Quote:
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Like people don't compare NYPD Blue to Hill Street Blues
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In fact, people hardly
ever compare
NYPD Blue to
Hill Street or
Homicide to
Law & Order. They certainly don't devote entire websites to the "war" between two such shows, or argue that it is somehow wrong or disloyal for someone who likes
Homicide to ever watch
Hill Street. They don't celebrate one show by denigrating the other.
Also JMS didn't call the folks who ask him these questions "rude", he called them "tactless" - which is not quite the same thing. The lack of tact comes from their assumption that his show
should and
must be considered only in comparison to
Star Trek - that
Trek is the template against which all other SF TV shows are to be measured. Do book critics interviewing Dean Koontz always and automatically ask him how his latest novel compares to Stephen King's last book? Will the creators of the next cop show or doctor show be asked to describe their work in terms of
Homicide or
E.R.? (Or
Columbo or
Marcus Welby, for that matter.) Probably not.
The
Trek question (or the
Star Wars question) mostly comes from people who have no other frame of reference in SF. They don't
read science fiction (except spin-off novels) and they don't watch much of it that isn't directly related to their particular favorite. Therefore they assume that everything they saw on
Trek was a completely original idea, and anything that resembles one of those ideas must have been copied from
Trek - because they are simply ignorant of how much
Trek itself borrowed from the existing body of SF literature, and the rest of Human history for that matter. (This reached the limit of absurdity when someone on the newsgroup said that the concept of the "soul" as discussed by various characters in the
B5 episode "Soul Hunter" was merely the
Trek concept of the "katra" from
ST III: The Search for Spock. Apparently this fellow had never heard of any Earth religions.)
You get tired of this kind of thing after awhile, and the whole "us vs. them" mentality it fosters. I'm not surprised that JMS mentioned it. To his credit he said that it was
equally unfair to criticize
Enterprise for not being more like
B5. The point is to enjoy each work on its own terms.
Regards,
Joe