Bad writing for film and television really irks me because of how avoidable it is. I’m not talking about mediocre or lackluster writing, but the actual bad writing.
TV shows and movies are tremendously expensive to make. Every part of it costs a fortune except for one: the writing. Even if a studio or production company was paying for a whole team of writers to work full time it’s still only a fraction of the cost of paying film crews, actors, editors, and VFX artists.
Given the relatively lower expense, relative lack of time constraints, and enormous importance of the script to the overall quality of the product it absolutely boggles my mind that production companies consistently fuck up the writing process.
It’s like reading a news article and seeing horribly constructed sentences and typos. Like, this is your main job! I know there are a lot of English majors out there who would love to find work.
At least for some of those there’s an excuse of needing to get the news out ASAP, but there’s no reason an in depth piece or an online article that’s been up for a few days should be butchered.
Really though writing should be the least important part of a journalists job, digging through stories and finding the truth or understanding the complex strands of the story should be and that often involves going back and editing, restructuring, reediting, reworking and adding to it over and over again.
It gets really hard to see your writing with fresh eyes once you’ve got it so perfectly constructed in your head, it’s super easy to miss awkward mistakes that have crept in - this is why editors were a thing but newspapers rarely bother anymore or the editor is too focused on political and social acceptable to notice grammar or word choice errors
Dropped subplots is like reading a news article with sentences that are
Great, now I have to find page B12.
This guy has birds and a good morning ritual.
I got the results of the tests back. I definitely have breast cancer.
You’re tearing me apart!
they truly are 😔
Yeah but taking advantage of that would require executive ghouls to be capable of appreciating art or even be willing to read drafts.
My pet theory is that this is because of the assembly line way of thinking of studios. Script -> Casting -> Shooting -> VFX -> Editing -> Profit.
It takes time to develop a good idea and script. If you force a writer to adhere to a strict schedule you’ll get a rush job and bad writing. As long as money keeps flowing in, their assembly line theory is validated.
Maybe it’s studio meddling or director indecision? Lots of changes at the last minute make the writers fly by the seat of their pants?
I’m sure there’s plenty of those making a mess of things, but taking time in the writing process, getting input from relevant parties, and doing as much preparation as possible cuts out a myriad of problems.
Studio got a product placement deal? Great, let’s integrate that into the story long before filming even begins so it feels natural.
Director doesn’t know if he wants plot point A to happen or not? Good thing he heard about that while the movie was just a script instead of having him decide with dozens of people on set.
I’m sure there are uncontrollable, unforeseeable problems that will come up in any production. There is no reason to exacerbate those by being willfully unprepared. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure but it seems like film studios reliably hamper the “prevention” part to shave a few weeks off on prep time and end up losing more time or huge piles of money because of it.
That’s why the Lord of the Rings movies are so good. They had almost as much time in pre-production as they did during filming.
i wouldn’t be surprised if a big part of it is that the higher ups don’t know much about what good writing actually is, or they’re too focused on ratings and they don’t dare deviate from “what works”. it also wouldn’t surprise me if writers weren’t allowed to make “major” changes to scripts after seeing how the writing looks after scenes have been recorded, because it might be “too expensive to change”.
I’ve been building a list called “The Micro or Low Budget Sci-fi” https://letterboxd.com/mattcoady/list/the-micro-or-low-budget-sci-fi/
Basically movies that cost almost nothing to make and use great writing to build up the world. Our minds are really good and fleshing out the rest as long as their given good writing as a foundation. Productions could save a lot of money with good writing. It blows my mind you could sink $200 million dollars into a project and not have an absolutely flawless script.
Hey, thanks for sharing!
It’s completely beyond me why scripts get rushed out the door before they’re at the very least solid. Sure, a production company might make their money just a little bit sooner but they run a massive risk of losing all of their money making a movie that completely bombs.
It’s impossible for every script to be a masterwork, but holy crap it seems like an audience wanting a competent script is too much to ask. It’s not like there’s a shortage of aspiring writers that can take a crack at a script until it’s at least passable.
Ever heard of Time Lapse from 2014? It involves a camera that takes pictures 24 hours into the future.
