Darling in the franxx, I was really interested in the world building and was on the minority of people that liked the episodes that had no mecha fights and they were just exploring the current city and how weird it was.
But trigger couldn’t contain themselves and had to do their asspulls and sudden massive power escalation that worked on Gurren Lagann because it wasn’t a grounded take on post-apocalyptic future with a few mechas that defend humanity!
TV show with really interesting premise that is well written, well acted, with great sets:
Streaming service cancels it after the first season and doesn’t renew it.
RIP ‘Night Sky’ with JK Simmons. What could have been.
I was just thinking about that show last night and wondering if/when season 2 was coming out, as it had good reviews, great cast, a good plot, and the dialogue was pretty good too.
Went to the Wikipedia page and found out Amazon cancelled it two months after it’s debut. Two months! They didn’t even give it a chance.
I was enjoying the heck out of The Peripheral. RIP.
That leaves for an interesting question: why is most writing these days so god awful? There are great writers out there. Hollywood isn’t stupid (is it?) and wants money. Why do they put shit writers on so many projects that then flop like the shit that it is?
Hollywood is stupid and they didn’t want to pay writers after the first draft is written. It may not be so much the writer is shit (they came up with some good ideas after all) it’s that they don’t have time to make additional drafts to fix plotholes, improve the dialog, etc.
Writing isn’t just banging out something on a typewriter and it’s pure genius the moment is written. It’s a process that usually involves multiple drafts.
You gotta admit a lot of things feel like a first draft, and it’s probably because it is. Hopefully these issues were sorted out with the writer’s strike.
Executives chasing profits with data they don’t understand, or the show just sticks around too long.
know to man
Maybe proof-read your writing. Maybe once.
Foundation. Such awesome design, great acting… but such awful writing.
My conspiracy theory is that the writers had an idea for their own show, but execs made them slap on the Foundation label for notoriety. Because the parts that aren’t in the books, like the Genetic Dynasty, are great – probably the best parts. It feels like that was the actual story here, then everything else had to be put in after the fact to justify the universe they put it in.
I stopped watching after season 1 because the “special powers held by individuals” angle felt like a slap in the face to the theme of the books. Apparently season 2 is better but I’m still a lil bitter so I don’t think I can do it lol
This is brilliant, and it would explain so much! And I agree that the most interesting story arch is the one that has nothing to do with the novels (and the entire show shared very little with the novels, outside of some names).
I said that I liked few of the characters; I don’t know if that improves after the first season, but like you, I’m traumatized enough by S1 to be uninterested in watcing S2. I realized I’d spent the last 3 episodes literally shouting at the TV because of characters being so unreasonably stupid, and if there’s a literary sin I can’t forgive it’s characters doing stupid things as a plot device. “We need tension in this scene, so we’ll have this character refuse to get in the escape pod until the last minute, for some trivial reason.” It is infuriating, sloppy, weak writing, and I refuse to watch it.
I knew I wasn’t crazy. I just can’t get into that series.
The movie “In Time” and the movie “Upside Down (2012)” are both great examples
If you like the concept of Upside Down, you might be interested in the anime movie Patema Inverted. It has the same premise and came out around the same time.
There’s this show called Stranger Things that also deals in the Upside Down.
It’s a little different. The Upside Down in Stranger Things is a kind of alternate dimension, whereas in the movies Upside Down and Patema Inverted it’s that gravity is reversed for some people.
I’m still salty about League of Extraordinary Gentleman. Literary Avengers is such an awesome concept, but what we got was so fucking bad Connery walked away from acting forever.
But it did give us one of the most beautiful movie cars ever which, you know, is nice.
Welcome to America.
The Dark Tower movie adaptation, I am a huge fan of the books and I was so looking forward to a 3 movie arc. Turned out 🤮
This gets me every time!
Me when they say the name of the movie in the movie:
Lumberjack Larry: “Darlin’, I’ve carved the grandest totem, but it’s too tall for the town square!”
