(1) David Brin urges everyone to make a fashion statement for Back To the Future Day:
Okay so October 21 is “Back to the Future” Day,” when movie houses all over will be holding special showings of BTTF-II, to commemorate our crossing that particular frontier — when Marty McFly and Doc Brown arrived at the ‘future’ of 2015 from the year 1985. Here is a rundown of ways the film was eerily on target… and another… if you set aside hover boards and flying cars and hydrated pizzas. And Mr. Fusion, alas. Hey, everyone wear a DOUBLE TIE that day! I haven’t heard anyone else pushing that meme, so pass it on starting here!
(2) Jim C. Hines’ Icon report includes a photo of a group posed around the “Future Birthplace of James T. Kirk” monument in Riverside, Iowa. Hines is there with Ann Leckie, David Gerrold, Joe and Gay Haldeman, and some others I should probably recognize.
(3) Amanda S. Green considers possible outcomes of Amazon’s new move against fake reviews in “To Pay or Not to Pay”.
I can’t speak for Amazon but I have a feeling what we will see happening is that a number of reviews will simply drop off the site. These reviews will either be directly tied to the sites Amazon has suspicions about or will have key phrases that are oft repeated across other reviews. It is easy enough to code a data crawler to find such similarities. It is basically the same sort of tool that schools use to determine if a paper contains any plagiarized parts.
Amazon might go one step further. Right now, if you look at Amazon customer reviews, you will see some from verified purchasers and then those that aren’t. A verified purchaser is someone who actually purchased the item from Amazon. The only problem with this is it doesn’t reflect those who borrowed a book or short story under the Kindle Unlimited program. This may be the point where Amazon needs to add that as one of the descriptors. I know a number of authors, and readers alike, who have been asking Amazon to do just that. At least that way, people who look at reviews before buying something would have an idea if the reviewer actually put down money on the book in question.
There is always the possibility that Amazon will require you to have purchased an item from them before you are allowed to review it. I’ll admit to being torn about this option. That would keep reviewers like Shiny Book Review from posting reviews on all sales sites. It would kick out reviewers who receive free copies of books unless Amazon has them register as reviewers. This is a path I’m not sure I want to see them go down.
Right now, Amazon gives more weight to reviews written by verified purchasers. As they should.
(4) The Tiptree Award is looking for recommendations. Got one? Click and fill out their form.
Most of the books and stories that Tiptree Award jurors read to pick a winner are nominated by authors and readers. We need your suggestions. If you’ve read a work of science fiction or fantasy that explores or expands our notions of gender, please tell us about it by filling out the recommendation form below. If you have more than one, just fill out the form again with a new recommendation and submit it until you’ve told us about them all.
Recommendations close on the 1st of December, 2015.
(5) Fans and everyone seeking eyeballs for their blog are busy mining the newly-released Star Wars trailer for provocative material like – Who dies in the movie?
The first full-length trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens gave fans plenty to speculate wildly about, but one moment in particular is causing widespread panic across the galaxy — or at least, the Internet. Towards the end of the trailer (watch it here!), there is a one-second shot of heroine Rey (Daisy Ridley) sobbing over what looks like a dead body. So who dies?
(6) Geeks Are Sexy has photographic proof that Canada’s Newest Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is a member of the Rebel Alliance. Eh?
(7) Catherynne M. Valente delivers The Big Idea today at Whatever. You were warned!
Radiance doesn’t have a big idea at its heart.
It has about six. It’s a decopunk alt-history Hollywood space opera mystery thriller. With space whales.
Over-egging the pudding, you say? Too many cooks going at the soup? Gilding that lily like it’s going to the prom? I say: grab your eggs and hold onto your lilies because I am cannonballing into that soup FULL SPEED AHEAD.
(8) Brandon Kempner assesses the chances of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora getting a Hugo nomination.
The Hugo is a murkier award in 2016, given the turbulence surrounding it. 2312 took third place in 2013, and was also third in the nominations. Given the campaigns that are sure to take place in 2016, 3rd place is probably vulnerable to being pushed out. Add in that 2016 is a strong Hugo year (former Best Novel winners Robinson, Stephenson, Leckie, Walton, Bacigalupi, Scalzi, and Liu are all fighting for 5 spots, and that’s not even factoring in Puppy campaigns or buzzy authors like Novik). As a result, I think Robinson will miss the ballot, but a strong year-end push could definitely grab Robinson a spot.
