[Kamen Rider Lucha]

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Originally Posted by Locke

Hard for us maybe, but if your job is to be the headwriter of a fifty episode series...you should be able to do that job. No excuses. You don't hire a guy to plaster your house only to find out that they aren't even a plasterer. Apples and oranges maybe but I still find it baffling that people defend this nonsense.

Not defending failure. Just refuting your assertion that "it's not hard" to create an ongoing 50 episode TV series that is satisfying on an episodic level and also contributes to a grand story -- while also taking into account the chaos of filming weekly, episodic TV (i.e., actors get sick or hurt and are suddenly unusable; weather conditions make certain scenes unfilmable as written; practical effects artists run behind on suit fabrication; a director has an idea for a scene change -- all these things require on the fly rewrites which create ripple effects that disrupt everything that comes next). There are very few people who can do that, and even fewer who can do it well -- as proven by the number of people who have failed (in your estimation, every single head writer that's ever written for a Toei show has failed at this "not hard" task). It it weren't hard, every Sentai and Rider show would be flawless.

These writers are doing their jobs. To stretch your analogy to its breaking point -- they're plastering the house. But the house they're plastering is 1 of 6 mass produced pre-fabs in Ohio they pop up in 3 months, not a multi-million dollar mansion in Beverly Hills that takes 3 years to construct.

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"Yeah but it's hard for the headwriter..."
"What to do his job?"
"Err...HARD."

I'm not saying Sentai and Rider's head writers shouldn't aspire to perfection or that they shouldn't be held accountable for their failures. I'm just saying that those who succeed should be highly respected because while they made writing their show seem easy, it was an incredibly difficult, uphill battle all the way. That's just the nature of writing for weekly TV.

But you're going in the opposite direction -- you're coming off as incredibly dismissive of the writers' gargantuan efforts. We're talking a team of 1-to-5 writers who have to churn out 1500 pages of high-quality script in a year. How in the world is that easy for any writer, regardless of medium??? (Compare that to an American TV series, which has half-to-a-quarter of the number of episodes a year to write and twice as many people on the writing staff.)

I think you're forgetting that this is a pulp genre. It's about fast, mass production. It's not meticulously crafted high art. As such, Kamen Rider can't be held to the same standards of quality as, say, The Wire. That would be like saying "well, "Game of Thrones" can do XYZ. Why can't "Teen Mom" do the same?"

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And I'm not saying US programming is without sin, because they play to the ratings US shows are generally a fucking mess but even bad shows when you look at individual seasons there is rarely throw away episodes and they rarely fail as a whole cohesive unit.

I can't think of a single toku show which is worth watching from the very start to the very finish.

Maybe because you're from the UK, you're not exposed to the sheer volume of shit on American TV. Bad shows fail constantly. Good shows fail all the time, too (see: Buffy Season 6, Supernatural seasons 6-9, X-Files' last 2 seasons, Battlestar Galactica Season 4, Lost season 6, and on and on and on).

Why? Because writing weekly TV is murder!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Locke

On the downside though, when stuff isn't regulated it also isn't consistent either.

To end on a less contentious note...

I've come around to your idea of having a consistent producer in place, for like, 5 years at a time. They can hire different head writers with different visions & voices, but the producer could be the gel that keeps everything consistent.