I felt a pang when I got through the beginning part of this post because I, too, am disappointed in Emma Approved and don’t like all the merchandise partnerships that are happening (though, as a marketer, I think – good on them for finding a way to work the money-making in such a well-integrated and natural fashion!) and I REALLY miss the diversity of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries cast. But honestly, I miss diversity in MOST shows I watch and I guess I just feel like if they made such an effort to do it the first time around… why not this time? It obviously worked very well for them in LBD, so it just frustrates me that they wouldn’t stick with it when it is so hard…

And for JKR – I totes agree. It must be so hard for her to even write outside the HP universe and to do it so well but still have that on her back forever… well, I can completely understand why Harper Lee never wrote another book after To Kill a Mockingbird.

I MISS DOCTOR WHO MAKING EMOTIONAL AND RATIONAL SENSE SO VERY MUCH. (Caps necessary.) I hope and pray the next showrunner does wonderful and amazing things that push the series in an exciting new direction. Shaking things up is so much more interesting than keeping them the same, or going back to a tried and true formula.

See, I think Kaylee and Jayne balance each other out — he’s gruff and cynical, while she’s cheerful and somewhat naive. Maybe I’m a crazy person, but next time you watch the “Firefly” pilot, focus on Jayne while Kaylee is in mortal peril (I forget the exact plot point, because it’s been a while, but there was definitely some sort of mortal peril, right?). I swear, he is into her, and that’s why he takes such a huge dislike to Simon Tam right away.

Or maybe it’s just me, and my love for Jayne is somewhat warping my perception of things. But anyway, yeah, I totally wanted that relationship to happen!

Yep, I agree completely. That’s what I love about the Family of King, who runs The Good Wife — they aren’t inattentive to what the fans are saying, but they don’t let it rule them. They just do what makes sense to them, and makes sense with the characters, and sometimes that means huge shakeups. It works sometimes and fails sometimes, and they keep on learning and trying new things. It is the best.

What was the Alias moment? (I have never been able to love Alias. I tried but could not.)

I think it’s wonderful too! I think it’s great, and I hate for Bernie Su — who is putting so much energy and creativity and awesomeness into this work — to feel all sad and discouraged about it.

Hm, a Jayne-Kaylee romance, you say. INTERESTING. I can imagine it on Jayne’s side, not really on Kaylee’s though — wouldn’t she want someone nicer than Jayne is?

I was thinking about Doctor Who when I was writing this post! I was thinking about that exact thing, how Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who was destroyed for me by a) his lady issues; and b) his inability to consistently construct a plot that makes emotional or rational sense. I love that show, and I don’t love what Moffat has done with it. I consider myself broken up with it too, until Moffat ends his tenure as the showrunner. 🙁 But even there, my problem isn’t that I want the show to go back to what it was under Davies — I think Davies was right to leave when he did (he could have even left a bit sooner), and I say that as the hugest fan of the seasons he ran. It just turns out that I hate what Steven Moffat does when he’s the boss of a show. (Except Sherlock, I suppose, but even there, I don’t feel confident Moffat can keep it up. I don’t even like all the episodes that exist AND THERE ARE ONLY SIX OF THEM.)

But yeah, it’s way more fun to love something. The example I was thinking of that’s actually a really good example is The Good Wife — the first two seasons were absolutely superb, some of my favorite network television of all time, and then the third and fourth seasons weren’t as consistently good, and I missed the things I had loved about the early seasons. Now this season, the fifth? IT TOTALLY GOT GOOD AGAIN, and not by returning to the formulas that worked for it in early seasons; it got good again by shaking everything up! And I love it! I love it so much more than I would have loved it sticking to what it did well in the first two seasons.

I try soooo hard to maintain a Lucky Me attitude, and I think I mostly succeed. When shows and books head off in a direction I’m not crazy about, I can usually manage to console myself with the whole “oh, it’s not over yet, it might get better” excuse, or sometimes the “well, ain’t nothin’ stopping me from inventing a headcanon” excuse. When series end, I look back on what I got and remember I can always reread (or rewatch, or whatever).

The exception to this, in recent years, has been DOCTOR WHO. The good Doctor and I recently broke up over creative differences, and I’m still in the angry stage. I keep reminding myself of how much I loved S1-S4, though, and that helps. It helps an awful lot. And hey, I haven’t quite abandoned the idea that the show might get good (ie, what I consider good; clearly, a lot of fans still love it) again. Word on the street says Peter Capaldi has already argued with Steven Moffat over some of the scripts, so things might turn around. I haven’t abandoned all hope.

Because it’s a lot more fun to love stuff than to hate it. Back when I read a lot of media criticism, it drove me crazy whenever I came across a paper that was packed full of doom and gloom with nary a trace of love. It’s good to criticize media, and it’s good to call media out for what it does wrong, but I much prefer to read criticism that comes from a place of affection, even if the writer can’t get behind every element.

I want to “exactly!” so much of this post. It is really hard to walk that tightrope between criticizing things when they are not good (which I think is totally legit) and feeling entitled to have everything exactly the way you want it. Like, I loved “Firefly” and will always be slightly disgruntled that there was never a Jayne/Kaylee romance (which I think the pilot was TOTALLY implying, at least on Jayne’s side). But Whedon et al. did the best they could with what Fox gave them, and I still love the show. All of which is to say, authors/showrunners/creative types can’t please everyone, and they shouldn’t be expected to!

It makes me think of a commercial for Alias, which I was completely addicted to for the first couple of seasons. The commercial said something like, “the moment all the fans have been asking for,” and it was a moment I was very much not wanting at all. It was precisely what I hoped wouldn’t happen, and it made me feel like the writers were just listening to the fans and making a story that was less interesting. Of course, other people loved what happened, but I gradually lost interest and found other stuff I liked better. There’s always other stuff to enjoy.