I understood your point, I was just saying that I disagreed. In my experience, the word "reboot" has been used in this specific sense for a long time, and nuBSG was merely another instance of it, not one that shifted people's understanding or usage of the term. But regardless of the history, I'd say the more specific/"rigid"/"prescriptive" definition is a feature, not a bug. it adds clarity and facilitates communication, just like (for example) the distinction that comes up so often in these forums between continuity and canon (and headcanon).
James Duff joins Discovery Season 2 as co-showrunner.
- Thread starter SilentBen
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Good luck arguing with him, @Christopher is the font of all knowledge and seasons it with selectively applied pedantry in ways that interest no one except to provoke their frustration. It's ok because he's such a big time writer you see.
Well, I can't recall ever hearing it before BSG, except occasionally in industry-insider speak, where they were using it in a different, broader sense than fans use it today. I certainly don't recall it being a big enough buzzword that fans were going around complaining that other fans were using it "wrong." That seems to be a uniquely modern bit of pedantry.
Rigidity in language use is rarely a good thing, and prescriptivism is usually just a excuse to pretend you're better than other people. I would agree that a more consistently understood usage of the term is useful, but it shouldn't be used as a bludgeon against people who use it differently.
And it's important to remember that the perspective of fans is different from the perspective of industry insiders and businesspeople. To fans, a work of fiction is a purely abstract thing, valued only for its content, and so the distinction between reviving an existing continuity and starting over with a new continuity is a major issue -- hence the evolution of "reboot" as a term specficially for the latter in contrast to the former. But to people in the business, a work of fiction is a moneymaking property, and their top priority is simply whether they're making money from it or not. It doesn't really matter to them whether a revival is in the same continuity, a completely different continuity, or a reinterpreted continuity that pretends to be the original; they'll go with whichever one they think will be most effective at making the franchise profitable again. That's why business insiders, in my experience, use "reboot" in the broader sense for any revival regardless of continuity. And that can lead to confusion when fans hear the term used by industry insiders in a different sense from the one they favor.
So I'm not arguing about which use is "right" or "wrong." I'm pointing out that it's useful to understand that there is more than one way this particular term is used by different people, and it's good to be aware of those different usages so as to avoid confusion.
I liked redux. Redux was more fun.
To me the most interesting thing about James Duff is his writing and producing background has been mostly in procedurals. Is this a sign that Kurtzman think's it's a good idea to dial back the serialization level of Discovery a bit? IMHO it worked a bit better in Act 1 during the period it was semi-serialized than it did in Act II when it became totally serialized.
Reboot didn't become a common expression until boot itself did with the popularity of home computers in the 1980's, and even then that was not a wide part of the population, itself derived from bootstrapping (a computer turning on and loading necessary interpreter or OS to become useful, the equivalent of pulling itself up by its own boostraps), as opposed to sitting around throwing a series of binary toggle switches all day.
I don't recall reboot used in other contexts much until maybe the mid-90s.
I don't recall reboot used in other contexts much until maybe the mid-90s.
I don't think you can necessarily extrapolate what kind of writing a staffer will do based on their past experience. Keep in mind that Naren Shankar went from sci-fi (ST:TNG, Farscape) to a lengthy stint showrunning a procedural (CSI), and is now back doing sci-fi (The Expanse). Noah Hawley's first producing gig was on Bones, and now he's showrunning Legion, which is as far from a formulaic procedural as you can get. Tara Butters & Michelle Fazekas started out on Law & Order: SVU before moving on to shows like Reaper, Dollhouse, and Agent Carter.
Procedurals today are like Westerns in the '60s. There are so many of them that it's hard to find a producer who hasn't spent time on one. It's just a way of gaining experience in the business, and the skills learned doing them can be applied to shows in different genres.
Besides, lots of shows are both procedural and serialized, using the cases-of-the-week to advance their overall seasonal arcs. This includes shows Kurtzman has been involved with, such as Fringe and Sleepy Hollow. So the two aren't really in opposition.
I understand that. But (and again, this is just my opinion) one of the things which really hurt Discovery is that they decided to go big and go serialized before they had spent any time building up the characters, conflicts, or "mythos." I mean, doing a completely serialized show on the fly from day one is possible of course, but it's much easier if you are mining a book series (ala GoT or The Expanse) or at least have some cursory plan for where the series is supposed to go over multiple seasons.
