Good Wife Creators Pledge To End The Kalinda/Ex-Husband Storyline Because Fans Hate It So Much
Don't get me wrong: it's not like I thought that the introduction of Nick (Marc Warren), ex-husband to Kalinda (Archie Panjabi), has been interesting or compelling or at all fun to watch on The Good Wife -- and not just because Warren is in no way cute enough to have ever so much as held hands with Kalinda, never mind married her. Under any other circumstances, I'd have been very happy to learn that The Good Wife creators Michelle and Robert King had decided not to let it play out as long as they'd originally planned. The issue is that they're publicly admitting that part of the reason they're doing it is because of an outcry from fans.
TV fandom is a subject I happen to know a lot about. Before this one, I used to run another website about television, which boasted a very large and very active community of bulletin board members, the vast majority of which were extremely smart and cool and loved to dig into the minutiae of their favourite TV shows because they liked to have other people to discuss such things with who were just as smart and cool as they were. But there was also a constituency of forum posters who felt that their fandom entitled them to a seat at the production table, as it were. At the time, it was not that common for fans to experience direct contact with showrunners; occasionally, a show's writer or (even more rarely) star would visit the boards and interact with fans. That was slightly dangerous because it gave the impression that the series personnel was treating the forum members as an unofficial focus group.
All things considered, even though our site was pretty big and, among TV industry nerds, pretty well known, it was also easy enough to avoid. In the age of Twitter, it's got to be much harder for showrunners to tune out fan response, particularly if -- as in this case -- it's overwhelmingly negative. So I'm sympathetic to the Kings for what they have to deal with. And, certainly, it's their right to bail on a storyline if they don't think it's working. But why would they go on the record giving credit for the change to the fans? Even if it's the truth, it sets such a dangerous precedent!
When they're disappointed with the direction a show has taken, fans have a few legitimate options. They can, as discussed, go on the internet and bitch about it. If whatever's annoying them doesn't stop, they can quit watching the show. They can try to get jobs writing on said show so that they can write more satisfying storylines -- but we can probably all agree that this last option is open only to a very small minority of series viewers.
The thing is that fans are not producers. They know how to consume a show, not how to make one. And just as every successful fan campaign to revive a dead show gives hope to viewers of less and less viable cancelled series (really, now we're rallying behind Mockingbird Lane?), every time a fan influences a showrunner, TV inches closer to fanfic. A showrunner should have a vision for his or her show and the conviction to carry it out even if some viewers get annoyed. If fans want to vote on a show's outcome, that's what American Idol is for.