Rockne Obannon Speaks

It was a rather bizarre night at class…  We had Rockne Obannon, the creator of the shows “Farscape” and “Seaquest.”  Steven Spielberg had his name on “Seaquest” and some drawings back in the early 1990s that led NBC to give him $100 million for it and then Obannon got hired by Spielberg to come up with the show.

Amusingly, we then had a second guest for hour #2 who was the guy who replaced Obannon for the second season of ‘Seaquest’ after it hadn’t done overly well ratings-wise during the first season.  More interestingly, he spent a considerable amount of time talking about why his most recent show – “Nashville” on Fox – failed after only two episodes this fall.  It seems that Fox wanted to focus on the love affairs and ‘hookups’ of the no-talent bimbos on the show rather than the talented guys in the ‘cast’ who were overly-cautious about providing any real drama.  At one point, the executives at Fox suggested to one of the male leads that he should either dump his girlfriend or get engaged.  The guy did neither.

Finally, it was revealed that one of my classmates’ mother was a cast member on ‘Seaquest’ in the entire second season.  Her mom had a romance with the captain of the ship and eventually died on an alien planet at the end of the second season.

The girl’s father has had a career in westerns and his IMDB page has one of the worst-written mini-biographies that I’ve ever read.  His quote on being an actor is hilariously distasteful:

“I’ve flown jets, driven speed boats, been fast with a gun, raced through a river on horseback, shot the bad guy, been the bad guy, operated on people, been a crazy S.O.B., and seduced some extremely fine women. All in all, it ain’t a bad life.”

Finally, the instructor and guest #2 also talked about how ‘The Bachelor’ is actually completely scripted and all the ‘interviews’ and scenarios are faked by the writing staff.  But you probably already guessed that.