In Defense of the Networks
In my quest to become a one-woman unpopular opinions thread, I’ve chosen to tackle an issue that’s been bugging me for quite some time, and that is the tendency of fandom (not specifically VM fandom, but any fandom) to blame the network when a show has problems.
The subject came up at The LoVe Shack the other day, on this page, and I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer. Here’s a snippet of what I wrote:
Writers love to blame the network when something goes wrong, but you never hear them give credit when something goes right. Rob in particular loves to blame other people for everything that goes wrong. When fans complained about Duncan, Rob said, “You guys are so hard on Teddy.” (i.e., “It’s all Teddy’s fault that the fans didn’t connect with him. Duncan was a super-well-written character!”) When the fans complained about the season 2 mystery, Rob said it might’ve been “too complicated”/ “too complex.” (i.e., “A lot of fans weren’t smart enough to get it, or weren’t tuning in religiously every week and re-watching the episodes and poring over the message boards like they should’ve been if they had any appreciation for my genius.”) When fans complained about the ridiculous coma-baby storyline, Rob blamed the network for wanting Meg to survive the bus crash. But the network didn’t tell Rob that Meg should be pregnant, that her baby should also miraculously survive the crash, that she should be in a coma for nine episodes and then wake up just long enough to tell Veronica to save the baby from some weird religious adoption that made no sense logically or legally, and then, right after imparting this exposition to Veronica, drop dead of a blood clot. There were about 55 things in that storyline that didn’t make any sense, only one of which is attributable to the network. And yet people still think that it’s networks that ruin TV shows.
It wasn’t until after I posted that I saw the interview on EW.com's Cult Corner with Rob Thomas, where he answers the complexity question this way:
Why do you think the second season became too complex?
It was a result of us saying, ''Let's get Kristen Bell some time off because we're going to kill her.'' Honest to God. Because that second season-long mystery was largely a Logan-Weevil (Francis Capra) story, I could play a ton of scenes without Veronica. In year one, we almost worked that girl to death.
So it seems he also likes to blame Kristen Bell for the mess of Season 2. This is particularly stupid, since most dramas on TV are ensembles, and they all have multiple storylines going on featuring different characters. What RT was writing in S2 wasn’t unusual or difficult. Season 1 was the more unusual story structure; S2 followed standard TV drama. Most shows manage to write multiple character storylines without losing their audience, so this isn’t an excuse for sloppy writing. The other reason I find this funny is that Rob always sounds like he regrets doing the Logan/Weevil storyline, but most people I’ve heard from found that one to be much more enjoyable than the main mystery of the bus crash.
Then I read this today, in the ratings thread at TWoP:
I too think renewing or even just giving VM the back nine would be the most logical decision for the CW if they want to keep ANY credibility (it's very little, I know, but it's something). However, I've been burned by networks before, so I'm trying not to get my hopes up. Nobody ever said network execs were particularily smart.
I love it when fans suggest that network execs are dumb if they cancel low-rated shows. I find it particularly amusing when the person insulting the execs’ intelligence thinks that “particularily” is a word. Most of the execs I know, especially the very high-level ones, are extremely smart, but more than that, they have a lot of patience and good people skills, since much of their job is babysitting showrunners. Some of my friends and colleagues have asked me why, since I love giving notes so much, I never tried to get on the exec track. And I would tell them honestly: I don’t have the personality for it. I would have too hard a time massaging the writers’ egos. I would tell them exactly what I think, and I would get fired. Execs are much more replaceable than showrunners, and execs aren’t the ones who bring in the money - they’re just overhead. The showrunners are called producers because they actually make the product.
So being an exec is not an easy job, and the hardest part of that job is trying to keep showrunners like Rob from flushing good shows down the toilet.
Writers screw up, even the best of them. Some get bored and want to try something totally new in the second season. (Execs, on the other hand, tend to subscribe to, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”) Some get lazy, some check out entirely. That’s what happened to Joan of Arcadia. After the brilliant first season, Barbara Hall handed over the reigns to her Co-EP and went off to make a movie and record an album with her band. Without her, the show lost its voice and lost its way. Much like the second season of VM (hence the heartbreaking pangs of déjà vu that I experienced all last year), the show started to suck, and its ratings nosedived. The network retaliated by canceling both of Barbara Hall’s shows (JoA and Judging Amy). Les Moonves doesn’t put up with that kind of shit. (And that’s how you know that Dawn Ostroff was really fighting for VM.)
Some showrunners buy into their own hype and fall too much in love with themselves. NBC is right now dealing with a nightmare in Aaron Sorkin, a brilliant writer who’s created a show so smug it even turns off the uber-smug intelligentsia he writes for. The ratings are horrible, and there’s little NBC can do because they signed away too much of the creative control.
Then there are showrunners like Kevin Williamson of Dawson’s Creek, who, much like Rob Thomas, had a vision in his head of what his show’s OTP would be; the problem was that his OTP didn’t have nearly as much chemistry as the girl did with the guy’s best friend, and the vast majority of the audience was rooting for a couple that the creator didn’t want, in part because it left his title character as the odd man out. I think of this whenever somebody says that showrunners should have total freedom to write the show they want to write. To me, the point is to make good television, and good romance makes good television. The studio and network finally stepped in, fired the showrunner, and gave the audience what they wanted. The ratings went way up - unusual for the middle of the third season of a show - and everybody was a winner. Was it fair? Should KW have been left alone to do his show his way, which probably would’ve led to an early cancellation, and none of the fans would’ve been happy? And for you Everwood fans, there wouldn’t have been an Everwood if it hadn’t been for the execs at Columbia Tri-Star and The WB. They took a low-level writer at DC and promoted him to showrunner - Greg Berlanti. The fact that Berlanti saved the show is what got him a development deal at WBTV and allowed him to get a show of his own on the air.
