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That's just like saying McCreary > Williams because Williams hasn't scored a long-form television serial.
That's not like what I'm saying, at all.
Yavar
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Nope. Vanity Fair edited the article to remove the Howard Shore reference.
Before:
Will It Sound Like The Lord of the Rings?
In one very obvious respect The Rings of Power will sound absolutely familiar to Tolkien fans. Composer Howard Shore, who won three Oscars for his work on the Jackson films, is back to score this new Middle-earth adventure. But what about the language? Jackson and his team had the advantage of working off Tolkien’s novels and could lift long passages of dialogue straight from the source, but McKay and Payne are building their story from sparser material. Here’s where their love for Tolkien’s language came into play. “We start every single day of our writers room with a quote from the books,” Payne says. “Every day in production a quote from the books gets emailed out.”
After:
Will It Sound Like The Lord of the Rings?
Jackson and his team had the advantage of working off Tolkien’s novels and could lift long passages of dialogue straight from the source, but McKay and Payne are building their story from sparser material. Here’s where their love for Tolkien’s language came into play. “We start every single day of our writers room with a quote from the books,” Payne says. “Every day in production a quote from the books gets emailed out.”
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I'm fine with it if McCreary does it and Shore is out actually. I was talking in a different thread about movies and TV being "self-important", and reading how the writers start every day with a new Tolkien quote, smacks to me of the pinnacle of self-importance. I'm pretty sure Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson were just raging Tolkien nerds and didn't need to start their day with a Tolkien mantra.
A lot of this has to do with the construct of "the writer's room" and how it has become a coveted location of power in TV productions now, along with the role of "showrunner". The role of the "showrunner" itself has become an anointed position of power, equivalent to automatically calling a film director "auteur". The reality is that "auteur" was an external critical film theory concept that sometimes applied to some directors, but not all. In many cases, a film could largely succeed by the editing, cinematography, sound design, or a couple great performances and not the director at all. But not so with current TV/Content Streaming, which inflates the work of the "writer's room" and "showrunner" right from the beginning.
To me I observe this creating a myopic vision of the story, leading to the creation of what is basically just a "content engine". For the writers, they have to create moments and episodes requiring an artificial hook / cliffhanger / moment of punctuation that captures attention episode by episode. But that's just "content".
In contrast, a movie is a complete story or, in the case of LOTR, 3 parts of a whole story. Inherently, what you end up running the risk of is TV lending itself more to "self-importance" in these moments and monologues from the writers if they cannot transcend ego for the larger story.
BREAKING BAD is one of the few examples I can think of in TV where the overall show as a whole told a clear story with very little filler and started and ended at just the right time. While it had great writing, much of what helped it succeed was its outstanding non-verbal performances and cinematography. That is a complete anomaly in the streaming era of today.
GAME OF THRONES is a show I liked initially but sensed the writing became self-important through hoary monologues and ever-increasing one-upmanship in episodes when it stopped hewing close to Martin's writing. The final episode ended with an extremely self-indulgent sequence about how the writing of stories is the pinnacle of human achievement (cue writer's room patting themselves on the back). It started to just feel like CONTENT. Episode after episode of CONTENT.
THE RINGS OF POWER has a potentially similar trajectory. It's up to the showrunners and writer's room to create something from scratch, essentially attempting to equal Tolkien's achievement with LOTR. With the way the industry is now, I don't see how they can avoid the trap of it just being "content". LOTR is a content mine and it will be excavated for any little remaining nugget it can cough up to adorn some gilded content. We'll see what happens, but I think Shore can find more creatively fulfilling projects to score than a LOTR content-mill TV show. I think they're probably just desperate to claim ownership and usage writes of Shore's CONTENT, aka all the wonderful themes and rich musical textures he spent years crafting.
