#can't collaborate effectively with the producer to write a scripts that actually works | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pynkhues · 4 years

Note

Sorry if this sent twice, tumblr messed up, but I was basically asking if you think the good girls writers are intentionally trying to push boundaries and step into racist territories (they have malicious intent) or do you think it's more down to malicious intent? I'm asking mostly because I love your wording and how you explore things. I know you can't predit what others think but you're a creative and work in creative fields so I thought you might have more of an insight (or just a feeling)

It didn’t send twice, anon, so thank you for re-sending it (and for your kind words!) :-)

It’s hard for me to comment on what the show does or doesn’t do deliberately because the creative team does so little press, but I wouldn’t say that they do anything deliberately malicious, no, and I don’t think that the fact that the show has fallen into racist traps and tropes has been done intentionally either, rather I think it’s indicative of a thoughtlessness or perhaps general ignorance around these topics in the writers’ room.

This got a little long, so I’m putting it behind a cut to save your timelines!

While I’ve worked as a writer in lots of different capacities, I’ve only been formally in a TV writers’ room for one show, and even in that, I was only a writer attachment (so basically the person who collates script notes and transcribes story discussion and ideas). It was also an extremely different show given it was only a two-episode miniseries, and it was a biographical one based on somebody’s real life. In that though, what I learnt is that writers’ rooms are intense! Everyone’s on really strict creative deadlines with no room to move, so for the couple (or several) months that you’re in (and out of) one, writers are so deeply embedded in the story that they often can’t see the wood for the trees.

They’re usually not focused on optics, or even tropes or stereotypes (unless there’s a voice in the room who brings it up) - they’re focused intently on character and how to get that character from Point A to Point B.

The writers’ room that I was in was...strange, haha. There were only two writers, plus the producer, the director and me, and a lot of it was spent trying to understand the actions of this real life person (who was frequently extremely hard to understand), looking through video footage, old interviews, trying to bring him to life in a way that felt authentic. The show was also plagued though with legal issues as the person the show was about was still alive, and across the 10 weeks of the writing (of which there were only four days of formal writers’ rooms), he started by trying to tank the show, and then changed his mind, came on board, but demanded his life essentially be sanitised (i.e. take out all the criminal activity, adultery and anything that implied he was unpatriotic aka the only reasons people would want to watch the show, haha).

By the end of it, the show was so constrained creatively, that both the writers were very unhappy and the show that came out is, frankly, not very good.

Good Girls obviously doesn’t have a number of those problems, haha, but I do think it’s likely that how they depict race hasn’t been at the forefront of the show’s mind in the writers’ room. This is pure speculation, but I think the one thing they’re thinking of over and over again is Beth, Ruby and Annie, and particularly the themes of female autonomy, and what women are prepared to do for their loved ones, and I think ideas that sound good in the very insular space of the writers’ room sometimes don’t translate when they actually play out.

Beth shooting Rio in 2.13 is a good example of this.

In the writers’ room, they would likely be fixated on Beth, and that theme, and on paper, y’know, I get it as a creative choice (again, just to clarify, I don’t like it! But I do get it!) In that insular bubble of the writer’s room, I understand the excitement of having Beth realise her power in finally committing the one act she’d been pressured to do all season. And to do it to the person who was both the one pressuring her to do it, and the person who’d empowered her to do it in the first place! What a dark twist on her arc!

That story then goes to a director who signs up and a team that’s either driven by the same focus and tunnel vision, or just there for a paycheque, which means sometimes it can take an episode being launched out of the safety of the nest for people to realise that it’s wrong.

Because out of that nest, that 2.13 doesn’t play as a shocking, full circle moment for Beth. Rather, it meets an audience who brings to it different context, knowledge, history, socialisation, and so it plays as what it actually is, which is a white woman shooting a brown man on screen. A brown man who happened to be her ex lover. A brown man who’s suffering the camera lingers on. (It’s further not helped by the bad pacing of the episode, and murky motivations generally, but that’s neither here nor there for this particular point).

The process of a story finding any audience can be tricky, because for all the wonderful things it can do, it can also expose weaknesses in storytelling, inherent bias in the writing (particularly as it relates to racism and misogyny), writing shortcuts and laziness that perhaps even the writer didn’t realise they were doing as they wrote it.

Which brings me to the point of the individual writer, which I think is a particularly pertinent one with this show in particular.

The system of writers’ rooms is that everyone’s together, workshopping, talking, sharing, building the story, then episodes get assigned to different writers, and those episodes get taken away and written, and then brought back. In this sense, TV is extremely collaborative, but also typically the buck stops with the individual writer.

I think this has, historically, been a part of Good Girls’ problem too, because ultimately I think that the writers who do think consciously about things like race write it into the show, while the writers who don’t, well, don’t.

I think there are two examples of this.

Firstly is Stan and Turner’s conversation about being black men in America in 2.06, which was an episode that was written by Des Moran, a black man, who talked briefly about the significance of getting to write that scene on his Instagram.

The other example is the Duke University interview with Retta, Jenna Bans and Bill Krebs, where they talked about the fact that one of the writers had experienced herself what Ruby and Stan had about being invisible while shopping, and thus written it into her s3 episode.

In other words, I think the way the show approaches race comes down to the individual writer, which has the effect of being sort of transient and unfortunately not cohesive. It means it can sometimes be harmful and outright racist, and it can sometimes be compelling and thoughtful and nuanced. It depends on the conversations that were had in the writers’ room, and it depends on the person writing the episode.

I will say though that Good Girls does seem to have made a huge push to diversify their writer’s room. They had no episodes at all written by women of colour in s1, whereas half of s3 was written by women of colour. (I actually did a handy breakdown of this here if you’re interested!) They also in s3 hired a black woman, Ester Lou Weithers, as an overall story editor for the season too. Those are both pretty loud actions in terms of creating space for different voices behind the scenes, and I hope it translates more on screen in future!

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

#behind the scenes #welcome to my ama #Anonymous

14 notes · View notes