< Executive Meddling

Executive Meddling/Other

There are executives in every industry.


Art

  • It is said that the Greek sculptor Polykleitos was making a statue once, and people constantly instructed him about how it should look (in some variations, it was an official committee). He made such a statue, while in secret, making another the way he wanted. In the end, he showed the people both statues, and explained the difference between his creation and theirs.


Documentaries

  • Dinosaur Revolution would have been a purely animal-centric animated Edutainment Show, with the entire series consisting of highly anthropomorphic prehistoric animals doing their stuff, with no obtrusive Narrator or any Talking Heads. Then, to explain the science behind the stories, there would have been a companion show in which we see real life paleontologists, well, explaining stuff. This was deemed too "risky", so they added "sparse" (yet at times still obnoxious and unneeded) narration, and cheesy holograms of talking scientists and various Stock Footage cips now interrupt the stories.


Fan Fiction

  • Beta readers in general. The idea behind a beta reader (or simply beta) is that you hand out your story to someone else and have them fix the grammar, spelling and possibly plot, but that also means you take responsibility for anything your beta does.
    • Fanfiction.net has their own requirements for beta readers because of this reason.
  • TEEN FORTRESS 2: MarissaTheWriter came in contact with "Logic Edtor", who wanted to fix one chapter of horrible spelling and grammar, a Mary Sue cameo, indiscernible mixture of different fandoms and overall OOC-ness; however, the original was posted as well as the fixed chapter. (Note that this is in fact with agreement from the author, unlike My Immortal's hacked chapter.)
    • And the fixed chapter had Cave Johnson's trademark lemon rant randomly inserted.

AN OK GUYZ IVE BEEN THINKIN AN A GUY NAME LOGIC EDTOR WANTS TO EDIT MY STORY AN MAKE IT MORE BETTER. BUT I SEED LOTS OF TV SHOWS WERE THEY CHANG STUFF THEN PEPOLE DONT LICK IT NO MORE SO I WAS WORRY BOUT THE CHANGES THEN I HAD IDEEA! I WILL PUT BOTH TEH UNCUT AN UNSENSORED VERSHUN AN LOGIC CORRECSHUN SO YOU CAN DESIDE WICH ONE YOU LIKE YURSELF!

EVRYONE WINS!


Magazines

  • This brought Cracked down. Tabloid owner Dick Kulpa bought the mag, and as a cost-cutting measure, turned most artists' and writers' pays to flat-rate instead of by page. As a result, many veteran writers/artists left, such as Walter Brogan and John Severin. Kulpa was literally running the mag from his kitchen table, plastering it with tabloid-like covers, constantly delaying releases, and overall ruining the mag through his lack of experience. After that, an anthrax attack briefly stopped things. Finally, the mag was re-tooled as a "lad mag" like Maxim for three issues before dying and coming back to life as a highly popular humor website.


Newspaper Comics

  • The creator of Luann anticipated this so he made alternate strips concerning one story arc.
  • Lynn Johnston wanted to end For Better or For Worse in 2008, however she was forced to write more strips because the syndicate(s) didn't want to lose their slots in the papers.


Puppet Shows

  • A positive example of executive meddling is with the creation of Thunderbirds. The production company exec, Lew Grade, liked the show so much that he demanded that the half-hour show have hour-long episodes. As a result, Gerry Anderson's company had to, at least initially, pad the time with additional plot twists and character development, which gave the series a sophistication that made the show a cult classic.
  • Further executive decisions resulted in the cancellation of Thunderbirds after The Film of the Series failed to perform. This did, however, allow Anderson to develop his next show, Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons, which gathered a significant cult following of its own, if not as big as that of Thunderbirds. Grade made a less positive decision concerning Anderson's final Supermarionation show The Secret Service. Each episode featured Father Unwin, voiced by Stanley Unwin, bamboozling people with Unwin's trademark "Unwinese" doubletalk. Unfortunately, when Grade first heard this, he cancelled the show with only 13 episodes in the can, on the grounds that viewers wouldn't understand Unwinese -- despite the fact that they weren't meant to.


Radio

  • The Howard Stern Show: Executives were trying to change Stern's vision of his show since his first day on the air. It's generally agreed upon by critics and fans that him fighting and being able to do his show the way he wanted completely changed the way morning radio shows were presented. However, whether or not Stern going through the actual process of fighting these battles was entertaining leads to a case of Broken Base.
    • While discussing the constant format battles in his Private Parts biography, he brings up several interesting anecdotes. For a Crowning Moment of Funny, when airing on WNBC, the station required a quick station identification before every commercial, which Howard dutifully agreed to do. But later, his program supervisor came to him and told him that the station wanted him to say "WNBC" with a quasi-Southern drawl, emphasizing the "N", specifically (Something like "W-Ee~ee~en-B-C!"). Naturally, the next day, Stern featured a skit with himself and another cast member playing the role of gay men auditioning for a WNBC program, debating over which of their ridiculously overexaggerated drawls was most suitable.
    • Later on, he had a female program manager who was willing to go along with just about any idea he wanted, as long as it was planned out in advance, something he himself admitted was a perfectly reasonable request. If he wanted to have such-and-such skit, great; just pencil it in at X time on Y day, so listeners know to expect it on a regular basis. But at that point, Stern was still in that strange embryo phase between Small Name, Big Ego and Protection From Editors, which led to him arguing that he should be allowed to air skits and segments whenever he felt like it; in this case, he got away with it, but one wonders how many other supervisors there were willing to work with his ideas and get them into a structured format, as opposed to the majority he talks about in the book who were simply looking to hammer the censorship button and make his life hell.
  • BBC executives banned The Goon Show from imitating politicians (which was a shame, since Peter Sellers had such voice-acting talent he could imitate pretty much anyone on Earth), and would regularly censor the scripts so nothing overtly political got through. Spike Milligan responded by trying to make the censors' lives as miserable as possible and ranting a lot about the BBC.


