Tag: charlie bradbury

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Well, this was awkward…!! (video)

I love how the cast sits back and lets the fans call Carver out on his shit. Like They just turn around and sit back like “Yes, my children. Be free. Drag him the way I cannot because he controls my paycheck.”

I’m not even in this fandom, but this is still super satisfying.

I love love LOVE how people like this say “we have to go where the story takes us.”  No.  The story is not sentient.  The story does not have a will.  The story is an artificial construct CREATED BY YOU AND CONTROLLED BY YOU.

It is fine if you start writing something and YOU, THE WRITER, realize that you want to do something different, or focus on a different character, or the plot evolves in a way that does not line up with your initial outline.  You can CHOOSE to go in a different direction or focus on a different thing, but when your audience points out that your CHOICES are problematic and distasteful, you don’t get to say “The story made us do it!”

No.  You did it.  You chose to do it, you wrote it, you approved it, you filmed it and you aired it.  And good for the cast for letting him squirm.

What I think is interesting about this, though, is that whereas Bob Singer, when asked a variant of the same question, was utterly straight-faced and serious and seemed to believe what he was saying, Jeremy Carver is stammering, clearly lacking the same conviction. The bit about “there’s so many ways to answer that” feels like it comes with the implied rider “but I’m not allowed to discuss them”, and given that he word for word defaults to Singer’s earlier answer –

the “we go where the story takes us” bit – I can’t help feeling that what Carver’s saying here is the party line, not his actual opinion.

And let’s not forget, it was Singer’s wife, Eugenie Ross-Lemming, who cowrote Dark Dynasty. Carver and Singer are both EPs, but Singer’s been in the role for far longer than Carver, and I’d lay money he has seniority in terms of decision-making. Given how many of the cast members and writers were up in arms about Charlie’s death – and even here, you’ve got every main actor physically turning their backs on Carver, siding with the audience, to say nothing of how many of them came out on social media against it – I think it’s pretty clear that there was a creative schism about going through with it, and that while Singer and Bucklemming were demonstrably pro, pretty much everyone else, possibly including Carver, was against it.

Which doesn’t absolve Carter in the slightest for having signed off on it; the actors are totally justified in letting him flounder here. But I do think it’s relevant to note that Supernatural has a broken creative base as well as a broken base fandom, and that if Singer – who’s clearly got a hell of a lot of pull over the show, given how long he’s been running it – hadn’t been pushing for Charlie’s death, if he’d been neutral or against it, then things probably would’ve been very different. If Singer hadn’t pushed for it, I don’t imagine that Carver would’ve done it on his own. However he justified it to himself at the time, he clearly knows it was a bad call, but is constrained in what he can say about how it happened. 

It’s also worth comparing Misha’s reaction here to his reaction when Bob Singer answered the same question at this year’s Jibcon. Here’s Misha’s face when Singer starts talking:

That is the face of a man who knows he’s about to hear some bullshit and isn’t allowed to offer a contradictory opinion. And, true to form, Misha stays quiet while Singer talks, looking by turns bored, angry, awkward and frustrated, rubbing his arm and staring off into the distance – and when he does finally speak, which only happens after Singer is applauded, he mentions that death is seldom permanent on Supernatural, implying that Charlie might come back, adding a quick ‘no offence’ to Singer.

But when Carver is asked the question here, the reaction of the actors is instantaneous and, once Mark Sheppard starts laughing, unanimous: they all turn away, they all laugh, Jared interrupts Carver, who can barely speak without stammering, and the vibe is totally different. Even though the actors are holding Carver accountable by leaving him to answer solo, their behaviour also makes it clear that they know he doesn’t believe his own answer; that this is something he deserves to have to suffer through, but which is still a joke, albeit a bad one.

tl;dr: Carver is flustered because he knows killing Charlie was a bad move, but still has to own his part in it, even though he regrets it and was likely pushed into it by Singer; Singer, by contrast, was unflustered answering the same question at Jibcon because he believed then and still believes now that it was the right call, and that the death wasn’t problematic.