That is such a good movie.
Well maybe right. What draws a general audience? A flashy trailer of the sun exploding or someone talking about their family issues?
I never said they’re mutually exclusive. There’s tons of big budget explosion movies that have great scripts. Dark Knight, Casino Royale, Matrix, The Bourne movies, Heat. The best movies have legs and continue to sell for years after release, exploding sun only gets you a good opening weekend.
Why not both?
It’s crazy cause if you hear writers in tv talk about it, they’ll get contracted like a month or two before they have to finish the first batch of scripts. Writing in Hollywood is as much about learning quick writing shortcuts/tropes to move the plot along to get the product out on time as it is being able to develop a plot.
That’s what sticks in my craw. If I’m a studio exec who’s going to invest potentially hundreds of millions of dollars it’s beyond stupid to jeopardize that to get a payout a little faster.
It just seems stupid to put a time crunch on the most important phase of your investment. I don’t see how taking a greater risk of a project being a flop is worth getting the script a few weeks sooner.
I think a lot is because Hollywood became a Henry Ford production process, one part feeds into the next so they’d have empty studios and workers idle if the next idea isn’t ready to go.
Also it literally doesn’t matter, this marvel film has literally the same plot and jokes as the last one? That’s ok we cooked up a drama where we pretend villainous gamers are against it to get people talking about it, we seeded stories into the media we own about it and forced our celebrities to pretend to love it…
They can make the absolute worst shit and as long as they link it to something vaguely related to some culturally significant thing it’ll be huge, even more so if they can link it to a social divide or political division they have no intention of ever actually caring about.
Childhood toy + social flag = money, it works for comic books ‘i had a the flash t-shirt when I was six I have to like these new films’, it worked with Barbie ‘this proconsumerism corporate tat which was heavily criticised by notable feminists has made a film attempting to shoehorn social progress back into a corporate friendly sales generating mush, they say the baddies don’t like it so I have to go see it!’, and it works with endless sequels ‘this franchise now makes zero sense, has the most painfully predictable plots, has gone so far off the rails jumping sharks that literally nothing makes sense and there are zero stakes to any of it which totally ruins everything that made the first one good…’ and you can’t even tell what I’m talking about with that because it’s everything (i was thinking john wick btw)
Make something actually good and no one will care unless the media circus tells them to, that’s how you get s flop. Make something even slightly changing intellectually or from a certain point of view and instantly most your audience is gone or angry, but be like Barbie and put sparkle on social concepts 90% of the world has agreed on for decades while actively avoiding anything more contentious then you don’t need to worry about alienating the audience or going over their heads.
And for some reason people just won’t stop watching it, they won’t watch indy stuff made with passion or small budget things no matter how good they are because they HAVE to see the big releases, like you’ll lose touch with society and be unable to make friends if you don’t force yourself to endure at least a dozen painfully dull industry movies a year.
Because writing doesn’t really work like that, the reason we get bland writing is because they keep adding extra chefs.
Thay get these professional writers that learned formula in school and apply it to sections of someone else’s work and wonder why the result is an ugly tapestry of formulaic rubbish.
All the things people love are written by people with passion for the project, then they get a budget increase and professional industry writers get brought in and it’s all shitty generic snappy dialog and dramatic posing that feels uncomfortable and awkward in the scene.
They have to have bad writing because otherwise it will be canceled 2 seasons in to a 3 season story arc
Mr Robot the writing was so bad I genuinely spent several episodes thinking it was a parody of how bad Hollywood script writing had got.
Like someone was trying to make M Night Shyamalan’s Fight Club: Now with More Daddy Issues.
I was watching with two friends and I thought they didn’t like it because I was the only one laughing.
M Night Shyamalan’s Fight Club: Now with More Daddy Issues.
Best take 🏆
Thank you! I have to admit I was pretty pleased with that one.
I liked the first season of that show and some of the second, but after that it fell off real hard.
Mr. Robot is genuinely my favorite show and I was shocked to see it brought up in this thread. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
Yeah, I used to bring it up a lot because plenty of people who don’t strike me as idiots seem to have enjoyed and respected it, which I probably find as confusing as you find my opinion.
