Do TV Writers Have A Fiduciary Duty To Their Audiences?

Leaving aside your polemical, partisans fantasies, I was not addressing the morality of fiction, just the nature of fiction. Fiction is about the truth, although it may be marginally referential to the "truth." (That's without going into a discussion of in what the truth consists, and how we can know that.) This was a direct comment on Whackeyes idiotic claim that artists have an duty to tell the truth.

ERRATUM:
"If he does not pay off, then he is opprobious and he shud be
remembered for that when he offers more work."

Shud be:
If he does not pay off, then he is opprobrious and he shud be
remembered for that when he offers more work.





David

My post above should have read "Fiction is not about the truth . . . "

if it is good it is....it is emotionally true. but untrue fiction is easy to spot, untrue non-fiction not.

I 'm under the impression that when the average, typical customer
buys a historical novel, he expects fiction in the foreground of the story
set against a historically accurate background; e.g., the author does not
casually mention cities being situate in an incorrect State.
There is no incidental reference to Buffalo and NYC being in Iowa,
nor is there tangential reference to the South winning the Battle of Gettysburg.

I believe that a rigid segregation is expected
between areas of fiction and of historical accuracy.

Lrry McMurtry hqs mqde a living with posing historical backgrounds and characters in his western novels. Most people are left with a decision to mke about whether to believe it or not. His novels sold well despite the disregard of the truth.
As jespah said"Its a business" the product is sold to the clients ("which are the sponsors, not the audience)

Its to your credit that u did not fall for the bait.
I was expecting a great eruption of semi-hysterical acrimony,
like poking a beehive, but u did not accomodate.

I think you may be a bit premature with your angst about how that branch of the storyline ended. I also watched it and saw that it ended with him still at the graveyard, saying to stay tuned for the next episode. It is the typical cliffhanger technique being used by serial plot lines on TV.

Perhaps they will still bring together all the loose ends by making you watch the next episode to find out "who shot JR."

Agreed; it is always possible (tho note that he bid farewell to Robin Tunney,
implying that he had no further business with them).

I cud not help but notice the knife-slashing woman.
I was wondering if she was the real Red John.
I 've had a chronic hunch that there 's been a feminine quality
about Red John 's work.
I 'm pretty sure that the writers have some future for her.

Something that the writers left un-answered
was how Red John persuaded his followers to commit suicide
to keep his secrets secret. The Emperor of Japan was not Red John.

In a moment, more about your silly remarks.

As FM says, Larry McMurtry has made a really good living selling novels about the "old west" which display a cavalier disregard for historical truth. His novel Anything for Billy, ostensibly about Billy the Kid, has about one point of junction with historical "truth"--the central character's name. The rest of it is complete and utter hogwash.

Harry Turtledove is another successful writer of putative historical fiction--and successful in the alternate history genre. His 1992 novel, Guns of the South, posits time-travelling Afrikaners who travel back in time to give the Confederate States AK47s. I once read an alleged historical novel which had the central characters travelling west in a wagon in the 1850s, and they, apparenly, entered the wilderness somewhere in western New Jersey. I knew it was really out on the edge when the author wrote of South Indiana, as though there were a state by that name. Cherokee mounted on horses came riding along . . . out of South Indiana . . . in the 1850s. I looked the author up, and discovered that she was English. She had obviously not bothered to do any but the scantiest research. She is also a successful writer of historical fiction--heavy emphasis on the fiction.

