[ SECRET POST #2571 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2571 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[Revenge]


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03.
[Vatta's War - Trading in Danger]


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04.
[Dirty Rotten Scoundrels]


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05.
[Doctor Who]


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06.
[Sherlock]


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07.
[Mass Effect]


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08.
[Sleepy Hollow]


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09.
[Star Trek: The Next Generation]


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10.


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11. [tb2]


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12. [repeat]


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13.


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14.


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15.


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16.















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 022 secrets from Secret Submission Post #367.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[tenlittlebullets]

What worries me is that the talent pool for next showrunner is looking awfully shallow right now. Unless the BBC takes a risk and picks someone who's never written for the show before, we've got... let's see. Excellent writers who aren't available to write for Doctor Who full-time (Neil Gaiman, probably Toby Whithouse), excellent writers with fantastic extended-universe credentials whom the BBC wouldn't let near the head-writer spot with a ten-foot pole because they haven't done enough TV work (Nick Briggs, Paul Cornell), and mediocre writers who couldn't plot or pace a two-parter let alone a whole season to save their lives, but whom Moffat seems to be grooming as potential successors (Mark Gatiss, Chris Chibnall). Moffat's issues as a writer are spiralling ever further out of control, but they're still less bad than handing the show over to a hack like Chibnall who can't handle anything with more substance than a generic monster-of-the-week episode.

It kind of makes me worry about the show's future. It's a huge commercial success, sure, but a lot of that has to do with it getting picked up by BBC America and getting a huge US marketing campaign right around the time the writing started to go off the rails. I'm not sure how long the tapping of that mostly-untapped market can disguise the loss of interest and investment from people who were already watching it. For the rest of Moffat's tenure, sure, but if his successor isn't much better...

(This isn't gratuitous Moffat hate. There are things I like about his writing. But (a) his flaws have been getting worse and worse as he goes on, and (b) he has never been as good at capturing investment from viewers as RTD was, which spells very bad news for the fanbase. From whatever slice of the fandom my Tumblr dash represents, it looks like a lot of people are only tuning in anymore 'because it's there,' and the highlight of the 50th anniversary season was the six-minute Paul McGann short because it was the first time since sometime mid-2011 that I'd seen a bunch of people getting really genuinely excited over currently-airing Doctor Who. That's just sad, and bodes ill for the show's future.)

[(Anonymous)]

I'm driving by so I don't have time to chew the fat but I wanted to say I agree with most of what you're saying.

I will say Broadchurch series recently which Chris Chibnall did was pretty good, tense and well-plotted. It's not sci fi though. Plus it had the awful awful cliche about stay at home dads stinger at the end which was ugh ugh ugh. But in general it was good and made me a lil more hopeful about him.

I have really enjoyed some of Nick Briggs' scripts. *sigh*

Does the successor need to have had experience in children's telly like Moffat and RTD?

[tenlittlebullets]

I'm not sure whether the kind of TV experience matters; what I've heard through the grapevine is that even though former EU authors like Paul Cornell and Rob Shearman wrote some of New Who's all-time best episodes, they got shut out of writing more scripts after it became a hugely successful BBC flagship show due to lack of experience writing for TV. I don't know whether it's truth or just speculation; if it's true, I don't know whether it's just the BBC being so insanely risk-averse that they shot themselves in the foot, or whether there were actual behind-the-scenes issues with rewrites or "unfilmable" scripts. So take it for what it's worth, i.e. not much, but a depressingly plausible explanation for some of the choices behind the current lineup of scriptwriters.

I'm all aboard the "Nick Briggs for Showrunner 2015" campaign. He's been executive producer at Big Finish for close on eight years now, he writes good scripts, unlike Moffat we know he can deal with managing long story arcs, he Knows People in all sorts of circles relating to the show, and he's been involved in the actual TV stuff (even if only as a voice actor) since the beginning of the reboot. I'm just pretty pessimistic about his actual chances given that he's never produced for TV--I think Coupling did more towards getting Moffat the job than all the fan-favorite episodes on earth.

I was actually really surprised to hear that Chris Chibnall was behind Broadchurch, because his track record on Doctor Who is so dire. *g* He's okay at monster-of-the-week episodes with no pretentions of being anything else (42, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship), but I've disliked to outright loathed all his attempts at tackling anything more substantial. And I love Gatiss' enthusiasm, but he cannot pace or structure a story to save his life, not even on the level of a single episode. He might make a better showrunner than Moffat at this point, but that says more about how out-of-control Moffat's problems have become--it amounts to "Gatiss might suck less, and in ways less likely to bore or alienate his audience."