#cast bloat

[owl-house-hot-takes]

The main thing I want to see in Hazbin Hotel season 2 is for Charlie to get a lot more development and for her to snap and beat up one of the season's villains till they look like a mashed potato.

Don't become like RWBY, Vivzi. Actually, let your protagonist remain the protagonist; don't try to bloat the cast and have the side characters do everything.

[rwby-confess]

Confession #948

[lol-jackles]

https://deadline.com/2023/06/superman-amp-lois-dylan-walsh-emmanuelle-chriqui-michael-cudlitz-promoted-regular-1235417430/

S&L cut not only the number of episodes but also 7 regular cast members so far. Looks like All American and AAH will have big cuts as well.

Why are they announcing this so early? Is Nextar bragging that they won the negotiation?

I'm also wondering why haven't we hear if Walker will have these type of cuts as well or if reducing the number of episodes is enough.

Link. It's not uncommon to announce pay cuts as part of good PR, like when the original principle cast of The Big Bang Theory took $100,000-per-episode pay cut (10% of their salary) to raise the salaries of Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch. Jonah Hill famously worked for scale so he could be in The Wolf of Wall Street. Keanu Reeves semi-regularly took pay cuts to raise the salaries of either his co-star or the special effects workers.

Walker had pay cuts in form of reduced number of episodes. But compared to other shows, it appears that is all it is. There are no reports of reducing the number of series-regular cast members. Superman & Lois has a large regular cast - as well as the Kents, there are the Cushings and the Irons in every single episode, plus their associated assistant characters. While S&L cast bloat is not as bad as Grey's Anatomy or Blue Blood, I had this thing that I call the Winnebago Problem - when your regular cast is too big to fit in a Winnebago, finding things for them all to do is difficult.  Heck, the cast of Supernatural can fit in a Volkswagen Beetle and writers still have problems finding stuff for Castiel to do.

For companies, pay cuts sounds better than "layoffs". Layoffs are viewed as being a PR disaster while pay-cuts are not because it's considered more humane option when it comes to cost savings.   With that said, about half of these publicized pay cuts are publicity stunts to earn good will among the public, especially if it result in increase in stock share price rises which most of the executives' earnings come from.

[lol-jackles]

What's the real creative power of the nepotism duo? I read in one of your posts that the title of executive producer is just given around like candy, so i was hoping their ideas and contributions amounted to nothing. Hoping.

Money is the real power and draw of the nepotism unwonder twins.  Robert is the line producer, the money man that keeps the budget from blowing up.   Producers with no creative bone in their body at best can offer suggestions and demand that their favorite actors be included in episodes, but it’s up to the writers on how to utiliize the characters.  It’s not unusual for ‘regular’ characters to get sidelined and their actors having nothing to do because the writers couldn’t find ways to incorporate them into the season’s storyline.  Ensemble shows have problems with “cast bloat” where extraneous actors are required to be in the episodes so writers give them one-line and send them off screen for the rest of the episode.  It gets frustrating for actors to be on set and on call for 18 hours for one scene and one line.  Bradly Cooper famously asked to be fired from the TV series Alias because he was frustrated over doing very little in spite of the much-needed regular salary.  Cooper isn’t a versatile actor but his ambition, work ethics,and committment to roles is on the Tom Cruise level.