Whats a show you think has good writing?
The Wire is almost a cliche to mention but the dialogue is frequently phenomenal.
Frasier has some incredibly well written farces - the ski lodge love pentagram episode is a great example.
Simpsons and Futurama have some episodes that are just gold from start to finish - cape feare, hell is other robots, war is the h-word. The jokes are all so good and so densely packed.
Arrested Development wobbles occasionally but when it’s good the writing is so well balanced - over the top while still being subtle.
The Great, season 1 at least. 2 was too awkward for me. I believe it was based on a play though, so maybe that didn’t count (I’ve been ignoring shows based on books).
Veep and The Thick of It have absolutely beautiful dialogue. The swearing, the insults. “Don’t mention Israel, Katherine” is a real triumph of a line.
Motherland, all of the characters are so impeccably written, it makes all the petty status games so transparent.
Deadwood has some lush dialogue.
Gavin and Stacy ekes so much joy out of impeccably written normal lives.
Derry Girls and London Irish. Moonboy.
Well I haven’t seen many of those shows but I agree with you on the ones I have, Simpsons futurama and AD.
Is there anything specific that sticks out to you as bad in mr.robot?
Mostly it was the cheesiest, most overused “twists” appearing with such mind numbing regularity that I honestly thought it was parody. Hence the M Night Shyamalan comparison. Which also made it feel like a 12 year old boy’s idea of deep.
And speaking of 12 year old boys, I remember not being able to tell if the dialogue was supposed to sound like an overly serious 4chan user because that was basically the personality of the main character, or if that was unintentional.
And the daddy issues! Whining about a distant or abusive father figure is the default character arc of US cinema. It’s probably an artifact of boomer screenwriters having dads messed up by ww2 but by now it’s like a painting of a naked lady on a couch - the single least interesting choice that will fill that space.
I honestly mean no disrespect to people who enjoyed it - it makes no sense to judge others based on the stories they like - but hopefully the above gives you a sense of how i experienced the show.
Those are pretty fair criticisms I guess. I just wasn’t as bothered by those aspects and I was more curious to see where the story would end up. Ill check out some of your recommendations. Cheers
A lot of people don’t like Rami Malek talking to the viewer/breaking the fourth wall. I love the show but I’ll admit it can be a bit overly self-indulgent at times
That has nothing to do with the quality of the writing though.
I completely agree, I don’t know why everyone sucks that show’s dick so hard every time it’s brought up. It’s good for TV, but a lot of it is just hard to watch because of how stupid the writing can be.
They put the emo chick in and there’s a lot of drugs so it’s deep and cool can’t you see.
At least the programming terms check out.
Recently this was Hazbin Hotel for me. Thought I would give it a shot but it’s written like a kid’s show instead of an edgy adult comedy about demons.
Aw man, I was hoping it’d be better. I will still see and hope for the best.
I liked the hazbin hotel pilot, but very much felt how you do about the helluva boss pilot. I thought hazbin was fun and quirky and I liked it a fair bit, helluva boss cranked up the edginess and immaturity but didn’t bring anything else that made up for it. Maybe the actual series is better Idk
How is it compared to Helluva Boss?
Much less clever and subtle. I would call that a pretty low bar, honestly. Helluva Boss also has a lot of poorly-written content IMO, but in Hazbin it’s nonstop bad writing until there’s a small glimpse of something competent. I would recommend Helluva Boss to anyone who likes shitposts and sitcoms, but I wouldn’t recommend Hazbin to anyone right now.
Damn, had high hopes, too bad.
Sliders… Had two great seasons then they started chasing trends and it jumped off a cliff.
Witcher :(
And I’m not talking about the casting or other stuff. Just the general writing and conversion from books to screen sucked ass
It was like a teenager wrote the dialogue.
From what I’ve heard it would have been multitudes worse if Cavill wasn’t so passionate about the source, too.
Yeah I never read the books or played the games. So when I watched it I thought it was kinda janky because they were trying a little to hard trying to stay true to the books.
