Carter's exact words are not in opposition to anything I said. The fact that it's all being done to Fox's wishes and he is only "occasionally" consulted is not exactly reassuring since he is, technically, the creator and showrunner. That probably means that the original special effects guys and cinematographers and producers are NEVER being consulted on more nitty gritty types of decisions. Carter is not going to diss Fox in an AMA- they own his bread and butter- but that comment comes pretty close, since he does question their aesthetic choices as politely as he can (he "imagines" they'll be in 4:3; well, they aren't).

Aspect ratio and HD quality are two entirely different issues. If you don't understand that, you should not even be talking about this. The average person's first experience of HD coincides with their first experience of a 16:9 shaped TV, so it's easy to confuse the issues. But HDTVs could technically have been made in a 4:3 or any other shape. Of course that would not have made any commercial sense. It makes sense they are 16:9 shape because this is what most new content looks like, as well as many classic movies from the late 1950s onward- probably 75% of the content most people want to watch was always 16:9 shaped, which is why that shape of TV is preferable. But the fact the TV can show HD quality has nothing to do with the fact it is 16:9 shape. They are two separate things. Like I said, plenty of great Bluray restorations exist where a movie or TV show is actually restored to HD in its ORIGINAL aspect ratio, whatever that may be- and Twin Peaks is a recent example where an HD restoration was done on a 4:3 shaped show, and it was restored to HD without altering the intended 4:3 aspect ratio. It makes sense that casual viewers would be annoyed at "black bars" (I imagine if some hacker turned all the bars on all the TVs white for a day, some people would suddenly stop complaining...) but if you are an actual fan of a movie or TV show, demanding that it change its aspect ratio to suit your TV is, in fact, a reversion to low grade VHS "pan and scan" ideology. That's really what's going on- DVD was a format that might lack the quality of Bluray but it was a format that turned out to be very good for movies and TV, and respectful of art, because it promoted seeing everything in higher-than-previously-available quality AND in its original shape. That was the point of introducing DVDs and 16:9 TVs in the first place- so movies that were made in 16:9 would not be squished and cropped (panned and scanned) to fit into 4:3 TVs, and would not require huge ass letterboxing. But now we have a 16:9 TV landscape and the same exact problems (and total ignorance of cinema) that appeared prior to DVDs in the '80s and '90s have reappeared, this time in a different form, now disrespectful towards 4:3 art (which includes not only all TV until the mid '90s, but also most of the classic films of the 1940s and earlier, and some from the '50s).

Everything that was done by Scorsese and others in trying to educate the public in the '90s about film restoration issues- everything that actually led the way to creating these wonderful technologies of HD and 16:9 TVs- has been forgotten. Now, once again, it is all about technology and fashion over art- like in the '80s (when VHS and 4:3 was actually fashionable believe it or not- and 16:9 wasn't). People see a "pillarbox" black bar on the sides of the screen now and their angry reaction is exactly the same as in the '90s when they saw a "letterbox" black bar on the top and bottom. It's like the DVD format and the respect for art that it briefly inclulcated in the public never existed at all. DVDs presented the work as it was originally intended, more so than a Bluray in which they revert back to the VHS-era idea that artistic intentions are irrelevant and screen-filling entertainment is the only thing that matters. At the end of the day, HD and Bluray might end up being more damaging to cinema than the VHS format ever was, because with Bluray people are being sold the idea that the plastic surgeried, radically altered face is actually the original.