As for metrics, as of mid-October 2015, Aurora has 2,535 Goodreads ratings with a 3.79 score and 264 Amazon ratings with a score of 3.7. Those aren’t great but they aren’t terrible. It’s a rare thing to see the Goodreads score higher than Amazon, but I couldn’t tell you what that means. I think around 1500 Goodreads / 100 Amazon is the cut off to be competitive, so KSR is well above that. Score doesn’t seem to matter for either the Hugos or Nebulas; VanderMeer won a Nebula last year with a 3.62 Goodreads score.
(9) Tobias Buckell is losing readers right and left. Mostly right. “Today’s passive aggressive fan mail: reader will not read more of my books because I don’t speak English English as my first language”
(10) Peter David “Just when boycotts couldn’t get any more stupid: Star War VII”
When the first “Star Wars” film came out in 1977, it was criticized for the overall whiteness of it. The one major black actor, James Earl Jones, wasn’t even given voice credit (his choice). This was answered with the introduction of Lando in the very next film, but still, mostly white.
So now the new film prominently features a black hero and there are actually idiots who are declaring it should be boycotted because of that? I mean, I knew there are people for whom Obama can do no right because of his skin color, but this is quite simply insane.
(11) But Gary Farber says it’s a fake boycott trolled by 4chan.Here’s one of those claiming credit.
https://twitter.com/The_Extrange/status/656225411773300736
(12) Meanwhile, in the interests of being fair and balanced, we bring you the A.V. Club’s post “Conservative pundit bravely comes out in support of the Galactic Empire”.
Star Wars’ Galactic Empire tends to get a bad rap. Oh sure, Emperor Palpatine started the whole thing by manufacturing a phony war to scare people into supporting a leader who would slowly take away their freedom in exchange for “safety,” the entire organization is suspiciously stocked with almost exclusively white human men, and there was that one time it destroyed an entire planet full of innocent people just to prove that it could, but is any of that stuff objectively evil? Conservative pundit Bill Kristol doesn’t think so, according to a tweet he posted this morning in response to a joke about how the Star Wars prequels encouraged conservatives to root for the Empire….
(13) Today In History:
- October 20, 1932 — James Whale’s The Old Dark House makes its theatrical debut.
(14) Today’s Birthday Boy:
- Born October 20, 1892 – Bela Lugosi. As they say at IMDB:
It’s ironic that Martin Landau won an Oscar for impersonating Bela Lugosi (in Ed Wood (1994)) when Lugosi himself never came within a mile of one, but that’s just the latest of many sad ironies surrounding Lugosi’s career.
(15) Today’s Birthday Book:
- October 20, 1955 – The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien published. The Wertzone pays tribute:
The Return of the King, being the third part of the novel, was released on 20 October 1955, completing the publication of the tome that had begun on 29 July 1954 with the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring. The Return of the King had originally been planned for release much earlier in the year, but Tolkien delayed it due to working on the book’s appendices, to the annoyance of readers (yet another epic fantasy trend begun by the Tolkmeister).
(16) Belfast-born writer C.S. Lewis is to be honored in his native city with a series of new sculptures depicting characters from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe reports the BBC.
Belfast City Council has commissioned six new pieces of public art, including Aslan the Lion and the White Witch.
They will be erected in a new civic square, currently under construction, at the Holywood Arches in east Belfast.
…As well as the lion and the witch, the six pieces of art also include sculptures of Mr Tumnus, Jewel the unicorn, Mr and Mrs Beaver and the Stone Table
(17) Belfast is also where the third C.S. Lewis Festival takes place from Thursday 19 – Sunday 22 November 2015, marking the 52nd anniversary of the death of the author, theologian, academic and creator of the incredible Chronicles of Narnia series.
Across 4 days of Lewis-related events will be reflections and assessments of the cultural significance of Lewis’ rich legacy, the impact he had on Belfast, as well as the strong influence his native city had on his vast body of work. There will be something for everyone with many magical and free events offered; it’s definitely worth checking out.
Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898. The C.S. Lewis Festival will recognise and celebrate both his life and his legacy to the world. Across 4 days of Lewis-related events will be reflections and assessments of the cultural significance of Lewis’ rich legacy, the impact he had on Belfast, as well as the strong influence his native city had on his vast body of work.
(18) Free lifetime memberships for trying it! One of the best book cataloging sites. LibraryThing launches in iPhone app.
We’re thrilled to announce the official LibraryThing iPhone App!
What it does. This is our first version, so we’ve limited it to doing the most basic functions you’ll need for cataloging on the go:
- Browse and search your library.
- Add books by scanning barcodes. Scanning to add is VERY FAST!
- Add books by searching.
- Browse and upload covers, using the iPhone camera.
- Do minor editing, such as changing collections and ratings. Major editing sends you to LibraryThing.
(19) Wait, you mean it isn’t fake? “This Software Lets Someone Else Control Your Face”
Researchers created expression transferring software that projects mouth, eye, and other facial movements onto another face in real time.
(20) “Life on Earth likely started 4.1 billion years ago – much earlier than scientists thought” reports Phys.org.
“Life on Earth may have started almost instantaneously,” added Harrison, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. “With the right ingredients, life seems to form very quickly.”
The new research suggests that life existed prior to the massive bombardment of the inner solar system that formed the moon’s large craters 3.9 billion years ago.
“If all life on Earth died during this bombardment, which some scientists have argued, then life must have restarted quickly,” said Patrick Boehnke, a co-author of the research and a graduate student in Harrison’s laboratory.
Scientists had long believed the Earth was dry and desolate during that time period. Harrison’s research—including a 2008 study in Nature he co-authored with Craig Manning, a professor of geology and geochemistry at UCLA, and former UCLA graduate student Michelle Hopkins—is proving otherwise.
“The early Earth certainly wasn’t a hellish, dry, boiling planet; we see absolutely no evidence for that,” Harrison said. “The planet was probably much more like it is today than previously thought.”
The researchers, led by Elizabeth Bell—a postdoctoral scholar in Harrison’s laboratory—studied more than 10,000 zircons originally formed from molten rocks, or magmas, from Western Australia. Zircons are heavy, durable minerals related to the synthetic cubic zirconium used for imitation diamonds. They capture and preserve their immediate environment, meaning they can serve as time capsules.
(21) A New York Comic Con panel on the economics of Star Trek gathered Trek writer Chris Black; Manu Saadia, author of the book “Trekonomics”; Annalee Newitz, founding editor of the culture site io9; moderator Felix Salmon, of Fusion; Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist; and Brad DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
“Gene Roddenberry tried to paint our future,” said DeLong, noting that we’ve gone far down that road. “We’re now, in fact, approaching post-scarcity in food and products.”
But, as Newitz pointed out, because “Trek” is a future where money no longer exists, people work because they want to but are therefore supported by other economies. To prove her point, she cited as an example “Measure of a Man,” an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” that centered on the character of Lt. Cmdr. Data, an android.
Even though Data is a crew member of the starship “Enterprise,” unlike his fellow crewmates, he’s a robot. But does that make him a person or Starfleet property?
“We’re constantly being reminded that slavery and low wages support the comfortable, ‘Enterprise’ living,” Newitz said….
Salmon, the panel’s moderator, pointed out that in 2016, “Star Trek” will turn 50 and Thomas More’s book, “Utopia,” will turn 500. He then asked the panel if there is anything utopian about “Trek.”
“We are problem-solving, puzzle-solving, status-seeking creatures,” DeLong said.
Krugman responded by saying: “People have an amazing ability to be unhappy. The problem with utopia is not the lack of scarcity — it’s people.”
[Thanks to Will R., Steven H Silver, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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Jim,
I think a number of American series were aimed at five seasons historically for syndication purposes, for example the producers of something like “Fringe”, even though they had “six to eight seasons worth of material. We see it as having certain chapters that would enrich the overall story, but aren’t necessary to tell the overall story. God willing, the network allows us the time to tell our complete story.” Ultimately that was five seasons.
I’m a bit sad that by excluding “limited series” we’re omitting a bunch of really good stuff.
Are their enough limited series to have their own bracket? There certainly are enough animated shows, especially if you add puppet shows.
