TV series gone awry

[Jennkryst]

@Aria It’s been forever since I watched it, but if memory serves, Xander does grow past the creeper stage. The problem with telling a story where someone overcomes their flaws and becomes a good person is that they START as a horrible person.

Alternatively I’m misremembering how much he develops into a less, uh… problematic person. I give it 50/50.

[Arkandel]

@Jennkryst IIRC there was a more involved arc planned out at first but the actor was struggling with addiction, and his character wasn’t as popular as his costars’.

I mean giving him a committed relationship with a girl he cheated on didn’t help his character become sympathetic, nor did they ever try to redeem him.

[Aria]

@Jennkryst said in TV series gone awry:

The problem with telling a story where someone overcomes their flaws and becomes a good person is that they START as a horrible person.

This is absolutely true. I think that, at least for me, the trick is how a character’s general horribleness is presented, in no small part by the reactions from the rest of the characters in whatever media I’m consuming.

Do the people around them see their behavior poorly or do they treat it as acceptable? Is the horrible person depicted as sympathetic (maybe even funny) because of what they’re doing or is my sympathy being directed towards their target? Does the rest of the context in the scene suggest that I’m supposed to be questioning their actions or amused by them?
The character doesn’t necessarily have to be openly called out, but there being some indication that the creators of the piece recognize this as Not Okay will make me far more inclined to stick it out and see where the story goes than if the general tone is like, “Haha, yeah, this is Bob and he’s a complete piece of shit. Cool story, right?!”

I can’t agree or disagree with the rest of your statement because, like I said, I absolutely tapped out after just seven episodes. Maybe Xander does get way better, but what put me off wasn’t just the way he behaved towards Buffy. It was the fact that everyone around him seemed to think it was absolutely fine and in the few cases where they didn’t, it was played for laughs.

[sao]

@Aria Yeah I loved Buffy when I watched it but going back and trying to rewatch a few eps I retreated into a misogyny cringe ball and stopped so as not to continue spoiling my perfectly good nostalgia with reality.

[Arkandel]

@Aria said in TV series gone awry:

@Jennkryst said in TV series gone awry:
This is absolutely true. I think that, at least for me, the trick is how a character’s general horribleness is presented, in no small part by the reactions from the rest of the characters in whatever media I’m consuming.

Do the people around them see their behavior poorly or do they treat it as acceptable? Is the horrible person depicted as sympathetic (maybe even funny) because of what they’re doing or is my sympathy being directed towards their target? Does the rest of the context in the scene suggest that I’m supposed to be questioning their actions or amused by them?

What about series like Mad Men where people around the protagonists (including the protagonists themselves) are just… flawed, each in a different way? Some are products of their times and misogynists or homophobic etc, others are driven by trauma in their pasts, or they are ambitious and self-serving, they have blinders on, etc.

Sometimes there’s no catharsis in bodies of work like this, either. That’s the drama in the characters’ arc; they could become better people, they have it in them, they are so close to getting it… but they fail.

Which is to say - not all shows (or books, MU*, etc) are meant for everyone to enjoy. There’s nothing wrong with watching something like this and going ‘this ain’t for me’.

Unless it’s Buffy, in which case you’re wrong, obv.

[insomniac]

@Snackness said in TV series gone awry:

(ETA: Except Sansa, she stuck the landing)

I’d say that even Sansa got done kind of dirty.

From S1 E1, it’s obvious that she needs to wake up from her fairytale mindset and realize that she’s not in your daddy’s fantasy storytime, this is serious business where we don’t shy away from showing how the middle ages really were (ie, “this has rape”) but in the early seasons she was still able to influence people with her skills as a canny observer of human nature and a compassionate person who prays with the women during the siege of King’s Landing while the Queen sits in the corner and gets drunk.

By the later seasons, it turns out that the lesson she needed to learn was how to be a Girlboss Bitch who watches without emotion as she feeds people to their own dogs, but gets completely played by Littlefinger until she just remembers that she has an omniscient godkid in her house that she can use to check on things. And then she spends the start of S8 being jealous and catty toward the pretty lady who’s dropped everything to come to save her home from the ancient evil.

[Kestrel]

@Selira said in TV series gone awry:

True Blood was terrible from the start, but at the beginning, it seemed to have a real awareness of how cheesy it was and lean into that. I made it five seasons, but after that, it felt like it had gone so far into character flanderization and needing more ridiculous things that I was done.

Basically with the death of the one character at the start of the last season, just left a foul taste in my mouth.

I’m okay with cheesy dumb vampire stories, but apparently I have my limit.

ETA: All that said, “I LOVE YOU JASON STACKHOUSE” is perhaps my favorite moment in the whole series.

True Blood was ridiculous from start to finish, and I loved every second of it.

I never expected it to be great. It was always a corny, kitschy mess.

