Says one comment in a Reddit thread about the HBO series "Rooster," after a line of dialogue in the first season finale episode that suggested a new narrative for one of the secondary characters.
Somebody else says: "Wouldn’t be the first time a studio monitored fan reactions on Reddit and took them into consideration while working on future seasons."
What were the other times? Well, back in 2017, there was "Reddit users correctly guess ‘Westworld’ season 2 plot twist/Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan says he's had to re-write the script" (NME). Nolan said: "It’s annoying sometimes when people guess the twists and then blog about it, but the engagement is gratifying, on one level, because if someone guesses your twist, it means you’ve done an adequate job.... You can’t complain when people are that engaged. It’s very gratifying — but stop doing it, please."
Stop doing it? Ridiculous! If there's one thing people instinctively do with any new material that comes their way, it's try to predict the future. If we weren't designed to do that, we wouldn't be drawn into stories with plots in the first place.
Here's a neuroscientist talking to Joe Rogan about her study of the capacity of the human mind to predict the future, which she seems to believe in:
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40 comments:
Nobody saw the Dream Season of Dallas plot twist coming.
…they aren’t Ann’s thing but GoT and The Walking Dead often relied on online fans to help them shape plots. The show runners used it to their advantage, helping fans connect and engage with the shows.
Westworld lost the plot by season 2
Television without piry
I am enjoying Rooster. And I agree the plot is nothing really; just a device to get these characters together. Steve Carrell is aging very well and does good projects. I like almost everything he's in and, now that you brig it up, it's almost never for the plot (40 Year Old Virgin was my least favorite Carrell project).
So when I started reading this post, I thought, oh no! No spoilers! But it doesn't really matter because nothing I watch the show for is going to be spoiled on Reddit.
A full 20 years ago, social media chatter led to a rewrite of "Snakes on a Plane" (2006). This was the first case of fan direction that I recall, not counting Hollywood's decades-long bad track record with video game inspired movies. The filmmakers didn't begin to understand video games back then.
https://www.cbr.com/movie-legends-revealed-how-did-the-internet-change-snakes-on-a-plane/
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
We haven't even explored the plot device of unearthing single twitter posts that accurately predict the future plot twists.
I wanted to like rooster. I got through half an episode. Hollywood men are pathetic, and it’s just too hard to watch.
Our host would probably like Eric Rohmer's movies.
Rooster - According to a summary per wikiepedia: "The audience has largely described it as comfort viewing which one can watch without emotional exhaustion."
LOL. What an odd way to put it. I saw this TV show and I have to lie down and rest. I'm emotionally exhausted.
The best movies to rewatch have great scenes, great dialogue, and fascinating characters. What is the plot of GWTW or Casablanca. The best Hitchcock movies can be rewatched even after "The suspense" is gone.
The idea for "Rooster" seems to be: Steve Carell is really good, let's make an environment where Steve Carell can do Steve Carell things.
Just dial up the agonizer
"The best movies to rewatch have great scenes, great dialogue, and fascinating characters. What is the plot of GWTW or Casablanca."
Right, and those happen to be 2 movies I've rewatched within the last year. Both are very silly in the overall plot (though they have a background historical setting that is completely un-silly). But, in both, it's just very cool to see those 2 actors/characters saying things to each other... or in the case of Ingrid Bergman, just emoting facially.
"Casablanca" has so many plot defects it's just absurd, but all is forgiven, because of the characters and the acting.
This whole post convinced me not to watch.
Which defects
I was unaware that Westworld season two was deliberately changed because the audience had figured out a creative way to continue the story. It explains why the show turned to shit so quickly after the pretty damned good first season.
Never really got Carell’s comedic appeal, and watching that clip of him interacting with a bunch of drunken dude-holes didn’t change my mind. He was very good in The Big Short, though.
I watch a lot of K-dramas. Korean TV shows are usually planned to be a limited series, between 12 and 20 shows, but the soapy weekend ones can be much longer. In the last few years, several of them have had second (and more) seasons.
When I started watching them in the early 2000s, they were filming episodes just before they aired. I know that fan response to what was happening in the shows made the writers change what they had originally planned in order to please the fans. I think that usually ended up making a poorer show. Now that K-dramas are more popular and have Netflix, Hulu and Amazon airing them, more are finished before they start airing. That, and, of course, more money for production, has made for better shows.
Dear show writers - If you hooked people with the first episodes, keep doing what you're doing and stay off social media. If the fans knew best, they'd have your job.
My wife, the Outlander nerd, says that the last few shows of this, the last season, have been screwed up because series author Gabaldon hasn't finished the last book and the showrunners are making up their own plots, and rewriting characters.
Lots of outrage on social media, apparently.
