I'll say it at the front: I don't thing Dumb and Dumber wrote the first seasons of the show.
I'll present my clues to why I think so, and possibly the answer to the question in the post title.
Let's analyse a couple of Benioff's shows and movies he wrote:
Troy (2004) and X-Men Origins Wolverine. Both suffer from lackluster writing, especially the ladder one. I'm not into X-men, bu it's said to be the worst movie in the franchise, with the writing being the biggest flaw.
Weiss seems to be there just so the blame splits onto 2 people instead of one honestly...
At this point we can assume they are not the best writers.
Then we move to GoT. Why did Martin choose them to write the show? Because they guessed the most popular "secret" of the books - Jon's true parentage. So geniouss... Anyway, they get to work. And they fuck it up again. The pilot is rumored to be utterly terrible. If you want more information, this is a report on what Tamzin Merchant said about the work on the pilot (the actress who was supposed to play Daenerys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2dEidhnJNk ).
So we have another proof that Benioff and Weiss are not good writers (let alone producers, but we're not talking about that here).
Then magically seasons 1-4 after some recastings, reshoots, rewritings, become the best TV series ever put to the screen, with the writing being by far the best component of it.
How could this happen? Did Dumb and Dumber suddenly learn how to screenwrite? But it doesn't end there.
Seasons 5 and 6 were way worse in term of writing, but everything started falling apart in season 7. Season 8 was just disfunctional.
If they needed the books to write good episodes, then why season 5 was way worse? Secondly - how do you gain and lose writing talent so fast and frequently? There the book excuse comes into play very often, but you can not just copy the material and paste it into the script. You need to know how to do it - you need to have talent. Dumb and Dumber went from "chaos is a ladder" to "why do you think I came all this way?". You would think that after 6 years of writing experience on the best show on the planet they would gain some skill, but the absolute opposite actually occured.
My answer to the question:
Martin noticed how untallented Dumb and Dumer were and wrote the show himself. After season 4 he started to distance himself from them, and in season 7 he left them completely. He prooved to be a good writer because he officially wrote 4 episodes: S1E8, S2E9, S3E7, S4E2 - the last one being the red wedding. I can assume Martin really didn't want the credit for one of the best episodes in the series going to Dumb and Dumber.
There also comes the psychological argument. Usually, talented and succesful people tend to have common personality traits. They are intelligent, eloquent. Dumb and Dumber on the other hand were a bunch of buffoons who most of the time didn't know what they were saying. Their after-episode comments gained a lot of publicity in season 8, but prior to that they were also saying idiotic things about the show, nevermind their attidute toward the crew and actors. Benioff said they wanted to kill Selmy even more because his actor wrote them a letter explaining why they should reconsider their decision about killing him so quickly. So childish. Who cares about the story, let's have some fun.
TL;DR : D and D didn't magically gain writing talent for 4 seasons to then lose it again - it was Martin writing everything untill season 5, when it started going downhill. The source material argument is overblown - you need actual talent to adapt a book to the screen.
Tell me what you think, what holes are in my theory or maybe you agree with it.
Submitted May 23, 2021 at 05:48AM by throwaway-1-4 https://ift.tt/3u7ciJ2
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