Akiva Goldsman (sort of) admits that they screwed up the ending of PIC

[Mabus]

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat- ... for-picard

Switching to Picard, what did you guys learn from the first season in terms of pulling off the show that you’re bringing into season two?

Figure out the end earlier. If you're going to do a serialized show, you have the whole story before you start shooting. It's more like a movie in that way — you better know the end of your third act before you start filming your first scene.

So, the guy who's been writing and producing films and series for nearly 30 years doesn't understand the basics of writing a season-long plot, let alone how to end said plot.

Then there's this:

Certainly, there are different levels of complication over the seasons of Discovery — and I'm just a friend of the court at this point on Discovery. After season one, I started trying to excavate this Picard idea. But no, I think where our storytelling is complicated, if it is frustratingly so, it's just our own fault for not doing it well enough. The great thing about plot complication and character excellence is they shouldn't be mutually exclusive. Even a really complicated plot should ultimately become invisible, that's sort of the job of it. Chinatown being the example that we all endlessly lean on in our imaginations — [the plot of Chinatown is] really complex and complicated, yet at the end of the day you just remember it's about water.

Someone should send Goldsman that video where Chuck talks about the difference between complex and complicated and how it affects the story, because it's clear that this guy doesn't know the difference.

He also gives us this beautiful gem:

Or Harlan Ellison would have "City on the Edge of Forever," which is hard sci-fi.

The guy who writes for a sci-fi series doesn't understand what hard sci-fi is.

[TGLS]

Switching to Picard, what did you guys learn from the first season in terms of pulling off the show that you’re bringing into season two?

Figure out the end earlier. If you're going to do a serialized show, you have the whole story before you start shooting. It's more like a movie in that way — you better know the end of your third act before you start filming your first scene.

So, the guy who's been writing and producing films and series for nearly 30 years doesn't understand the basics of writing a season-long plot, let alone how to end said plot.

Based on the quote and his career thus far, I don't think it's so much a problem with writing plots for stories, rather he lacks experience running a short season serial TV program. So they wrote a few episodes, they started shooting (like traditional television), then by time he realized the tempo wouldn't work, they were already committed because the episodes were done.

Someone should send Goldsman that video where Chuck talks about the difference between complex and complicated and how it affects the story, because it's clear that this guy doesn't know the difference.

I dunno; I've been looking at comparing complicated and complex, and it seems there's no real consensus on when to use one or the other. Here's one thread.

[Nealithi]

Switching to Picard, what did you guys learn from the first season in terms of pulling off the show that you’re bringing into season two?

Figure out the end earlier. If you're going to do a serialized show, you have the whole story before you start shooting. It's more like a movie in that way — you better know the end of your third act before you start filming your first scene.

So, the guy who's been writing and producing films and series for nearly 30 years doesn't understand the basics of writing a season-long plot, let alone how to end said plot.

Based on the quote and his career thus far, I don't think it's so much a problem with writing plots for stories, rather he lacks experience running a short season serial TV program. So they wrote a few episodes, they started shooting (like traditional television), then by time he realized the tempo wouldn't work, they were already committed because the episodes were done.

Someone should send Goldsman that video where Chuck talks about the difference between complex and complicated and how it affects the story, because it's clear that this guy doesn't know the difference.

I dunno; I've been looking at comparing complicated and complex, and it seems there's no real consensus on when to use one or the other. Here's one thread.

That thread was kind hard to read.
If I had to define complex versus complicated as I see it. I would do so with a mechanical analogy.
A windup watch is complex. It has many precise moving parts to successfully do what it does.

A Rube Goldberg trap as seen in Tom and Jerry is complicated. It works, but most of what is done seems unnecessary.

[Mabus]

Based on the quote and his career thus far, I don't think it's so much a problem with writing plots for stories, rather he lacks experience running a short season serial TV program. So they wrote a few episodes, they started shooting (like traditional television), then by time he realized the tempo wouldn't work, they were already committed because the episodes were done.

Alex Kurtzman was involved in the writing or should I say lack of writing for "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen", a film described by Shia LeBoef as "having no script" and was filmed by a director that was forced to film it on a specific time period against his wishes. End result is what I can best describe as "mess".

Akiva Goldsman wrote "Transformers: The Last Knight" which was so good that it killed the franchise (not that the franchise could be saved after the 4th film), and 20 years earlier, at the beginning of his career, Goldsman wrote "Batman & Robin" which was so amazing, that the director Joel Schumacher apologized for the film and George Clooney said that "I think we might have killed the franchise".

There are dozens of great films with troubled production. Yet for some reason these two numbnuts have managed to consistently destroy everything they touched for the last two decades and they still haven't learned anything not have they improved over the years.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

IIRC the complex/complicated dichotomy was from the Empire Strikes Back video.

