Martin Gero: It’s tough to stay focused with those kind of long deadlines. It’s going to require an enormous amount of self-discipline for all of us to stay on top of the lead that we already have. Writing is no fun. There’s always more fun things to be doing. We make a TV show here. You can wander in the art department, talk to them. You can eat up your time very easily doing “productive” things, but really what we should be doing is putting our ass in the seat and grinding out episodes.
Is that the question? “What do I want out of the season?”
GateWorld: What does it offer you as a writer this season?
MG: Oh. Yeah. What does it offer me? I really like my job. I do. I like everybody that comes to work, for the most part. And the people I don’t like I don’t need to have a lot of interaction with. I love the group of writers that we have together. And Alex and Lauren. This is too much fun. We are very handsomely to have an enormous amount of fun here. I can’t imagine any situation where I ended up “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
GW: Where would you like to see Atlantis end up at the end of the year? Not the physical city itself, but the show overall.
MG: Well I hope we hold on to viewers. That’s really it. We have the back half of Season Three airing right now. It makes me a little nervous because there has been such a long gap. Also the show is so readily available on the Internet. I can go to YouTube right now. We just clamped down on a lot of them but I can still go to YouTube right now. All of a sudden episodes will start streaming for free. And if I want to spend a little more time, I can get them in better quality than they’ll air in the United States.
So that’s a problem, I think. I think the core of our show is incredibly intelligent and technically savvy people, for the most part. I, for one, if the show I liked was airing two months before it was where I lived. I would sure as hell download it. I do do that for HBO stuff.
So I can’t blame them, but it’s a dangerous game. I actually think that Battlestar was being hurt by how much it was being downloaded. It’s the most watched show that no one watches. More people watch that show than they watch ours, I think, just talking to people on the street, in planes, in bars and stuff like that. But no one watches that show when it airs. Everyone downloads it off of iTunes or watches the DVDs when it comes out. Unfortunately the business model is such at the moment that it’s very bad for the health of shows.
GW: Needs some tweaking, perhaps? The system?
MG: Well you can’t change that. There’s no point being angry or regretful. “Argh, they should count iTunes!” They shouldn’t. The reality is that a lot of the money that makes these shows comes from the network that airs them. They make their money off of advertising. You can never forget in this business that basically at the end of the day, my job to sell toothpaste and cars and crappy gadgets. That’s my job. I’m a toothpaste and car salesman, and I’ll distract you just long enough for you to watch those commercials. The second that we stop being able to do that is the second we stop being able to do our jobs.
So it’s frightening in one way but in another there’s really nothing we can do about it. I feel like we’ve done our job. I feel like the shows are good. And how they are consumed is out of our control.
GW: Are you looking forward to writing for Amanda a little bit more often? And writing for Jewel?
MG: Oh for sure! I’m a huge Firefly fan. When she came and did “Instinct,” she was great, but she was under forty pounds of makeup. She’s a very pretty lady. So it sounds like “This is kind of a dumb use of Jewel.” She was great. I just thought “Kinda wasted her.” “We’ll bring you back, we’ll bring you back.” You don’t really want to bring her back for just one again.
So this was, I think, the perfect opportunity and how we had all conceived what this new doctor character should be. She was perfect. She’s so delightful. She’s such a pro. She’s just a welcome addition. And I hope people give her the chance. I know there’s a lot of Carson people who’ll be like “No! I will never accept Jewel!” Hopefully it’ll be like that Simpsons episode where Barney replaces Chief Wiggum in the barbershop quartet. They’re like “Boo — [gasp] He’s got a beautiful voice, I can live with it.”
She’s great, and she has a beautiful voice … that’s kind of strange. I love writing for her and for Amanda. I’ve written two out of the three Atlantises that she’s been on. So yeah.
GW: So basically the message to fans this year: “Don’t pass judgment before you see it.”
MG: Well, yeah. You know, look: I’m worse than anybody. When I hear rumors about stuff or spoilers about this I go “Well that is a terrible idea. They do not know what they are doing.” And “That is crazy.”
