POWER OF THE WEB
While the producers of ATWT and GL are always listening to fan feedback about their shows -- they read their mail, monitor message boards and regularly hold focus groups -- recently, a group of viewers seem to have overestimated their immediate influence on the goings-on in the town of Oakdale.
On December 15, Broadway World.com ran an interview with several young stars of the musical, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! One of the actors, Daniel Manche, the recently SORASed JJ, was quoted as saying that he had just filmed a scene where JJ killed his on-screen brother, Parker.
The ATWT message boards lit up with outrage and fury about the upcoming plot twist. Which turned out not to be true. Within days, the story was amended to read that "Daniel said he'd just filmed a scene where he beats up his on-screen brother."
While a majority of posters understood that a mistake had been made by a reporter unfamiliar with the show, a small group decided that the revised story was merely P&G spin and that, in response to their vocal uprising, the story of JJ killing Parker had been quickly scrapped.
This may -- may -- have been a possibility if the plot were still in long story stage. Less likely if it was in the breakdown stage.
But, if the scene had already been filmed, that meant it was, at most, six weeks from airing. (I'm not even factoring in the time that must have passed from the interview being conducted to it being posted; let's be generous and say it was a one day turn-around on the writer's part).
To kill the story based on fan uproar, ATWT would have had to mutilate a good chunk of an episode that was ready to air. They would then need to film new scenes to fill the gap.
Furthermore, since a story like JJ killing Parker would hardly have played for one day and never been mentioned again, that meant they would have had to rewrite weeks of scripts already in the can, not to mention possibly cut and reshoot several more episodes (all during the holiday season, with its multitude of vacation days, to boot).
ATWT loves their fans. They care what their fans think about their show and its direction.
But no way would they -- frankly, no way could they -- kabosh a major story in a few weeks under the above circumstances. No matter how loud an outcry.
On December 15, Broadway World.com ran an interview with several young stars of the musical, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! One of the actors, Daniel Manche, the recently SORASed JJ, was quoted as saying that he had just filmed a scene where JJ killed his on-screen brother, Parker.
The ATWT message boards lit up with outrage and fury about the upcoming plot twist. Which turned out not to be true. Within days, the story was amended to read that "Daniel said he'd just filmed a scene where he beats up his on-screen brother."
While a majority of posters understood that a mistake had been made by a reporter unfamiliar with the show, a small group decided that the revised story was merely P&G spin and that, in response to their vocal uprising, the story of JJ killing Parker had been quickly scrapped.
This may -- may -- have been a possibility if the plot were still in long story stage. Less likely if it was in the breakdown stage.
But, if the scene had already been filmed, that meant it was, at most, six weeks from airing. (I'm not even factoring in the time that must have passed from the interview being conducted to it being posted; let's be generous and say it was a one day turn-around on the writer's part).
To kill the story based on fan uproar, ATWT would have had to mutilate a good chunk of an episode that was ready to air. They would then need to film new scenes to fill the gap.
Furthermore, since a story like JJ killing Parker would hardly have played for one day and never been mentioned again, that meant they would have had to rewrite weeks of scripts already in the can, not to mention possibly cut and reshoot several more episodes (all during the holiday season, with its multitude of vacation days, to boot).
ATWT loves their fans. They care what their fans think about their show and its direction.
But no way would they -- frankly, no way could they -- kabosh a major story in a few weeks under the above circumstances. No matter how loud an outcry.
1 Comments:
Oh, Alina, I hate spoilers! :) Oh well, at least we know they will be SORAS'ing the missing JJ.
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