I got thrown completely out of the episode the moment Steve called after his nightmare and I thought FINALLY Danny's going to have a meaningful scene again, cause Steve is ready to admit he has some shit to work through and then they cut to Steve'n'Grover (even though I have to say Danny was a great hope, but I knew Grover was coming because of the previous episode's set up of course). And never mind the left-fielding of important goings-on that continue to rattle me but not surprise with the writer's rooms abysmal track record of thinking it's a good idea to assume people will fill in the blanks of off-screen story development, what really pissed me off is the fact that I feel more and more like they're screen-testing us for the feasibility of just full on replacing Danny with Grover (because supposedly Scott wants out or they want him out is frankly the egg and the hen at this point) and I admit I like Grover and all, but if you're going to do a switcheroo that's supposed to be as phased in and stealthmode looking at Scott Caan and Chi McBride next to each other IT'S KINDA CONSPICUOUS. Never mind that the discussion is absolutely right to balk at how Danny and his legitimate concerns are treated by the 'ohana-scheming', but that's a whole other can of worms. I would be so happy to keep on Grover as a nice meaty recurrent character if his story wouldn't feel more and more like Danny's story from traumatic police past to eroding principles in the Steve-school-of-life retelling Steve's story just to shine some more light on why our resident superman has still ISSUES to work through.
And I even liked the CASE this week because it had continuity and nice little character dynamics in the supporting cast and very controlled and spread out exposition dump and it wasn't boring!
But really all the goings on with the characters just right now sour it for me. *frustrated sigh*
I confess the idea of Scott leaving fills me with both dread and relief. Dread because unlike TPTB, I remember the Danny of S1 and adore what's left of him. Relief because then I can give up the show with a clean fan conscience.
I kind of feel the same way, and I know exactly what you mean. Even though I didn't really have a favourite of the original four-tier-team, Danny was totally my favourite if you know what I'm talking about. I originally got on board with the show because of the awesome team dynamic as a whole with everyone of them contributing their unique skills and experiences... but I especially liked Danny as a POV-character, I still hands down prefer fic where he fills that role too and I feel now that we've been relegated to a Steve-has-sidekicks-that-do-exposition-he-hasn't-got-time-for-show, it's all falling apart and that makes me sad, because this had the makings of cult classic.
I think Danny is/was the glue and no one in charge seemed to realize it (or want it that way - Leading Man is supposed to be the glue). I promise, PTB, the audience will still understand it's all about Steve even if you give the rest of the characters some meat.
I think Danny is/was the glue and no one in charge seemed to realize it (or want it that way)
I think they realized it but didn't want it that way. In season 1, all four main characters were treated pretty equally in terms of character development and contribution to the cases, but the long term story arc (Wo Fat and all the baggage that entailed) went to Steve as the main character among main characters. From season two onward, the show's been about Steve and the people he occasionally shares screen time with. It hasn't been as much fun since.
It's a sad state of affairs when I get more ohana feels from Grimm than from this show.
I just don't get the logic. S1 was a pleasant surprise and people liked it ... so, let's scratch that and mutate it beyond all recognition!
People need to stop kissing Lenkov's ass on Twitter, if TPTB insist on playing in fandom, and tell him his show is really quite terrible much of the time.
Sometimes I wonder how much is Lenkov and how much is network interference because the same thing happened on NCIS: Los Angeles, which is also a CBS show.
Season 1 was a lot of fun, with the icing on the cake being the close friendship between Sam & G. In season 2, they killed off one of the other male leads and replaced him with someone Kensi could have a romance with. It's been het city ever since, with Sam & G getting less and less screen time and friendship moments. I bailed ages ago.
I'm sure you're right, and that's sad, because the only recourse is to stop watching. And if people stop watching, it'll get cancelled rather than fixed.
I feel the not wanting is the central problem here. Because an actor who's given the good stuff has no time to be unhappy about anything else and TPTB have just too much of a track record of choosing exactly the avenues for the show - narratively, character-developmentally, hell even the handling of outside conditions that influence the production - that turn into a disadvantage down the line. And what I really hold against them most is not learning from mistakes. At All.
This was the first show I'd gotten fannish about in years. I have a hard time remembering why now.
I've been putting off updating the H50 Newbieguide because comms are dying off at an alarming rate, and it just depresses me when I remember how much fun I used to have in this fandom.
I really am upset over the fact that not only are they wrecking the source material, they're wrecking it so much beyond recognition, not even the die-hard fans, the ones that keep going after a show is over and keep it alive, not even those are finding the footholes to make fic out of that. I'd happily supply my share of botched canon with a good helping of fix-it fics and AUs but Steve/Danny was the only pairing I've ever had interest in shipping in this fandom and things are just drying so fast, it's pitiful. A show's fandom shouldn't stop going before the show does, it just makes me sad.
