The truth is usually just an excuse for a lack of imagination
So what would happen if a show with this promotional image was actually produced right now is that it would be a buddy cop style romantic dramedy / spythriller starring Garak and Bashir.
Garak would be quixotic and aloof, Bashir studious and empathetic.
Garak would usually end up getting most of the girls, but to counter this Bashir would eventuslly find his true love.
And all of this would basically be set as the two of them randomly encountering each other, somehow in some kind of utterly contrived scenario that enables them both to basically need to sleep around partly for survival and partly to stop some new kind of dystopian society genocide plans.
Obviously there are lots of spy thriller style fight scenes and love betrayals and what not.
Garak is of course still a tailor as a front, and when he dispatches enemies he delivers one liners like ‘well that puts a pin in that’’ after he just /literally/ murdered some one with like knitting needles, the bad guy lying dead on the ground with a knitting needle sticking out of his ear canal, blood pooling.
There ya go, thats what this image made me think of.
The tone woukd be all over the place to the point it gives the audience whiplash and makes the main characters come of as somewhere between absurd caricatures of actual people, and maniac psychopaths.
Youd cut from funny sex scene joke to other storyline with like brutal fight scene, and then theyd both like meet up at a space bar and just yuk yuk as if these were equivalent and normal parts of roughly comparable and standard lives.
Sorry, you were expecting a contemplative character study?
Those are /hard/ to write.
We dont do that any more.
Sure, but no matter how bad the writing is that show will be a hit on the strength of the concept alone.
See thats the terrifying thing.
At this point, I might even watch this ludicrous show, as it would at least probably be entertaining.
So far in the last 5 years it basically seems like film and tv style media, with a few notable exceptions, has just absolutely gone down the shitter compared to what has existed before.
For christs sake its even happened to Anime too. Again, there are some notable exceptions, but good lord so much crap is just, what if we do exactly the same thing other show did, but mash it together with a bunch of elements from either another successful show, or made it edgier, but only superficially, or we just swapped the time period or theme.
(Please dont get me started on how none of the fans of Neon Genesis Evangelion seem to understand that the reboots are literally mocking, insulting, and making fun of the fans who completely did not understand the actual message of the original series. Or how the Matrix Revelations receiving largely the same criticisms broadly received by Reloaded and Revolutions also indicates the vast majority of fans or viewers completely missed the point)
I believe the Red Letter Media guys basically seem to actually be kind of hopeful, as Mike isnt as /actually seriously suffering from actually real alcoholism/ as he was a few years ago, because they know the industry, and are expecting basically a massive collapse that will force it to go through a sort of rennaissance of trying a whole bunch of low budget concepts that theyd previously never consider, with a bunch of total unknowns, and they know the last time that happened to hollywood it did produce a lot of insane garbage, but also a lot of insane stuff that is we now refer to as groundbreaking and hugely influential.
Basically they seem to be banking on a kind of reset of the grand karmic cycle of entertainment media.
I hope to god they are right.
This is an excellent critique of Hollywood.
And I’m part of the problem. If what you just described got made as a Fast and Furious spin-off (with the DS9 actors), I would watch it.
I’m so sorry. But not enough to not watch it.
I really do… Is that so bad?