[Roadspike]

@Faraday said in TV series gone awry:

It might be different if it were more of a solo endeavor, but even then… I don’t think I would throw away my favorite book series if I discovered the author was awful.

I have two used copies of Ender’s Game, one specifically as a lending copy so that I can give it to folks that I recommend the book to. I’ve given zero money to Card since learning what a shit he is, and I won’t encourage others to spend money – but I will encourage them to read the book that had such a huge impact on me as a teen.

@Arkandel said in TV series gone awry:

What about series like Mad Men

I just couldn’t get into Mad Men. Like, I didn’t like any of the characters, or like to hate them, enough to keep watching.

[Pavel]

@Faraday said in TV series gone awry:

It might be different if it were more of a solo endeavor, but even then… I don’t think I would throw away my favorite book series if I discovered the author was awful.

To touch on this for a moment and to do a little moralising perhaps, I believe it’s perfectly okay to still like and enjoy the work of a person who has revealed themselves to be horrid. So long as one does so privately. This is especially true when the sole creator is still around and producing work.

Enjoy what you had, don’t support their future work, and don’t partake in the online ‘community’ around their work - if their horridness is bad enough to give you pause, it’s probably going to be a hell of a ride following them on Twitter, for instance.

[Arkandel]

I don’t know how to feel about either the fact Amazon is putting The Rings of Power cover art on Lord of the Rings novels or about the petition to stop them from doing that.

Tolkien’s work is basically sacred to me but this has got me stuck somewhere between ‘meh, who cares’ and ‘someone must burn for this’.

[Warma Sheen]

@Arkandel Could not care less. I can barely tell what is on the cover besides something fantasy-ish. People have too much free time on their hands. Why anyone feels like they are entitled to make demands like this is beyond me.

If you’re gonna try to make demands of Amazon, at least make it something of substance for them to ignore.

[Pavel]

@Warma-Sheen said in TV series gone awry:

@Arkandel Could not care less. I can barely tell what is on the cover besides something fantasy-ish. People have too much free time on their hands. Why anyone feels like they are entitled to make demands like this is beyond me.

If you’re gonna try to make demands of Amazon, at least make it something of substance for them to ignore.

People are passionate and interested in something. I really think you’re doing them a disservice by saying they have “too much time on their hands” when they actually take some kind of action instead of simply complaining on the internet all the time.

They prefer older styles of cover over the new ones, and that’s a perfectly fine thing to prefer. They’ve started a petition (which will likely go nowhere) to show that they are frustrated by the decisions that have been made.

[Arkandel]

@Pavel To add to that, much of what’s in the list of issues people quite intensely debate, complain or even rage about on this forum would certainly seem like a waste of time in many other folks’ opinions.

Even this thread. “If you don’t like it you don’t have to watch it, stupid!” would probably be a very valid response to almost every post. Yet here we are.

[Arkandel]

To go off on this tangent a bit more, rumors about how some of The Witcher show writers ‘actively disliked’ the books and games probably had at least something to do with Henry Cavill no longer being attached to it.

Combined with other series that suffered from similar issues (Halo, Silent Hill) I don’t know whose is the bigger mistake; showrunners who pick up established properties to do their own thing with, or the producers who put them in charge.

[bored]

@Arkandel I rise.

This may be the end of Netflix for me. I trust Cavill’s instincts since he’s known for being passionate about the material. Despite all the ‘he just quit because he’s Superman,’ the idea that an actor cannot be in 2 things is just… wrong? Chris Hemsworth made a dozen movies while playing Thor. (Or Chris Pratt. Just look at any Chris, I guess.). Matt Smith played a campy villain in a terrible comic movie while staring in a prestige fantasy epic. Their prior (mustachegate) conflict was due to their production fuckups (dumb reshoots), not an industry standard.

And he’s in a strong position. That one-line cameo in Black Adam was to put 11th hour buzz on a movie that was looking mediocre, and it only happened due to close personal connections (and probably a fat sack of money). They were begging him, not the other way around. He’s always been clear about his financial interests (he’s got interviews about this, and is pretty honest about it), and they just weren’t willing to give him what he felt he was worth until they were desperate.

Based on his comments, and the story earlier in the week, the reception of season 2, this feels like a split with the showrunners & writers. They’ll fall back to culture wars defenses, but it doesn’t work here, when the books are about cycles of racial violence and pretty much every villain is an avowed anti-feminist literally hunting Ciri’s womb. They could have made the material work, if they got people with any kind of respect and talent. Instead they got, well, your typical gaggle of hack fraud TV writers who think they can improve on a bestselling author. Every one of them can go fuck themselves. And they won’t renew Sandman. Seriously, fuck Netflix.

[Pavel]

@bored Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if the author was causing problems. Sapkowski is a… bit of a pain, at least around the copyright of his works (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrzej_Sapkowski#Legal_dispute_with_CD_Projekt).

