I've never really understood what Whedon meant by that comment. Was it reaction to the online fandom clamoring for stories about things they "wanted"? (ie. Put Buffy and Angel together and show us their adventures fighting vampires! Or put Buffy and Spike together...ditto. And Whedon responded, yeah, but when I do that it is boring (mainly to him) and the ratings dive, and as was discovered during the show Cheers - when Sam and Diane got together - the show was ruined.
IIRC, that was the context it was made in the first time, at least; fans were asking for the story to be about Buffy/Angel 4ever, or Buffy/Spike 4ever, or Willow/Tara 4ever... and Whedon said that essentially, if that's what they want that's fine, but it's not the story he's trying to tell. Which is always going to be a problem in any form of serialised storytelling, but at some point I have to agree with him: whatever the fans want, they have to give the storyteller the benefit of the doubt and a chance to tell the story he/she wants to tell. If they end up disappointed, so be it, you can't please everyone; but if fans get to dictate every step of the way what they want the story to be from here on out, then we don't need storytellers at all. And funnily enough, most of what I've seen shows that people don't actually want (heh) that. There's been tons of experiments with interactive storytelling, where the audience gets to vote on where the story goes past a certain point, and not one of them has ever become popular. (Except in video games, I guess.)
I can always tell when a writer isn't telling a story that they "need" to tell and are just "catering" to an audience. Marvel Agents of Shield is actually a good example of catering - it feels like it was feed to a focus group (which they have been known to do) tested, then changed to meet those needs.
Exactly! That's what's so weird about applying this here: the show seems put together by some sort of automated scriptbot where they've fed in what they think the audience wants, to which the scriptbot spat out a ready-made show built entirely on stock characters, stock conflicts, stock motivations, stock relationships, stock setpieces, with absolutely no sense that there's an author behind it telling a story.
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IIRC, that was the context it was made in the first time, at least; fans were asking for the story to be about Buffy/Angel 4ever, or Buffy/Spike 4ever, or Willow/Tara 4ever... and Whedon said that essentially, if that's what they want that's fine, but it's not the story he's trying to tell. Which is always going to be a problem in any form of serialised storytelling, but at some point I have to agree with him: whatever the fans want, they have to give the storyteller the benefit of the doubt and a chance to tell the story he/she wants to tell. If they end up disappointed, so be it, you can't please everyone; but if fans get to dictate every step of the way what they want the story to be from here on out, then we don't need storytellers at all. And funnily enough, most of what I've seen shows that people don't actually want (heh) that. There's been tons of experiments with interactive storytelling, where the audience gets to vote on where the story goes past a certain point, and not one of them has ever become popular. (Except in video games, I guess.)
I can always tell when a writer isn't telling a story that they "need" to tell and are just "catering" to an audience. Marvel Agents of Shield is actually a good example of catering - it feels like it was feed to a focus group (which they have been known to do) tested, then changed to meet those needs.
Exactly! That's what's so weird about applying this here: the show seems put together by some sort of automated scriptbot where they've fed in what they think the audience wants, to which the scriptbot spat out a ready-made show built entirely on stock characters, stock conflicts, stock motivations, stock relationships, stock setpieces, with absolutely no sense that there's an author behind it telling a story.