Kontextmaschine

9th July 2022

Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 31,955 notes

brazenautomaton:
arbitrarygreay:
brazenautomaton:
arbitrarygreay:
pussyhoundspock:
crazy that so much tv is just so bad. don’t people literally go to school and dedicate their careers to this in a highly competitive job market. aren’t you paid to be good at this.
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 “should” happen.

In 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’t be available?

It doesn’t matter how good the artistic vision is, if you can’t deliver the writing on time. If you can’t 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.

In other words, it’s all about executive function. RIP 99% of fandom’s population.
like you can say that it’s about turning in scripts on time, and that would lead to things being bland
but this doesn’t explain CW writers. this doesn’t 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.

Then 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’s happening with the characters and relationships before the script writing even happens in the first place.

I’m not saying that it’s 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’t tilted towards good art, they’re tilted towards “can you get the episode to the broadcast station on time.” 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.

The 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’m saying that there is a population of people who can turn in content on time that is merely bland or below-average, so “they can turn in scripts on time” cannot be the only explanation why the CW continues to use astonishingly, bafflingly, jaw-droppingly bad writers
Netflix’s 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’s no amount of “on time” 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’s 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’t bring specs and pitches to a running show unless it’s — 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 ‘90s. Under Writer’s Guild rules shows are required to buy one freelance script a year but even then it’s heavily (uncreditedly) rewritten by the staff because since TV writing staffed up in the ‘80s they’re too tightly written to farm out, and even then it’s uneven. You can tell which the outside-pitched episodes on the 2000s Battlestar Galactica because they’re completely tonally incongruous and batshit characterization.
And like, lifetime showrunning careers might be filtered on executive sensibilities but no one gets Aaron Spelling’s career these days, the far more common situation is that someone who’d been on staff for years elsewhere gets a pilot greenlit on the strength of their writing and then it’s a total crapshoot how they do at the production executive side of things, that was the story behind a fair bit of “oh but that show was so good, how’d it get cancelled midsession?”
Netflix-style “dump a whole season at once” production started after I checked out of that world, can’t speak too confidently there.

But like if you can’t finish scripts in town you probably don’t even make it through your first season at “story editor” (the entry-level writing staff) to get to the point where you’re pitching pilots

Tagged: screenwriting