I finally saw a tv series that handled it well, which I know you aren't into so won't bore with details, The Good Wife.
Scandal has become increasingly silly about it. Every week there's a "huge twist". It needs to slow down, it's losing emotional impact. Last season worked better - because of the slow build.
Say what you will about LOST, but it did build up to those emotional beats. Juliet's death was shocking and heart-wrenching. Neal's wasn't. And it should have been. They could have written it better. Instead of doing the last three episodes on Regina, Snow, and Charming - focused on Neal in the flashbacks and his search for a way to get back to Emma and Henry, how he got desperate and realized the only way was to get Rumple back. Instead they summarized it. Regina's love interest with Robin Hood has gotten far more build up. As has the baby storyline with Snow and Charming and their fears of being parents. But Neal got relatively little. It was sort of in the background.
Fanfic always flourishes where there are many gaps to fill and things to fix.
The way you can tell a tv series has great characters, but flawed plotting is how much fanfic it has. Straight-up canonical fanfic that fills in gaps and fixes things.
Genre television writers, for some reason, are great at metaphor, world-building, and characterization, but horrid at plotting.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2014-04-01 02:00 am (UTC)I finally saw a tv series that handled it well, which I know you aren't into so won't bore with details, The Good Wife.
Scandal has become increasingly silly about it. Every week there's a "huge twist". It needs to slow down, it's losing emotional impact. Last season worked better - because of the slow build.
Say what you will about LOST, but it did build up to those emotional beats.
Juliet's death was shocking and heart-wrenching. Neal's wasn't. And it should have been. They could have written it better. Instead of doing the last three episodes on Regina, Snow, and Charming - focused on Neal in the flashbacks and his search for a way to get back to Emma and Henry, how he got desperate and realized the only way was to get Rumple back. Instead they summarized it. Regina's love interest with Robin Hood has gotten far more build up. As has the baby storyline with Snow and Charming and their fears of being parents. But Neal got relatively little. It was sort of in the background.
Fanfic always flourishes where there are many gaps to fill and things to fix.
The way you can tell a tv series has great characters, but flawed plotting is how much fanfic it has. Straight-up canonical fanfic that fills in gaps and fixes things.
Genre television writers, for some reason, are great at metaphor, world-building, and characterization, but horrid at plotting.