Wednesday 3 June 2009

WTF?!?!??!?!?!

*** SPOILER TERRITORY FOR WATCHERS OF "THE BILL" ***

Okay... I have now officially moved from mildly irritable to really peeved. What the heck are the producers doing to TB?

I get the new gritty storylines and more explosions... (not with any real feeling of joy that's for certain) and I get the concept behind the 'new dynamic', honestly I do.

But watching the exodus of good characters, leaving us with the pretty but dumb ones is really, really irritating. Now they appear to be sidelining experience and gravitas for no other reason than an impression that pretty and young appeals to their audience?? (If I'm wrong about this... Producers please tell me so...)

TB's audience is not entirely composed of teenagers... the more I read about actors leaving and being sidelined, the fewer reasons I can justify to continue watching into the new post-watershed.

Producers... TB has spent the last almost three years getting back on track, please don't throw the baby out with the bath water!

1 comment:

Mick Bordet said...

At a guess, I'd say the show probably has new producers or a new script editor.

Exactly the same is happening on two of the only shows I watch on TV (and I only got into them because they coincide with lunch and dinner times).

'Doctors' kicked off by pensioning-off two long-standing characters and followed this by a one-in, one-out policy of character replacement. In several cases the characters still had plenty of development left in them, but have been replaced by fairly shallow blank slates.

'River City' introduced a pile of new characters at once along with a storyline that bore no connection to the past of the show. My initial reaction was "4 new characters - who's getting the boot?" Again, well-established characters moved on so that a new writer(s) can get his/her stories in the script using photofit characters instead of considering how existing characters might react to the same situations. I think it's just lazy writing (though it may well be out of the writers' hands).

It almost bugs me as much as the way affairs are used to spice up characters in a plotting-by-numbers manner. There are plenty of things you can throw at a character without having every single one have an affair with another. Grrr.