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Fox TERMINATOR series: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (1 Viewer)

Robert Floto

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According to the Sci-Fi Channel News, Variety is reporting that Fox has committed to a pilot for a Terminator-themed TV series called The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and that Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar's C2 Pictures (which made Terminator 3) has a deal with Warner Brothers and War of the Worlds writer Josh Friedman to develop the series.

I must admit I'm not quite sure how I feel about this...

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire2005/i...ory=0&id=33223
 

Mikel_Cooperman

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But we already know the outcome of the character so why even watch???
I thought it was lame the way they explained her out of the movie in the first place
 

TravisR

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I haven't seen a frame of this but it'll be better than Terminator 3. Will the series also take the main theme of the first two movies that you make your own fate and change things for the better and say that that's wrong and Judgment Day is inevitable?
 

Inspector Hammer!

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This won't work.

The major distinction between this proposed series and Smallville is that Clark Kent's pre Superman years have, until now, gone largly undocumented, we never got to see him grow up, experience life in school and slowly aquire the building blocks that will lead him to becoming the Man of Steel.

In short, there was a lot of interesting stuff to be told about Clark Kent. Not so of this series, but let's walk through it shall we...

In the first film she is in her early 20's and working as a waitress, everything before that is your basic tale of a normal girl, pretty ho-hum stuff so we can't use that part of her life for a series because it would be boring as sin.

Next, we see her in T2 where it's ten years later, had her son, she's toughened herself up by training with various tough guy types about weapons and the like, tried to blow up a computer factory, got caught and is now in a mental institution. Again, there is nothing of substance there that would make a series worth watching, who wants to see her doing all these things when we already know she did them from the dialogue? All of that stuff is very cool, but not interesting enough to follow on a series.

And finally in T3 she has died, but in the previous years she thought the war was over so she most likely didn't do anything really Earth shattering that we need to see play out during a tv series. Sure, she may have had suspicions that it wasn't really over, but that certaintly isn't enough to base a series on.

My point to all of this is that we have seen virtually every interesting aspect of Sarah's life play out already on-screen in the films, and what we didn't get to see we were told about, and those unseen parts of her life aren't worth a series.

Nothing to tell here, folks, move along...

Now, a series set in the future during the war between man and the machines would rock so hard! :emoji_thumbsup:
 

Will_B

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I would. Hearing a line of dialogue versus watching 13 or 22 hours of action/adventure/drama in a series are an entirely different experience.

Why read a book when the cover flap says what happens?
 

Inspector Hammer!

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But, Will, it is just so pointless and uninteresting to see her do these quite frankly redundant tasks when the conclusion has already been reached and we have a very clear picture of what has happened to her. The tasks described in the films do not warrent anymore time or effort put towards them.

So she slept around with grunt types, big deal, John explains that sufficiantly when he and the Terminator are working under the truck in T2, so she tried to blow up a factory, yawn, we've seen where that got her so she wasn't even successful. These events are fine when given in dialogue, but stretching them out to a series is a case of spoon-feeding the audience unimportant information in the grand scheme of things.

I am not against a series based on The Terminator, but Sarah's life is not interesting enough to base a series on when we've already witnessed all of the events that mattered in the films themselves and have seen the end result.

Like I said, the first 20 years of her life are incredibly uninteresting since this was her pre-Kyle years when she was a normal young woman, so we can rule that out right now. In the ten years between T1 and T2 the only significant thing she did was give birth to John and prepare him for his destiny, don't need to see that, either. Then, in between T2 and T3 nothing happens because she believes that they stopped the war.

If they decide to base a series off of her and actually show what was said in the films, it would, IMO, be an insult to the intellect of the fans who have enough information already from the films on what happened.

If they want to do a series on The Terminator, they're looking in the wrong place by basing it on Sarah.
 

Inspector Hammer!

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If they insist on following Sarah Connor for this show, agreed, I don't see it lasting long.

