raina16:

frozen-delight:

frozen-delight:

hunenka:

hunenka:

“I reached
out [to Andrew Dabb] and he’s like, ‘Yeah, really man, just do whatever you
wanna do.’
And I’m
like, ‘That’s not giving me any concrete direction here.’
And he’s
like, ‘Well, you know, you saw what Christian [Keyes] was doing…’
I’m like,
‘Oh, okay, so I need to watch what Christian was–’
‘No, I
would say just kind of, you know, do your own thing.’
And I’m like,
‘The one thing I was actually taking direction from, you’ve now just taken that
away.’ So it’s… Yeah, I was an island unto myself.”

—Jensen
Ackles about playing Michael, EW 14×01 premiere screening (x)

This is a perfect demonstration of what a bad showrunner Dabb is. Having basically no thoughts on Michael’s character and leaving it up to Jensen to figure it all out and clean up Dabb’s mess… No wonder Michael hasn’t been exactly overwhelming so far.

@evilprincesskeri​ said:

Like… i get why people have issues with Dabb, some of his choices for the show have been objectively BAD.  But… That being said… Why are you mad that he’s keeping OUT of it and putting his trust in Jensen who, honestly, is a freaking genius and lives that character.  Maybe we should thank Dabb for keeping his mouth shut for once?

Because this
obviously isn’t Dabb going, “You know what you’re doing with this character
better than I do, so I’ll let you do it.” It’s Dabb having no idea who Michael
is—beyond “he’s the Big Bad No. 3,457 and a way for us to take Dean out of the equation
and give breathing space to the other characters"— and he’s not even trying to
hide that.

And it
shows, because AU!Michael’s motivation and
characterization has been all over the place since he was introduced last
season. Jensen certainly makes him more watchable because he’s a skilled
actor trying to find Michael’s inner life, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies… and because we,
the audience, are curious and excited to look for all the differences between
his portrayal of Dean and Michael!Dean. That’s
what makes it at least remotely fun to watch. But take that away and Michael is
a pretty incomprehensible and frankly quite boring character. (@frozen-delight talks a bit more about this here)

Of course,
good actors (when working with good directors, writers etc.) should be able to
cooperate on shaping the characters they’re playing. But they need to build on something. So when a
writer/showrunner is asked for directions on playing a new character, especially a
character that is this important, they should give a better answer than “I
don’t know, you’ll figure it out.”

Becuse if they don’t, then no matter how good the actor is, the result is inevitably going to come off looking directionless.

Well, the basic problem is that Jensen is not playing a new character, and that any showrunner worth his salt should care about character continuity. That Dabb doesn’t showcases once again how secondary character development is to his concept of the show, no matter what he might tell us in his interviews.

A more particular problem posed by the script of 14×01 is that one of the most powerful tools of character building, namely interacting with other characters, is hardly utilised. (Not a bad writing method per se, but one that would make it harder to figure out the character from an actor’s POV.) The easiest way of introducing a new character is having him interact with the characters we already know. 

In his three scenes, Michael barely does anything that can be called “interacting” with others. He talks, they remain mostly silent. And they, with the exception of Anael/Jo, are new characters as well, meaning that we don’t know them any more than we do him. Meanwhile Anael/Jo’s characterisation isn’t necessarily in line with what we learnt about her last season either. So Michael remains as shapeless as the rest of them.

It would be interesting to know what sort of notes Thomas J. Wright gave Jensen on his performance, or if the script left him completely clueless too.

@69obsessions said: Sera Gamble did the same thing when Jared asked about soulless sam. Left it up to him completely and he pulled it off.

@ambular-d said: This is not an issue unique to Dabb, however.  IIRC, Kripke told Gen exactly the same thing about Ruby.

I think both of you have a point that this isn’t a mistake no other showrunner on the show has ever made. However, the examples you name clearly show that yes, in all cases, it was a *mistake*.

S6 didn’t give us one Soulless!Sam, it gave us about a dozen. When people talk about Soulless!Sam, they usually mean the way the character was presented in 6×09, by far the best episode featuring the character, in which Ben Edlund really nailed it. However, when one considers all the episodes from 6×01 to 6×11, one has to admit that both the writing for the character and Jared’s interpretation of the character are incredibly inconsistent. Sera Gamble neither giving clear directions to Jared nor to her fellow writers didn’t pan out. (And created a philosophical and mythological abyss of problems that the show never recovered from, but that’s a whole different topic.)

Likewise, S4!Ruby was completely different than the character by the same name introduced in S3, was pretty much all over the place over the course of the season, and was more or less universally hated until Jared married Gen and criticism of the character  or her acting became a no-go.

That being said, however wonky the writing and acting, if we gained a slightly more clear idea of the character of Ruby and Soulless!Sam in the S4 and S6 premieres respectively, it’s because we saw them interact with other established characters. They didn’t exist in a vacuum, and that made a big difference.

Also I would point out, they had an idea of the over all effect of the role in the story – where Jensen is saying he really hasn’t been told a THING about where this fits into the story as a whole or with his character. He’s said that in multiple interviews. They basically have left him completely in the dark.