ShannonA
06-13-2007, 07:30 PM
Some notes about changes in the upcoming season from http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=1&id=41899
Anthony Michael Hall, who stars as reluctant psychic Johnny Smith in USA Network's The Dead Zone, told SCI FI Wire that the show feels like new again thanks to major changes both in front of and behind the camera going into the sixth season. "We've moved from Vancouver to Montreal this year," Hall said in an interview.
Hall said the change has been good for a lot of reasons. "It's been nice to take it to a new city and have all those production changes occur," he said. "Like, we have a new writing staff, new directors, a new cinematographer, all these things that keep it fresh. It makes it new, in a way. And at the same time, it's been a challenge from a production standpoint of catching this whole French-Canadian crew up to speed on how we do the show. But they've all adapted really well."
The new season starts on Sunday.
I'll have to admit that I've been hot and cold on The Dead Zone. There have been some entirely brilliant individual episodes, mostly centering on interpreting Johnny's abilities in interesting ways, and I like the core concepts of the overarcing clash between Smith and Stillson.
But I think the show runners have generally done an X-Files-style poor job of developing this arc. The worst part has been its grossly episodic nature. You'd have an arc episode at the start of the season, maybe one or two in the middle, and then one at the end, and beyond that the arc was pretty much ignored in between, even when it didn't make sense to do so. And when you jumped back into the arc, it was as if we'd always been there, and you had to remember things that were in some cases a year old as if they were the previous episode.
I also feel like it's floundered a bit, particularly with that one Johnny-in-the-future season which came out of nowhere, and then was unceremoniously thrown in the river at the start of the next season.
So I feel like the show has a lot of potential that's generally been squandered.
But I'll still watch season 6 starting this week.
Anthony Michael Hall, who stars as reluctant psychic Johnny Smith in USA Network's The Dead Zone, told SCI FI Wire that the show feels like new again thanks to major changes both in front of and behind the camera going into the sixth season. "We've moved from Vancouver to Montreal this year," Hall said in an interview.
Hall said the change has been good for a lot of reasons. "It's been nice to take it to a new city and have all those production changes occur," he said. "Like, we have a new writing staff, new directors, a new cinematographer, all these things that keep it fresh. It makes it new, in a way. And at the same time, it's been a challenge from a production standpoint of catching this whole French-Canadian crew up to speed on how we do the show. But they've all adapted really well."
The new season starts on Sunday.
I'll have to admit that I've been hot and cold on The Dead Zone. There have been some entirely brilliant individual episodes, mostly centering on interpreting Johnny's abilities in interesting ways, and I like the core concepts of the overarcing clash between Smith and Stillson.
But I think the show runners have generally done an X-Files-style poor job of developing this arc. The worst part has been its grossly episodic nature. You'd have an arc episode at the start of the season, maybe one or two in the middle, and then one at the end, and beyond that the arc was pretty much ignored in between, even when it didn't make sense to do so. And when you jumped back into the arc, it was as if we'd always been there, and you had to remember things that were in some cases a year old as if they were the previous episode.
I also feel like it's floundered a bit, particularly with that one Johnny-in-the-future season which came out of nowhere, and then was unceremoniously thrown in the river at the start of the next season.
So I feel like the show has a lot of potential that's generally been squandered.
But I'll still watch season 6 starting this week.