What are the best TV show episode guides?

November 11, 2005 4:57 PM

Are there any TV show episode guides as well-written and interesting as the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine guide?

If you've never seen the DS9 guide, basically it's over 700 pages of stories from the production of the series. The DS9 crew hired their own historian early on in the series to document the creation of each episode and the guide is much better for it. Every episode commonly has a 1 page plot summary, photos from the set, production sketches, and then 2-3 pages of production stories, unused plotlines, scenes cut from the script, ideas that evolved from one idea into another, and all kinds of interesting material. It's far and away from the other Trek guides that just have episode summaries.

Are there any other episode guides out there for other shows that are as detailed? I'm particualrly interested in guides that spend a lot of pages discussing the writing process and how plots take shape.

posted by Servo5678 to media & arts (6 comments total)

The way you've set the bar on this question, you might get no answers at all!
The guide I'll recommend, The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5, definitely isn't quite that good, but it does have a bunch about the writing process, insofar as it incorporates a great deal of back and forth with the creator, J. Michael Straczynski.
One thing that made Babylon 5 truly Great was that the third season was all written by JMS.
posted by Aknaton at 5:07 PM on November 11, 2005

Servo, the original Alan Asherman guide to Star Trek is one of the most literate and wide-ranging TV guides I've ever seen. He touches on this incredible range of '50s-'60s sci-fi culture as well as literary dimensions of Trek, in a way I have never seen since. here it is.
posted by johngoren at 5:17 PM on November 11, 2005

To add to Aknaton's post, the JMS-written Babylon 5 scripts are available for purchase here. The first volume includes a wealth of memos, photos and script/production notes, as well as seven scripts fom the first season.
posted by JDC8 at 6:23 PM on November 11, 2005

Well, iy's not 700 pages long, but the "Mystery Science Theater" episode guide is written by the show's writers and thus is every bit as hilarious as the episodes. Although the first copy I bought fell apart, so apparently the binding was far from top-drawer.
posted by GaelFC at 11:03 PM on November 11, 2005

Everyone is posting sci-fi answers, so I don't know if that's all you're interested in. But "Inside Updown the Story of Upstairs Downstairs" by Richard Marson is excellent and very detailed. This compainion site is also good.
posted by grumblebee at 3:58 AM on November 12, 2005

Well done grumblebee. Inside Updown should have occurred to me too.
posted by Aknaton at 7:49 AM on November 12, 2005