\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\ncrazy that so much tv is just so bad. don\u2019t people literally go to school and dedicate their careers to this in a highly competitive job market. aren\u2019t you paid to be good at this.\u00a0
The thing is, especially when it comes to TV writers, the industry inherently filters for the people who can turn in the script on time. For everyone in the notes talking about fanfic, those are the results of people having infinite prep time to think about the entirety of the canon and draw out all of the patterns in it, in order to extrapolate what \u201cshould\u201d happen.
\n\nIn real life? You have to come in with multiple well-developed pitches and spec scripts, and be prepared to hypothetically do it for any/every episode of that season, ON PRODUCTION SCHEDULE. Are your fave fanfic writers popping out a finished case fic once a week, for at least 3 months? Can they rewrite those halfway through because suddenly the favorite recurring guest star won\u2019t be available?
\n\nIt doesn\u2019t matter how good the artistic vision is, if you can\u2019t deliver the writing on time. If you can\u2019t answer the phone and the emails and attend the meetings and make your pitch multiple times and talk back to the many rounds of feedback and weather all of that rejection and also write the scripts concurrently, all under time crunch.
\n\nIn other words, it\u2019s all about executive function. RIP 99% of fandom\u2019s population.like you can say that it\u2019s about turning in scripts on time, and that would lead to things being bland
but this doesn\u2019t explain CW writers. this doesn\u2019t explain how people can be such bafflingly BAD writers and continue to be paid for it
See, what happens is that showrunners get to make shows because they could attend all of the emails and phone calls and in-person meetings with all of the execs on time, without being destroyed by their anxiety. This impacts the kind of story they even think is possible or relatable.
\n\nThen they hire the people around them who can mimic the writing the showrunner did, and turn in many scripts like that on time. This further impacts the kinds of stories they think are even possible. Also, production schedules necessarily truncate how much editing they can do before any scripts are forcibly sent off to production. Production budgeting also impacts how much time the writers can even spend time thinking about what\u2019s happening with the characters and relationships before the script writing even happens in the first place.
\n\nI\u2019m not saying that it\u2019s impossible for good art to happen in such an environment. Obviously, good TV happens! But 1) several of those involve writers georg who are outlier workaholics and 2) my point is that the incentive gradients aren\u2019t tilted towards good art, they\u2019re tilted towards \u201ccan you get the episode to the broadcast station on time.\u201d Bad Episode That Actually Broadcasts will automatically make more ad money than No Episode Broadcasts, ergo, bad writers who turn the scripts in on time will get paid over good writers who cannot.
\n\nThe alternative to not filtering for people who can turn the content in on time (and under budget) is the shitshow the anime industry is in.I\u2019m saying that there is a population of people who can turn in content on time that is merely bland or below-average, so \u201cthey can turn in scripts on time\u201d cannot be the only explanation why the CW continues to use astonishingly, bafflingly, jaw-droppingly bad writers
Netflix\u2019s Another Life was 10 episodes, all of which premiered at the same time, at a date of their choosing. They had time to get it right. The writing in that series was not merely bad, it was nonsensical. Like there\u2019s no amount of \u201con time\u201d that makes up for the sheer fucking gibberish in these episodes, these things were not minimum viable product, they were wildly and obviously inferior to that fanfic writer with low executive function\u2019s WIP. How did that happen?
Series that have no time pressure turn out bafflingly bad writing in exactly the same way, being on time cannot be the answer.
Jesus, you don\u2019t bring specs and pitches to a running show unless it\u2019s \u2014 do Star Trek shows still do that? Maybe as a legacy of TOS being Sixties SF Playhouse, they were the only ones still doing it in the \u201890s. Under Writer\u2019s Guild rules shows are required to buy one freelance script a year but even then it\u2019s heavily (uncreditedly) rewritten by the staff because since TV writing staffed up in the \u201880s they\u2019re too tightly written to farm out, and even then it\u2019s uneven. You can tell which the outside-pitched episodes on the 2000s Battlestar Galactica because they\u2019re completely tonally incongruous and batshit characterization.
And like, lifetime showrunning careers might be filtered on executive sensibilities but no one gets Aaron Spelling\u2019s career these days, the far more common situation is that someone who\u2019d been on staff for years elsewhere gets a pilot greenlit on the strength of their writing and then it\u2019s a total crapshoot how they do at the production executive side of things, that was the story behind a fair bit of \u201coh but that show was so good, how\u2019d it get cancelled midsession?\u201d
Netflix-style \u201cdump a whole season at once\u201d production started after I checked out of that world, can\u2019t speak too confidently there.
Out of curiosity, which were the outside-pitched episodes of BSG 2004? I\u2019ve tried Googling and not found anything. I didn\u2019t notice at the time but then I last watched it in high school and may still not have been that great at noticing things like that or just had lower standards overall.
Honestly I was thinking “Black Market”, the one where Apollo leaves Galactica for an episode to have an action-adventure with his new hooker wife, but apparently that guy was staff and they just shot a completely unpolished script (I know the signs. But later they got Jane Espenson, who was behind like 50% of the wordplay attributed to Joss Whedon!) for an unrelated reason
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