Ronald D. Moore, the seasoned TV writer Amazon tapped to showrun its upcomingGod of Warseries for Prime Video, reiterated that he is “not a gamer"at San Diego Comic Con last weekend. This isn’t the first time Moore has admitted to not having played through the iconic Santa Monica Studios action series, and it likely won’t be the last time he’s asked to discuss his relationship (or lack thereof) to the medium he’s currently adapting for TV.
My reaction this time is the same as it was last time: who cares?
The Mandalorian As A Case Study
Gamers care, obviously. I’d argue that the showrunner knowing the material inside and out can be one of the worst obstacles an adaptation can face. The successes and failures of Disney’s live-actionStar Warsshows illustrate this.
I liked the first season ofThe Mandalorian, and kept enjoying the show right up until the second season’s fan service-driven finale. Luke Skywalker showed up to save the day, took Grogu off to train in the Force, and completely threw the series off its axis. Now, the spin-off seriesThe Book of Boba Fetthad to devote multiple episodes to getting Grogu and Mando back together. The result was that, if you didn’t watch this otherwise unmemorable spin-off show, you had no idea why the narrative threads the season two finale set up had been undone between seasons.
This failure has many fathers — not least of which was Disney’s need for more and moreMCUand Star Wars content for its streaming service — but the big problem with most of the live-action Star Wars shows is creative braintrust Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni’s desire to keep “playing with action figures.”
In other words, they were so excited by the prospect of including Luke Skywalker in their Star Wars show that they completely derailed what worked about their Star Wars show. It worked, for one highly-rated episode, but it led toa derided spin-offanda third season that fans largely disliked.
Knowing The Source Material Is Wildly Overrated
The best-loved Star Wars media that Disney has produced isAndor. Critics and fans love it alike. Though Star Wars fans will defend their own favorite movies, TV shows, books, and games from the past ten years, Andor is the only one that doesn’t really need a defense. The showpossesses solidly fresh ratings from critics and fans on Rotten Tomatoes, anduniversal acclaim on Metacritic.
And you know what’s interesting about that? Showrunner Tony Gilroy doesn’t care about Star Wars and hassaid that he isn’t a fan. But what he does have is storytelling talent, honed into skill through decades of experience making great work. He cut his teeth in the ’90s, writing the scripts for the thrillers Dolores Claiborne, Extreme Measures, The Devil’s Advocate, and Proof of Life, the comedies The Cutting Edge and Bait, and the sci-fi action blockbuster Armageddon.
He rose to prominence as the scribe behind The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum, before taking his first shot at writing and directing with Michael Clayton, widely considered one of the best films of the 21st century so far.
He also wrote and directed the Jeremy Renner-starring attempted reboot, The Bourne Legacy.
He had decades of experience as a screenwriter by the time he got involved with Star Wars as the writer (and eventual reshoot director) for Rogue One. More specifically, he had worked to adapt pre-existing material from Stephen King and Robert Ludlum, among others.He wasn’t a fan of King’s novel Dolores Claiborneor the Bourne novels, either. In fact, The Bourne Identity being as good as it is largely comes down toGilroy convincing director Doug Liman to toss much of the material in the book.
You might notice that Tony Gilroy doesn’t seem to be a fan of much, and yeah, the more I read about his history, the clearer it is that he doesn’t often seem to love the material he’s tasked with adapting. But, I’d argue that Gilroy is a great writerbecausehe’s kind of a hater, not in spite of it.
The Power Of Apathy
When you really love something, it can make it difficult to see what makes it tick. If I were ever tasked with developing a Star Wars movie or TV series, I’d probably have a tough time because I love the universe’s weird little minutiae. The series is about Luke Skywalker, sure, but it’s also about Babu Frik and Revan and Plo Koon. I have spent more time than I care to admit pondering the bubble opera that Anakin and Chancellor Palpatine attend in Revenge of the Sith, racked up dozens of views on the Bad Lip Reading Star Wars song, ‘Bushes of Love,’ and competed with my family of non-Star Wars fans in Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. I can’t see the forest for the Endorian trees.
There’s also the danger — whichNeil Druckmann seems to have run into with HBO’s The Last of Us— of being too close to something. Druckmann lived through the intense, polarized reaction toThe Last of Us Part 2and, when it came time to adapt the game for TV, the show shied away from some of the game’s sharper edges. I don’t know how much blame belongs to Druckmann. He and The Last of Us Part 2 co-writer Halley Grossstepping away from the show followingseason two suggests that they may have had creative differences with Druckmann’s co-showrunner Craig Mazin.
Regardless of what happened behind the scenes, The Last of Us' second season certainly doesn’t indicate that having people who really know the material in the writers’ room improves the outcome.
Showrunners like Tony Gilroy and Ronald D. Moore don’t have that problem. They don’t know every last detail of the fictional universes they’ve chosen to work within, and they haven’t internalized every byzantine intra-fandom controversy. They can see the characters as characters, not iconography. They can see the story as a story, not a foundational myth.
God of War is better off for having a showrunner who sees Kratos as merely human.
