Month: December 2014

David: Well, you know, I got so much grief from the Seinfeld finale, which a lot of people intensely disliked, that I no longer feel a need to wrap things up.

Simmons: That’s interesting. So you’re still mad about that?

David: I wouldn’t say I’m mad about it, but it taught me a lesson that if I ever did another show, I wasn’t going to wrap it up.

Simmons: Right. What’s interesting is the Internet was around, but not in the form it’s in now. Now, anytime a show ends, it has to turn into this three-week referendum before and after the show about whether they did it right. If they didn’t, people are so upset. It’s a free television show!

David: I think the thing about finales is everybody writes their own finale in their head, whereas if they just tune in during the week to a normal show, they’re surprised by what’s going on. They haven’t written it beforehand, they don’t know what the show is. But for a finale, they go, “Oh, well this should happen to George, and Jerry and Elaine should get together,” and all that. They’ve already written it, and often they’re disappointed, because it’s not what they wrote.

Every comic book hero — TV heroes too, like “Doctor Who” — must inevitably, relentlessly, repeatedly face a dedicated threat to his or her very essence and core. It’s no longer sufficient to commit a weird sort of crime in Gotham City; any given baddie has to gnaw at the very roots of Batman’s being, fuck up the private lives of his friends and relatives, make him doubt his raison d’etre, set his postal district on fire and blow up his cave. Poor old Batman seems to lurch from one apocalyptic life-ruin epic to another these days with barely a pause for breath, making me long for the days when he jumped around at night helping people or solving mysteries that didn’t lead to some aeons-spanning plot by the ultimate villain to do the ultimate Bad Thing. And the Caped Crusader’s not the only perma-victim of the Ebola-like “crisis” epidemic. For a while it was genuinely thrilling to watch our heroes facing such directly focused threats to their meaning and relevance, but now the “crisis” approach, where every day is “The Day Evil Won,” is beginning to feel like another grim, played-out sales strategy with diminishing creative returns.

Kevin [Feige] came up to me and said, ‘Hey, listen, you know,’ cause we were coming out in a week. I hadn’t been greenlit on 2 yet. So he came up and he’s like, you know, frankly they were gonna announce some other things that got announced, just recently. And they didn’t have contracts signed and things done and so he said, ‘We need to announce some stuff. So what about you and Chris announcing, you know, Guardians 2?’ And Chris and I were both there that day. And I was like ‘Well we’re greenlit? All right, sounds good, buddy.’