Quote:
|
Did Jerimiah get canceled, since he's working on something else?
|
1) A good producer can work on more than one project at a time. Did they have to cancel
Law & Order before Dick Wolf could do
L&O: SVU?
2) JMS has almost
always worked on mulitple projects simultaneously - like most other writers. (The long stretch when he was writing every single episode of
B5 and working on few other things was an exception. Even then he wrote several TV movies and started the ball rolling on
Crusade) While working on
Jeremiah for the past two years he was writing several comic book series and a feature film (the first several drafts of the big screen version of his
Rising Stars comic book.)
3) As it happens, JMS is no longer the show runner on
Jeremiah. He and MGM had creative differences about the future direction of the series, and he left. The show hasn't been cancelled (Showtime is just holding the last half of S2 back for broadcast in 2004 - not an unusual thing in the world of first-run pay cable series, especially given that
Jeremiah has more episodes per season than most other shows.)
Quote:
|
I don't have cable and therefore never saw an episode of the ill-fated "Crusade".
|
I think it can be. The thing you have to remember about
Crusade is that there was a tug-of-war between JMS and the network during production, and the show was shut down after only 13 episodes were shot - and before
any of them aired. (Shooting was ended in February 1999 and the episodes didn't air - as a "limited series" - until June of that year.) So it wasn't a matter of the show's being rejected by the audience.
What you have to understand is that the 13 surviving episodes were never meant to be seen as a block. Other episodes would have come in between them. (Because JMS's shows started out with a plan for each full seasons, shows were shot out of order to maximize efficiency. The final episode of
B5 S1, for instance, was shot half-way through the production schedule to allow extra time for the post-production people to work on the greater-than-usual number of FX shots.) Also TNT made changes to the show that created continuity issues with the episodes already shot. The plan was to go back and reshoot some footage late in the season to fix all this up, but production was halted before that ever happened.
Even with all of these problems, however, I think
Crusade was a worthwhile show - different than
B5 and with its own character, but still very much in the
B5 tradition. Warner Bros. will no doubt follow the same episode order that Sci-Fi did for the broadcast - leaving two episodes that were only produced due to network interefernce for the end, and to hell with continuity, and running the other 11 in the order that makes most sense for character and story development. JMS will no doubt explain all of this in his commentaries and interview, assuming that the set includes such extras (and I
am assuming that.
)
A
