Troot to Powah

YOU KNOW, sometimes somebody just writes something that's so matter of fact, so true, that you can't even really get upset or exercised about it. It just is.

Such is the post the Mighty Kay Reindl of Seriocity made on the subject of the current state of Notes. You remember Notes, right?

It's 10 days old but, wow...still pretty fresh to me:

I went to the Buffy thing at the Paley festival the other night and Joss Whedon was talking about how he came to write "Hush." He thought he was being somewhat hackish and wanted to break out of those conventions.

It would be nearly impossible to do the following today: have the time to realize you were becoming hackish, and successfully get "Hush" past the studio and the network. I've talked about the notes process before and I'll continue to talk about it, because it is one of the biggest problems facing TeeVee. It's not that the notes are horrible or the executives stupid. It's that the process of giving and taking notes is so time-consuming, nobody involved has the time to really devote to crafting an hour of television. A good executive can be very valuable and can give a project or an episode a fresh look that, at times, is sorely needed. But even the brightest of executives is going to struggle when they have to give notes on a story document, an outline and several drafts of a script. They don't just have to do this for one show. A current executive covers many shows.

This leads to notes calls being pushed, which leads to drafts being delayed, which makes problems for production, which costs money. Everybody is trying to make the show work. The execs at the studio want to save money and stay on budget and get the show picked up. The execs at the network want to get the show picked up as well. And the writers want to get the show picked up, and write and produce decent hours of television. You may think you're done with the notes at some point, but you're never really done. And all the craft and heart you've put into your script is eliminated in hurried notes sessions during the last day of prep.

The days of Joss Whedon having the time to actually focus on the aesthetics of his show are long gone. Now, everybody is just trying not to get buried. Forget theme and depth and subtext. You're lucky if the story is coherent. Many times, stories have to be rebroken more than once at the behest of the studio or the network. And that is not going to lead to depth and meaning. It's going to lead, instead, to just getting the fucking thing done so you can shoot it.

The notes process is killing everybody in television. It's killing shows, writers, executives and production. Shows that manage to transcend this are creator-driven shows but those shows are increasingly few and far between. See, making television really isn't that hard... if you're allowed to make it. But due to the corporate nature of things, even a simple process needs to be fucked up.

Yup. See? Wow. Not even angry.

Oh God? Is this Stage Five? Am I there?