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I can hear this criticism when it comes to McCreary's film work, but I think some of his TV (and video game) work absolutely shows he can do this! Outlander might be the best example of all (though maybe you have to see the show to appreciate what's he's building there in context). But I like the Shore examples you provided, so allow me to provide a powerful example from McCreary's first Outlander album which I feel 100% shows his ability to tell a story over a sustained period of time without wasting a note, developing constantly while still breathing... to me this is practically on the level of The Breaking of the Fellowship, and it's utterly incredible in context too. It's the perfect thing that illustrates why McCreary is a perfect choice to collaborate with Shore on this, IMO:
The way McCreary lets everything flow while also developing his main theme, Frank theme, Druid theme, etc. throughout, for the great culmination of the mid-first season finale of the series... it's just a masterclass and IMO above anything he's done for film.
Yavar
Thanks for sharing this. The McCreary piece is good and it does develop, and I watched the scene and can understand why it has an impact - but it's sticking with one central concept, essentially acting as one long cue that begins and ends along the same path. Forlorn woman wanders the woods and comes across a stone circle that could connect her back with her love... but she's captured and can't escape.
Different music and different rhythm, but I'd liken it to the outstanding "Promontory" cue from the finale of LAST OF THE MOHICANS. That's an equally long piece, and develops with the action unfolding onscreen, but it's scoring essentially the same movement over the course of its playing time. Where it begins and where it ends is interrelated. Trapped characters must rescue their friends.
In contrast, the LOTR examples don't have a singular constant driving force, they're following the contours of a story across multiple scenes and for multiple characters, and where they start and end bears no tight relation to each other. The first cue starts with Tension and playful mystery of Bilbo performing a magic trick at a party and 9 minutes later ends with the terrifying horror of a dark horseman threatening to lop off the head of an innocent Hobbit. All of this is scored without distracting from the story. I could actually see a casual listener being completely bored with Shore's music because so little happens, but as a fan I'm aware and in awe of how Shore kept the music progressing with the story without overshadowing it. There is no singular build, but there is musical continuity.
I think McCreary overdoes it by trying too hard, usually by over-focusing on instrumentation and making things "unique" and heavily orchestrated when I think he'd actually get more with less by focusing on simpler core compositional approaches. Shore's LOTR, as amazing and detailed as it is, to me still had solid and clear concepts from which he could then build compositions that in some cases were quite simple, but expertly executed.
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Posted: |
Feb 16, 2022 - 4:53 PM
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By: |
SchiffyM
(Member)
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A lot of this has to do with the construct of "the writer's room" and how it has become a coveted location of power in TV productions now, along with the role of "showrunner". The role of the "showrunner" itself has become an anointed position of power, equivalent to automatically calling a film director "auteur". The reality is that "auteur" was an external critical film theory concept that sometimes applied to some directors, but not all. In many cases, a film could largely succeed by the editing, cinematography, sound design, or a couple great performances and not the director at all. But not so with current TV/Content Streaming, which inflates the work of the "writer's room" and "showrunner" right from the beginning.
Jurassic, as a person who has spent the last thirty years in "the writer's room," and about half of those as "showrunner," I am not offended by what you're saying, but I am confused by it. The fact is, writers have been the ones who run television shows for decades, and contrary to what you suggest, only in the current streaming/limited series world has some of that power leached away to directors or producers. (For instance, the Disney+ Marvel shows are not run by writers, at least not in the way that has historically been the case.)
To me, what you're talking about is showrunners doing their job well or doing it poorly. Or else you're talking about a form that you may prefer or not. (I happen to believe that these days of "Peak Television" have allowed for storytelling never before possible. Some of it is, I think, brilliant. More of it is, I think, tedious. But that is always the case for anything.)
Regardless, you may have liked the shows I've run, or hated them (it's more likely you never saw them), and that's fine. But believe me, I never once felt like I was "anointed" or any version of an auteur, just a guy doing my best to make an entertaining show on time and on budget while keeping my bosses at the network happy and also keeping my staff, cast, and crew in good spirits. Some weeks, the show comes out better than others. But I feel like you're assuming the title of "showrunner" comes with some level of unearned pretense or arrogance. To that, for me, I have to object.
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A lot of this has to do with the construct of "the writer's room" and how it has become a coveted location of power in TV productions now, along with the role of "showrunner". The role of the "showrunner" itself has become an anointed position of power, equivalent to automatically calling a film director "auteur". The reality is that "auteur" was an external critical film theory concept that sometimes applied to some directors, but not all. In many cases, a film could largely succeed by the editing, cinematography, sound design, or a couple great performances and not the director at all. But not so with current TV/Content Streaming, which inflates the work of the "writer's room" and "showrunner" right from the beginning.