We know that Berg/Harberts from interviews considered themselves as the showrunners the "keepers of the arc". If in addition to their abuse of the writer's room and budgetary issues there were underlying stresses with trying to keep the frayed arc moving forward, a sort of "back to basics" reset which just concentrated on breaking good stories and developing the characters organically from episode to episode would be a great place for a new showrunning team to start.
To be clear, I do not want Trek to return to procedural days. But if no one really has a solid idea what overarching story they want to tell in DIS, it's better to focus on smaller-bore stuff and character dynamics until a good hook presents itself.
Well hopefully this will calm down everything.
Him working on Enterprise gives me some hope for the future of the show. Scale back the nuttyness and darkness.
Him working on Enterprise gives me some hope for the future of the show. Scale back the nuttyness and darkness.
Which is no different from any other showrunner's job these days. Seasonal arcs are the standard for modern American TV. Even case-of-the-week procedurals have ongoing character and mythology arcs that develop over the season -- usually with the contrivance of the weekly cases always coincidentally happening to be directly relevant to whatever the main characters happen to be going through at that point in the arc. Lucifer, for instance, is a textbook example -- e.g. the murder of a noted philanthropist happens just when Lucifer's wondering if he should be more generous. (Fringe did that so much that there was an episode where the characters actually commented on the constant coincidence and wondered if it was evidence of some kind of cosmic synchronicity.)
Weren't they already 6-7 episodes into writing the season when Berg & Harberts were let go? That means the arc for the entire season was already worked out months ago. This stuff isn't done a week at a time -- the whole general arc of the season is usually devised at the start, and there are always multiple consecutive episodes in simultaneous development and writing, feeding back on each other. It might take 10-12 weeks for a single episode to get from concept to completion, so any episode's creation is going to overlap with quite a few subsequent episodes. So there's no way there can be a sudden, clean break if the showrunners leave mid-season. At the moment they leave, there are bound to be a sizeable number of episodes that they already had a hand in writing or outlining and that are too far along in the production process to be ditched. For instance, Robert Hewitt Wolfe was fired from Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda about halfway through season 2, yet all but two of the remaining episodes that season were scripted or at least outlined while he was still there, so his influence lingered for nearly all of the rest of the season.
For that matter, we already saw this in DSC season 1, since Bryan Fuller was let go very early on, and yet the war arc he devised remained in place throughout the season, although there were changes in how it developed (e.g. Lorca's origins and the length of time spent in the Mirror Universe). In this case, the showrunner change happened midseason, so that limits Kurtzman & Duff's ability to change course in the back half. And of course, B&H were answering to Kurtzman all along, so he must've been okay with the story choices they made. Remember, they were reportedly fired for their treatment of the staff, not for anything story-related.
I think it's a bit of an overstatement to say that the Season 1 arc was already worked out before Fuller left. We know major sections of the series - like Lorca being from the MU - were added later. We know entire episodes - like the Pahvo one and the Mudd time-skip episode - were inserted after he left. We know that Cornwell was originally supposed to die in Lethe. We know that the Tardigrade was supposed to be a bridge officer. We know the entire original third episode script was pulped late in production. All we know for certain that was retained from Fuller's vision was Micheal Burnham herself, along with going to the MU. That's it.
Also, obviously it's just my opinion, but the season finale was so lackluster in its final half that I simply cannot believe they planned for the season to have ended that way from the beginning. Perhaps they had something more expensive planned that CBS shot down? Or maybe they had the season initially end in a way which was deemed too "dark" by the network, and they were forced to make a quick rewrite? The last few episodes were filmed after the premier, which means CBS might have been reacting to the reception of the series at that time and telling Berg and Harberts to change things late in the game.
Regarding Season 2, given Kurtzman is hiring someone on to manage the writer's room, that seems to indicate that a great deal of writing work still remains for this season - that whole scripts have yet to be broken. I should also say that since part of the reason that Berg and Harberts were fired was due to blowing the budget early in the season, it's almost certainly the case that whatever plans existed for the back half of Season 2 will have to be severely curtailed. Thus it's likely that we'll still see considerable drift from their plan - presuming it was anything more than a few paragraphs to begin with.