The biggest problem you have here is a naïve belief in what you are pleased to call the truth. Even when people think they are getting it right, they are off base. I found a real bargain at the second hand store a couple of weeks ago, it was the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy in a single volume, for five dollars. I hadn't read it in about 50 years or more. It has proven to be a sad disappointment. Of course it is a fictionalized account of events. However, one of the two authors, James Norman Hall or Charles Nordhoff, had found in a used book store in Paris, the 1831 account of the mutiny by John Barrow. Barrow was the permanent Second Secretary of the Admiralty for more than 40 years, and so had access to the records there. But his account seems to have been heavily biased against William Bligh. An online search brought up an article which says exactly that, that Barrow was biased against Bligh. At the time of publication, flogging had all but disappeared as a punishment in the Royal Navy. But Barrow apparently did no real research on the matter--he just condemned Bligh out hand. He also condemned Edward Edwards, commander of HMS Pandora--but Edwards richly deserved that, even by the standards of 1790. Early in this century, a descendant of William Bligh did an exhaustive survey of ship's logs in the Public Record Office in England. Punishment was at the least a weekly event, and it was recorded in ships logs, because Admiralty policy mandated that. William Bligh was not only not a flogging commander, he used the cat far less than the average of ship's captains in the last two decades of the 18th century--little more than half as often as the average for the period. So, Nordhoff and Hall, with the best intentions in the world, have created Bligh as a fictionalized monster, a judgment not supported by the evidence. They go further, though. In the first volume, Mutiny on the Bounty, they substitute their fictional character, Roger Byam, for the acting midshipman Peter Heywood. I can see why. A dispassionate look at the court martial testimony-- even though Mr. Cole, the Bosun, Mr. Purcell, the carpenter and Mr. Fryer, the sailing master, all spoke well of Heywood, and thought him innocent of intent--shows at best an equivocal behavior on Heywood's part. The evidence both of those who remained loyal, and those who were brought back for trial strongly suggests a young man, hardly more than a boy, caught up in the excitement of the moment, and not thinking of the consequences. It was much easier to make a sympathetic fictional character.

But Nordhoff and Hall, already successful writers of short stories and novels, wanted an exciting story, and one with sympathetic characters. I really do doubt that, had they known the "truth" about William Bligh and Fletcher Christian, they would have written their three novels very much differently.

It's FICTION, get it?

The Mentalist is Bruno Heller 's baby, very directly.
It sprung full armed from the mind of Bruno.
I can 't imagine that he is lying about it.

Its a little saddening to observe the mendacity, the fraud
that is put out by other personnel in the show, to wit,
we were told that Grace and Rigsby wud marry and then leave the show.
That 's not what happened.

Maybe it will happen now that the "CBI" has gone the way
of the dinosaurs.

That doesn't surprise me--it's exemplary of your character . . . or rather, lack of character.

WoW!
I gotta say!
U must have found the BEST psychiatrist in Canada.
Years ago, u were much more BOMBASTIC in your vituperation.

If u remain that mello, u r gonna live a lot longer.

The short answer, of course is, there is no fiduciary duty, in the same way that audiences (or readers, if it's a book) have no duty whatsoever to keep reading, buying, viewing, listening, etc.

The writer who writes believable fiction will have a readership (or viewership). The one who doesn't, won't. The one who starts off with believability, and then veers into self-parody, won't keep an audience forever. Audiences don't like to feel betrayed by writers, or by lazy writing.

Except networks love it, because it's cheap.

Don't like it? Stop consuming the product. Just like toothpaste, restaurant meals or home heating oil companies, you can vote with your wallet, and encourage your friends to do so.

if you get sick on my food at my restaurant and dont like that then dont come back to my restaurant, I have no fiduciary duty to make sure the food I serve is safe.

BULLSH**!

Yeah, right . . . Dr. I'm Sick . . .

That analogy isn't even close. This is a decision to engage in the consumption of artwork, not something that can imperil life or limb.

So, you allege that if you read a novel, and then learn that it's not the truth, it will make you ill? You really crack me up.

I must agree; there is no basis for a dispute of what u posted,
in that there was never a justiciable controversy,
but I had a moral and an ethical point of vu in mind.

We know that if a merchant sells u a purported mystery novel
all of whose pages r blank, there arises a cause of action
for the purchase price, but if a book is poorly written,
then there is no legal cause of action available.
As a practical matter, u don 't have a suit in equity available, either,
but in all candor, I am open to considering whether an author has
a duty (however non-justiciable it may be) in fairness to his customers.





David