Lucy, the Lumberjill: “And here I am, trying to fit this massive log through our cabin door. It’s a tight squeeze!”
Lumberjack Larry: “Looks like we’re both in a pickle with ‘My Big Stick Doesn’t Fit: The Log Jam Love Story.’”
Lucy, the Lumberjill: “Time to put our heads together and chop this problem down to size, honey!”
“And the world will always remember the Backdoor Sluts 7: Anal Apocalypse.”
Superman: The only way for me to solve this crisis is to be Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.
Peter: Oh, that’s why they called it that.
[Ding] Roll Credits!
“Ah boy, I’m just so tired of all these star wars.”
What are your opinions on The Magicians?
I did not like the constant tonal shifts between silly magic frat boys and depressing magical apocalypse.
Bad writing for film and television really irks me because of how avoidable it is. I’m not talking about mediocre or lackluster writing, but the actual bad writing.
TV shows and movies are tremendously expensive to make. Every part of it costs a fortune except for one: the writing. Even if a studio or production company was paying for a whole team of writers to work full time it’s still only a fraction of the cost of paying film crews, actors, editors, and VFX artists.
Given the relatively lower expense, relative lack of time constraints, and enormous importance of the script to the overall quality of the product it absolutely boggles my mind that production companies consistently fuck up the writing process.
Because writing doesn’t really work like that, the reason we get bland writing is because they keep adding extra chefs.
Thay get these professional writers that learned formula in school and apply it to sections of someone else’s work and wonder why the result is an ugly tapestry of formulaic rubbish.
All the things people love are written by people with passion for the project, then they get a budget increase and professional industry writers get brought in and it’s all shitty generic snappy dialog and dramatic posing that feels uncomfortable and awkward in the scene.
It’s like reading a news article and seeing horribly constructed sentences and typos. Like, this is your main job! I know there are a lot of English majors out there who would love to find work.
At least for some of those there’s an excuse of needing to get the news out ASAP, but there’s no reason an in depth piece or an online article that’s been up for a few days should be butchered.
Really though writing should be the least important part of a journalists job, digging through stories and finding the truth or understanding the complex strands of the story should be and that often involves going back and editing, restructuring, reediting, reworking and adding to it over and over again.
It gets really hard to see your writing with fresh eyes once you’ve got it so perfectly constructed in your head, it’s super easy to miss awkward mistakes that have crept in - this is why editors were a thing but newspapers rarely bother anymore or the editor is too focused on political and social acceptable to notice grammar or word choice errors
Dropped subplots is like reading a news article with sentences that are
Great, now I have to find page B12.
Maybe it’s studio meddling or director indecision? Lots of changes at the last minute make the writers fly by the seat of their pants?
I’m sure there’s plenty of those making a mess of things, but taking time in the writing process, getting input from relevant parties, and doing as much preparation as possible cuts out a myriad of problems.
Studio got a product placement deal? Great, let’s integrate that into the story long before filming even begins so it feels natural.
Director doesn’t know if he wants plot point A to happen or not? Good thing he heard about that while the movie was just a script instead of having him decide with dozens of people on set.
I’m sure there are uncontrollable, unforeseeable problems that will come up in any production. There is no reason to exacerbate those by being willfully unprepared. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure but it seems like film studios reliably hamper the “prevention” part to shave a few weeks off on prep time and end up losing more time or huge piles of money because of it.
That’s why the Lord of the Rings movies are so good. They had almost as much time in pre-production as they did during filming.
Yeah but taking advantage of that would require executive ghouls to be capable of appreciating art or even be willing to read drafts.
I haven’t watched all of them but the animated Suicide Squad movies have been pretty good.
DC’s direct to video animation department consistently puts out absolute bangers, so that’s not surprising. It’s the live action stuff where they continuously drop the ball.
So Snyder?
Preacher, the series adaption. Could have used the comic, but no, Seth Rogen had to butcher it.
Seth Rogen has proved he is the reverse Midas
Mierdas, everything touched turns to shit
