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The Walking Dead

egatti

By egatti
in Off-Topic General

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The Bookie Canucks Second-Line

The Bookie

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Ren - wow, excellent post and so much food for thought. I'd like to make several replies off-the-cuff but I think I'll sleep on them and get some perspective. In the meantime, can someone tell me if there's a good consensus site policy on this - if someone writes stuff hidden as a spoiler, but that/the response is not so spoilerish, is a respons/quote expected to be hidden under a spoiler tag or not?

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avelanch Canucks All-Star

avelanch

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Okay, I wrote this all very late and it's a little long/out of place in this thread. Anyone is welcome, of course, to click the spoiler tags and read what I have to say. A word of warning, however, the spoiler tags aren't hiding any actually spoilers relating to the show; it's merely a way to hide my accidental feminist rant so anyone who doesn't want to read it, doesn't have to.

Even if there is one writer for an episode TV shows generally have their writers/creators sit down as a group to determine what goes on in a single showing, from the most important plot points/conversations/events/etc. Like I said, I could be wrong but I was under the impression a single writer doesn't pen one episode, deciding exactly what's going to happen and how completely on their own. They usually break it down as a group and send one or more people to write it over the course of a couple weeks (depending on the episode) with the plot of the episode already determined. IMO, the big reveal and the fallout would be a big enough decision that it would be made by more than one writer. If all TV shows wrote their episodes one writer per without input from the other writers, things would be terribly inconsistent and you would never have plot threads which extended more than a few episodes. As I already stated, I think Rick's reaction will be part of a larger story line (determined by a room full of writers) and the situation hasn't resolved itself, despite how I may wish otherwise.

Perhaps you have a better perspective than me on the behind the scenes of The Walking Dead in particular. No, I don't watch The Talking Dead (I don't get AMC so I watch it on my computer). However, I do have some perspective, based on interviews and articles, on how other shows operate. One show I can think of, Glee, has been notorious in the past because they had three or so writers who split the show and its episodes in a way that made it particularly disjointed and inconsistent. It was very easy to tell who wrote specific episodes because the three writers were extremely different and they didn't sit down together to discuss the direction of the show; as a result, promising (and not so promising) plot lines dissolved, sometimes without so much as a word, and the characters who's names and faces remained the same, acted like completely different people. To me, Rick's reaction wasn't really out of character. He's pretty blah, anyway, and only lashes out at statues of Jesus as far as I can remember.

Also, for the most part, I find The Walking Dead to be pretty consistent from episode to episode (mostly consistently bad), and if you hadn't mentioned that a woman wrote the episode, I would have assumed it was the same collective effort of writers who wrote the rest of this season. Even on good shows like Community, of which I have seen most episodes more than once, I usually can't tell who wrote any specific episode. In retrospect I sometimes notice small differences in style and speed, but I know for a fact that the plot circle for any and every episode on that show is hashed out by the group. For the record, I think Community currently only has one female writer (I'm not sure how many The Walking Dead has) and she is one of their best. That show, perhaps not coincidentally and certainly in stark contrast to TWD, also has some of the strongest female characters on TV.

Maybe having a better behind the scenes perspective can help you answer this question for me: is this female writer one of the main showrunners? If not (and even then), I don't see how she could have written that scene and not have had someone read over it before going to scene Wouldn't at least one man, who would presumably have some perspective/opinion on the guy's side in dealing with marital infidelity, have read it first? I'm also wondering about just what you saw. Did you see the scene with Laurie and Rick and think, "Well that was weird. I don't understand why he reacted like that"? Then later, watching The Talking Dead, you made sense of the scene by assuming it was only written that way because it was written by a woman who is inherently inclined to side with members of her own gender? Or was it bad because women can't write for TV, in your opinion? Perhaps I'm making too big of a leap there, but I definitely made sense of it in a different way. I'm operating under the assumption that in this era of television there are enough checks on a script that it doesn't go to screen without a lot of input. The point of having a group of writers is having many perspectives to draw from; because men and women are different, and the backgrounds within each subset is distinct enough that not drawing on several perspectives when you have the ability to do so seems irresponsible. I very much doubt a show on AMC of all networks isn't putting even that basic effort into their scripts, especially after the highly publicized turmoil in the writer's room last year. It just doesn't seem possible to me that a single person could be at fault for any mishandling of any story line on this show. Therefor, I found your remark to be not just offensive, but quite possibly erroneous.

