Steven Moffat Crime Drama "Inside Man"

Sadly Moffat is tainted goods for me now in the same way M. Night Shyamalan is to many. He's gone from being the writer you look out for and are intrigued by what they'll deliver next, to the writer you avoid anything with his name on now.

Everything Moffat touches goes from half-decent to unbearable... Sherlock, Jekyll and Coupling as well as Dr Who. I get the sense he runs out of ways to stimulate his own intellect.

I have to admit - I am interested in this. He can write good stuff. Just not recently in my view.

Fingers crossed he could be back on form.

If not then maybe those who commission such shows will begin to realise Moffat is not the hot property he once was and stop paying him so much money for what is essentially confused, garbled rubbish. But then that may not happen as long as the likes of Piers Wenger, controller of BBC Drama, remain in place.

Random comment: I personally liked Jekyll although I felt James Nesbit didn't quite suit the role.

Jekyll is almost a metaphor for his era. It starts off great, gets progressively more addled and confused as it goes on, and ends up unwatchable shit.

Jekyll’s duality complex reminds me of Moffat as well. Hyde represents a very mockery of Jekyll due to the fact that Hyde is very much a product of animalistic id-driven ‘ape-like fury’, whereas Jekyll is a logical thinker and an individual of science, and said mockery slowly drowns out the scientist. The fact that Moffat’s era post series 6 is very much a mockery of his own previous work and the works of prior writers is quite pertinent- it’s as if the animal within him had slowly purged any integrity left in his writing.

I don't want to see anything from Moffat after the Capaldi era. I view him as a vandal now who destroyed other people's creations. Given how henpecked, and how cucked he is, I don't doubt this will be the usual shit. How he keeps getting work when his DW was an absolute disaster (viewers fell every year to catastrophic lows) I don't understand?

stengos wrote:I have to admit - I am interested in this. He can write good stuff. Just not recently in my view.

Fingers crossed he could be back on form.

Well that was always the hope with me. He'd been a great writer before, maybe in time he could be so again. In time though, even that hope died out as I realized things weren't going to be put right.

I lost hope on him on Doctor Who in Series 8. But I did hope maybe his issues with Doctor Who were merely localized to Doctor Who and to do with his fannish complexes and playing to a kids' audience, and to the obnoxious formula RTD set out, and that he would still take a bit more pride and distinction with Sherlock. Because I was still up for enjoying that show.

Then The Abominable Bride became a major kick in the nuts after such a promising first half. Toward the end (as Wizard of Cause pointed out) it somehow stopped being a Sherlock episode and turned into a Buzzfeed article.

Series 4 seemed almost a return to form until the finale just ruined everything.

There is the feeling for me that Moffat as a writer has changed for the worse. Perhaps through believing his own success too much, perhaps for being given too much budget and creative control, or perhaps because of the pressure of feminist influences.

But for me that's the problem. Moffat needs people around him to rein him in and occasionally say 'no' to his dafter ideas (or at least limit how many ideas he burns through per story). The problem is, it seems most likely the people around doing that function for him are going to be feminist identity politics types in the BBC, so they're likely just going to make things worse.

If I'm being honest, I just don't like the guy anymore and feel burned too many times to feel charitable toward him. I just think of him as a bullshit merchant, and you just never know where you stand with them.