[bored]

@Pavel It’s possible but seems unlikely.

I’ve followed most of this stuff (I like the franchise a lot, even play Gwent as my silly computer CCG of choice), and Sapkowski has never seemed very engaged with the secondary fandom. He writes books, considers the books the important part, and sells other rights as a revenue source but doesn’t tend to involve himself.

Famously, his suit toward CDPR was because he thought videogames were silly and sold the Witcher rights assuming the games would fail - and thus took a low flat payment versus royalties. Even though he made his own bed to a degree, Polish law allows for compensation when the discrepancy is so vast (so… they’re way ahead of the US in that regard), and he was allowed to reclaim some additional payments after CDPR became massively successful entirely on the backs of his IP.

His deal with Netflix was well after Witcher had garnered its huge success, so I imagine he got a much better deal this time around. But he never gave CDPR trouble over how his material was used; indeed the very concept of the games essentially requires violating the ending of the books.

[Faraday]

@bored said in TV series gone awry:

Despite all the ‘he just quit because he’s Superman,’ the idea that an actor cannot be in 2 things is just… wrong?

I have no idea what happened in the case of the Witcher, but the idea of an actor bowing out of a project over scheduling conflicts is not at all far-fetched.

It’s not so much because they can’t be in a franchise and another movie at the same time (as you mentioned with Hemsworth), but because of scheduling conflicts.

This is especially true with TV shows, which generally have to shoot a lot more material (8-20 hours for a series vs. 2 for a movie) and thus require a bigger time commitment. If a show is filmed for several months of the year in Canada (or in Europe, as was the case with the Witcher), it may be hard/impractical for someone to do a simultaneous project that’s shooting in Hollywood or elsewhere overseas.

Happens all the time.

[bored]

@Faraday I think the answer to all of this is ‘it can be both.’

It’s definitely being floated is that Cavill is ‘too busy’ to do it, or that streaming is too crappy for him as a big star now, etc. Various stuff to make it his fault and not Netflix. That’s very convenient narrative for Netflix, a company that is not exactly having the best year.

His schedule is 100% going to get busier (he may well end up as James Bond, too). But it’s not a pre-existing conflict. No way. This movie wasn’t even going to happen before ~2 weeks ago. Cavill was blacklisted under Hamada for the ‘insult’ of negotiating. He was never going to be Superman until that leadership changed. Right now, it’s not clear they have anyone attached besides Cavill. It’s still in pre-production. There’s no shooting schedule.

So the bottom line is that he could have negotiated it if he cared to. That he didn’t care to says everything. At the outset, he treated this role the way Ryan Reynolds treats Deadpool (down to releasing test footage.) He could have been getting better money doing anything else. But he’s been making noise about the writing going back to when he still had zero chance of ever being Superman. He said he’d do 7 seasons ‘if it stayed true to the books.’ We shouldn’t be surprised.

Because we have eyes. We’ve seen the show. It’s bad, in the same way all of these streaming IP shows are bad. Netflix is just trying to protect its image (and cratered stock price).

[Arkandel]

@bored said in TV series gone awry:

Because we have eyes. We’ve seen the show. It’s bad, in the same way all of these streaming IP shows are bad. Netflix is just trying to protect its image (and cratered stock price).

What I don’t get is… Netflix pays money to buy these IPs. They’re definitely not cheaper than going with its own original home-grown content. The reason they’d do that is to take advantage of an existent fandom, and essentially land viewers right out of the box - plus extra ‘free’ marketing from those fans spreading the good word, etc.

If they’ll do that for Witcher (or Halo, Silent Hill, Wheel of Time, etc) why on earth wouldn’t they attach people to this project who at least care about that IP to protect the investment made?

So if I think the Witcher books and game are shit so I’ll need to fix them… I’m a bad fucking choice for Netflix to make as a showrunner. That’s the sum of it, end of story. I’m just going to infuriate the existing fans who are the point of buying this thing out in the first place.

Nowhere is the difference more plain than House of the Dragon. The folks running the show love the book. You can tell; it lives and breathes Fire and Blood. They made adjustments, pruned some characters and greatly expanded others (Viserys comes to mind) but the reverence to the original material is all over.

And it shows. Ever since it launched its subreddit (which, if you know anything, subreddits tend to be pools of vile toxicity once a series is going the wrong way) has been goddamn… admiring it. People post their artwork of cool scenes, they applaud their favorite actors, cheer for how good the casting choices were for characters whose actors switched in a time-jump. The fans are happy - and they explain to each other how the changes made were for a reason instead of just protesting them.

Compare this to the absolute shitshow of Wheel of Time. Ugh.

At that point just do your own thing, Netflix. Save some money from an existing IP. Then let it stand or fall on its own merits.