I just heard that at weecon, Alex Sherman said that they were forced to rewrite the last two episodes at basically no notice. Even the night before at one point? And apparently in ways the cast didn't like, so they are adjusting WHILE THEY WERE SHOOTING
a) fuck you hbo
b) thoughts???
okokok! SO
the interesting thing here is TWO episodes, which is i think the number i would least expect here.
like, mermen, okay, i have said before that i think mermen is basically an incoherent mess, it's barely an episode at all, the pacing is disastrous and almost nothing really even HAPPENS, it feels like the entire main plot of the episode was surgically removed and what they kept was basically a long series of character denouements with the thinnest possible thread of narrative stringing them together. i would be completely unsurprised to learn that mermen was rewritten at gunpoint the night before they filmed.
but man on fire does not feel like that. i would not describe man on fire as an especially good episode - i mean, you know me, i like the worst episode of ofmd more than the best episode of a lot of other shows, but if i ranked every ep of ofmd man on fire would fall pretty low, maybe right above mermen. it's not incoherent, though, it's not the kind of mess that mermen is. it has a consistent through-line of what's happening and there aren't a bunch of dangling plot arcs failing to go anywhere and the pacing feels, like, not great but basically fine. mermen has a bunch of obvious holes where you can tell cut plotlines are supposed to go; man on fire doesn't, or at the very least they're WAY less obvious. so what did they cut?
and then we know calypso's birthday was ALSO rewritten, like the entire plot from top to bottom, on very, very short notice. so short that the set design had already happened (if you look closely at some of the party decorations you can tell they're meant for a wedding). that's an insane turnaround on tv. and yet he didn't say the last THREE episodes. so what happened on the last two was even more upsetting and short-notice than calypso's birthday?
the other hint here is that some of these cuts were upsetting to actors. which, hm.
i will reblog this with some more thoughts but it's gotta cook a little first, thank you for the ask!
