Seaclock wrote:
> Rob Jensen wrote:
>
>> The symbolic im****tance of the Leery house being destroyed by one of
>> the core characters (and by that point, Audrey was well-established as
>> a core character) suggests to me that they were on the verge of a
>> storyline that would have put Dawson's "moral authority" to the test
>> -- just *how* many times could Dawson "save" everyone around him, and
>> what would happen if *he* fell further off his pedestal (with or
>> without Audrey) than *anyone* in the group had gone before? Not
>> necessarily anything like Audrey's drug/alcohol abuse, but something
>> just as alienating -- or even *more* alienating to the gang than
>> Audrey's meltdown.
>
>
> The thing is, would a Dawson meltdown just lead to more conflict with
> Joey because she would want to save him, or at least be in the lead of
> any group effort to rescue him? The consequences of that turn of events
> are all too obvious -- more conflict between Joey and Pacey because,
> once again, Dawson, Dawson, Dawson; conflict between J and Audrey
> because a) Dawson is now Audrey's guy or b) with Audrey's past J will
> think she dragged him down. (Now, just what could Dawson do to lead him
> down the dark path?)
>
> The thing is, the show had become such a lost cause that I don't think
> the writers could even have dared to devise storylines that might lead
> in any of these directions. Was the show canceled in the ordinary way
> (i.e. ratings) or did everyone just decide to pack it in? In either
> case, I'm sure they knew that there was nothing coming after S6.
The renewal for s6 was virtually a fluke (I'd even heard that at the
time and I'd never seen even an episode), so I think they knew for the
entire s6 that they were teetering on the edge of cancellation. I think
the cancellation was announced similar to the cancellation of Angel,
Jan-Feb-ish, early enough to give them enough time to cap the storylines
at the end of the season. Even so, I think for the first half of the
season, they were *trying* to do set up to lead to a possible s7 and
beyond. It'd be ludicrous for a show to *not* try to plan ahead no
matter what -- there's just too much money involved for them to not make
an honest effort to at least try to make it work, regardless of whether
s6 ultimately worked or not.
Curiously, now that I'm thinking about it, there is a certain kind of
attitudinal similarity between s6 of Joey's Creek and s8-9 of The
X-Files -- I'm not talking about the stories, obviously, but the
apparent creative mood and the way they were doing them. In the first
half of Creek s6 and s8 through the first half of s9 of The X-Files,
they were obviously trying to set up new long-term story arcs with some
arguable success, but once the cancellations were announced, the teams
gave up and the series' respective stories degenerated into incoherence
until the creators returned to write the series' final episodes. Like
with the final half-season of the X-Files, the final half season of
Creek was marred by the creative team finally giving up.
-- Rob
--
LORELAI: In the movie, only boy hobbits travel to Mount
Doom, but that's only because the girls went to do something
even more dangerous.
GIRL: What?
LORELAI: Have you ever heard of a Brazilian Bikini Wax?
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