In advance of a second season for their new showCitadel, theRusso Brothersare speaking out about their strategy going forward, and how they plan to be mindful of audience feedback. “You want to see what it is that the audience is responding to and what it is [that excites] them about the narrative,”Joe Russosaid inan interview with Collider. “We have our ideas, we can speculate, but it’s always refreshing to get that feedback. We certainly made adjustments toAvengers: EndgameafterAvengers: Infinity Warcame out because you want to be organic and fluid and iterative so that you just keep telling the best and most interesting story.”
On paper, this sounds like a good idea — especially if, like the Russos, you just madean incredibly expensive showthat needs to do everything it can to retain viewers. As any poor soul who disparagesBTSon Twitter can attest, an engaged fanbase is a powerful thing, and that’s especially true for television. Through memes, fancams, podcasts, and sixty-tweet-long threads, fans can turn fledgling series into hit shows and hit shows into inescapable cultural behemoths.Game of Thronesfans made “Red Wedding” a byword for shocking TV deaths;Stranger Thingsfans propelled aKate Bushsong from 1985 into the Billboard Top 10;The Last of Usfans are the reason whyPedro Pascalcan’t leave his house without someone calling him Daddy. With that kind of power, why shouldn’t showrunners do everything they can to make fans happy?
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Anticipating the Television Audience’s Reaction Is Pure Folly
There’s a persistent rumor that the showrunners ofWestworldgot rid of a twist in Season 2 after it was accurately predicted on Reddit. (Jonathan Nolansaid something to that effectat a panel discussion, but he was likely joking.) To be clear, this is almost certainly apocryphal: the second season would have been completed long before anyone online could make predictions about it. Still, the rumor stuck, mostly because, well, itfeltlike that’s what happened.Westworldwas a “mystery box” show in the tradition ofLost, offering the audience tantalizing puzzles (What’s the deal with the island? Who is the Man in Black?) to keep them engaged no matter where the story takes them. When it’s done right, a mystery box is a great way to hook an audience and lead them to a satisfying conclusion.
However, if the writers aren’t careful, two major problems present themselves. Firstly, it’s a lot easier to pose an enticing question than it is to come up with an answer that’s both surprising and sensible; secondly, every question that gets answered is one less reason for the audience to tune in every week, requiring the creation of even more questions. In both cases, the “solution” to these problems requires the writers to care more about what the audience thinks than what works best for the narrative. The end result, as seen withWestworld, is a tangle of intrigue so convoluted and impenetrable that even the writers didn’t seem to know where it was all headed. Thus, what appeared to be the next great water-cooler prestige drama ended upunceremoniously booted off of HBO Max last year.
Sometimes, Fans Don’t Know What They’re Talking About
Other times, the problem comes not from trying to outsmart the audience, but from trying to please them. Fans, generally speaking, favor what’s familiar: they don’t know what they want until they have it. Very few fans ofBreaking Badwere clamoring for a spinoff centered on Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) and his previously-unmentioned ex-wife, and yetBetter Call Saulmatches (and arguably betters) its predecessor. This isn’t to say that fans are stupid or unimaginative, but that the show’s creative brain trust usually has insights and ideas that run deeper than what the average viewer might imagine. If you were to ask fifty differentTwin Peaksfans what they wanted fromThe Returnbefore it came out, you would get fifty different answers — and not one of them would beas haunting or powerful as whatDavid Lynchended up making.
And yes, there are times when the fans are simply wrong. Listening to the fans is howGame of Thronesdeclined, sparing audience favorites and stretching subplots past their breaking point. It’s howGleewent from a cultural juggernaut to a bloated, indulgent mess. It’s howThe Mandalorianbecame the Baby Yoda Variety Hour.Breaking Badfans hated Skyler White (Anna Gunn) more than the actual Nazis that served as the final season’s villain: how would Walter White’s (Bryan Cranston) moral descent have played out ifVince Gilliganlistened to them? Nowhere near as effectively as it did, that’s for sure.
Fan Friction Can Be a Good Thing
WhenThe Sopranosfirst aired, HBO received countless letters from viewers demanding more action, more violence, more “whackings.” (This was back when you had to write letters to the actual production company instead of just posting through it online.) These people tuned in every week, and they were clearly passionate enough about the show that they could be called “fans,” but there was a fundamental disconnect between what they wanted fromThe Sopranosand what made the show great. The essence of the show was its perfect distillation of turn-of-the-millennium, middle-class America, juxtaposed with the moral depravity of its protagonist and a pervading sense of existential dread.David Chasewas famously disgusted byviewers who only wanted blood and guts, and his recriminations grew less subtle as the show went on: that infamous cut to black was one final middle finger to those who wanted to see Tony Soprano re-enact the ending ofScarface, and it couldn’t have been more perfect.
As IP dominates our pop-cultural landscape, the attitude of creators towards their fanbases has grown increasingly reverent. Every new Marvel or DC property is “for the fans.”Star Warsis currently run by two huge superfans inJon FavreauandDave Filoni, who have overseen the franchise’s descent into self-referential mediocrity. (It’s no coincidence thatTony Gilroy, who seems faintly embarrassed by his previous work forStar Wars, turned out the best iteration in ages withAndor.) Perhaps it’s time for a course correction: the goal should not be to give the fans what they want, but to give them what they didn’t know they needed.
