Not so frequently global
I've just been watching the pilot episode of Global Frequency. As usual I'm late to the party on this on. The pilot's been around since June of this year, but I've seen it now, so I can rant about it.
For those of you who don't worship in the Church of Warren Ellis, Global Frequency was a comic book published a couple of years ago about a secret organisation that dealt with all the weird stuff, generally saving the world from threats it never realised existed. It was a sort of Thunderbirds for grown-ups and I got very excited when I heard Warner Bros had picked up the TV rights. OK, not so excited that I sat up at nights just counting the days until I could see Miranda Zero and Aleph on the small screen, but I thought it would make for better entertainment than most of the pseudo-reality shite that's pumped out these days.
The pilot episode more than lived up to my expectations. Great script, fine actors, enough money spent on sets and locations. All in all it was top notch telly. Can't wait for the series.
But I didn't see it on the telly. Nor, I suspect will I ever be able to. And there won't be a series. It seems that the great and good at Warner Bros decided that Global Frequency wasn't good enough for their network, or that it didn't fit into their viewer demographic, or perhaps that they just didn't know how to handle something of such originality.
Pity those poor network executives. They have to make money from advertisers, and advertisers aren't hugely interested in creative talent, more on getting the maximum number of bums on the couch in front of the tube. So the good shows make it to a single season and then get canned, like Firefly, or languish as pilot episodes - tantalising glimpses of what might have been.
On the other hand, the central premise behind Global Frequency is a bunch of ordinary people getting together to achieve things where the big machinery of corporation and government either can't be bothered or is the problem in the first place. Even though the show has never aired, there's a huge buzz on the internet about it. Maybe, just maybe, the Global Frequency will win out on this one.
Well, you've got to dream
For those of you who don't worship in the Church of Warren Ellis, Global Frequency was a comic book published a couple of years ago about a secret organisation that dealt with all the weird stuff, generally saving the world from threats it never realised existed. It was a sort of Thunderbirds for grown-ups and I got very excited when I heard Warner Bros had picked up the TV rights. OK, not so excited that I sat up at nights just counting the days until I could see Miranda Zero and Aleph on the small screen, but I thought it would make for better entertainment than most of the pseudo-reality shite that's pumped out these days.
The pilot episode more than lived up to my expectations. Great script, fine actors, enough money spent on sets and locations. All in all it was top notch telly. Can't wait for the series.
But I didn't see it on the telly. Nor, I suspect will I ever be able to. And there won't be a series. It seems that the great and good at Warner Bros decided that Global Frequency wasn't good enough for their network, or that it didn't fit into their viewer demographic, or perhaps that they just didn't know how to handle something of such originality.
Pity those poor network executives. They have to make money from advertisers, and advertisers aren't hugely interested in creative talent, more on getting the maximum number of bums on the couch in front of the tube. So the good shows make it to a single season and then get canned, like Firefly, or languish as pilot episodes - tantalising glimpses of what might have been.
On the other hand, the central premise behind Global Frequency is a bunch of ordinary people getting together to achieve things where the big machinery of corporation and government either can't be bothered or is the problem in the first place. Even though the show has never aired, there's a huge buzz on the internet about it. Maybe, just maybe, the Global Frequency will win out on this one.
Well, you've got to dream
Comments
Actually it's been released as a Bittorrent, which took me a while to figure out, since I'm technologically challenged that way. I downloaded a copy of the comic first, which was stupid as I already have a hard copy.
But of course, I never downloaded the pilot. No, that would be theft. And theft is wrong.
Though given most of these pilots are presumably consigned to some dusty archive forever more (probably alongside the Ark of the Covenant), it seems a pity they aren't made widely available to the public, either freely or otherwise.