40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
Coincidence can truly be crap.
When you’re writing…whatever you’re writing.
Yes, yes, I know it’s cool when that long lost wedding ring turns up in the gullet of a fish a fisherman just caught…and it’s his wife’s wedding ring.
by John OstranderIt was announced this week that Stana Katic, who plays Detective Kate Beckett on the ABC seriesCastle, was not going to be asked back IF the series is renewed for a ninth season. The reason cited was cost cutting which also accounts for the shortened 13 episode season planned IF the show comes back.
The premise of the show is that mystery writer Richard Castle, played by Nathan Fillion, worms his way onto the NYPD and helps the detectives solve actual murder mysteries rather than the fictional ones he creates. Central to the series has also been his relationship with Beckett; he started by annoying her but, after as many complications and delays that the writers could conceive, they fell in love with each other, acknowledged they were in love, and finally married.
Which makes the loss of Katic/Beckett difficult to understand for me. The show may have been titled Castle, but its core was that relationship between the two leads. Yes, I originally tuned in the show because I had really enjoyed Fillion on Firefly (and the movie that concluded that series, Serenity) but it wasn’t the sometimes predictable mysteries or the often interminable story arcs that made me a big fan of the show. It was the relationships between the characters and central to it all was that relationship between Castle and Beckett. That WAS the show so far as I was concerned and has been since the first episode.
In other words – some outstanding writing/directing tips here!
Why does one series succeed and another, with all the same hopes, dreams, and good intentions, fail?
There are many reasons, of course, starting with the oft-quoted adage, “Nobody knows anything” when it comes to what’s going to grab audiences, and ending with “What a stinkeroo!” which probably is said much more often even though nobody seems to want to step up and claim authorship.
Today, just for the hell of it, let’s head ‘down under’ and explore the fates of two Aussie dramas – Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (Debra Cox and Fiona Eagger, 2012 -2015) and The Dr. Blake Mysteries (George Adams, 2013–).
Earl Pomerantz calls himself “a regular person” who “thinks about things and then writes about them.” But his work as a writer on Cheers, Becker, Major Dad, Amazing Stories, The Cosby Show et al show him to be the kind of special dude new writers can – and should – turn to as they enter the Biz:
I never wrote mean. I never wrote sexy. I never put characters in humiliating situations. And I never wrote dumb. And I still got a thirty-year career and a pretty nice house.
Visitors to my blog have repeatedly asked me to talk about my writing experiences on shows they enjoyed like Taxi, for which I wrote nine episodes. I hesitate to comply, because the half-hour comedy terrain has been so radically altered that I seriously question the relevance of my experiences with what’s happening in comedy today.