But give us the benefit of the doubt. With the comings and goings of cast, people assume that we’re doing it just because of a whim of storytelling. I just came into the office one morning and I was like “You know what? I’ve got this great idea but it only works if we kill Beckett.” And everyone’s like “OK! Sure! Let’s do it!” Same with Rainbow. There’s a greater political thing. This is about a bunch of people who need to work smoothly together for things to work.
GW: It doesn’t always happen. It’s not a perfect world.
MG: There was two Dr. Weir’s. You can’t do that all the time. And I’m not saying that about Paul, by the way. Paul was a whole other set of reasons. So sometimes I get frustrated that they’re like “Well why would they do that?!” And I just want to be like, “Because we had to! There was no choice! We have to make it work.” Just like we’re trying to make it work as best as we can given the situation that we have.
GW: You’re not doing it to screw with fans.
MG: No! Some people are like “Why wasn’t Teyla in that episode?” Because Rachel had to physically be somewhere else. Sometimes there are family emergencies that come up. Someone’s parents die. You have to leave. It’s like stuff like that. I’m not asking to be forgiven for that, because I certainly don’t take that into consideration when I watch shows. But just in the processing of spoilers, I feel like there’s a quick-to-judge kind of “Well, they’re doing that to **** with us” as opposed to “We’re doing it because we have to.”
GW: Last year, when we talked to you, you made a really interesting statement about Season Three. You said Season Three has got to do something really interesting. The show’s got to turn a corner. We’ve got to take risks. How well do you think you executed that in Season Three and what would you have to say about what Season Four has to do?
MG: Well it’s a great question. I think it’s really hard for me to answer it, though. We do as best we can. We try to keep up on the message boards, gauge by the ratings and stuff like that.
I think Season Three was really well received. I think it was not a marked departure from Season Two but we’re definitely using the Season Three model on Season Four as opposed to a Season One and Two model, which is not being afraid to do character-centric shows. Not being afraid to have longer-lasting multi-arcs, and trying whenever we can to veer a little different and potentially dark. I think we were successful.
Some of my favorite episodes of the whole series are in Season Three. There’s a disproportionate amount of episodes that I love in Season Three versus Seasons One and Two. But that should be anyway, because we need to be there all the time. So looking into Season Four — I don’t want to repeat myself, but every year I think we go in with more confidence. Every year we know what we can do technically better.
This is a first year, for instance, that we haven’t lost our main visual effects supervisor. We’re going into Season Four right now with the same visual effects supervisor that we had in Season Three. Even something as small as that is a huge deal. You’ve developed a shorthand. You both know what you can do. We had a conversation the other day — I was really unhappy with how most of the explosions look on the show, digitally. So that’s something we’re going to fix.
I feel like we are in a much better position financially, time-wise, personnel-wise. I feel like the interpersonal dynamics on set and in the office are running a lot smoother than they ever have. But that being said, it feels very new because we don’t have Brad and Rob around anymore. And that’s a huge deal. They are the patriarchs of this franchise, and they are focusing predominantly on the feature films. That’s not to say they’re not involved, but from a day-to-day situation Joe and Paul are my boss. And that’s awesome. It feels like the parents are away and …
GW: …the older brothers are —
MG: — Exactly. We get to just go and make this crazy TV series on our own.
So that’s incredibly liberating in a way. It’s incredibly frightening as well. We’ve always relied on them to pick up those fumbles. And so far they’ve still been doing that. They’re reading all the scripts. They’re sitting in on some of the breaking sessions. They’re giving great notes. But it’s weird.
It’s a strange thing, turning over new management so to speak, especially when the other guys are in the building. Everyone’s trying to figure out what’s the right thing to do. They’re trying to be respectful to Joe and Paul. They don’t want Joe and Paul to feel like second-class show runners, show runners in name only. But we’ve obviously gotten into situations where Brad and Rob maybe disagree with Joe and Paul.
It’s been a really interesting year, and not at all in a negative way. I just miss seeing Brad around the office as much. But he’s taking some much-deserved time off, and not coming in every day. I’d be doing the same thing if I was in his position! So that in itself has given the year a different flavor than anything else.