T E L E V I S I O N
TV's Top Gun
Jerry Bruckheimer, Hollywood's top-grossing movie producer, is television's new go-to guy for high-rated drama. How'd he do it without blowing anything up?
By JOEL STEIN
JILL GREENBERG FOR TIME |
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Wednesday, Apr. 30, 2003
Jerry Bruckheimer shouldn't be able to make television shows. Television characters deal with issues by having conversations; guys in Bruckheimer movies solve problems by blowing them up. If all TV shows were Bruckheimerian, Ross Geller's brains would have been splattered all over that giant Friends apartment by season two. But somehow Bruckheimer, the most successful producer in film history, with $12.5 billion in worldwide box-office receipts from movies such as Top Gun, Armageddon and Con Air, is on his way to becoming the most successful producer in the history of TV. He's the first to have three shows hit the Top 10 simultaneously: CBS's CSI, CSI: Miami and Without a Trace. And he has done it with shockingly few large-scale weapons.
His next hand will be that of Star Trek High. A new take on the Star Trek franchise which pits some of the main characters from previous installments into a high school atmosophere. Among the issues the show will be dealing with; pregnancy, death, marriage, gays, affairs, and other teen drama relationships. Among the characters appearing on the show, you have Data played by Eric Christian Olsen. In the previous installments, this robot was unable to love and give relations. That is thrown out of the window in the pilot when he and his girlfriend find out she is pregnant. Their child, a soon to be baby boy who will become Rikard (played by Jonathan Frakes in the original show).
The principal for the school will be Nelix. In this show, he is gay. In the previous show, he was not. His lover in this series is Worf. Their love affair is kept secret, until later in the series. Among the entire cast, LaVar Burton is back playing Geordi LaForge. To have it make some sense, they have him waking from a deep coma. His looks are old, but his body and mind still tells him he is 17. A weird plot outline later in the series. Don't forget PiCard, Spock, Crusher, Jonathan Archer, Kirk, and McCoy. All of these are regulars on the show. All of them with different traits. Crusher is now blind after an incident with a star explosion and PiCard isn't quite the same after a battle with some space-aged leeches. Watch for this show. Bruckheimer has redefined the way people think about the series, and the series past. It will blow you away.
MY RATING : A-
From the May. 05, 2003 issue of TIME magazine
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