From an abled perspective, my impression is that these assessments are awful to nightmarish, at best. I’ve had friends go off on rants, especially re: mental health. Though the worst I’ve ever heard wasn’t a friend’s, but the news story recently used as an exemplar for “Canadian Veterans’ Services are FUBARed”, of the man who had to come in in person for an assessment every year to prove his leg was still amputated.
@Cally
I’m idly wondering whether a limited series/animated/puppets combined bracket can be worked in around my other projects. I suspect not, but we’ll see how I feel once this and the films bracket are over. 🙂
Has anyone mentioned The Tripods?
Based on the books (a trilogy plus a sequel), but only two seasons (based on the first two books) ever made. (An argument can be made that only three seasons were ever planned.)
Ooooh, Tripods. I remeber watching that, but not much memory I’m afraid – I was in single digits back then I think.
Okay, my personal list, which if you’d believe it is the cut-down version. Combination of things I like now and things which hammer my nostalgia button (and I still like, but the nostalgia is probably pushing the needle a bit).
Farscape
Due South (no, really, it’s fantasy)
Star Trek: Voyager
Star Trek: Enterprise
Sticking up for the less popular Trek’s. 🙂
Battlestar Galactica (original series)
Wonder Woman
The Munsters
Blake’s 7
Warehouse 13
Red Dwarf
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Xena the Warrior Princess
Hercules: the Legendary Journeys
Life on Mars
The Mighty Boosh
Bewitched
I Dream of Jeannie
Might Morphin Power Rangers
Pushing Daisies
Sabrina the Teenage Witch
3rd Rock from the Sun
Animorphs
The Avengers (UK)
The New Avengers (also UK)
Birds of Prey
Eerie, Indiana
Lexx
Misfits
Mork & Mindy
Sliders
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
The Tribe
I was very good and didn’t put Farscape after every other entry. Gabriel F (who I haven’t seen for awhile?) would understand.
Men Into Space never got its second season when they were supposed to go to Mars. Is it eligible?
AKICIF (All Knowledge Is Contained In File770):
So there’s this TV series pre-1980s(?) that’s at set in part in an underground city and featured prominent women characters. There might have been a scene where they got to the surface and snow(?) was falling and to my recollection had a lot of red in the background. Any ideas?
ETA: It was some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario.
Soon Lee: So there’s this TV series pre-1980s(?) that’s at set in part in an underground city and featured prominent women characters. There might have been a scene where they got to the surface and snow(?) was falling and to my recollection had a lot of red in the background. Any ideas?
Perhaps Star Maidens?
Hmm, Star Maidens might have been it. Guess I’ll have to find a copy & see if it triggers any memories.
Soon Lee: Hmm, Star Maidens might have been it. Guess I’ll have to find a copy & see if it triggers any memories.
Based on the description, you may want to lay in a supply of brain bleach first… 😉
Does no one else remember Doomwatch? They blow up Toby!
@Doire
Sadly not I – it looks like the masters were wiped so repeats are rare. The one in the 90s was also on limited access channels so I’m not sure there’s been one I could have seen.
If the comment box time travel takes me to the mid-late 20th century instead of 9981 (which is a lovely place, plants are pets now) I’ll do my best to sneak in and snap up as many master tapes as possible before they’re gone. 😉
Would the UK series Misfits or Being Human be eligible? I think they might be pushing the date limit but can’t check at work.
Am late and haven’t read all the posts yet, but haven’t seen:
1. Eureka
2. Torchwood
3. Roswell
I really liked Eureka, Torchwood had its moments, didn’t care for Roswell but trying to be complete :-p
Misfits ran from 2009 to 2013, should be eligible
Being Human 2008 to 2013, ditto
The original Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes is some of the best TV ever. It’s a procedural, but so is Bladerunner at some level.
The original Avengers was X-Files long before anyone had thought of X-Files, and there are elements of it that are still radical. It’s also a joy to watch.
Man from Atlantis? Alf? The terrible one with the little robot girl? Not my favorites, but haven’t seen mentioned.
Buck Rogers (shudder–for early-round eliminations). Six Million Dollar Man. Bionic Woman.
Little Wonder?
Are supers allowed? If so: The Greatest America Hero
Buck Rodgers
“Little Wonder”
I think that’s it. So bad.
Good list Meredith but if we have The Munsters we have to have The Adams Family.
