I'd kind of like to see someone do Brave New World a bit better. It was done in the 60s(?) but it's just a bit out of date today, while the book is absolutely something the world needs to think about now. A modern version might actually be even enhanced by certain elements of the modern style.
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Television
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List of Best Rated TV Series as voted by the Fediverse
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There was a modern attempt by Peacock in 2020. It got cancelled.
Once Upon A Time, Van Helsing (the Syfy tv show), Supernatural (specially the heaven lore), and Yellowjackets
You know what, I already did one but I'm gonna do another one: Lovecraft Country.
First episode did just about everything you'd want out of a Jim Crow-era supernatural horror road trip mystery. Felt like they really had a handle on the whole "fear of the unknown and incomprehensible" vibe that you don't see done well very often, the cast had great chemistry, and the whole theme of "the real incomprehensible eldritch abomination threatening human sanity is racism" was executed flawlessly. They walked a very fine tightrope between homage and condemnation of Lovecraft's whole... deal and nailed it in one.
And then the main mystery is resolved by the second episode and the whole thing devolves into a very uneven anthology of psychic snakes and angry ghosts and like, Nazi wizards worshipping what I think was just the regular devil and overall very known and comprehensible horrors that didn't really hold my attention for long enough to see if they even tried to tie them all together.
Man, all I wanted was a long-form cosmic horror story wrapped in a character-driven prestige TV period drama with some biting social commentary that doesn't suck. They don't make a lot of those!
You might like Watchmen. The TV show on HBO not the movie. It’s actually a sequel to the original run of comics and original ending.
Star Trek Voyager. I don't think I need to explain further, we all have the same ideas.
Looks like the upcoming game will do the fixing though, so that's good.
The original plan for the second season of Stranger Things was supposed to be a separate story with a few connections to the first season, each season being a different story and cast. I would have loved to see that actually happen, since the second season lost my interest a couple episodes in.
Heroes, too. Same deal.
I would love to watch something like The Walking Dead, but more chill. More to do with building a community, and re-imagining society. Surviving the zombies would be a topic, of course, but without all the extra evilness of the remaining humans.
And episodes that don't force me to increase my TV's brightness to the max.
Modern Family with Zombies
Santa Clarita Diet?
You know, I’ve never really fucked with that show. I watched it a couple times n it’s just fine-ish. Idk why tho, it should be up my wheelhouse but it doesn’t do it for me.
Sword art online. Drop the rape and incest beats entirely. It had potential to be a great anime about the meaning of life and instead largely ignored that possibility.
I have that show on my watchlist so thanks for the warning about themes.
None of the cringe happens until the end of the first season.
My recommendation for SAO is watch the first season and pretend like the rest doesn't exist.
Mine is legitimately just watch SAO abridged. It reworks story beats for a smoother story in addition to adding gags
Is that rework anything like full metal alchemist Vs. FMA brotherhood? Like starts the same but then goes somewhere else?
I already have a copy of the whole SAO so I’ll probably still watch it (I’ve watched some pretty questionable stuff all the way through just because I started it..) but if it’s genuinely worth watching both, even if just for the sake of comparison, I’ll try to find a copy.
Better character writing too.
I want a faithful adaptation of Asimov's Foundation, where it's the 1940s in space like in the novels.
Guy gets to planet, immediately buys a physical newspaper with physical cash. Takes a taxi cab. Everyone smokes constantly. Space soldiers are bribed with dishwashers and fridges, computers barely exist. Every desk has an integrated atomic ashtray to vaporise cigarette butts. Scientists carry bulky pocket calculators.
I’d love a proper retro-futuristic TV series. The latest Fantastic Four film showed that people will swallow a retro-futuristic vibe. Just something unironic with rayguns.
The Expanse. Or at least an ending to the Expanse that we have. I loved those books so much and they did the series so dirty.
I do accept that the last (I think it was) 2 books don't translate to film very well but at least they could have tried!
Dare I continue? I kind of switched off from it as the main female protagonist went from brilliant bad ass engineer to weak love struck teenager. It was galling. The story was so fun, but I was suffering through the teen drama.
I made it when they went through the thing and made discoveries on the planet. (Vague but failed at spolier tag).
Ya see that's how they did the books dirty.
Without spoilers, the books are kinda written like GoT where they change perspective a lot and in the books she had kinda just seen like 9/11 x 30 and then a little first hand and her best friend react to it in a very unexpected way and say he wanted more... They turned her PTSD into teen drama and when it wasn't wildly decried the teen drama eventually took over everything.
They really do the books pretty well up to that actual point though. And the events that happen do lead up to the main story points for the most part
Probably blaspheming here, but another show like Firefly would rock. Don't try to catch that exact lighting in a bottle, just give us space cowboys. In space.
Have you watched Killjoys? Very similar vibes
Yeah I love space westerns and unfortunately they're very uncommon and rarely done well. Firefly had the huge advantages of being Whedon at his peak with a great cast (as he often had) at the right time and with the courage to commit to the genre in a way I wish more would.
I don't want more Whedon, his golden era is over and I'm now convinced that he really only excels at the overlying ideas for a show and casting. What I want is someone who loves the genre to do something similar, but better.