OMG, the fic in this fandom used to be so good. So many amazing authors bailed during/after season 2.
The only other time I've seen a fandom flame out this bad was with Heroes, which was another show where TPTB took a good hard look at which characters had the best screen chemistry, then made sure those characters appeared together as little as possible.
I know that out there, there's a mainstream audience that's not invested in the same way and that (probably?) doesn't even notice the things we're continuously harping on in the comms around here, but I think despite all jumping into the twitter world and social media promotion and shit, the producers of this show as well as the network has not realized yet that in this day and age, it's not the mainstream audience that keeps the show going, it's the fans, the people who are so passionate about it that they watch together and discuss and create so much free promo and run the engine on their idealism alone, because that's how you stand out these days. And that means you owe it to your fans to honor that passion and investement. Doesn't mean that you're creatively obliged to cater to their every whim (there's another fandom we know intimately that has a problem with that entitlement on the flipside of the coin, but at least they're aware that the fans are what keeps them going), but you owe them good product. And I don't feel like past s1 they even tried, it feels more like the writer's room is throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.
Oh... and Heroes, yeah, the one that got away... I recently started that one all over to finally make it past the second half of season two to get to the end of the series, but I've been at the finale of s1 for a few months now again. God, but Peter Petrelli with his incompetent and reluctant messianic heroism used to push ALL my buttons so bad. And then it just fizzled out... I never got into fandom on that show, but dang did I love it. But looking back, yeah I can see what you mean about the characters that worked and the ones that didn't... I'm actually sad to say I just realized Suits is doing the exact same. The first season was spectacular because they were master and padawan and together they squashed the bad guys in an awesomely complicated legal fashion, never mind the sizzling UST. And watching the latest episode I realized that Mike and Harvey barely had three scenes together the entire hour that was perfunctory interaction to frame the entirely hetero-boring-normative romance plots that this show about badass lawyers has become and it made me wanna weep.
God, I need some good TV in my life again to be fannish about so badly. Sorry for the depri-dump here.
in this day and age, it's not the mainstream audience that keeps the show going, it's the fans
Yes and no. Yes, fans keep interest in the show alive (people are still writing Man from UNCLE fic after all these years and occasionally pulling in new fans), but that interest doesn't always translate into money the way we think it does from the echo chamber of fandom. Shows still make the bulk of their money from syndication sales and advertising, and advertising rates are still based on ratings, so they have to cast a wide net to catch as many viewers as possible. The ratings aren't weighted by how much the viewer likes the show, just whether there's a potential set of eyeballs there to view ads.
Peter Petrelli with his incompetent and reluctant messianic heroism used to push ALL my buttons so bad.
I loved Peter. Milo could generate screen chemistry with a lamppost. It didn't matter who they stuck him with, except, ironically, for that one Irish girl who was supposed to be his love interest.
I recently started that one all over to finally make it past the second half of season two
The only reason I made it to the end was because I discovered the über snarky heroes_meta comm. The episode reaction posts were hilarious.
Sorry for the depri-dump here.
Don't be sorry. I've been missing the opportunity for episode discussion, and somehow this post seems to have accidentally generated more discussion than the four official discussion posts combined. I don't know why that happened, but I've been having fun this weekend.
True about the ratings and stuff, however, the recent Nielsen-to-twitter development of extending data mining for ratings to social media shows that at least some people in the entertainment industry caught on to the fact that viewership is not solely based on people that switch on the glumbox that night and I think they're beginning to realize the potential behind the shifting audience and media landscape (whether that's to our benefit or disadvantage remains to be seen I guess).
I will have to check out that comm for sure, I really want to get to the end of that show sometime, even if it's only to end the mystery after all.
I love the way your post turned into a fandom fireside meeting, I think people find it easier to join a discussion when they have a point to jumpstart it from and your reviews have always a lot of meat to work with.
I'm not sure how I feel about Twitter tracking. On the one hand, it's good that Nielsen is branching out to try to get a more accurate picture of who is watching what. On the other hand, I don't have Twitter any more than I have a Nielsen diary, so it's still not counting me. Yes, I could get a Twitter, but if I wanted to be on Twitter, I would be already.
I suppose I wish that Nielsen had a way to track hash tags and blog posts and such all across the Internet without changing people's behavior, because I wonder how many people signed up for Twitter and started Tweeting about their shows like it was their job as soon as they heard about Nielsen. As soon as you change the thing you're measuring, it's no longer an accurate measurement. And yet they do need to expand beyond a tiny set of families representing the whole country's viewing habits.
I think people find it easier to join a discussion when they have a point to jumpstart it from
True. It could also just be that people had a lot of FEELINGS about this episode. I know my feelings have been experiencing a slow build, but this episode just put them over the top for me.
