Eeeeeek!
Bloody trick or treating chavs. Give em all ASBOs I say. I’m not answering the door to no-one tonight. I’m staying on my chair reading the whole of the internet and watching men kiss on telly. No change there then.
Talking of spooky shit, remember that show Dead Like Me? I do. Ever wonder what happened when its rather fantastic creator Bryan Fuller quit halfway through the first season? And why there was an over-reliance on clip shows? Well… now we know. Thanks to Comic Book Resources…
“It was an ongoing creative battle with the studio, specifically the president. We never saw eye to eye. They budgeted it as a talking-head show without any effects, which was a half million below what it should have been. Which made it impossible to produce and why there are two clip shows in the first season, which is unheard of because it was only 13 episodes. It goes right to the heart of the studio’s perception of what type of show they were producing. Simply put, they had champagne tastes for a beer budget and it couldn’t be done. It was also my first show so I was fighting for everything. I didn’t pick or choose my battles, everything I believed in I fought for, including cast members I believed in, like that whole Rebecca Gayheart debacle. Her leaving the show was because the studio executives had second thoughts because here is this woman who accidentally killed a child in her past and is now playing a Grim Reaper. They got uncomfortable with that and told me to let her go. She’s great on the show and everyone thinks she’s great on the show and everyone likes her as a person. I went to the mat for it and it got really ugly. It was only one of the battles that got really ugly. Finally I got tired of fighting, and “Wonderfalls” got an order, so I left. “
“I talked to several cast members and they called me and told me “they are ruining it!” and I just had to tell them sorry. But I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t watch the show, it was too emotional for me. It was a really traumatic experience, I lost a lot of weight and my hair fell out and thank God it came back, but speaking as someone who has never been in a real war, it was the worst part of my life to deal with a studio and a network who had no love for each other and had two totally different takes on the show – with me getting caught in the middle. I wish I could go back and do it all over, but time is linear. “
“I would have stayed on with the show through its final days. I had very clear ideas on what should happen with the characters. When they were making choices, I would scratch my head. They missed the joke on a lot of things. The biggest thing was making her father straight. He was going to be gay and around episode six or seven where she discovers he was gay and she learns to value her life even more because hers was a life that wasn’t meant to be because her father was gay and wasn’t wired to procreate. So the life that she lost is much more valuable to her. It affected her life and her story and made it mean that much more. And then they threw it out the window even though there were major seeds planted in the episodes when I was there.”
“I think (George) would have continued to do the things she was doing. I wanted to have a lot more fun with the genre. I wanted to be able to cut to 20 years in the future and have George looking like George and still carrying out her missions. As far as specifics go, she wasn’t going to meet her maker – but that wouldn’t stop her from trying. I was going to bring Rebecca Gayheart’s character back at the beginning of season 2 and have her fall out of the sky and send her and George on this mission. Here’s a grim reaper who returns from the afterlife and has something to say about it, and the question would become how the characters could “storm the castle” and come back. But those episodes were not meant to be.”
More from the marvellous Mister Fuller tomorrow. He did Wonderfalls too, you know. And he does Heroes now. Bleeding hell, guv’nor!
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