'Cowboy bebop' did it three years earlier and much better. But then I'm very partial to jazz and film noir. Then got remade by the same people much grittier as a period piece set in immediately post-feudal police state Japan.
Edit: in kind of the same way a lot of Kurosawa films got remade as westerns
What's the remade show? Samurai champloo?
Yep. Same characters, secondary characters shuffled slightly.
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Rings of Power. I really wanted it to love it.
This one hurts. The potential was there, the visuals were genuinely incredible, the acting was solid, and I remember liking the music. But the writing was atrocious. It was like they went with the first draft. And also they piled on all those stupid prequel tropes like: "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to find out how this iconic character got their NAME!"
The music and the visuals are what I kept going back for, and the clearly-insane hope that someone on the writing team might have picked up any of the Silmarillion or History of Middle earth books and just given them some consideration
Heroes. First season was great, if they kept the concept of each season being a be set of people with special powers they could have made endless seasons and stories.
By now the "loads of people have superpowers" trope had been done to death (and the best incarnation was Misfits), what more would you want to see?
Misfits was amazing. I loved that it was people you wouldn’t normally give powers to, cinematically speaking.
writers strike killed heroes.
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Space Force, really good cast and concept but I wish they better writing.
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There was a miniseries on the SyFy channel called "Ascension" that, ostensibly, had the premise of being a murder mystery set on a massive generation ship launched at the height of the Cold War, which sounded fun in theory. 1960s Space Race technology, generations raised on Red Scare values despite the Soviet Union being a distant memory in every sense, a bunch of already-paranoid people trapped with a murderer with safety literally decades away - seems like there's a lot of room for a story there, right? Well, if the words "miniseries on the SyFy Channel" didn't tip you off...
spoiler, not that I recommend ever watching this show
They solve the murder by the end of the second episode, or at least they think they do. The subplot is nonetheless dropped entirely.
Turns out the ship never left Earth. It's in an underground bunker. The entire thing was a ploy to trap America's greatest minds in a self-contained generational think tank and steal all the super-cool technology they invent. Which also eliminates the 1960s Space Race aesthetic because the ship is now, by design, more technologically-advanced than modern Earth, leaving... exactly none of the original hook intact.
Except two episodes later they reveal it wasn't even that, it was actually part of a top-secret government eugenics program designed to breed telepathic super-soldiers, and the show ends with a child super-soldier using her nascent psychokinetic powers to teleport all the bad guys into space for realsies. And the real murderer is some guy we'd never even heard of working for the, again, top-secret government eugenics program, and his motives were... Either never explained, or explained after the part of the show where I stopped watching.
So anyway, a show that actually stuck to that premise would probably make for a pretty compelling yarn.
God this show pissed me off with how silly it got
I don’t want to read your spoiler because I have pretty low standards and enjoy things I probably shouldn’t just for the sake of it being novel; why do you not recommend it? Like is it at all any good and just disappointing how the plot was handled or bad generally?
It's a show that relies a lot more on plot twists than actual plot, and they're the sort of twists that heavily recontextualize the story in such a way that everything that happened prior is rendered kinda irrelevant and thus never followed up on, which kills a lot of the narrative momentum before it even really has a chance to build. There's maybe one halfway-decent "oh shit" reveal followed by a long series of "huh?"s and a big final "where the fuck did that come from?". And by the time it's two or three twists in, anything that seemed unique about the concept gets sidelined in favor of some increasingly credibility-straining political intrigue with token sci-fi elements.
And in general I kinda thought they did a poor job of making the spaceship feel like a spaceship, making the descendants of the Red Scare people feel like descendants of Red Scare people, and making the 1960s Space Race technology feel like 1960s Space Race technology, but in that annoying way where it's clearly not from a lack of budget, just from a lack of imagination. It's all just some very generic people with generic sci-fi technology living in a generic sci-fi city that just so happens to be shaped like a spaceship. And it's one of those shows where the main plot (term used generously) grinds to a halt every couple act breaks so everyone can fuck and backstab each other for no reason other than the characters that aren't part of the plot right now need something to do. And then the whole thing kinda just... stops.
All in all I found the whole thing dull, generic, more than a little frustrating to watch and harder to get invested in the longer it went on. The main characters weren't all that relatable, barely likeable and not particularly memorable; the mystery at the very heart of the premise was handled in a way that made it very uncompelling, and the ending fails to justify about 70% of the story that preceded it.
It kinda sounds like the same overall problems that 1899 had.. I watched that knowing the “big reveals every episode that makes everything pointless” problems (from comments much like yours) and was just as disappointed as I expected to be by that aspect, but it was still pretty good imo (probably blessed by lowered expectations), and I’m curious what another few seasons could have done after the big end reveal.. I’d probably have given it another season of my time. It was actually pretty well done, imho, all things considered. But then I have admittedly pretty low standards.
Although maybe this has lower production quality, by the sound of it. Any show that has to shoehorn multiple sex scenes when they don’t need them is just.. mmrf.. uncomfortable. So I expect to be uncomfortable.
I’m gunna give it a go with open eyes, I hope to be as disappointed as you were! Thanks for the detailed reply! I can’t wait to know exactly what you mean! :D
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