The Walking Dead

[AdmiralDigby]

ai ya good episode. Very powerful stuff.

I predict crazy scientist is going to be crazy .

[Spooky]

ai ya good episode. Very powerful stuff.

I predict crazy scientist is going to be crazy .

I kept thinking that he feels he just found some new guinea pigs.

[TinkTanker]

I kept thinking that he feels he just found some new guinea pigs.

[Spooky]

Frank Darabont FIRES entire Walking Dead writing staff

With The Walking Dead about to finish its first season this Sunday, how is executive producer and guiding light Frank Darabont celebrating the show's huge success? By firing the series' entire writing staff.

According to Deadline, Darabont canned all the writers for the show, including executive producer and second-in-command Charles "Chic" Eglee. It's not unusual for TV show writing staffs to go through changes between seasons, and sometimes the staff is even "laid off" temporarily during a hiatus. But Darabont's move is more surprising, as is the news that he might not even retain a staff for the show's second season.

Instead, Darabont may use freelance writers to pen the scripts for season two rather than keeping a full team of scribes on the payroll. When you look at the credits for the show's first season, it kind of makes sense: Darabont himself wrote two of the six episodes and was heavily involved in rewriting or co-writing the other four. Of those, two were written by outside writers, one was penned by Glen Mazzara, and the fourth was written by Robert Kirkman, creator of the comic book on which the show is based. So it doesn't appear that the full-time staff was a necessity.

If he does plan to use only freelancers, however, Darabont could run into problems with the Writers Guild, which frowns upon that sort of thing on a network series. And with AMC ordering 13 episodes for the second season, the workload may be much heavier—possibly requiring Darabont to keep a bunch of writers around all the time anyway.

No final decision has been made yet on how this will shake out, and there's still time to iron it all out, since AMC doesn't plan to launch season two until around Halloween of next year. We hope that Darabont knows what he's doing, especially since The Walking Dead has been so freakin' awesome so far, but what kind of signal does it send to fire a hit show's entire writing team?


http://blastr.com/2010/12/frank-darabont-fires-enti.php

[Pearl@32]

No final decision has been made yet on how this will shake out, and there's still time to iron it all out, since AMC doesn't plan to launch season two until around Halloween of next year.

Ugh. What a wait.

[Spooky]

Why dumping Walking Dead's writing staff might be a GOOD thing

The news that executive producer Frank Darabont has fired the hit show's already small writing staff—and wants to go without for the second season—has sent a ripple through Hollywood. Relax, Deadites: This could work.

Of course, seeing anyone out of work is never a good thing. And in episodic television, there are always tons more writers than there are jobs, so the news that The Walking Dead might turn to a freelance-driven model came down like an anvil among members of the creative community.

But the idea of a show fueled primarily by freelance writers isn't new, nor is it necessarily bad. In fact, it was par for the course in the '60s, '70s and '80s: A small cadre of writing producers would chart the course, take some choice stories for themselves to write, assign the others and rewrite them when they came in. Classic Star Trek worked that way, as did The Twilight Zone before it, as did countless non-genre TV dramas.

Is there a virtue in having a writers' room, in fostering the free-flowing exchange of ideas, inspiration and experience? Absolutely. But that's not the only way of making television; there are others, and they are perfectly capable of turning out excellence. Babylon 5 was written nigh-exclusively by J. Michael Straczynski, and didn't have a writing staff. Every line of dialogue during the first three seasons of the Emmy-winning West Wing came from Aaron Sorkin's keyboard; the writing staff there served more as a platoon of researchers.

Turning to freelancers might allow for a shorter production schedule, with a dozen writers all working at the same time, turning in an avalanche of material simultaneously to then be honed and polished by executive producers like Darabont and Robert Kirkman. And production time is production money. No matter how big a hit The Walking Dead is, it's still a cable show on a small network: Every dime they can save will get you one more awesome zombie death.

And freelancers will get you new voices, fresh legs to help carry the drama over the long haul. They can also come from anywhere: Wouldn't it be sweet to see Stephen King bounce in for an episode, or David Chase, or Neil Gaiman, or Steven Moffat?

Ultimately, this hue and cry is all just anger from a very tiny population. The viewers of the show, by and large, don't know or don't care how the show they like gets pumped through their viewing screens, just that it shows up when it's supposed to. They don't want to know how you make the sausage, only that they get to eat it. And just that it continues to taste good.

Like brains.

http://blastr.com/2010/12/why-dumping-walking-deads.php

[AdmiralDigby]

ai ya good episode. Very powerful stuff.

I predict crazy scientist is going to be crazy .

I kept thinking that he feels he just found some new guinea pigs.

Exactly .

Or "bingo" as proclaimed by the world's most favourite Nazi .

[Pearl@32]

How did everyone like the finale? I thought it was pretty good. [spoiler]Everybody got way too drunk, but those scenes are true to life.[/spoiler]

http://insidetv.ew.com/2010/12/06/walking-dead-finale-robert-kirkman/

EW's recaps are pretty good, too. One theory on the Doc's whisper: [spoiler]JEFF: If Jenner knew for sure there were other scientists still alive and working, why did he surrender to suicidal despair? But I am open to the notion that perhaps he was giving Rick a tip about where he might find more help. Like: "Los Angeles hasn't fallen to the zombies yet. Maybe you spend all of season 2 trying to get there."

DAN: Los Angeles? Too smoggy. Think of a place that zombies would hard-pressed to attack. Yes, the ocean. What if there is an underwater facility off the Atlantic that caught word of the zombie attack and these folks are plotting and/or waiting it out a few thousand leagues under the sea, and our gang has to figure out a way to reach them? Now that's a SEAson 2!

JEFF: Can there be zombie sharks?

DAN: I'll do you even better. There's an invasion of pirates, led by a hook-handed man...named Merle!

http://tvrecaps.ew.com/recap/the-walking-dead-season-1-episode-6/[/spoiler]

[Spooky]

I enjoyed it and am wondering what the Doc said to Rick. I don't like that we have to wait a year for more.

I just started reading the graphic novels and am really liking them. I'm just finished #8.

[Spooky]

http://insidetv.ew.com/2010/12/06/walking-dead-finale-robert-kirkman/

We will definitely see Michael Rooker again.