. ( far superior medium to movies ) this is a writer's medium with a chance for storytelling and exploration of subplots.
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>>Think Babylon 5. Imagine writing a 5 season story arc before the first show airs.
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>Yeah. Too bad you get to have Mira Furlan at her best only once in a lifetime :). And I remember her when she was some sort of internal legend of the Yugoslav rock scene in mid-seventies (when she was probably a student at academy of arts somewhere, being mentioned on several albums whereas she didn't make a single sound :), and then in early eighties when she was getting top roles. Funny that you should mention Babylon 5, where the top officers were near catastrophic casting failures (except the guy who played Garibaldi, he's had a few good moments) while the actors playing the aliens were much better (Jurasik, and speically Andreas Katsulas).
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>>The amazing Battlestar Galactica his finished 3. Buffy ran 7 seasons, Angel 6? The Shield is going into 6 I think. The Wire is on 5 now. Sopranos 6. Deadwood unfortunately many fewer. That's story telling like we've never seen before - even novels usually don't get that much time.
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>Let's not forget Stargate, which takes this long arc thing even further and wider (add SG Atlantis with its own set of long arcs in parallel, which coexists with it quite nicely). And you may have a point here - the pilot movie didn't make much sense, I remember the plot being riddled with holes from then online critics, but then the series was done much more seriously (where I don't mean the units of seriousness per aired minute, but rather the amount of forethought).
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>>Then think of how one could tell those stories in less than 2 hours.
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>>No doubt the best work now is being done on television. Movies are mostly special effects and packaging.
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>Reminds me of Lynch - Dune just wouldn't fit in two hours, no matter how much you omit from the plot. OTOH, Twin Peaks was exactly the right format.