Jurassic, as a person who has spent the last thirty years in "the writer's room," and about half of those as "showrunner," I am not offended by what you're saying, but I am confused by it. The fact is, writers have been the ones who run television shows for decades, and contrary to what you suggest, only in the current streaming/limited series world has some of that power leached away to directors or producers. (For instance, the Disney+ Marvel shows are not run by writers, at least not in the way that has historically been the case.)
To me, what you're talking about is showrunners doing their job well or doing it poorly. Or else you're talking about a form that you may prefer or not. (I happen to believe that these days of "Peak Television" have allowed for storytelling never before possible. Some of it is, I think, brilliant. More of it is, I think, tedious. But that is always the case for anything.)
Regardless, you may have liked the shows I've run, or hated them (it's more likely you never saw them), and that's fine. But believe me, I never once felt like I was "anointed" or any version of an auteur, just a guy doing my best to make an entertaining show on time and on budget while keeping my bosses at the network happy and also keeping my staff, cast, and crew in good spirits. Some weeks, the show comes out better than others. But I feel like you're assuming the title of "showrunner" comes with some level of unearned pretense or arrogance. To that, for me, I have to object.
One would assume that a show runner would be hired to, oh I don't know, run the show.
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Jurassic, as a person who has spent the last thirty years in "the writer's room," and about half of those as "showrunner," I am not offended by what you're saying, but I am confused by it. The fact is, writers have been the ones who run television shows for decades, and in fact contrary to what you suggest, only in the current streaming/limited series world has some of that power leached away to directors or producers. (For instance, the Disney+ Marvel shows are not run by writers, at least not in the way that has historically been the case.)
To me, what you're talking about is showrunners doing their job well or doing it poorly. Or else you're talking about a form that you may prefer or not. (I happen to believe that these days of "Peak Television" have allowed for storytelling never before possible. Some of it is, I think, brilliant. More of it is, I think, tedious. But that is always the case for anything.)
Regardless, you may have liked the shows I've run, or hated them (it's more likely you never saw them), and that's fine. But believe me, I never once felt like I was "anointed" or any version of an auteur, just a guy doing my best to make an entertaining show on time and on budget while keeping my bosses at the network happy and also keeping my staff, cast, and crew in good spirits. Some weeks, the show comes out better than others. But I feel like you're assuming the title of "showrunner" comes with some level of unearned pretense or arrogance. To that, for me, I have to object.
Thanks for sharing, I appreciate your perspective and fortitude to not be offended  I don't know your real name (or anyone else's on this board excepting Yavar and Lukas) so I wouldn't know if I've seen your work or not! I'm painting with a really broad brush, but to elaborate, I'm referring more to the newer streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, sort-of HBO) and not so much network TV. Historically as far as I know, network TV has always had "writer's rooms", primarily for multi-cam sitcoms where collaboration was essential - but also to an extent for dramas. I don't know if the general public was really aware of them as "writer's rooms" though as opposed to just "writers", I'm guessing because long-term continuity across seasons of a show wasn't as widespread until maybe the 80s and solidified as the norm most popularly with THE SOPRANOS. As far as I have observed, the general public referring to "writer's rooms" really only seemed to start to take off around the time of LOST but more noticeably with BREAKING BAD, which also coincides with when Netflix started streaming. Same for the term "showrunner" - you can definitely weigh in on this, but it had always seemed the contemporary "showrunner" was usually referred to and credited as an Executive Producer / Producer, which to the average viewer seemed to contain far less marketing prestige than "showrunner". Your description of your role is quite humble and I think matches how TV operated and was perceived pre-streaming.
What I'm referring to now is the cache that the "showrunner" has in marketing. Weiss and Bennioff are so known as "the showrunners" that a couple years ago they were attached to a potentially new STAR WARS trilogy purely because of their visibility as "showrunners" in the streaming era. Yet much of what made GAME OF THRONES strong was George RR Martin's source writing and I'd argue everything else external to the "showrunners", namely the other producers, UPMs, directors, editors, VFX, performers. I think they get way too much credit for what it has seemed like actually happened behind the scenes.
