I know nothing about making TV shows. But I know a lot about watching them, and I definitely know a lot about writing. And every time I read an interview with Battlestar Galactica's executive producer, Ron Moore, I want to wring his neck.
As you guys may or may not remember, a lot of the top blogs are Sci-Fi fans. And every Friday we'd all do a blog post about Sci-Fi Friday on the Sci-Fi channel. Not anymore. Sci-Fi took what was one of the best shows ever, Battlestar Galactica, and pretty much destroyed it. Now, friends in the industry tell me that it could easily be the studio heads who are destroying the show - demanding the writers add this and that stupid idea to the script, etc. But
as I've noted before, when you read interviews with the executive producer of the show, they're kind of scary. Moore doesn't seem to believe in plots. It's almost as if he thinks he's writing a soap. Every day brings a new twist in the story inspired by a burrito and an antacid the night before. Read my other post to get the full flavor of how he writes the show - pretty much anything goes, and it shows.
Here's a recent interview with Moore:
For Moore, writing the series finale was more than a little difficult: “I was getting caught up in the wrong plot in my head, and I was getting annoyed with myself, and with my writers, and life in general, and my children, and cats.... I was in the shower and just sort of had this epiphany that I was concentrating on the wrong thing, it’s really not about the plot, it’s about the characters. I came back into the writer’s room the next day and wrote ‘It’s the characters, stupid’ up on the board.”
It's not about the plot? Uh, maybe if you're writing "Waiting for Godot." We learned in my last post about this topic how Moore, out of the blue, would make major changes in the show's plot on a whim, and then have to rewrite the entire season. The problem is, it showed. The plot didn't hold together, the dialogue didn't ring true.
One of the show's recurring themes has been the conflict between the Cylon monotheism and humanity's polytheism. When asked if this was planned from the start, Moore said, "When I wrote the miniseries, the first draft didn't really have much to do with religion. There was actually only one line -- I just had [Number Six] say 'God is love.' I thought it was an interesting thing for a robot to say. I didn't really know what it meant. I didn't really have a context for it. I just thought it was cool."
At least the way I was taught to write, you don't write things that sound good and mean nothing. Everything - every thing - you write should be there for a reason. And sounding good isn't a good reason.
Whatever. I loved this show. And in a very real way, good TV shows are like family, or pets. They dig their way into your routine, your life, so that you're angry, and feel a sense of loss, when they're gone.
Yeah, the show is better this season than it has been the last two. But it's still not back up to snuff, back to what it was in Season One. The problem now is that I just don't trust Moore any more. I know his shtick. The plot doesn't matter to this guy. It can change on a whim, and, in a way that isn't consistent with what transpired before. The shows just isn't real anymore. And that's probably the greatest sin you can commit in any kind of fiction, be it writing or acting - taking the reader out of the moment. Once you do that, it's over.
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