Yes, I did already acknowledge those changes. My point is that the basic idea of spending the whole season on the Klingon war was kept, even though the specifics were refined. The term "arc" refers to the overall storyline, not every exact step along the way. If they'd wanted, they could've decided to wrap up the war sooner and spent the rest of the season on something else; arguably that's kind of what they did do with the massive Mirror Universe arc in the second half, so it wouldn't have been much of a stretch beyond that to wrap up the whole war in episode 9 and do something different for the finale. But they still stuck with the original plan to continue the war arc until the end of the year, keeping the basic idea even while changing the details.
Not in the specifics, obviously, but in the broad strokes. Don't think of it as a single step. That's not how writing works. You start with the rough idea for the season's arc (Klingon war, Burnham's disgrace and redemption), then you break the season by figuring out what broadly happens in each episode (e.g. "This is the episode where they make the drive work" or "This is the episode where Lorca is revealed"), then you break each episode by figuring out what broadly happens in each scene, then you write the actual scripts and come up with the specific lines and the specific way the scenes happen. Then you rewrite and rewrite and rewrite some more, and eventually you run out of time and are stuck with whatever the most recent version was. Each new layer of decisions refines how you advance toward the goal, though the overall goal remains basically the same.
That doesn't follow at all. First off, Kurtzman brought in Duff to help him run the room. Kurtzman is the main showrunner at this point. Second, breaking the scripts is just the very start of the process, like outlining a novel. The whole staff is involved in every stage of the writing from beginning to end. Scripts are assigned to individual writers, but the whole staff is then involved in the rewriting process.
Third, even writer-producers have responsibilities beyond the writing itself. This is a business, and they're management. They have to oversee every stage of the creative process, and that includes aspects of the process that don't get onscreen. As we saw with Berg & Harberts's firing, there are factors of budget, personnel management, and other business considerations that are part of a producer's responsibility independent of the content of the scripts, and a full staff complement is needed to handle all those behind-the-scenes management responsibilities so that the scripts can be produced smoothly and on schedule.
Here's a PDF essay by Javier Grillo-Marxuach (The Middleman, LOST) about the business of writers' rooms and showrunning:
The Eleven Laws of Showrunning
It explains how the modern writer's room is not merely a mechanism for creating scripts, but a mechanism for cultivating future showrunners. It's a systematic hierarchy designed to train writers for progressively greater responsibilities until they reach the level of creating their own shows or founding their own production companies. It's all very structured, and it's about a lot more than just the scripts themselves.
And here's an io9 article in which a bunch of showrunners talk about writers' rooms and how they operate.
But it would be more expensive to throw everything out and start from scratch than it would be just to find a more economical way of telling the same stories they'd already been making plans to tell. Again, even if they change the specifics, the broad strokes of the story arc for the back half of the season will probably remain, and it'll probably end up in basically the same place as originally planned even if the path to get there is different.
It's been said that writing series television is like building a car while it's racing downhill, or trying to fix a runaway train. You don't have the luxury to stop everything, do a rethink from scratch, and start over. You have to do everything on the fly, on a time limit, and it's hard to change direction once you're underway.
Duff is hopefully a mature guy who can produce competent, workmanlike episodes that hold together without veering off in badly paced, crazy, wild, gimmick filled directions. I would settle just for that at this point.
I don't get why people are talking as if Duff is the sole showrunner. Again, Kurtzman is the showrunner now; Duff is just one of the people who will be working with him in the writer's room, although it sounds like he may be second-in-command.
Well it's one major new face, it's bound to have some impact I would imagine.
Yeah, but Duff is just one member of the team, brought in to fill a vacancy. Kurtzman is the one making the final decisions, and he's been there all along. He was the guy that Berg & Harberts reported to, the senior executive who signed off on their decisions, and now he's just stepped into a more hands-on role in making those decisions. So there probably won't be that much change in approach. Whatever course the season was taking under B&H was determined with Kurtzman's approval, so it must be already going in the direction he wants. He's just taking on a more hands-on role in bringing it about, because somebody had to fill the void.
Well Season 2 as far as we know is 100% new, nothing from Fuller and previous stories.
As far as I know, Fuller was the one who came up with the idea of Lorca being from the MU, making this statement inaccurate.