To your point about directors, I'm not sure if you mean the current TV landscape allows for more creativity (to which I agree, with the downside being you get an equally proportionate increase in trash content that can easily obscure quality work). Specifically for directors, Disney does uniquely have more emphasis on directors, depending on the project. THE PUNISHER was a show that was centered around a "showrunner" with no real visibility on the directors. In contrast, WANDAVISION emphasizes Matt Shakman as the director but the media refers to him as "showrunner" when his role is far less extensive than other showrunners. Overall, I find Disney's approach to highlighting directors vs. showrunners vs. the writing room to be mostly based on whatever they can leverage to communicate diversity to the public, since they are constantly battling those perceptions. But it does have the benefit of highlighting directors who, depending on the production, can sometimes have a greater impact than the "showrunner".
In contrast, GAME OF THRONES was not marketed as director-centric - I doubt anyone in the audience really knows who the directors were, yet I suspect they had a much larger hand in crafting the actual production of an episode than Bennioff and Weiss. That's ultimately my point which is that regardless of the level of work, TV shows are predominantly framed in the media and seemingly perceived by the public as being the work of the "showrunner" and the "writer's room".
With RINGS OF POWER, Payne and McKay were hired pretty late in the game, long after the directors and producers had already been attached to the project. Additionally, the project existed before anyone was hired simply because Amazon had bought the rights and as a company had been figuring out how to make it. In the past, shows like THE SOPRANOS and BREAKING BAD were legitimately created and shopped around by their respective showrunners/creators before being produced. But with Payne and McKay I have a hard time believing their influence stretches much further than filling a "writer" slot.
And that's ultimately my point, that with streaming services, these projects are being conceived and planned with a templated "showrunner" slot open to be filled along with a "writer's room", rather than these constructs happening naturally from a creative idea that grows and builds into needing support. Does every show need a "writer's room"? What if the "writer's room" is just 2 people? What if it's just Jon Favreau writing MANDALORIAN by himself? Or what if the show has very little writing and is more visually and artistically-focused like TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN? Not every show has to be a writing / showrunning powerhouse.
I really appreciate you sharing your experience because it's good to know that there still exists teams that operate not by the job title but by how the team works together to get the job done. I don't know whether that happened on RINGS OF POWER or not, but so far it seems like the "showrunner" role on it is a bit inflated, which is one of the things that makes me question the integrity of the project as a whole.
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Payne and McKay, with no prior production experience even coming close to the scale of LOTR: TRoP, were recommended by J.J. Abrams, which is all the reason I need not to watch.
You have mastered the power of brevity! Teach me!!!
For this kind of show I'd expect a story to have been written by an amazing writer with a love for Tolkien and having similarly humanist works, and paired with a Tolkien scholar and possibly a screenwriter to later help with formatting. Then I would have expected an experienced director and cinematographer to follow who are similarly established and they all discuss how they would want to film this and break it down into episodes. Same with the composer. No need to "showrun" this, it would be more about executing the logistics required to film what is essentially a long movie broken up into multiple parts - you know, kind of like what Barrie Osborne did for the films.
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Posted: |
Feb 16, 2022 - 10:24 PM
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By: |
SchiffyM
(Member)
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Jurassic, I'll try to be brief (generally not my forte) so this doesn't fall too far afield on this side of the board. As you say, showrunners are credited as executive producers, but executive producers can also include everybody from the (non-writing) head of a production company that sold the show to a supervising director to the star's manager. Producer credits are ridiculous, and seemingly immutable, and honestly I don't know why anybody should read them (we've joked in the room that a viewer would shout "Hey Mildred, there's a person named Jeff Zander and it says here he's a supervising producer on this show! How about that!").
