Is Terra Nova going to make it?

Anyone remember BATTLESTAR GALACTICA? The real one, not the one SyFy did.

Most expensive TV show ever, at the time, and it made it a whole season, but due to costs and threats from Lucas ("It's just like Star Wars! I'll sue!") ABC let it go after one season.

They later tried to bring it back, but with the lower budget and poor planning (initially none of the original cast were to be used), the "second season" tanked after a few episodes.

All later efforts to bring it back as a continuation (no matter who was behind them) had one common thread- "The events in the second season never happened."

This has me concerned again. Likely to be renewed but so expensive Fox is saying "Let's only do a few episodes each season"?

Worked well for "V", didn't it?

Oh well, I suppose I can just throw another set of recorded DVD-Rs away if the show gets killed on a cliff-hanger.

Steveknj said:

I like it. It's not the best show around, but it's entertaining and I can watch with my 12 year old daughter, so there's that. But perhaps there's only 13 episodes because...ummmm...Fox's schedule from January on is dominated by American Idol, a cheap show to make that makes the network oodles of money. So they keep the schedule as open as possible for as many AI episodes as they can broadcast,and fill in with less expensive shows, like Traffic Light, which is what they did last year. And with the success of X-Factor, I wonder if they do the same thing next fall, and just not bother spending the money on anything decent, when they have another cash cow to dominate the schedule.

Click to expand...

Still, Fox has to fill the schedule with something, especially if, as expected, this is the last season of House. (Then again...time to stat another unfounded rumor: the real reason they demanded a major pay cut from the main actors on The Simpsons is to have enough money to make Hugh Laurie an offer he just can't refuse for "just one more season" of House.

Then again, if they go ahead with the much-rumored Glee spinoff with Lea Michele and Chris Colfer, the schedule can look like this:

Monday: NYADA (the Glee spinoff); Masterchef / Hell's Kitchen
Tuesday: Glee; Raising Hope; New Girl
Wednesday: X Factor / Idol
Thursday: X Factor / Idol (results); Bones
Friday: Kitchen Nightmares; Fringe
Saturday: Cops; animation repeats
Sunday: animation (and football/NASCAR when applicable)

Terra Nova has one thing in its favor; they can "get away with" 13-episode seasons.

I think it's going to be hard for this show to find an audience. To be honest, I gave up in the first episode. The way the characters acted and the sets were too unrealistic for me to suspend disbelief enough to get into the story.

For example, the scene when the family enters their new house is a good example of what I mean. The dad has been living in prison and the rest of the family has been living in polluted slums. They enter their new house which looks amazingly furnished and decorated (what!?). They complain about how it looks and say they want to repaint and put down rugs (huh? Is there a Home Depot nearby?). The son compains that the dad deserted the family (yeah! in prison). The baby is worried that there isn't a place for her because she can't find her own bedroom (what? wasn't she living in an air duct in the last scene?) Just too many eye-rolling scenes for me to care about the story.

I can go along with a contrived situation, but I want the characters to respond in a believable way. "Twilight Zone" is an example of this done well. Each episode was a contrived situation, but the characters seemed to react in an appropriate way for what was happening. In TN I kept thinking, he wouldn't do that, she wouldn't do that, he wouldn't say that, that place wouldn't look like that, etc.