FUTURE DRAMA

'Star Trek'

'Babylon 5'

'Farscape'

'One Tree Hill'???

The CW teen soap, a hold-over from The WB, will be returning in January of 2008, after being off the air since June of this year. (That may be unusual for a network, even a netling show, but something of a standard practice for cable shows.) And like the other shows listed above, it will be dealing in a bit of speculative fiction.....

Here's what Roger Catlin of the Hartford Courant (Link to the Left) had to say about what we might expect:

In what the network claims is "unprecedented in the annals of television drama," the show will bypass the usual problem of high school dramas, where stories start to meander once characters go to college and the actors start to look too old for their parts, by jumping the action way past post-high school, where most of the characters graduated last spring, to post-college.

Some characters will have succeeded, others will not have, The CW says.

Lucas will have written and published a book (hello, "October Road"!). Brooke is big in the fashion industry; Peyton is slugging it out in the music industry, and Nathan and Haley are raising a school-aged James.

Four years into the future will put the show in the year 2011, which could prove dangerous should there be any cataclysmic event that should happen here in the Trueniverse before then. Even though Toobworld is not the same world as ours, people watching will expect real events to be reflected in the shows they watch (despite some cries of "Too soon!"). It was done with the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the World Trade Center, Viet Nam, and Iraq (both times). I expect the California wildfires of this year may factor in episodes of shows like 'Brothers & Sisters', 'Chuck', and other Southern California, shows eventually. (If the writers' strike is ever settled, that is.)

Let's say that in 2009 the carved presidential faces on Mt. Rushmore crumble off, like the Old Man of the White Mountains did in New Hampshire and tumble below, killing hundreds of tourists. Shouldn't that be mentioned by the characters of 'One Tree Hill' around that time, even if they're down in North Carolina? (Granted, it took a long time before Toobworld acknowledged that the Viet Nam war was going on, save for an occasional mention in 'The Twilight Zone' or 'Then Came Bronson', but things are different today.)

It only took a few weeks for the tragedy at Cincinnatti concert for The Who to be dealt with on 'WKRP In Cincinnatti', and even though they were a sitcom, they HAD to address it considering the subject matter of their show. What if something dire happens in North Carolina and there's no clue that it ever happened in the past of 'One Tree Hill'?

Bad enough they never mention Mt. Pilot or Mayberry being in the same state!

BCnU!
Toby OB