The Star Wars show on the other hand could possibly work if done right IMO.
 

MickeS

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I agree with John, for the most part. However, there are various aspects of the time they are going to be covered that are interesting, and could work in a series format. I'm thinking of the development of Skynet and the research at Cyberdyne Systems. If characters from that aspect of the story are incorporated into the series, parallelled with the story of "the resistance" that Sarah is starting up, it could make for decent drama. And they should change the incredibly bland title to something more eye-catching, like "Terminator: The Road To War" or something more ominous.
Still, nothing exactly earth shattering in this part of the story... it's the Terminator that makes the Terminator movies interesting, without that, I just don't see much of value.
 

Will_B

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Her son knows she tried to blow up a factory, but what else did the mercenary-trained Sarah do? Probably a lot.

Assume that like Battlestar Galactica there's very little budget for endoskeletons, the producers would therefore likely be going for the angle that there are some people infiltrating the culture who are Terminators sent back in time to ensure the development of the various nefarious technologies that would ensure doomsday. Plus she'd be fighting against the development of time travel, as well as against Cyberdyne Systems and related AI progress.

Her freak-out upon seeing the T800 again in T2 does not mean she never saw any other Terminators, it could mean just that the one that looks like Arnie is particularly terrifying to her since it confirms that all the BS her therapists were telling her was wrong.

There is even room for her winding up in the future, if they want to do some scenes of Sarah continuing her fight in the ruins, since from T3 we know that eventually she seemed to die of natural causes and her body vanished. Maybe she found a way to go to the future that gave the appearance of her current body dying. Who knows. A lot of room for suspense here.

The pitch probably went "It's a mercenary version of Jennifer Garnder on Alias, with the human-looking cylons of Battlestar Galactica, on Earth!"

The general concept of a person who is fighting crime, but who must do so covertly, is a pretty reliable vehicle for suspensful shows.
 

Mikel_Cooperman

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I saw a poll at TV guide.com asking people if they would watch it and it was like 75% No, they wouldnt.
It's doomed.
 

Todd Stout

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But... how many people read TV Guide (or tvguide.com) since they ruined it...uh... I mean chaged it? I'm not sure if I trust their poll.

I'm kind of interested in seeing what they come up with. I guess time will tell if they have a hit on their hands.
 

Inspector Hammer!

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If they go with the Sarah angle, it won't last, wait and see. But hey, if i'm wrong i'll be the first to say so. ;)

Series based on the Terminator...good idea.

Having it revolve around the dull, hum-drum and not so pleasant life of Sarah Connor when we already know what happened...bad idea.

Contemplate this if you will, here we have an opprotunity to have a series set in the future war between man and Skynet, an opprotunity that is dripping ripe with untapped stories and exciting avenues that could be explored.

New material vs old, redundant material? Hmmm, which to choose?
 

Will_B

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Wow, I never knew people disliked the Sarah Connor character so much. I thought she was a great character. Strong, gun-toting, torn between motherhood and stopping a terrible future... to me, that is what drove the Terminator films, and it is why T2 in particular was a good film.

"Dull and humdrum" couldn't be a more inaccuratre description of her, unless you are referring to her life as a waitress before Terminator 1.

In fact her life was probably more interesting than the chick from Alias'. And that made a pretty good series.

I can just imagine how difficult it may have been for her, a regular woman, kind of crazy, to become accepted by the mercenaries and weapons dealers South of the Border that we learned she befriended in T2. How did they become convinced that she was what she said she was... well, there's a several-episode story arc right there.
 

Inspector Hammer!

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I don't dislike Sarah, I think she's great, but when it comes down to it she isn't a very likable character and following her exploits for an entire series is going to be boring as sin.

They're missing the boat by following her when the juicy stuff is in the future war. In fact, what they need to do is forget about a fourth film and pick up right after the events in 'T3' for the series.

It would be INFINITELY more interesting to follow John as he grows and matures into the future saviour of mankind than to follow his mother.
 

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