Did that make any sense at all? Sorry to go so overboard here text-wise, but I just couldn't keep my opinion to myself. I may have overreacted, but I kind of resented the implication that this writer, after one and a half seasons of buildup to that very moment, single-handedly determined based on her own misinformed or misguided opinion as a female that the guy in this scenario should be okay with his wife kind of sort of cheating on him with his best friend. Not only that, but after a million different instances of this scenario on TV I think it's probably safe to say most fans, no matter the situation on the show in question, rarely side with the woman (which is part of the reason I hate the story line). Laurie is no exception to this; in fact, I don't think I know a single person who watches this show, male or female, who actually likes her. If this specific writer in question does have a bias affecting the way she writes her episodes, it's likely the fact that she is a writer and is presumably inclined to sympathize with all the characters she writes. Admittedly, this is a subject I don't have any first-hand knowledge in - hell, I don't even know this writer's name, never mind her personal viewpoint - but I think my assumption here is a little more fair than yours. You're free to disagree.

And despite this mini essay I just wrote on something barely related to the show (I've never even taken a Women's Studies class, I don't know what just happened), my main point was that I personally didn't mind the way it played out, and I think it may have been a creative choice in the writer's room. I don't know what you wanted: was it for Rick to get angry? If so, for what purpose? To me it would be pretty insulting to Rick for him to be totally unprepared for that scenario. And, creatively, why have him get angry then? I just don't see how they could even work that. Anyone who's seen more than three TV shows has seen that, anyway, even on good shows (see - Homeland). I guess I mostly didn't hate his reaction because I hope that's the end of it and we can bury this stupid plot thread beneath Hershel's barn, never to be seen or heard of again.

I don't mean to give you too hard a time about it seeing as it seemed like more of a joke than anything anyway, but in my opinion (which has been shaped through many of my life experiences as, yes, a woman) the implication you made there seemed a little unfair. There are already few enough female writers on TV - and far too many terrible female caricatures on TWD - for people to be shooting down any well educated female writer who's opinion may be valuable to the betterment of this show and television in general. Unless, of course, someone were to suggest this person in particular, and not because she is a woman, is just not a very good writer. That would be an entirely different discussion.

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Ren Abbotsford Prospect

Ren

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im not going to pretend I read all of that, because it early and before my coffee and i don't feel like reading a novel right now, but here are the writing credits for the show:

http://www.imdb.com/...credits#writers

only the sole writer for the episode, the rest of the writing credits are for the novels it's based on and the developer. they don't have a writing team this season, it's how they planned it. they are doing something different than typical show development. interestingly enough, the season opener was written by Frank Darabont and Robert Kirkman, every subsequent episode was done by a completely different writer each time. I'm sure they had some ground rules around what they can cover/main events, for continuity, but were given the freedom for their dialogue and other points of the story. Angela kang is to blame for the little interchange about the baby.

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Remy Abbotsford Star

Remy

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At least there's Breaking Bad. But only for one more season, and that's a ways off.

Does anyone here remember the first several episodes of the most recent Battlestar Galactica? They were under constant pressure and always on the move. They had to decide on a destination and worry about limited resources while being constantly threatened by Cylon attacks. I would love to see Walking Dead take a more similar approach, especially as it relates to backstory (like how this zombie apocalypse happened).

Galactica had some flaws of its own, especially near the end, but overall it was a much better show.

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