Post by cko on Aug 27, 2009 1:58:39 GMT -5
...that for some reason gives me hope that there might be a way to get more from Tara and Michele, and the actors, on Reaper. At the AV Club, thanks kathyk for finding this:
And also thanks to loandbehold for posting this at TWoP!
When I did Reaper, the episode I originally did was supposed to be the beginning of this introduction to this overall mythology, because they clearly were taking the Joss Whedon playbook: You have a monster of the week for a while, and then you start linking it all up, and you create this overarching kind of world and story. And in the middle of the week, the network just came down on them and said “No, go back to monster of the week.” And you could feel this deflation amongst the actors, because they really understood that they had to start putting mythology into things. The network was just like, “Nope!”
AVC: There a lot of tension, in hourlong network television, especially, where creatively things are heading in a more novelistic tack, but the networks need something people can tune into any given week and know exactly what’s going on.
PO: Yeah, but the thing is, they have plenty of that shit. They’ve got plenty of Law And Orders and CSIs, so why not use those to finance stuff like Reaper or Dollhouse, where the people who watch shows on DVD or iTunes can just gobble up the whole giant Dostoyevsky novel that it’s trying to be? Have some balance, for God’s sake. The mythology they were going to introduce on Reaper was really amazing. It wasn’t complicated, but it was troubling, and would have really given you something to think about week after week. It didn’t drive me crazy, because I was just a guest star, but getting to work with those actors, all of whom are so cool and really intelligent… They really cared about that show.
Imagine the cast of Buffy if they had been told that in the middle of the second season, when they really started layering in more and more mythology. Remember when Spike is ripping up the high school and Angel comes in, and Spike calls him Angelus, and you start to realize, “Wait a minute, this has been going on for a long time?” Now imagine if the network didn’t want to call him Angelus, and the episodes ended with Spike dead. New monster next week. It would have just been so… as an actor, you would have been upset. Like, that’s a great scene to get to play. Why can’t we just keep adding shit like that?
AVC: There a lot of tension, in hourlong network television, especially, where creatively things are heading in a more novelistic tack, but the networks need something people can tune into any given week and know exactly what’s going on.
PO: Yeah, but the thing is, they have plenty of that shit. They’ve got plenty of Law And Orders and CSIs, so why not use those to finance stuff like Reaper or Dollhouse, where the people who watch shows on DVD or iTunes can just gobble up the whole giant Dostoyevsky novel that it’s trying to be? Have some balance, for God’s sake. The mythology they were going to introduce on Reaper was really amazing. It wasn’t complicated, but it was troubling, and would have really given you something to think about week after week. It didn’t drive me crazy, because I was just a guest star, but getting to work with those actors, all of whom are so cool and really intelligent… They really cared about that show.
Imagine the cast of Buffy if they had been told that in the middle of the second season, when they really started layering in more and more mythology. Remember when Spike is ripping up the high school and Angel comes in, and Spike calls him Angelus, and you start to realize, “Wait a minute, this has been going on for a long time?” Now imagine if the network didn’t want to call him Angelus, and the episodes ended with Spike dead. New monster next week. It would have just been so… as an actor, you would have been upset. Like, that’s a great scene to get to play. Why can’t we just keep adding shit like that?
And also thanks to loandbehold for posting this at TWoP!