As of the late, my take is that complex has to do with what we know of the structure while complicated has to do with unaddressed or unaccounted circumstances.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Based on the quote and his career thus far, I don't think it's so much a problem with writing plots for stories, rather he lacks experience running a short season serial TV program. So they wrote a few episodes, they started shooting (like traditional television), then by time he realized the tempo wouldn't work, they were already committed because the episodes were done.

Alex Kurtzman was involved in the writing or should I say lack of writing for "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen", a film described by Shia LeBoef as "having no script" and was filmed by a director that was forced to film it on a specific time period against his wishes. End result is what I can best describe as "mess".

Akiva Goldsman wrote "Transformers: The Last Knight" which was so good that it killed the franchise (not that the franchise could be saved after the 4th film), and 20 years earlier, at the beginning of his career, Goldsman wrote "Batman & Robin" which was so amazing, that the director Joel Schumacher apologized for the film and George Clooney said that "I think we might have killed the franchise".

There are dozens of great films with troubled production. Yet for some reason these two numbnuts have managed to consistently destroy everything they touched for the last two decades and they still haven't learned anything not have they improved over the years.

Seems like Akiva Goldsman has pretty solid basis for writing grounded storytelling (particularly adaptations) and has potentially a healthy hand in sci-fi stories despite having generally integral parts in otherwise bad movies. Like we can't just blame him for Age of Extinction. And Batman Forever, Lost in Space, Practical Magic, IRobot, DaVinci Code series; they're not particularly disasters imo.

Not too dissimilar to David Ayer.

[Deledrius]

They screwed up a lot more than just the ending of Picard. But I would agree that "not knowing where anything is going" is plainly obvious, and I don't know how you write and produce a show as a ten-episode miniseries that is created in a single production block and not have a plan at all about what you're doing. Especially when it's the first spin-off, where you have the safety of an existing show to propel you as well as the responsibility of being the show that needs to prove spinoffs are viable. Everything is in your favor there to spend the time and do the work right. You don't just do "whatever".

It definitely explains why 8 out of 10 elements we waste our time watching in Season 1 never matter, or actively work against the primary plot and themes.

Like we can't just blame him for Age of Extinction. And Batman Forever, Lost in Space, Practical Magic, IRobot, DaVinci Code series; they're not particularly disasters imo.

You just listed a bunch of disasters. He was involved. How can we not blame him?

I'd add Titan A.E. to the list of his notable failures.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Like we can't just blame him for Age of Extinction. And Batman Forever, Lost in Space, Practical Magic, IRobot, DaVinci Code series; they're not particularly disasters imo.

You just listed a bunch of disasters. He was involved. How can we not blame him?

I'd add Titan A.E. to the list of his notable failures.

They're all flawed movies but appreciably coherent imo. Lost in Space I think doesn't have strong enough direction, but a decent story. Practical Magic is a subverted femme drama. I Robot was decent enough until we got Winter Soldier.

I don't see Titan AE on his wiki, though that's an appreciable introspective piece of post humanity.

[TGLS]

Well, reading a bit too much into the background of PIC, the unstated thing here is that Goldsman wasn't the showrunner. Michael Chabon was the showrunner, who had very little experience writing for television.

Like we can't just blame him for Age of Extinction. And Batman Forever, Lost in Space, Practical Magic, IRobot, DaVinci Code series; they're not particularly disasters imo.

You just listed a bunch of disasters. He was involved. How can we not blame him?

I dunno about the rest, but there are two reason I take exception with I, Robot:
1) The main failing was slapping on the Asimov compilation and names to the movie. That's largely out of the writer's control.
2) Goldsman was brought in to write for Will Smith (for whatever reason); most of the script was written by Jeff Vintar.

[Deledrius]

Well, reading a bit too much into the background of PIC, the unstated thing here is that Goldsman wasn't the showrunner. Michael Chabon was the showrunner, who had very little experience writing for television.

True. However, since we don't know what the individual dynamic was in production, and we do know that Kurtzman, Goldsman, and Chabon are all coming into this situation with considerable external clout, I don't think it's unfair to lay the blame on them as producers and head writers. They're all resposible for it on a high level, regardless of what their specific contributions are (which we will probably only know many years from now).

If Chabon wasn't doing a good job writing for TV, then Kurtzman and Goldsman weren't doing their jobs. If Kurtzman was too busy because they have too many plates being kept spinning now, then that's his own fault for spreading himself too thin. It's possible that the rapid franchise expansion came at the behest of the network, which makes it also CBS's fault for trying to pull a DCEU instead of a MCU (which, ironically, they already had thanks to DS9 before they started dismantling it with their current crop of shows). These are people who are hired because they (ostensibly) know what they're doing, being put in charge of a billion-dollar franchise.

There's a lot of blame to go around, and it always falls upward IMO.