All this talk of budget cuts. It really doesn't bode well, but it's part of the wider times. Witness NBC's woes a short while back. Guess everyone else is just catching up. This is kinda long, but y'all are talking about it, and I'm late to the game, so I'll pitch it in here.
I think
NY let Emmanuelle go for $$, but at least did so in a way to serve the show's ongoing bottom line, not just in terms of production costs, but in getting ratings while they did. I'll give 'em credit, aside from seeing so little of her toward the end, I thought the whole thing was handled pretty well. The culminating ep was a moving one on a few different levels. It sucks to lose her, but her death didn't seem to be as easily or cheaply expendable, within the ep and the season, as I'd feared might be. That's tempered yet by what we'll see as aftermath in S6.
In a way I kinda take that quote of Lenkov's, from the small article someone posted here, as two sides of the same coin; sure, maybe entertainment and that kind of release takes on a larger role in harder times. But at the same time, everyone knows just how insecure and volatile a business it can be, at least for those who work within it. An interesting, related point I came across, is that the entertainment divisions of these huge multinational megacorporations are feeling the pinch due failures in other divisions. Paying the cost for ripples in their web stemming from elsewhere. Probably not the sole contributing factors, but significant.
The belt tightening he speaks of, I just wonder across what boards it's travelling. How high up it goes. I read that in the approach to staffing season, CBS told it's show runners to cut a substantial sum from their budgets. Say approaching half a mil. You wonder where it's gonna come from and who's gonna fall and how deeply writing and production and lower-middling type ranks are ultimately gonna bear the brunt of it. Call me biased for those who work in the trenches, but I have my suspicions about where the blood's gonna be drawn from and who typically manages to remain relatively unscathed as things trickle down.
After several seasons I'd hope Emmanuelle was considered valuable enough to be getting beyond scale for her work. Simply including her would add a certain cost to an ep above a more anonymous supporting role I'm sure. Cutting, freezes, and reformatting their writing and production formulae (as much as contracts and standards of production values will permit), will enable them to cap or at least generally predict the costs of an ep. At least from the bottom end. There could be other places to trim things. Not intending to be redundant, just thinking out loud.
More generally, I've come across some interesting things here and there over the past little while that I'll toss into the mix along with a grain of salt. Apparently there are/have been various shows where there are an absolute myriad of executives, often non-writing say, that take a serious chunk out of a budget, and ya gotta wonder exactly why. Some must be worth it. But the sheer numbers of 'em... Who knows. I suppose it would also be naive to think that show budgets were used to simply pay people who actually work on the shows. And how about saving or re-routing some $ by
not paying a plethora of seemingly miscellaneous people episode fees. A few deft manoeuvers here and there in a few corners, who's to say, then maybe some cash could be put back into production.
As for filming in cheaper places, locations and all are easy to look at. ...But apparently studios have charged massive dollars
for their own shows to shoot on
their own lots... Belts, belts, everywhere...
All of this, it goes without saying, is purely speculative rambling from afar, but it's maybe interesting to consider along with everything else.
Regarding other recurring characters, I wonder if we'll see Bubba in S6. Not a whisper about Mykelti Williamson. I'm not suggesting Sinclair's exactly on the same level as Angell was as a character. But I'm curious in light of everything whether we'll see him again either.
It may be that losing Emmanuelle was a way to attempt to keep the regular roster intact, but that does seem like it's up in the air still. It really is too bad that Angell was the one to go. She was always a solid, stand-alone character, fit right into things, and the relationship with Flack did feel like an evolution that was encouraged to flourish upon discovery, a creative development that seems rare enough in itself. I'd easily prefer Angell, instead of Lindsay and the mess that's grown around her over the years.
I wonder if we'll see the continuation of the 3-ep guest arcs next season. It was something I quite liked. I hope they do keep it. They were separate from stunt casting, and I thought contributed to the show and a sense of a more integrated season. Of course, some of the stories were ultimately more interesting than others. I thought Elgers was a challenging figure, and perhaps the most compelling of the arcs. Julia Ormond and Craig T Nelson were pretty good. I think that Ella character was a creepy fruitcake. I think the flashdrive stuff felt contrived for Us vs. Them type stuff, and ultimately gave both good and bad eps and scenes. I think the greek coins started off strong but fell way short and far far offtrack in the end. Beyond Livingstone. What I'd hoped for it was certainly not what we got. Still. I think it would be a shame to jettison a new mini-format that has promise as a way to breath a little new life into the show, especially if they can find a balance with how they conclude.
I also wonder how absolutely badly they wished they hadn't done a 25-episode season... An extra ep and all those costs, and there were some I'd rather I hadn't sat thru. ...haven't yet made it to the grading threads.
Man, things must be abuzzing right now as TPTB all continue to try to figure out how they're gonna make the next season doable, with all the pressures being unloaded on them.
I could do with fewer virtual autopsies and blood droplets in stasis being picked out of mid air and the like. As I said a ways back, I'd by far prefer a scene like Adam tossing a paper airplane to excessive gadgetry and uber fx slickness for it's own sake. There is a lot that we do take for granted visually with the show, stuff we've been groomed to expect and that we would miss if it suddenly disappeared, but there's also a shitload of stuff that stands out and not always for the best of reasons.
Stuff that I'd like to take for granted are in the realm of the montages such as they had to open Pay Up, and then processing of the scene; that stuff probably wasn't cheap to put together, but those sequences did work well, and really are equally a signature of the series; compare that to the scene at the airport with the shoot out, that slo-mo bullet crossing? That may have looked great, but that's something didn't really do anything other than that and let ya know it wasn't your average cop show. I don't think it would substantially lower production values for
that sort of thing to be used more judiciously, along with those gut-flinging virtual CTs and the like.
I think the show has probably felt pressured to be slick and shiny and attractive and filled with famous faces and gad help me, kewl and 'Hip' a la PV, and perhaps the marketing and promo side of things were too much of a driving agenda in the stunt casting and cross platforming that we were subject too. And f*ck but the network fanvids were nauseating and laughable. I hope they don't actually rely
more on all that nonsensical crap to reach even further for an audience...
All I really hope for in the midst of all this is a refocus on just making good teevee that stands on it's own. It's often seemed like they thought the dressing could dazzle and distract the viewer from what might be lacking in substance. Well, it seems like there's gonna be a whole lot less to hide behind anymore. Now's a perfect time to really put the show together again with what matters most. I'm only wondering now there's some consensus between the network and studio and those who work on it as to what that actually might mean.