I asked her what she'll do with herself after the last show, scheduled for tomorrow, and she said, "Start over." Ugh.
The older I get, the less I care about shows, series, and movies. Some people have a thousand favorite movies, but I don't think I could even name a thousand movies.
Let me try and understand this. You are producing a television series. Your hope is that whatever you create will attract millions of people viewing your product. You care about your product, so you seek out feedback and opinion from wherever it might exist. You stumble across one person that pays careful attention and thinks they figured out the plot twist. One person, when you expect millions of viewers. So, you scrap the entire script for the next season to come up with something so abstract that none of the million viewers understand what one season has to do with the next season.
That explains so much of Hollywood these days.
I watched "Casablanca" for the first time earlier this year. I always knew of it, but the nostalgia never was enough to watch it earlier. I did enjoy it and especially the characters. However, I did lose the plot early on when the twist of Ilsa's relationship enters in the plot. From that point, it really takes the characters to carry the story through all the problems the twist creates such that the ending makes sense.
“ Here's a neuroscientist talking to Joe Rogan about her study of the capacity of the human mind to predict the future, which she seems to believe in”
I watched some of that. She seems like an amiable crackpot, as opposed to the flying saucer guys, most of whom strike me as flat-out liars. But if she wants to convince people precognition is real (it isn’t), making a ton of money predicting the market would be a lot more effective than some dubious experiments with autistic kids. More rewarding, too.
Nobody here has ever had a premonition? They're not something you exercise control over, any more than being able to feel a breeze on your face allows you to control the wind. Some of them are precise to an unfolding event, some of them are an emotional reaction that you only understand and put into place once it comes to pass, and you feel it as a kind of deja vu. We can't measure any of this, so therefore, within our modern gestalt, they don't exist. But they happen.
Michael walsh tried to close all the backstory about rick loius and ilsa and point to their future destination
The Chosen does not have this problem. Mostly. Some of the extrabiblical subplots do provoke fan theories, but I don't think the writers change their plans based on them. CC, JSM
I get deja views not previews.
Come to think of it, even the biblical scenes spark fan curiosity. Making one narrative out of four gospels requires editorial choices. So the Transfiguration was a subject of fan speculation, and it still is even after we passed it in the main storyline, because the show uses flashbacks, and it has a much higher budget now. So when resurrected JC shows up, maybe Peter, James and John will remember the earlier glorious appearance and go "okay, that's what that was all about." CC, JSM
The Reddit thread asks "Please. No 2nd season with Beth as the boss!" (Beth is the main character's powerful and selfish ex-wife, whom he has a hard time saying no to in part because -- as played by Connie "Mrs. Coach" Britton -- she's so good-looking.) But virtually every TV show brings in a new boss in the second or third season, as an easy way of adding conflict. Anyway, I'm not sure why anyone cares what happens on this show -- which is virtually all character interactions and hardly any plot.
Nobody here has ever had a premonition?
I distinctly remember as a young child dreaming about seeing friends that had moved away back at school. Then a few days later, they were there. It is a vivid memory then and now, because I thought they had moved away and I'd never see them again; yet there they were. It could be because they never moved, and I was too young to understand they left for some other reason (e.g. a vacation). But it is as close to a premonition I experienced. Otherwise, like Howard; it is deja vu all over again.
The dilemma with TV series is always wanting more and being dissatisfied when you get more. If season one is great, you want season two, season three, and more, but they are almost always disappointing. Nothing is good after season three.
If a showrunner is so impressed by some viewer's idea, don't rewrite the next season. Save it for a few years down the road. If the idea is junk, it won't matter. If it's good, it could save the series.
“Nobody here has ever had a premonition? They're not something you exercise control over, any more than being able to feel a breeze on your face allows you to control the wind.”
Nonsense. I once had a premonition that a friend of mine was going to die on Wednesday. But that didn’t happen, because I killed him on Tuesday, thereby proving that premonitions are bullshit. Sometimes I feel bad about it, but he gave his life for science, so it was worthwhile.
mccullough said... Nobody saw the Dream Season of Dallas plot twist coming.
Especially the writers of the Dallas spin off Knots Landing.
The endings of The Sopranos and Six Feet Under were excellent. The ending of Seinfeld was meh, and the writers of Lost should be shot.
Sopranos was terrible dont recall six feet under
The worst example of a Producer reacting to the fans is Deep Space Nine. IRC, the Producer was called Behr, and he got angry when he read people praising the character "Gul Dukat" who's the thinly disguised "Space Nazi".
So instead of continuing to portray Gul Dukat as an evil guy with redeeming features, he made the character into a Genocidal pyscho. The actor Marc Alimo still brought some nuance and attractiveness to the character but it was an uphill fight.
That was harris yulend character
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