User blog:Paul.rea/Teen Wolf News 092617

Teen Wolf News 092617

The Jeff Davis Post-Finale Media Blitz
Teen Wolf creator Jeff Davis is literally everywhere right now. When you have a show wrap after 100 episodes, it’s a thing people want to write about a lot. Here are a few things you should probably read if you have questions about how things went down in the finale or what might have been if certain characters had lived. http://www.thewrap.com/teen-wolf-showrunner-jeff-davis-on-series-finale-revival-idea/

http://tvline.com/2017/09/24/teen-wolf-series-finale-ending-explained-jeff-davis-interview/

http://ew.com/tv/2017/09/25/teen-wolf-series-finale-allison-argent/

http://ew.com/tv/2017/09/24/teen-wolf-series-finale-postmortem/

http://www.tvguide.com/news/teen-wolf-series-finale-jeff-davis-interview/

These links are just a smattering of the stuff that he did, but most of the sites that just take other people’s stuff to make their own stories are using these sources, so almost everything you’ll find online originated with these links.

Why Posey + SCREAM?
A couple of interesting things happened to SCREAM after its poorly received, two-season run on MTV. The guy who was in charge before the guy who’s in charge of MTV now didn’t cancel it, and then the guy who’s in charge of MTV now handed it over to Queen Latifah (Executive Producer) and Vampire Diaries’ Brett Matthews (Showrunner).

They’ve since announced the casting of Tyga, C.J. Wallace, Giorgia Whigham, Jessica Sula, and Giullian Yao Gioiello. All this spells REBOOT in bright neon letters and makes it feel like something really interesting is coming.

MTV is supposed to be looking to their bright new future where their reality and live programming bolsters a new generation of neverbeforeseen scripted programming. Why then are they bringing Tyler Posey to SCREAM? It's surprising because Posey is so inextricably linked to the Old MTV, the one that executives want so badly to cancel and erase. Posey is a solid actor. He’s got comedic chops as evidenced in his appearances in Scary Movie 5 and Yoga Hosers. He can also do the drama as evidenced by every time he made me cry during the six seasons of Teen Wolf. He’s currently filming Jane the Virgin over at the CW and has a movie scheduled where he co-stars with Andy Garcia and Frank Grillo.

There’s no doubt that he is a great choice for any casting director, but the only reason I can figure they’d want him in SCREAM is that they want to kill him off. I can see some network executive loving the supposed symmetry of having their first scripted show of the new era start with the death of the star of the only successful scripted show of the old era.

If you remember, the SCREAM franchise made a trope out of killing off very famous people at the start of each film. The television series began in much the same way with the death of Bella Thorne’s character. Oh, look - more irony for our imaginary executive!

The early reports suggest T Pose will be a series regular, but I think that’s a misdirect. As always, I could be wrong and usually am with predictions like this.

SCREAM Season 3 revolves around Deion Elliot (RJ Cyler), a local star running back whose tragic past comes back to haunt him at the worst time, threatening his hard-earned plans for his future — and the lives of his unlikely group of friends. It’s slated to debut on MTV in March 2018.

Did Y’all See the MR: The Death Cure Trailer?
Honestly, watching this is a little creepy knowing what we know about how Dylan O'Brien almost died to make it. Anyway, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Maze Runner: The Death Cure will be in theaters in January.

What Now?
I’ve been getting one question a lot during the past couple of weeks, “What are you going to do when Teen Wolf is over?” I don’t have a good answer for that. I’ll probably sleep more on show nights. I won’t have to stalk social media for behind the scenes news, and I won’t have to fret over if I’m emailing Jeff Davis too much (I email Jeff Davis WAY too much, and he’s a kind soul to put up with it.) Beyond all that, I just don’t know. I don’t have an exit strategy because I didn’t plan to become this involved in the first place.

What’s a Wikia?
I’ve told this story a few times now, but I’ve never written it down and shared it publicly until now. I didn’t set out to become a canon keeper for the show. I’d never heard of Wikia before June of 2011 and would have never heard of it had I not had a friend in the Teen Wolf cast who was clueless about social media and needed help building an online presence. <p class="MsoNormal">I was helping this friend – who shall remain nameless due to an NDA – expand their digital footprint when I stumbled on Teen Wolf Wikia. The site was a month old at the time and had, I think, 20 pages. I added one for my friend, and that would have been the end of it had I not started reading some of the other articles. They were bad - format, spelling, grammar - all bad so I set out to fix just one or two little things.

