Board Thread:False Info and Speculative Discussion/@comment-25123326-20140708033021/@comment-19765459-20140709170351

Paul.rea, not to be mean, but your comment is outright laughable!

Firstly, you are treating "creator's vision" as if it were a tangible object, like a diamond, whose purity defines it's quality. But for every Mad Men or Breaking Bad, there is a Pan Am  or The Playboy Club. To say nothing of piles of pitches and scripts that will never see the light of day.

Second, creator's vision does not guarantee a show's longevity. The new Battlestar Galactica was initially received with great enthusiasm, and promised to be a pop culture sensation. But decline set in quickly, viewship steadily trended downward, and despite a passionate core fan base it did not last (and the series finale remains among the most hated of all time!). The prequel series, Caprica, which was actually very cerebral and intelligent, was also so agonizingly slow-paced that even BSG fans abandoned it quickly.

You see, here's the trick: the creator's vision is worthless unless audiences get caught up in that vision. No audience means no show, no matter how much the creator refrains from "pandering" or adheres to the purity of their own vision.

Third, you confuse listening to fans with running things by "committee". That is a fallacy. But even a franchise with strong brand recognition like Star Trek has seen its fortunes rise and fall according to audience appeal, and responsiveness to audience reactions. TOS only lasted three seasons, in no small part due to executives thinkng they knew what fans wanted better than fans did. TNG was on track for the same fate, as early seasons relentlessly tried to follow the episodic formula of TOS. But changes began in the third anf fourth seasons in response to fan criticism and the series ended up running for seven seasons total, as well as launching two sequel series that frankly often coasted along thanks to inertia leftover from TNG (especially VOY). ENT was an outright flop, because the showrunners stupidly decided that thye were going to do a prequel series that would focus more on original storylines than established canon, and fans fled in droves, to the extent that some storylines (like that stupid "temporal cold war") were simply abandoned without closure. By the time they made course corrections, it was too late and the show was the first Star Trek series since TOS to not run for seven seasons.

The lesson being that audiences matter more than producers. George Lucas may have made Star Wars, but he also made Howard The Duck. The latter is something he would rather pretend never happened!