Writers typically run shows not because we're so good-looking, but because scripts have to be turned around weekly, including when a show is actively in production, and because even if a show is only lightly serialized, or (rare these days) not serialized at all, it is up to the writers to make sure the story is told consistently and is true to character and, on an obvious level, to make sure that what happens in episode 11 doesn't happen again on episode 14. Whereas a novel or a screenplay can be written over months or years, we don't have that luxury of time on television, and when a story isn't working, you need multiple minds on it. Once a script is ready to be shot, it is a writer who can best speak to the intent. Why did it get this way? What is flexible? Where is the season headed? Directors generally come in and out and don't have that big picture.
But as you say, as television moves to a short season model (say, eight episodes), a lot of this is changing. Hard to know what things will look like in ten years. Regardless, on a well-run show, the creative contributors should be as egoless as possible. A writer may request shots of a director, a director may pitch lines in a script, an actor may come up with the best joke. We all have the same goal.
Now let's talk about who's scoring this Rings thing!
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For this kind of show I'd expect a story to have been written by an amazing writer with a love for Tolkien and having similarly humanist works, and paired with a Tolkien scholar and possibly a screenwriter to later help with formatting. Then I would have expected an experienced director and cinematographer to follow who are similarly established and they all discuss how they would want to film this and break it down into episodes. Same with the composer. No need to "showrun" this
But what you're describing is showrunning!
I guess so, but I'm framing it through a film lens rather than TV, and basically saying that for this particular story of LOTR, I think it's better served by a film-production style roughly mimicking the three films, where the script writing isn't episodic but more about deciding what of an existing written work fits into a digestible narrative on-screen. The demands of the films were more managing the logistics of filming 3 films back to back and how you get this incredible vision on the screen. I guess you could retroactively call what Peter Jackson did for the films "showrunning" but I think that would be misleading, given how the demands of the films were very different from the demands of episodic TV.
In short, I'm not so sure episodic TV is the best production approach for a LOTR story. It will likely work in a popcorn sense because writing general character conflicts is a dime a dozen and when it's propped up by the richness of LOTR characters and setting that will be a crutch, but the staying power of LOTR has always seemed to be the story as whole - like you don't read a chapter or two and say "ah, that was a great chapter" - you sort of have to read the whole thing.
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Posted: |
Feb 17, 2022 - 8:09 PM
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By: |
SchiffyM
(Member)
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Jurassic, respectfully, I think what you’re describing here is a distinction without a difference. “Showrunning” is exactly what the term suggests, no more and no less. It is necessary that somebody –writer, director, producer – have that job. Saying you don’t need a showrunner is like seeing an ugly house and saying you don’t want an architect to design your new home. The problem isn’t the job, it’s the way the job was done.
To your point, what Peter Jackson did could certainly be accurately termed “movierunning,” if there were such a credit. (Of course, there is not, because the DGA – of which I am a member – would have us believe that directors are that by default. That said, there is no official credit “showrunner,” either.) He supervised those films from the very first outline until the final sound mix, hired key personnel, cast, oversaw the departments handling production design, costumes, music, revised every edit… I could go on, but you get the point. This describes Jackson, and also a showrunner. There’s no magic to it, it’s just the job.
There is no one way to run a show – there are many ways to do it well, and certainly many more ways to do it poorly. But a good showrunner adapts his job to fit the project, be it comedy or drama, episodic or serialized, limited or ongoing, epic or intimate.
Every form – movie, series, novel, poem, theatrical play, radio drama, what-have-you – has its individual strengths and weaknesses. Some of the greatest novels of all time have made for terrible movies, not because of incompetent filmmaking (though there’s always that), but because some ideas simply don’t translate well from one format to another. Form cannot be ignored, no matter how beloved the source material. That said, remember that Charles Dickens was paid by the installment, which is why Oliver Twist was written and published in monthly installments. That didn’t keep it from becoming an enduring classic.
I am neither defending nor damning the showrunners of this new “Rings” series, whom I don’t know, nor am I making any predictions as to whether I (or you) will like it. When it’s done, much of the credit or the blame will go to these showrunners. But that will be because of the job they did, not because that job existed at all.
And now, even I’m tired of hearing myself pontificate on this subject. Sorry, everybody!
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Thanks for traversing the existential rabbit hole with me, I think we've made it through and learned something along the way.
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