
Technology leadership lessons from TV show writing - daniel-tlt21
https://www.tlt21.com/tech-leadership-lessons-from-tv/
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thejohnconway
Most television writing is terrible. Dialogue seems to be written to sound
cool - structure or sense be damned. Characters talk past each other
constantly. Plots waver around like drunken louts. It all lacks coherency.

I can't help but think that a lot of it is to do with the collaborative
writing process, with frequent fast rewriting. Films suffer the same. Shows
with one writer or at least a very strong creative lead are usually much more
coherent.

Television is being carried by production values at the moment. It looks and
sounds great!

~~~
watwut
> Characters talk past each other constantly.

To be fair, that is something that definitely often happen in real life.

That aside, I find HBO or netflix series writing much better then the one in
movies. The movies became too formulaic over time, relying on the same
simplified character stereotypes over and over. The movie plots also tend to
move in predictable streamlined ways. The film writing tend to follow stiffing
rules.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_movies became too formulaic over time_

Don't forget about the endless reboots. E.g. Batman in film:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_in_film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_in_film)

1940s (before my time)

1966 movie

1987+ reboot with 4 movies

2005+ reboot with 3 movies

2021 apparently yet another reboot

I probably got some of that wrong, because there's just too many of them. And
I probably missed some. And that doesn't include the "extended universe".

Sigh. Can't they find any other stories to tell?

I think the same applies to e.g. Spider Man? Countless reboots? Don't people
get reboot fatigue? Or does enough time pass that the movies simply appeal to
a new audience?

~~~
basementcat
Many of us would be proud to have built systems that go > 15 years between
reboots.

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finnthehuman
>With over 200 TV shows produced per year, the TV business could be the
closest equivalent to the technology world

Why do people always oversell the equivalence of software and thing-that-is-
not-software when trying to take lessons from the other thing?

They're both collaborative creative processes with scheduled product
deliverables. That's where the similarity start and end.

If the author could admit the ways live action production is sharply divergent
from software development and show how the translatable advice crosses the
gap, then I might care what the rest of this article has to say.

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hoseja
With the state of scripts of recent TV shows, I am not sure this is a good
idea.