Then I later found out it wasn’t true to the books. Sure sometimes you need to change things to make a story work better for a new medium. But why is it so jank then?
If they made changes but it worked really well as a TV show because of those changes I can understand. And if the show is janky because they tried to stay too close to the books, I can understand. But they made a janky show that’s not true to the books. I don’t understand!
I’ve heard even that books aren’t that good, basically being medieval James Bond, but somehow even more misogynistic.
Some of the jank is because of the first book for sure. Doing three different converging timelines isn’t easy.
Almost every Netflix movie. Disappointed almost every time.
I haven’t watched all of them but the animated Suicide Squad movies have been pretty good.
DC’s direct to video animation department consistently puts out absolute bangers, so that’s not surprising. It’s the live action stuff where they continuously drop the ball.
While usually true, I can’t help but look at War World and wonder what the hell they were trying to do with that
So Snyder?
TV show with really interesting premise that is well written, well acted, with great sets:
Streaming service cancels it after the first season and doesn’t renew it.
RIP ‘Night Sky’ with JK Simmons. What could have been.
Well that really sucks. I don’t even have a guess to what’s going on with that ending.
I was enjoying the heck out of The Peripheral. RIP.
I was just thinking about that show last night and wondering if/when season 2 was coming out, as it had good reviews, great cast, a good plot, and the dialogue was pretty good too.
Went to the Wikipedia page and found out Amazon cancelled it two months after it’s debut. Two months! They didn’t even give it a chance.
I watched with my SO and googled it right after we finished it to see when Season 2 was coming, thinking it would be a joke “haha only 2 years to wait for the next season” and it had already been cancelled. Rough.
RIP Carnival Row. I thought it was a pretty damn good show, with excellent actors and good character building.
It hasn’t been “officially” cancelled, but it may as well be at this point.
Somehow Palpatine returned
I feel like this is personally attacking Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter and that movie deserves nothing but accolades.
Alternate ending:
A small, innocuous looking bat takes the form of DRACULA behind CHARACTER 1 and CHARACTER 2
DRACULA: Why the fuck would I need a jetpack? How did you morons forget about the bat thing? It’s been part of my image for like, a hundred years.
Alternate alternate:
Character 1 sees Dracula turn into a bat and fly into another tower in the distance. Chooses to keep that information to themself for no particular reason.
To be fair, it does what it says on the tin.
You know I’ve seen every other mainline Star Wars and several of the one-offs and TV shows but I never got around to this one and I haven’t really felt like I missed out.
Same. I read about it in memes mostly and at some point I was like ‘alright that’s enough of that’.
You’re right.
This thing again. Palpatine is in a room full of cloning tanks talking about having unnatural powers. Next scene characters mention cloning and dark powers. It’s just Poe doesn’t know how it happened (he’s not omniscient) and doesn’t much care. Fascism returned and he’s going to fight against it, that’s all he needs to know.
It’s explained but the hot take internet reactions missed it. And then memes were created to brag about being to stupid to understand something that happened in a Star Wars movie that a child could understand.
Somehow you don’t understand what things mean in a Star Wars movie. Congratulations!
Somehow all efforts from episode 4-6 were in vain and Anakin wasn’t the chosen one again because throwing Palpatine into the death star core didn’t have any impact on anything. Somehow they made everything Luke, Leia und Han achived pointless. Somehow cloning was easily achievable with some dark powers and somehow Palpatine cloned himself and chilled for a few dozen years. Somehow Palpatine was a father and somehow Rei was his granddaughter.
Yes just like my Grandfather fought in WWII in vain because fascism has returned to our world.
Except the fact that evil can return doesn’t actually mean opposing evil is in vain.
Also, you may be slightly not getting the point of Star Wars if you think that we’re supposed to believe Anakin is the chosen one and everyone is supposed to respect his greatness. Yes this is what Anakin believed of himself, but how did that go for him?
Luke was meant to kill his evil father (or rule at his side), it was his destiny. Luke refused that destiny, how did that work out for him? Pretty good until the real evil Empire (the Disney Corporation) came along.
Star Wars isn’t really about making prophecies come true. It’s about rejecting them and finding a better way.