The Mighty Boosh! I can’t believe I didn’t say that already!
Lenora Rose:
This is what I told my somewhat horrified relatives, as I fed pesto and peanut butter to a one year old (not at the same time, because that would be yucky), while letting her sample the dirt from the potted herbs. It worked out perfectly, and as a bonus, she eats anything I promise is tasty.
She also knows what wild/garden plants are safe to munch on (and not to try any others without asking me), and is only too happy to offer up some. The relatives remain slightly horrified, but I think she sees that as a bonus.
(ObSF: Hm, post-apocalypse prep? If it’s the kind of apocalypse that leaves us basil, honeysuckle, wood-sorrel and wild strawberries…)
Picking stuff up from the subway floor probably doesn’t fall under “studies show”, but it’s not like I can prevent it, so.
Anna:
Nope. He did take me to see Suzanne Vega at the park last summer, where she totally rocked that song (and everything else).
I was totally going to be an old spinster, but life got in the way. But I still want the cat, and the tea, the bad reputation, and the FUN.
Um.. I’ve very very late to this thread and everything I really liked has been mentioned already. But I do notice that one show that was a guilty pleasure of mine some years ago hasn’t been mentioned –
Beauty and the Beast. (I admit, I was mostly interested in it for Vincent. Vincent was hot…) I’m sure the suck fairy has been at it, however.
Re: Live-Action TV Bracketeering Chat
Haven’t caught up, so a few comments…
– Someone mentioned V. As much of a fan as I am and was, I cannot recommend the original weekly series. (The hamfisted “Charles and Diana” gag didn’t so much jump the shark as plunge headlong into its gaping maw.) The first and second miniseries, sure, but they’re not eligible. The remake series… I wanted to like it more, and shifting the metaphor was a nice touch, but it didn’t really click for me.
– Add me to the pro-Prisoner roster.
– There are three eligible Twilight Zone series. Original, 80s, and 2000s. The third didn’t get renewed, but surely it counts.
– Buffy, yes. Angel… I’d like to count it as part of Buffy, honestly. To a lesser extent, I feel the same way about the Trek Triplets (TNG/DS9/Voyager) where each did a conscious baton-pass to the next. In both cases, the franchise is greater than the individual series.
– Quantum Leap, Friday the 13th (aka Original Warehouse 13), Greatest American Hero (aka The Show Whose Cancellation Gave Us V’s Julie Parrish), all three Twilight Zones… I’m gonna have to check my shelves just to scratch the surface.
– Do I correctly read Rule Four to mean that a series which began airing (not development) before 2010 is eligible even if it continued through/after that year?
@Camestros
The Adams Family was a victim of me trying to make the list a bit shorter!
why have Little Wonder when you could have Metal Mickey?
To be honest, I would like to nominate Robot Wars. Not sure how it would with with the criteria though.
@Mike Glyer:
It sounds like it was programmed as a continuing series, so sure.
@Tintinaus: Supers are absolutely allowed.
@Rev. Bob:
As mentioned, when it comes to the matches themselves, how you vote is up to your secret heart. But these will all be separate contestants, assuming any of the five get nominated…
Yes. So don’t worry: you can totally nominate Vampire Diaries. 😉 And 2010 is itself the cutoff. Anything that started 2011 forward is ineligible.
Robot Wars appears to be a reality-TV show, which means it’s not in scope.
@Doire:
I do!
And I can add a British anthology series (a la Outer Limits/Twilight Zone) from the ’60s (1960s, that is, since I’m posting from 9933): Out of the Unknown.
Also, is Quatermass eligible? It originally aired as three self-contained serials, of which the better-known films are subsequent adaptations.
TV: “Mann and Machine,” a short-lived 1992 series featuring a veteran cop paired with a beautiful android rookie. Setting was a near-future Los Angeles; I remember a perpetual water shortage. Cancelled after 9 episodes, said Wikipedia, but it was intended to be open-ended.
@Peter J:
Taking this one under advisement.
I’ll add a rec for The Dresden Files. I could never get into the books, but I really liked the TV show.
I liked the Dresden Files TV show reasonably well. Blackthorne did a nice job. The scripts were inconsistent, but in my experience a lot of genre shows don’t truly find their footing until Season Two, and DF didn’t get that chance.
