Board Thread:False Info and Speculative Discussion/@comment-25123326-20140708033021/@comment-19765459-20140711210128

Paul.rea wrote: I've never once said Teen Wolf is perfect.

I've said, creator driven shows work - fan/survey/network committee shows fail.

Spock was HATED by NBC. They wanted him cut from the pilot - one of the reasons why they scrapped it and started again. They felt he would be too scary - "too satanic" for 1960s audiences. Gene Roddenbery stuck with it and was proved right.

Writer/Creator driven decision.

Still waiting for an example where fan driven decisions are recipe for success.

Gene Roddenberry was "proven right" BECAUSE of the fans, not in spite of them!

This is the point you seem to have trouble with, and innumerable arrogant showrunners have watched their ratings plummet and their shows get canceled as they scratch their heads in confusion for precisely this reason!

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Spock was Wesley Crusher. He was also Gene's creator's pet (and author avatar) and was widely loathed by the fans! No amount of effort to improve his character (or the fact that Wil Wheaton got better looking as he aged) made Wesley salvageable. Likewise, Picard was originally cast as a stolid, background authority figure while Riker was really supposed to be the TNG equivalent of Kirk. But as the seasons passed and fan reactions looked at, it was demonstrated that Picard was in fact liked by audiences as both more action-oriented and more of a romantic figure than originally conceived, and you will notice that Riker's equivalency to Kirk was gradually killed in later seasons while Picard's role became much broader than in the beginning.

It is generally acknowledged that had they stuck with "Gene's vision" dogmatically, TNG would not have lasted seven seasons, nor spawned yet more Trek series. It was a monster franchise that grew by reacting to the fans. If that meant that creator's pet characters had to have their roles dialed back (e.g. Wesley or, Q save us all, Neelix) then that was what had to happen. It worked. The showrunners certainly did not respond to every audience demand (e.g. for gay characters), but they did nonetheless make adjustments based on audience feedback. The result was a strong franchise that has lived on in syndication for decades!