You’re a Star Wars fan, you’re meant to reject the fascist ideals of past greatness, not conform to them! Have a balanced take on Star Wars, not leave it in darkness!
I know from your point of view JJ Abrams is evil, But only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Counterpoint: several flashy videos on the Internet told me that space samurai wisard films are bad now because there is a mean woman there and no kinky costumes.
This first Suicide Squad was hot garbage, the second was awesome.
Will Smith’s compulsive need to never be the bad guy didn’t help.
He did make an exception at the Oscars.
The dude definitely hits his wife and children.
I mean he is…
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Rich.
Dad bless you
I’m willing to bet that his battered husband brain thought it was being gallant by defending the honor of his abuser.
The second one should have just been called something else.
Every DC fan I knew had such a bad taste in their mouth for that Will Smith Suicide Squad.
That’s the beauty of the Suicide Squad, they die or escape or there are other teams, so they can wipe out the whole cast without hesitation because it fits into the plot constraints.
The Extended Cut version of the first movie is actually an okay time. It boggles the mind anyone would think it’s a good idea to pull every bit of backstory and subplot and give us the mess of a theatrical version we got.
I didn’t know there was an extended cut. I’m so intrigued now, given that a huge issue with the theatrical version was its editing
There’s always a Snyder cut…
Apparently a internet web series named Battle for Dream Island suffered from this right around the second half of its fourth season. Let’s just say that this is when it has hit its lowest point ever.
Havent heard that name in a while
Good for you, the newer episodes are pretty average.
New episodes dont exist. They are in the imagination of needy
By the time I’m writing this reply, you probably already got slapped.
Spelling error in a meme poking fun at bad writing. Hilarious.
rong righting
I’m still salty about League of Extraordinary Gentleman. Literary Avengers is such an awesome concept, but what we got was so fucking bad Connery walked away from acting forever.
But it did give us one of the most beautiful movie cars ever which, you know, is nice.
I know it’s bad but for some reason as a kid I loved that movie lol.
You, personally, are the reason Connery quit acting.
11 year old me would be devastated to hear that.
Are you me? As a
kidteen I fucking loved LXG and Connery was my favorite actor so not seeing him again after that did devastate me a bitedit: time is weird
Read the comic. It does so much better with the concept. Goddammit, can we get at least one good Alan Moore adaptation?! Look at the mans run of Swamp Thing! It’d do well as an animated movie, at the very least!
The swamp thing TV show for kinda close
Just like Sandman, it could only be good if the man himself was at the helm, but he hates comics now.
I really don’t think we can and I’m fed up of them trying, why don’t they let old things be old and comics be comics?
You want to make a good film in the twenty twenties then write a film to be a film in the twenty twenties.
I thought the little bit we got with that marvel mini-movie thing was nice. The main character and plot were a little cliche, but the acting was good and the execution hit well.
You didn’t like the watchmen tv show?
Not OP, but I wanted to like it only I couldn’t bring myself to keep watching. I can’t remember if I stopped before the end of the first episode or part way through the 2nd. I completely failed to connect with any of the characters, the setting, the premise or the politics.
I don’t mind fiction that’s a vehicle for political statements - I like Alan Moore - but it felt like a transparent vehicle for needlessly edgy politics, rather than a beautiful vehicle for needfully radical politics like Alan Moore’s stuff is.
But I barely watched it so I know this is a pretty hot take.
Fair enough. I enjoyed it but there’s so much good television out there these days that there’s not much point forcing your way through something you’re not enjoying.
It’s one of the best single season shows ever done.
It’s also mostly Damien Lindelofs work, not Moore’s (for the show).
Sean Connerys last movie, too. He did not deserve that.
“Somehow, Palpatine return.” -Poe-
Palpatine coming back wasn’t even an interesting premise though.
Palpatine = Fascism.
Palpatine returned = Fascism returned.
The word Fascism was coined be Mussolini because it was a reference to the Roman Empire. Fascism is often about restoring past Empires.
Luke tried (and succeeded) to bring his father back from the dark side.