I was coming here right this moment to mention things in my or my husbands’ tv collections nobody had yet – including the Dresden Files. Colin found the divergence from the books weird but enjoyed the show; I absorbed most of what I know of the books via osmosis so enjoyed it for what it was.
Also notably forgotten: Blood Ties (The Tanya Huff-based tv series — a Canadian product so I won’t be surprised if some people say “Wait, what? That exists?”)
and
Middleman MIDDLEMAN MIDDLEMAN!!!!!! How did I forget Middleman!
I think that’s my exclamation mark quota for at least two weeks.
All this bracketing is making me anxious both with the amount of TV I have watched and with the vast quantities of it I hadn’t even heard of.
Is Twin Peaks eligible, or is it not genre-y enough?
Twin Peaks is absolutely eligible.
I got interrupted during my brainstorming yesterday (silly day job) and never got farther than Xena, but my problem is that I’m reminded of shows when people mention them — and then there’s no need for me to do so! (I’m generally really horrible about being able to remember lists of things or people out of nowhere, though I can come up with anecdotal examples of things that stuck in memory for some specific reason.)
I, too, found the tv series of The Dresden Files more attractive than the books themselves. (I tried the books on the basis of having enjoyed the tv show and bounced off after struggling through the first two.) Conversely, having read Huff’s Blood books before the series came out, I was a bit disappointed in the tv show, particularly in how they handled the romantic elements (and erased most of the queer elements).
When I was a kid, it felt like every time there was a prime time sff tv show that I loved, it was immediately cancelled. But now I’d be hard put to draw up lists of the ones that gave me that impression. I do have fond memories of Time Tunnel (especially the thrill of identifying the historic setting before the reveal!). More recently, it seems that I have only to fall in love with a show that it jumps the shark. But “recently” is a relative term, given that I haven’t been following tv series at all in the last 5 years or so, except vicariously through others’ comments.
I just remembered Eerie, Indiana this morning, but I see someone’s beaten me to it. I really liked the first season, but spent most of the second hoping Dash X would be killed off.
How about Jeremiah? I watched it because it was the next thing after Babylon 5 for J. Michael Stracyznski, but never really managed to care.
If The Twilight Zone is eligible, then you gotta have Night Gallery too.
I second The Night Gallery. And fifth The Addams Family. My favorite Halloween costume is still Wednesday Addams. (The stage musical was kind of awful, though.)
I don’t think I’ve seen Odyssey 5 suggested.
Alphas
(I would suggest Andromeda but I can’t stand the later seasons)
Being Human (british version)
Brimstone
The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne
SeaQuest
This is a great bracket for reminding me how bitterly disappointed I’ve been at finding and falling for shows only to have them cancelled, sometimes a bare handful of episodes later. This is why I have show commitment issues.
@Viverrine: Alphas, alas, first aired in 2011.
Has anybody suggested The Water Margin?
I left Quatermass off the list because each of the serials seemed quite self-contained to me.
@Hampus
Robot Wars is pretty great. 🙂
I thought of a couple more shows but I see one of them has already been mentioned, Brimstone. However no one seems to have put up Strange Luck yet.
I’ll fifth the recommendation for Buffy.
And I add True Blood, which started in 2008 (I think) and should evade the “not too recent”-cutoff.
And perhaps Carnivale? I’m not quite sure about that myself.
Most Controversial Decision So Far (for those keeping track):
Excluding limited series
But people seem to be fine with animation & puppets happening at a later date and the 2010 cut-off, so three out of four ain’t bad. 😉
My only real issue with the limited series thing is it seems to me an accidentally anti-Brit rule – we have quite a few. Generally speaking I’m pretty happy with bracket runners putting in the restrictions they’re comfortable with (within reason). Lots of work goes into these and I’d rather people willing to do it felt happy with the experience.
(Which is not to say I won’t campaign given the opportunity. As poor David knows.)
I think it doesn’t fit Jim’s criteria but also if we have another bracket with a focus on adaptations, mini-series etc rather than on-going series, Quatermass will fare much better.
I think the way to do it would be to still allow things that have been in the current bracket but for specific story-arcs (i.e. more than one episode, definite beginning-middle-end) – so a TV equivalent of comparing novels. But I’m getting ahead of myself 🙂