Writing policy change (was: Walkabout)

[B5JMS Poster]

Subject: Writing policy change (was: Walkabout)
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 No. | DATE        |  FROM
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s  1: Oct  5, 1996: Chuck Fullerton <sdjpe at atl.mindspring.com>
*  2: Oct  6, 1996: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)

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From: Chuck Fullerton <sdjpe at atl.mindspring.com>
Lines: 23

gunther at dc.infi.net (Mike Gunther) wrote:
(dissapointment with Walkabout snipped)
>Is the best SF on television losing its edge? I sure hope not!



 . .If it is, it's because Joe may be suffering from slight creative
fatigue since, for some inexplicable reason, he now insists on writing 
every single episode himself. Joe has *no reason* not to be proud of his 
writing. His writing is *damn good*. The teaser in Walkabout was sheer
visual poetry. But what happened to the shared responsibility for the 
scripts? Peter David is a good writer too. So are David Gerrold, and D.C. 
Fontana. What I really want to know is, what happened to the variance in 
writing and JMS' willingness to bring in others to share in the work? 
Something obviously happened. Compare some of his older statements to his 
current defensiveness about writing every episode. Was there some incident 
that we don't know about? It seems to me that there must have been. 
      (BTW, Joe, if you're reading this, Walkabout was, for the most part,
fucking brilliant, but as others have said, the battle scene was a bit
lacking.) 


   -Chuck

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From: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)
Lines: 88

"Was there some incident that we don't know about? It seems to me that
there must have been. "

Nope.  No incident.  The situation with year 3 was that *so much* was
being paid off, and set up, and foreshadowed, and required such intimate
knowledge of where the show was going, and where it'd been, that it made
it nearly impossible to bring in any outside writers.  

There has never been any series in television history where every episode
was utterly beyond criticism.  Some are better, some are worse, some are
average.  There are many Twilight Zones by Rod Serling that are utterly
brilliant.  And some that just fall flat.  That's the nature of the beast.
 Sometimes something will look great on the page, and fall flat on the
stage.  (And sometimes it happens in reverse; you think you've got
something that won't work, and somehow the filmed version just takes off.)
 There's a lot about Walkabout I like; and there's some stuff that just
didn't work out.  You try something different here and there, and
sometimes it works, and sometimes it don't.  TV, or any form of writing,
is the constant process of trial and error.  It's not like one day you
forget how to write, or you're writing bad...you very rarely fall below a
certain facility once you reach it.  

There's not a writer alive who has turned out nothing but terrific stuff. 
Now, one could turn out a lifetime of mediocre stuff, by not trying...but
I think it's better to shoot high, and sometimes fall, knowing that you'll
get something great one out of every five tries, than not try at all and
just do okay.  

"Grey 17" is the same thing, for me.  There are bits in that I like a lot.
 And some parts of it just fell down dreadfully.  That's simply the nature
of the beast.  I thought I'd try something different in the tone of "Grey"
and while most of the writing works (mostly), the production fell down on
a couple of aspects.  It happens.  It doesn't mean anything.  

On the other hand, the following 3, "Rock," "Shadow" and "Z'ha'dum" are
some of the best stuff we've done.  The preliminary P5 survey has
"Z'ha'dum" as the best episode of the entire series to date.  Did I
suddenly learn to write better?  If there were a problem with being tired,
then by all rights you should see a descending order in quality.  But
these last 3 are some of our best work.

The real key here is something I heard someone say a while back about TV:
a flaw, or a flop, or a misstep happens by accident as often as by
inability; but real quality is never an accident.  So the latter is more
indicative of the level of the show than the former, since accidents or
missteps *always* happen.  

"Walkabout," for me, is a good episode with a very few clunky parts; for
me, it's a middle of the road episode.  "Grey" falls a bit short of that,
for me.  But then, I'm very hard on my shows; a lot of folks have liked
"Walkabout" a *lot*.  I didn't much like "Infection," but many did; and
some shows I love dearly, like "Geometry," don't catch on.  It's
subjective.  And where you say the battle falls short, others like it...so
on one level, I'd caution against applying your standard as an objective
one that is somehow more true than another, and thus asking "what's wrong
with *you* that I had this opinion?"  If everyone on the planet shares
that opinion, then you've got something.  Otherwise....

And there are always some people who don't want the character stuff at
all, they want battles...and some for whom the CGI is of secondary
interest to the plot...and those who want arc stories *only*...and those
who like the stand-alones.  Some of it is a function of what you want.

Anyway...point being, and I went around the barn a few times to get there,
no, there's no "incident" and I don't even know what this could refer to. 
Some episodes work better for some people than others.  That will happen
whether you've got 1 person or 50 people writing scripts.  I caught a lot
of *very* negative comments on Peter David's script, which you cite (as
well as many positive ones).  The Brits in particular seem to uniformly
dislike that one.  And in the P5 surveys, the freelance scripts are *all*
in the bottom third of the rankings.  So it's really not a question of
freelancers or no, it's just that TV is variable, as is any kind of
writing.  Not every episode is going to work for you.  Nor should you
expect it to.  I'm very much an X-Files fan...but there are some scripts
that work better for me than others.  Doesn't mean anything other than
that show didn't quite jell for me.  That's the nature of TV.  

I'm sure somebody will cite this as being defensive about it, but honest
and true, I'm not.  I'm just trying to explain it from this end of things.
 My prior exec producer said, "You're doing *real* good if, in a season,
you've got one-third that are pretty good, one-third that are okay, and
one-third you never want to see again the rest of your natural life."  I
think we do a heck of a lot better than that, and that's a heck of an
accomplishment.


 jms

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