Rey does not attempt to ring her grandfather back from the dark side. Why not? because he’s dead. You can redeem your family but you can’t redeem your ancestors because they’re dead. You also can’t confront your ancestors, but science fiction allows characters to do things that aren’t possible to do in the real world.
Rey confronts her evil ancestor and rejects him. Takes on a different name, She understands her ancestor doesn’t define who she is.
Children in school right now learning about what their evil ancestors did, what should they do? Take their side? Or realize like Rey did that they don’t have to identify with what their ancestors did. You can identify with the good people from the past even if you aren’t related to them.
Fascism relies on wanting the things that your ancestors had. Reject that idea and you reject fascism.
Also if you’ve ever seen a statue of some evil dude being removed, you will see a reproduction of an evil person that died a long time ago being moved around on a crane.
The problem with RoS isn’t that it didn’t do anything interesting, it’s just it didn’t tell you that it was doing interesting things. So people would know what to post on twitter immediately after watching the movie.
TLJ has the appearance of an interesting movie but actually did nothing. RoS tried to appear like a dumb action movie while actually doing interesting things.
And I didn’t even go into the layer about the grieving process, but that’s obvious isn’t it? Movie starts with a guy literally denying death and ends on Chewie inheriting Hans’s medal and Rey burying the lightsabers. The Sequel Trilogy was about death after all, so it’s obvious the last movie had a layer about the grieving process… right? RIGHT?
Those aren’t interesting premises. Those are the same, tired premises in a lot of current media.
It really did fail on all ends.
and that fucker got his lightening reversed on him AGAIN!
Stop using that spell you stupid fuck it always gets turned on you.
If I had a nickel for every time Palps got his lightning reversed…
I could afford to hire better writers than what we got.
3 10 cent-memorative coins would have gotten 3 fanboys who knows Star Wars front to back to write a lore-loyal exciting adventure involving potentially new force powers, cool new characters, and a coherent plot.
And yet, we got the drool dribbling out of the mouths of Disney executives at the thought of all the money they made.
Star Wars is god-tier IP.
You could shit in a bag, label it “Rancor poop” and make a million dollars with zero effort. Guess what happens when you actually put in effort to make things Good?
It’s like how the fan star trek movies are better than most the recent trek stuff but everyone throws their money at the corporations and doesn’t even watch the fans ones when they’re free.
People are to blame for media being as low grade as it is, every idiot that signs up to Disney channel and watches the most soulless drivel ever made is shaping our society to have more of the same
Poe doesn’t know or care why fascism returned, he just knows he’s going to fight against it.
The hot take internet culture rejected the movie simply because people don’t have the capability of understanding the layers and interpreting anything. It’s a shame really it’s the most interesting of all the Star Wars movies (though not the best, the editing was janky as hell). But people are more interested in consuming nitpicky memes about Star Wars than watching an actual Star Wars movie.
But it’s a movie that provided petty nitpicky assholes on the internet many hours of entertainment repeating the same false memes that only indicate that they didn’t actually watch the movie. You got what you wanted, so you should appreciate JJ Abrams for satisfying your cynical and petty nature with all the negative memes you’re still repeating over four years later.
I’ll just be over here enjoying a Star Wars movie that has layers about the relationship between our connection to our ancestors and fascist movements, the grieving process, and still isn’t so overly serious to not have a layer with the Emperor blasting lightning bolts at X-Wings.
Enjoy your memes!
The look on Oscar Isaac’s face as he delivers that line is something else.
It’s the face of a man who has been back and forth with the scriptwriter and director all day, and is resigned to the fact that this is the best they can come up with.
it makes sense for poe to say, how would he know how palpy came back?
the problem was the movie didnt really expand on that in any capacity
Even the writers didn’t seem to know. It was like they’d been handed some weird madlibs type shit and had to work Palpatine back in, even though the previous two movies hadn’t alluded to that in the slightest.
Even the groans from the rebels sound like “Jesus, three movies for this shit?”
If you look at Alan Rickman saying “By Grabthar’s Hammer, what a savings” and Oscar saying this, it’s the same pained expression, but only Rickman was acting.