Next up, we have Al Gough and Miles Millar. They created Smallville, which the network and the studio loved. But they ran out of story ideas before the show even debuted. They didn’t have a long-term plan for the show; they explained that they had envisioned it more as a miniseries that followed Clark through puberty, wherein each of his powers would come along and represent some adolescent milestone: superstrength = physical maturity; x-ray vision = noticing girls (remember that when Clark first gets his x-ray vision, he’s in gym class, and he finds himself looking through the wall into the girls’ locker room). Al and Miles had six of these metaphors ready to go, but then the well ran dry. They had a staff of ten writers, including some really good writers like Greg Walker and Michael Green, but they couldn’t come up with stories because nobody knew what an episode would be about if it wasn’t about Clark getting a new superpower. Production was shut down because there weren’t any scripts to shoot, and the showrunners were ready to cash it in after six episodes and go make another movie. Smallville has now been on the air for six seasons, because the execs fought for it. They believed in its long-term potential even when Al and Miles didn’t, and together with the writers they came up with a new paradigm for the show.
I could give a dozen more of these examples, but I’m trying to stick to the ones where I know the details. To me, the most interesting story is the one behind my all-time favorite show, The X-Files. This is just a theory on my part, but I’ll put it out there. A few years ago, I attended an industry event where Peter Roth was the featured speaker. Back in the early ‘90s at 20th Century Fox, Peter was the executive who bought the pitch from Chris Carter for The X-Files. He saw the potential to create something that was really missing on TV at the time, and so, without much support from the rest of the network, the two of them developed the show together. We all know how the rest of this story goes.
After being hailed as a creative genius, Chris Carter was never able to produce another hit. Millennium had its smart moments, but it never lit fire to the zeitgeist the way X-Files did. Peter Roth, on the other hand, went on to become the president of the FOX network and then the president of Warner Bros. Television, where he oversaw such huge, long-term hits as ER and Friends, and where he developed The West Wing, Gilmore Girls, Smallville, Nip/Tuck and many of the best character-driven shows on TV, including Veronica Mars.
When fans talk about the genius of The X-Files, they credit Chris Carter. But if I had to guess which of those two men is the true TV genius, I would go with Peter Roth. Most of you have probably never heard of him. To me, executives are the unsung heroes of television.
There’s one other thing that I want to note. I often see the most criticism of execs when a show starts to go downhill. The fans want to blame “network meddling” for ruining their show, as if the goal of network executives is to take good TV shows and make them suck. This has definitely been true with fans of Veronica Mars after its disastrous second season. But what most people outside of TV don’t know is that the first year of a show has the most network and studio involvement of any year.
Both the network and studio have two sets of executives - Development and Current Programming. Development execs (at the studio and the network) take the pitches and oversee the writing and shooting of the pilots. Once a show makes it onto the air, it’s assigned Current Programming execs, one at the studio and one at the network, who are the ones who do the notes calls, with upper level execs getting involved when necessary. But in the first year of the show, the development execs continue to read the scripts for whatever shows they developed, and they help to make sure that the show stays on track with the theme of its pilot and delivers what the studio/network wanted from it in the first place.
If a show is successful and gets renewed for a second season, a lot of the pressure is off. The development execs are no longer involved, the network and studio ease off a bit, and things get easier for the showrunner. So, in the second year of Veronica Mars, Rob Thomas had much more freedom to write the show that he wanted to write. And look what we got.
Of course, the writers continue to get notes, hence the network note mentioned above about Meg surviving the bus crash at the beginning of S2. I don’t want to rehash everything I already said, but I think this is a good illustration of the skewed view you get in fandom. Rob says that he wanted Meg to die in the bus crash, but the network thought it would be too dark.
Here are my issues with that:
1. We don’t know if it’s true. As noted, Rob likes to blame people rather than take any responsibility for his own writing choices when they turn out to be mistakes.
2. If it is true, we don’t know how specific the note was. Did they say it had to be Meg, or did they just ask that somebody live? Was it just about the bus crash being too dark, or did they specifically want Meg to live because they liked her? If it was just about the tone of the crash, then there were other options here. Nobody told Rob who had to be on the bus, so if it were just a matter of having somebody survive, it could’ve been anyone. If it was specifically about having Meg live, then Rob ultimately ignored the note anyway, since she ended up dying. And either way, that note in no way said, “Duncan should run off to Australia with a coma baby.” That was all Rob’s plan to give a “noble” exit to his “pure” character. So I really don’t see how the network is to blame for the mess of OAV and DR. I’m sure that if Meg had died in the crash, RT would’ve concocted a similarly nauseating storyline.
3. For every complaint about the network, there are 10 good ideas you never hear about, because writers never give credit to execs. Have you ever heard a writer say, “Oh, I’m glad you liked that plot twist. That was the network’s idea.” And you never hear network people place blame, because they have more tact. You don’t hear Dawn Ostroff saying, “Yeah, we didn’t want to have the whole L/V relationship play out over the summer, but Rob insisted that his way was the only way it would work.” I’d bet that 9 out of 10 notes are good ones, but the only one you’ll hear Rob attribute to them is the bad one.
These are my thoughts. I have a few more comments on some of the other notes issues that have come up recently, but since I didn’t plan on writing a 10-page essay here, I should probably stop now and open the floor for discussion. But I would just implore you all to hesitate before you start hating on the suits. If you think TV sucks now, you wouldn’t believe how much it would suck if there was no one minding the store.