I would be so happy to keep on Grover as a nice meaty recurrent character if his story wouldn't feel more and more like Danny's story from traumatic police past to eroding principles in the Steve-school-of-life retelling Steve's story just to shine some more light on why our resident superman has still ISSUES to work through.
And I even liked the CASE this week because it had continuity and nice little character dynamics in the supporting cast and very controlled and spread out exposition dump and it wasn't boring!
But really all the goings on with the characters just right now sour it for me. *frustrated sigh*
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No Danny. No show.
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I think they realized it but didn't want it that way. In season 1, all four main characters were treated pretty equally in terms of character development and contribution to the cases, but the long term story arc (Wo Fat and all the baggage that entailed) went to Steve as the main character among main characters. From season two onward, the show's been about Steve and the people he occasionally shares screen time with. It hasn't been as much fun since.
It's a sad state of affairs when I get more ohana feels from Grimm than from this show.
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People need to stop kissing Lenkov's ass on Twitter, if TPTB insist on playing in fandom, and tell him his show is really quite terrible much of the time.
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Season 1 was a lot of fun, with the icing on the cake being the close friendship between Sam & G. In season 2, they killed off one of the other male leads and replaced him with someone Kensi could have a romance with. It's been het city ever since, with Sam & G getting less and less screen time and friendship moments. I bailed ages ago.
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This was the first show I'd gotten fannish about in years. I have a hard time remembering why now.
I've been putting off updating the H50 Newbieguide because comms are dying off at an alarming rate, and it just depresses me when I remember how much fun I used to have in this fandom.
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A show's fandom shouldn't stop going before the show does, it just makes me sad.
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The only other time I've seen a fandom flame out this bad was with Heroes, which was another show where TPTB took a good hard look at which characters had the best screen chemistry, then made sure those characters appeared together as little as possible.
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Oh... and Heroes, yeah, the one that got away... I recently started that one all over to finally make it past the second half of season two to get to the end of the series, but I've been at the finale of s1 for a few months now again. God, but Peter Petrelli with his incompetent and reluctant messianic heroism used to push ALL my buttons so bad. And then it just fizzled out... I never got into fandom on that show, but dang did I love it. But looking back, yeah I can see what you mean about the characters that worked and the ones that didn't... I'm actually sad to say I just realized Suits is doing the exact same. The first season was spectacular because they were master and padawan and together they squashed the bad guys in an awesomely complicated legal fashion, never mind the sizzling UST. And watching the latest episode I realized that Mike and Harvey barely had three scenes together the entire hour that was perfunctory interaction to frame the entirely hetero-boring-normative romance plots that this show about badass lawyers has become and it made me wanna weep.
God, I need some good TV in my life again to be fannish about so badly. Sorry for the depri-dump here.
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Yes and no. Yes, fans keep interest in the show alive (people are still writing Man from UNCLE fic after all these years and occasionally pulling in new fans), but that interest doesn't always translate into money the way we think it does from the echo chamber of fandom. Shows still make the bulk of their money from syndication sales and advertising, and advertising rates are still based on ratings, so they have to cast a wide net to catch as many viewers as possible. The ratings aren't weighted by how much the viewer likes the show, just whether there's a potential set of eyeballs there to view ads.
Peter Petrelli with his incompetent and reluctant messianic heroism used to push ALL my buttons so bad.
I loved Peter. Milo could generate screen chemistry with a lamppost. It didn't matter who they stuck him with, except, ironically, for that one Irish girl who was supposed to be his love interest.
I recently started that one all over to finally make it past the second half of season two
The only reason I made it to the end was because I discovered the über snarky heroes_meta comm. The episode reaction posts were hilarious.
Sorry for the depri-dump here.
Don't be sorry. I've been missing the opportunity for episode discussion, and somehow this post seems to have accidentally generated more discussion than the four official discussion posts combined. I don't know why that happened, but I've been having fun this weekend.
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I will have to check out that comm for sure, I really want to get to the end of that show sometime, even if it's only to end the mystery after all.
I love the way your post turned into a fandom fireside meeting, I think people find it easier to join a discussion when they have a point to jumpstart it from and your reviews have always a lot of meat to work with.
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I suppose I wish that Nielsen had a way to track hash tags and blog posts and such all across the Internet without changing people's behavior, because I wonder how many people signed up for Twitter and started Tweeting about their shows like it was their job as soon as they heard about Nielsen. As soon as you change the thing you're measuring, it's no longer an accurate measurement. And yet they do need to expand beyond a tiny set of families representing the whole country's viewing habits.
I think people find it easier to join a discussion when they have a point to jumpstart it from
True. It could also just be that people had a lot of FEELINGS about this episode. I know my feelings have been experiencing a slow build, but this episode just put them over the top for me.
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