I think it’s great that people hate Mary. It’s brilliant. It means I’m doing my job properly, because who wants a vanilla character? You don’t want to watch somebody who’s just pedestrian and boring. You want somebody to shake things up a bit. And if she’s making people hate her, that’s great. And if she’s making people love her, it’s equally brilliant. And I think, I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if people just went, ‘Meh, okay. Well she’s there.’
This on the first double page spread of today’s (Tuesday 24th January) Metro paper. We made page 3! This paper is distributed for free at train stations which is why I picked it up on my way to college. This is pretty big, right?
maybe we should just pretend that we expect a 4th episode each Sunday from now on and comment on the heteronormativity of each show the BBC broadcasts during the Sherlock slot.
There are no cliffhanging items left over, not that I can think of?
No. There isn’t something we have to come back to address. Which is quite good for us. Because if we do come back, we can just start with a knock on the door and a new client, and they can go and investigate. (x)
“I am not that bothered about what social media has to say about the plot or whether they approve of a particular twist or not. We can’t over analyse, because if we start doing that, we’d never be able to finish the episode. To be honest, I am not making a show to get reactions on the Internet.” –Gatiss.
SURE JAN.
Isn’t…analysis…of your writing….part of being a good writer?
And where is he hoping to get reactions? Letters to the editor of The Strand magazine? A handwritten note from the Queen?
This reeks of ‘Yeah, well, I didn’t want your stupid approval anyway! So ner ner!’
Grow up, Mark, and take some fucking criticism for a change. So-called ‘internet reactions’ are just reactions. They’re the same as the ones people are voicing on their lunch break, and in a cafe, and on the tube. The only difference is the latter are easier for him to ignore.
As Valeria said, acknowledging criticism and identifying your mistakes are how you learn and improve. If he can’t see that, then why should we care about potential future episodes? You’re writing the show for yourselves? Well, grand, but guess what? No one wants to watch that anymore, which means the BBC won’t want to make it anymore.
How out of touch do you have to be….I knew that he didn’t care a bit about fans, but this just proves he has no idea how the world works and how important “internet reactions” are.
It’s not new, of course, this flagrant use of smoke-and-mirrors plotting and nonsense resolutions. Think of that great study in audience abuse, Lost, which began with a plane crash and then added twist upon twist, surprise after surprise, always dangling the possibility of everything coming together and making sense in next week’s episode. It never did. The script heaped up implausibilities and non sequiturs until nothing could finally account for what the show had actually been about. Lost was an object lesson in the financial reality of television whose job is to keep viewers hooked for as long as possible, and then, when they (and the advertisers) have lost interest, vanish, whether the story is wrapped up or not.
So we get extended and increasingly incoherent narrative arcs that leave fans scratching their heads (Battlestar Galactica, anyone?) because we are doing what readers are hardwired to do. We try to find coherence, unity, and meaning whether there is any or not. We assume that the ending was somehow planned from the beginning, though we should know by now that that is not how television is made. TV—unless it’s conceived as a self-contained mini-season—doesn’t begin with a macro idea which they then break into as many episodes or seasons as they have to fill. Generally, they start small and add to the end, extending and extending with no final end game in sight. We shouldn’t be surprised that it doesn’t finally make sense. All those plot twists and surprises we thought were complex revelations of some master plan were just new bits tacked on, each one taking the story in a direction no one (including the writers) had foreseen when they penned Episode 1.
The fact that they name-dropped LOST and BSG feels like a personal shout-out to me.
It’s funny, I don’t normally agree with critics but most of them have been spot on in their critiques of TFP. This one in particular is right on the money.
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