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The SciFi channel is officially on my shit list.
Last night and tonight, I've been watching Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. It's fantastic, as good as the four seasons of the series ever got (not going to be spoilery now, may write up a review later) and visibly benefitting from a considerably larger special-effects budget than they've previously had to play with.
But. The so-called "miniseries" is only four hours long. At least 40 minutes shorter than that, actually, what with the commercials. Actual run time, we're talking more like three, three-and-a-half hours.
In other words, it's a longish film.
On the bright side, I didn't have to figure out whether to use a 6- or 8-hour tape, or some combination thereof.
On the other hand, three or four hours is no replacement for the full fifth season of episodes that SciFi was under contract to buy from Farscape's production company, and screwed them (and us) out of.
Don't even get me started on the dren SciFi paid for with the money they stole from Farscape.
And then there's Earthsea.
Adapting a novel, or a series of novels, to screens large or small is always a challenge. It's impossible to keep everything in, and, particularly in the fantasy and science fiction genres, there can be numerous story elements which are either impossible or prohibitively expensive to depict. Some elements of a story will inevitably need to be truncated, or portrayed/narrated/explained in a way different from the original text.
None of these factors have any bearing on why I'm so ripshit over the way Sci-Fi is adapting Ursula K. le Guin's Earthsea books. (Yes, apparently they're condensing at least two of the books into the one four-hour microseries, but I'm not going to declare that's a mistake without seeing the thing first.)
Here's the problem.
Ursula le Guin made a point of populating her world of Earthsea with mostly non-white peoples: a wide variety of brown skin shades, a wide variety of cultures. There were a few characters we'd call white, but only a few. This wasn't just an affirmative-action gesture; it underlies, and is crucial to, many elements of the story.
SciFi cast everybody white. Everybody, with the two exceptions of Danny Glover as the Token Mystical Other (a blatant perversion of his character's status in the source material) and Kristin Kreuk as... a white girl played by a half-white, half-Asian girl who has demonstrated over and over again her inability to be a tenth as good at acting as she is at looking pretty.
I have actually seen people argue that SciFi "had" to cast the way they did, because audiences wouldn't be interested and advertisers wouldn't invest in a science fiction series with a handful of white characters outnumbered by black, brown and tan characters. Yeah. Suuure. Because the Matrix series was such a box office bust and never had more than a fringe following.
I'll just be over in the corner, growling.
Last night and tonight, I've been watching Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. It's fantastic, as good as the four seasons of the series ever got (not going to be spoilery now, may write up a review later) and visibly benefitting from a considerably larger special-effects budget than they've previously had to play with.
But. The so-called "miniseries" is only four hours long. At least 40 minutes shorter than that, actually, what with the commercials. Actual run time, we're talking more like three, three-and-a-half hours.
In other words, it's a longish film.
On the bright side, I didn't have to figure out whether to use a 6- or 8-hour tape, or some combination thereof.
On the other hand, three or four hours is no replacement for the full fifth season of episodes that SciFi was under contract to buy from Farscape's production company, and screwed them (and us) out of.
Don't even get me started on the dren SciFi paid for with the money they stole from Farscape.
And then there's Earthsea.
Adapting a novel, or a series of novels, to screens large or small is always a challenge. It's impossible to keep everything in, and, particularly in the fantasy and science fiction genres, there can be numerous story elements which are either impossible or prohibitively expensive to depict. Some elements of a story will inevitably need to be truncated, or portrayed/narrated/explained in a way different from the original text.
None of these factors have any bearing on why I'm so ripshit over the way Sci-Fi is adapting Ursula K. le Guin's Earthsea books. (Yes, apparently they're condensing at least two of the books into the one four-hour microseries, but I'm not going to declare that's a mistake without seeing the thing first.)
Here's the problem.
Ursula le Guin made a point of populating her world of Earthsea with mostly non-white peoples: a wide variety of brown skin shades, a wide variety of cultures. There were a few characters we'd call white, but only a few. This wasn't just an affirmative-action gesture; it underlies, and is crucial to, many elements of the story.
SciFi cast everybody white. Everybody, with the two exceptions of Danny Glover as the Token Mystical Other (a blatant perversion of his character's status in the source material) and Kristin Kreuk as... a white girl played by a half-white, half-Asian girl who has demonstrated over and over again her inability to be a tenth as good at acting as she is at looking pretty.
I have actually seen people argue that SciFi "had" to cast the way they did, because audiences wouldn't be interested and advertisers wouldn't invest in a science fiction series with a handful of white characters outnumbered by black, brown and tan characters. Yeah. Suuure. Because the Matrix series was such a box office bust and never had more than a fringe following.
I'll just be over in the corner, growling.