<p class="MsoNormal">As the show progressed, I noticed a lot of the information that was added as “fact” actually wasn’t. At the time, this site assumed more than it documented, so I fixed a few of those instances. I also contacted Wikia HQ a lot to delete things that didn’t go with the show and other tasks I couldn’t do on my own. I think they became annoyed that some guy from a site for a tiny show that hardly anybody was watching took up so much of their time, so they made me the first administrator.

First Ever Teen Wolf News Update
<p class="MsoNormal">The first ever Teen Wolf News update came on December 16, 2011. The original report included details and images from the first two weeks of Season 2 production in Atlanta. Casting news that week included the arrivals of Daniel Sharman, Michael Hogan, and Stephen Lunsford to Beacon Hills as well as a contest announcement that promised a walk-on role for some lucky fan (See Shantal Rhodes).
 * CHECK OUT THE FIRST EVER TWN REPORT - http://teenwolf.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Paul.rea/Stuff_from_the_Set_as_Teen_Wolf_Begins_Filming_Season_2

<p class="MsoNormal">At the time – as with most of the stuff I did here - I had no intention of producing updates every week. It was almost two months later before I posted another update and another month after that before the third, but the reaction was positive. These reports increased the number of visitors during the off-season and gave folks on the site something to talk about, so I decided it would be something worthwhile to pursue.

<p class="MsoNormal">Keep in mind that, back then, most folks didn’t realize what exactly they were doing on social media. The Teen Wolf set leaked like a sieve and provided us with an almost endless supply of behind the scenes images. We were, once Season 3 went into production, pumping out reports almost daily because we could tell exactly where they were filming, who was on set and many of the upcoming plot elements just from looking through the tags on Instagram.

MTV Hates Me
<p class="MsoNormal">It was around this time that MTV decided to “handle” me.

<p class="MsoNormal">Matt McDonough who was in charge of “digital and fan interaction” at MTV at the time sent me the following email.
 * <p class="MsoNormal">“Hey Paul - I've been talking with the Wikia team about a potential media spend, and expressed a few of my concerns about the Teen Wolf page. Please get back to me at your earliest convenience so we can talk about where you're getting these images. Thanks.”

<p class="MsoNormal">To be fair to Matt, he’d tried several other tactics before going over my head and waving money under the noses of my corporate overlords.

<p class="MsoNormal">He’d been friendly, just a fellow fan wondering where I was getting my “juice” so to speak LOL. He’d acted desperate, he needed to know how was I getting all the info because, OMG, it’s really making him look bad. He’d been conspiratorial, I was his spy on social media, and we were working together for the betterment of the show.

<p class="MsoNormal">His real intentions became apparent after he put MTV’s substantial advertising budget within reach of Wikia corporate. He wanted to shut me down and, if possible, remove me from the site.

<p class="MsoNormal">Much to their credit, Wikia didn’t play that game, and McDonough learned to treat me with grudging respect. And while Jeff Davis and the production would eventually embrace me and this site, the network continued to treat us as the ‘red-headed stepchild’ of Teen Wolf influencers and news outlets right up until the end.

Once More With Feeling
<p class="MsoNormal">That song from the Buffy musical episode has been my constant earworm while writing this – Where Do We Go From Here?

<p class="MsoNormal">The Wikia will remain as long as the servers hold out after the inevitable zombie apocalypse. We’ll probably re-jigger our pages a bit. For more than six years, Teen Wolf Wikia was a living document with a flow of constant updating. Now it will switch to something more encyclopedic and settled. We’ll need to figure out the best format for those researching the show and those just discovering it. That will be a work in progress for some time to come.

<p class="MsoNormal">Teen Wolf News will remain a thing as long as I can find stuff to write about on the topic and as long as people still read it. It will probably morph into one of those overly long and somewhat dull newsletters some people send out around the holidays. Whatever form it takes, we’ll try to stay up to date on all the exciting things to come for our Teen Wolf Family.