Tabletop Games

  • TSR, between "Code of Ethics" and management having its own ideas about how things should work - such as thinking that gimmick based world building is great. Or sometimes picking and dropping "strategical decisions" apparently at random right in the middle of developers already doing something else.

Ed Greenwood: although Newt Ewell specifically asked me to add a brief “drow biomech” section to the original (2nd Ed) DROW OF THE UNDERDARK, the “official but secret” design directives of the time were to avoid all “android and robot” flavouring in AD&D® because TSR was planning a robot roleplaying game, PROTON FIRE. Longtime DRAGON® readers may recall that it was featured in the back pages of just one issue of the magazine, as a preview; the game was “killed” on the very brink of its release by TSR’s upper management. So, just like de-emphasizing psionics in the Realms because they were to be a cornerstone of Dark Sun®, we were told to avoid mechanical/robotic/android/bionic elements for the AD&D® game.

      • The creators of the Planescape and Al-Qadim settings for have both commented that they were fortunate TSR bosses expected a different setting to be the Next Big Thing, and so were breathing down those developers' necks, and leaving them to do whatever they wanted.
    • Star Frontiers originally was not supposed to have the Sathar, but had the fifth PC species, S'sessu, as appeared later. As such, there was no war with universally hated enemy - it was rocket-punk with Mega Corps, pirates and all that. So, of course, the bright idea was "Hurr, we need Mordor".
      • The game part was originally streamlined, so

[Lawrence Schick 's] original skill system was much simpler than the one that appeared in Alpha Dawn. He found it strange that the TSR editors made the skill system more complex with the move to Alpha Dawn, since overall it was their intention to make the game simpler. [1]

      • Then there were changes hard to explain by anything other than either individual manager's personal tastes or desire to do something random for the sake of some activity appearing in the report:

Tech was drawn from literary science fiction, favoring "hard sci fi". Railguns were in the original game as artillery pieces, but for some reason replaced by Recoilless Rifles in the AD game.

      • Then, of course, that infamous turn when TSR got the new manager.

...and she killed Star Frontiers to start a Buck Rogers line at TSR. Her take on this move was that even if TSR lost money, her family would make money through licensing fees.

Theme Parks

  • Disney Theme Parks went through a period of this in the Eisner-Era. Among the results are shutting down the Subs for the first time, the entire fiasco surrounding Journey into Imagination, the infamous cost-cutting that went into California Adventure, the Paris Studios park and Hong Kong Disneyland, and other problems.
    • And that's not even mentioning the whole Horizons incident, which evidently caused a ban on even mentioning that Horizons ever existed until quite recently.


Web Comics

Mark and Ting were two minds, forced by an ancient curse to share the same body, but never the same idea.

Web Original

  • Spoofed in the League of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions with the Evil K-NIT TV-47 Executive.
  • Parodied in the series Revisioned: Activision, which has an executive trying to force two writers to remake the Atari game Kaboom for modern audiences. At one point, he even flips through a guide of "Screenwriting for Meddlers".
  • On Gamespy, a negative 1.5/5 review for Donkey Konga 2 was partially rewritten to score 3/5. Then they pulled it off the website and replaced it with a new one (3.5/5). Penny Arcade was not amused.
  • Caused a literal Creator Breakdown in the production of the series finale of There Will Be Brawl: Matthew Mercer had planned to release it on Christmas Day, but The Escapist (the host site) suddenly announced that it would be released a week early, causing Mercer to scramble so much to finish filming and editing that he ended up on bed rest with a pinched nerve. It ended up having to be released on New Year's Day.
  • Because Google has threatened to cut funding for TV Tropes, many pages are getting deleted or are up for deletion (mostly numerous "Real Life" pages, such as the High Octane Nightmare Fuel page).

Other

  • Early in World War II, Messerschmitt had a workable design for a jet-propelled interceptor that would theoretically wreak havoc on the Allies' air forces. They called it the Me 262. Fortunately for the free world, Hitler decided that what the Luftwaffe really needed wasn't an interceptor, but a tactical fighter-bomber. This arguably resulted in the Me 262's entry into the war being delayed until 1944, at which point it was too late.
  • There's Capability Maturity Model (CMM) devised by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, that's supposed to provide organizations guidance on the processes for developing and maintaining software and how to evolve toward better software engineering and management. It rates from 1 (Ad hoc & Chaotic: the organization completely relies on the initiative of individual developers, i.e. development works much like a small FLOSS project on SourceForge, etc) to 5 (Continuous Improvement: the organization has proper feedback systems, improves things proactively and learns to not repeat the mistakes). But since in reality 1 is not nearly the worst case - as illustrated by the rest of this page, for one - others made The Capability Im-Maturity Model (CiMM), which continues the scale downward from 0 (Indifference: management doesn't care until some crisis develops, then brings as a "silver bullet" solution something marked with whatever buzzword is currently promoted as the Key To Success) to -3 (Sabotage: the organization itself rewards failure and poor performance, and actively seeks to discredit and disrupt the work of other organizations).
  1. ↑ from interviews in Frontier Explorer #2
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