Oh, yeah... I’d repressed all memories of THAT very bad idea. I know the temptation is strong, but I’m a strong believer in what I call the Hannibal Lecter Effect - loading an effective character up with way too much WTF? back story that, in the end, doesn’t add anything to the experience.

The extra credit irony there is that if Roger Delgado hadn’t died, they were planning that the final story of season 11 (and John Pertwee’s run) would see The Master written out sacrificing himself to save The Doctor. I’m sure someone is going to correct me if I’m talking out my arse, but I think Roger Delgado was a…

Meh, I know I’m going to get my Whovian card revoked but I’d be perfectly OK if the Daleks, Sontarans and Cybermen took a long holiday until Chibnall is pitched a brain-meltingly brilliant story.  Don’t do it just for the sake of ticking them off a list.

No, because that’s what journalists do - they are curious, and don’t always have the keenest sense of self-preservation & risk management. Daemons aren’t house-trained pets either, their relationships to the people they’re bound to are a lot more complex. As people in any world are. And as others have pointed out -…

Oh, you better hope this isn’t successful enough to get as far as The Secret Commonwealth because Pullman pretty much throws “the rules” out the nearest high window.

If you’re in, I don’t think the “lore” is going to be a deal-breaker when the usually excruciating expositionary info-dumps are done this well. And, yeah, by this point I think you either accept there are some things here that are NEVER going to be explained, and aren’t supposed to be, or don’t.

NCIS and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit come to mind. And speaking of Dick Wolf, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Chicago Food Truck went straight-to-series and ended up being every bit as successful as the rest of that franchise.

Hell, I don’t think Stephen King was being entirely facetious when he said he felt kind of guilty cashing option cheques from people whose dreams proceeded to die in development Hell - but it passed remarkably quickly. :)

The whole pilot model is weird. I can’t remember who, but someone once described it as a movie studio saying to a room full of people “You’re going to go away and make five minutes of your script, and we’re going to pick which one to make from that. Sure, it’s an enormous waste of money, time and effort but there you…

I’d also note there’s plenty of shows that don’t fall apart when they burn through the source material. Hell, I’ve got 99 issues with Damon Lindelof, but The Leftovers isn’t one - and it was blindingly obvious that a (pretty free) adaptation of Tom Perotta’s novel was only going to fill out one season.

Who was expecting Kathleen Kennedy to come straight out and say “Well, we got rat-fucked by Netflix.” Really? Because the simplest and most plausible explanation is that Dumb and Dumber’s $200m Netflix deal came with a hard deadline for them to start feeding content to the beast. 

Suspect you’re right, but I sure don’t have the gambler gene to be betting with as much of someone else’s money as Netflix reportedly is.  Don’t blame anyone for making out the best they can when the going is good, but the wreckage isn’t going to be pretty when the streaming bubble bursts. 

It’s more plausible Netflix wrote Benioff and Weiss a reality check that they didn’t ink a $200m deal to get in line behind Disney and wait 5-7 years for the Chuckle Brothers to start delivering content.

Strikes me as a pretty fair description of a $200m+ five year exclusive content deal. I question whether spraying money around like a drunk horny sailor during Fleet Week (and carry billions of dollar in debt) is a viable long-term business model, but they’ve got to start getting content coming through sooner rather…

And American Graffiti was a HUGE critical and commercial hit. The studios weren’t twitchy about Star Wars because Lucas didn’t have a track record as a director and co-writer, but because the conventional wisdom was that nobody would want to see a 30's Saturday morning serial on steroids.

And, hell, if Martin wanted to be the damn show-runner he would have taken the job. He didn’t - and I get the impression that, given his own less than idea experiences in the industry, he didn’t want to be a backseat driver.  Wish he’d thought better of it, to be honest...

It’s Benioff and Weiss’s fault - because it’s a show-runner’s damn job to make sure they’ve got material in hand. Especially when you’re also the head writers.

Well, I pity the Netflix executive who draws the short straw to make sure these chuckle-heads don’t piss a quarter billion dollars of their creditor’s money money up a giant wall of ice.

Oh, and for reasons I still can’t figure out HBO kept writing cheques to cover bullshit that has seen other people fired for much less.

I get why people can get salty when their favorite characters get “side-lined” for long stretches.  But as I guess shouldn’t be surprising when one half of the writing team used to be George R.R. Martin’s PA, this series pretty quickly came to have an awful lot of moving parts spread out over even more real estate.