My friends, we have done it. My campaign for 90210 showrunner has borne fruit. What began as mere disappointment at the anti-climactic resolution to a season long storyline on 90210 has turned into an invitation to pitch my own work. It's shocking that your humble blogger's voice stood out among the sea of critics who have questioned that storyline at least since its resolution in September, if not its inception a year earlier. Indeed, for all my admonishments of originality in writing, the sentiments I expressed in those posts were nothing that haven't been said by most watchers of the series.
I'm quite moved by the reply I got from @90210Assistant. The job of a showrunner's assistant is not an easy one. Long hours, meager pay. It has all the stress of being a writer in series TV without any of the benefits, and frankly, the respect. That this individual cared enough to reach out to me speaks to the passion he or she has for their job and their fans, and the pride they take in performing it. And so, even if the response had not been to my liking, I would commend them for standing by their work publicly.
If I may, I would like to share that Twitter response with you in full:
You honestly don't even deserve a response, but, as the one who spent four days speaking with the DA, an LA County judge, and numerous defense lawyers, I can assure you that house arrest would be the most severe punishment assigned to an accidental death in a case with a minor. In fact, most experts advised that she would likely get community service and not even house arrest. Maybe you should spend some less time bitter blogging and more time fact checking before you tear apart stories for plausibility....oh, and one more thing...can you send us some of your work? You're such an expert, perhaps you can share samples of your own brilliant storytelling.
Did you see that? They want to see my work! They think I'm brilliant!
Also, this is a huge load off of my mind. Should my 16 year-old cousin accidentally strike someone dead while driving drunk, I no longer need fear she face a stiff prison sentence. No, even in the event that that cousin leaves the scene of an accident and spends a year covering up the crime, she still can go to any college of her choosing. In fact, even if the hit-and-run death was such a big deal so as to make major news in a town so callous to the suffering of the homeless as Beverly Hills, I can rest assured the research backs up that at worst, she'll spend a few months picking up trash from the highway.
I won't lie. It's days like this that I'm proud to be an American.
Wasn't Annie drunk when she ran over the homeless guy?
ReplyDeleteDrunk driving, especially underage... that's hardly "accidental" is it?
Well done! May your bold and inventive strategy prove to be the blueprint for aspiring show runners everywhere.
ReplyDeleteIt must also come as a relief to your cousin who can now plan their juvenile crime spree safe in the knowledge that redemption is but a trash can away...
Squeaky wheel and all that - congratulations. I'd be tickled pink to see you accepted into the 90210 fold. Keep us posted on how it goes!
ReplyDeletebest,
Ursa
Wow, could they be any snarkier?
ReplyDeleteI'm sure a rich teen like Annie will get off like she did. But any middle or lower class teen would surely be put in jail until their 18th birthday.
I know nothing about the law, so maybe the Assistant is totally right about this. If he did the research and that's what came back, well... that's what the show works with, so I can't slam the show for that.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised you didn't address the fact that such a light punishment means there aren't any stakes to the story. It sounds like the whole point of the plot was to establish the threat of discovery. You know - what happens when Annie gets caught. If they spent a year building up to that only to say "PSYCH! She gets community service!" then the story just fails on account of anticlimax.
So accurate or not, the plot then becomes a waste of screentime. Did they really stretch that out an entire year?
This is good news for my "move to America and run people over" plan.
ReplyDeleteWait, I'm too old. Arse.
@Husky Boy: Annie's season 2 arc was supposed to end with the revelation of Teddy's dad who already killed the guy long before the poor girl passed by Mullholland (or whatever the name of the palce is). Teddy's father issues was supposed to connect with Annie's in the finale but I've read from several articles that Ryan O'Neal (who played Teddy's father) was fired/quit the show/among other reasons so the ending had to be reworked and cutting off the originally intended resolution of the storyline from the final episode of Season 2.
ReplyDelete@wise5bata - I too had seen an article about that intended resolution to the story. I don't think that solves a problem with the story that existed the moment Annie drove off - for a year she thought she was a killer and she was more concerned with not getting caught than doing "the right thing."
ReplyDeleteBasically, the writers presented the character of Annie with a moral test and she failed big time. There's nothing in Annie's behavior during that year-long storyline that can be considered admirable, and even if they'd absolved her after the fact, it doesn't erase that. I think that would have been a dangerous route to go with any major character on your show, let alone the one who's ostensibly supposed to be the lead.
Plus, there's the fact that making Annie think she's a killer for a whole year only to let her off the hook in the end might have felt cheap and pointless. Though I'll concede the point that had someone else been revealed as the killer, they'd have at least side-stepped the ludicrous legal elements.
I'd love to know what went down with Ryan O'Neal's firing. He appeared in the finale last year, which was supposed to be the episode with the reveal. I wonder if that scene was actually shot and discarded, or if it was merely rewritten during production.