The New York Times ran a very interesting piece/discussion with several showrunners of popular shows that span network televison, cable and streaming (Netlfix). ‘Post Water Cooler TV: How To Make A TV Drama In The Twitter Age’ featured Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire), Shonda Rhimes (Scandal & Grey’s Anatomy’), Robert And Michelle King (The Good Wife), Scott Buck (Dexter) and Carlton Cuse (The Bates Motel & Lost). Social media has changed the landscape of how shows are produced and broadcast, and even how they are written. Or in some cases Rewritten. Where next week’s episode or the one the week after that can be rewritten and altered to either confirm, respond, or foil audience response and expectations. Is it because of the way American television is shot? with the writers trying to keep up with the shooting schedule. There’s a lot of pressure with that model, and it can lead to some loose or shoddy storytelling. But it also allows for a measure of responsive flexibility. As Rhimes pointed out in the NYT piece: ‘I miss the time to think. What doing 13 or 10 [episodes] allows you is the time to sit back and look at it and go, is this right? The way a painter stares at a painting while they’re doing it. You don’t have that time in network television’. Compare that to the BBC for example. Where some series (seasons) are much shorter, all written before they’re shot, and all shot before they’re aired, and the writers don’t have that kind of flexibility. The best they can do is monitor response and take that into consideration for the next season (series). On the other hand, that model can arguably lead to better crafted episodes, with tighter writing and an obvious story arc to follow before shooting begins, so the director/actors have a more clear idea of how characters develop over the episodes. A great deal of American television is still shot and “in the can” months before it airs, especially material that requires extensive effects or location shooting… so writers checking social media responses might be able to react to the beginning of the season’s episodes before the last of the season’s episodes are written. In most cases, they’d have to “react” in the next season’s stories. Both have their drawbacks and benefits, but television-by-twitter feels much more like fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants storytelling. My favorite part of the piece was this from Carlton Cuse on the Nikki And Paulo debacle: ‘We had all these characters who were just in the background who were on the plane, but we never saw them. Some people were saying: Who are those people? So, we decided we would introduce a couple of characters [Nikki and Paulo] out of the chorus. The moment we did it, the audience had a visceral, horrible reaction to them. I will say that we had actually decided before that, ourselves, that this was a bad idea. We had 16 series regulars on the show, so it was taking time away from the characters that they all loved. We had this whole story line worked out, which we sort of compressed into one episode. We buried them alive in the sand.’ Keep in mind that many of these episodes were in the can weeks – sometimes months – before they aired, so they were usually writing four-five episodes of front of what aired. Many attribute the killing of Nikki/Paulo on the show to directly audience feedback (and some of that was true), but it was written/shot long before it aired. Lindelof and Cuse actually debunked changes due to audience feedback several times on their podcast for the show. Yeah, they did give nods to the audience, but that was usually a season or more later. The point is you can’t respond to audience reaction when the entire run is shot before it’s aired; you have to wait until the next run. When you’re trying to keep ahead of the shooting schedule — even several episodes ahead of the shooting schedule — that flexibility exists. But I’m not sure that flexibility is always a good thing for the sake of well-formed stories. As far as them making changes, it’s not quite accurate to say they didn’t make changes. They had basic plot points mapped out, benchmarks in the story they wanted to hit, but how they arrived at those points was up for debate. So changes were made as they deemed necessary — and audience reaction was a factor. That’s how Ben Linus became such a major character; he wasn’t originally so significant, but after they introduced him and saw what they had on their hands, they wrote him into a more significant part of the narrative. I can see some danger in this. The people who are loudest on social media are usually the craziest fans. Like Scott Buck mentioned (in the same NYT roundtable): ‘A lot of audience members really take possession of the characters to the point that I’ll see messages or e-mails saying Dexter would never do that. It’s like, well, he did it.’ Very often, people who are throwing fits about characters acting OCD…have very bizarre interpretations of characterization or don’t really care how a character is acting as long as their ship is canon. As for people not getting the plots, that’s not always the writing. A lot of fandom simply doesn’t understand the basics of storytelling anymore so it’s no wonder that they can’t follow the arcs of television shows. Does this help or hurt the medium? -Dagobot Get at me on twitter: @markdago Like me on THE Facebook: facebook.com/markdagoraps Download my latest EP for free: markdago.bandcamp.com Listen to MY podcast http://poppundits.libsyn.com/