Executive Meddling - Television Tropes & Idioms

Works of art make rules. Rules do not make works of art.

— Claude DeBussy

As one person rarely has the financial resources to create and more importantly distribute their own television shows, movies, comics, etc. entertainment is generally produced by corporations. They are the ones that put up the money to see your favorite book turned into The Film Of The Book. While an actor gets paid for their services they're ultimately free agents, eventually they will move on to another gig. At worst they lose their time and reputation, but only rarely are personally invested in their work's success. Directors exist in a similar situation. A television network or studio, though, is a single entity, and if what it produces doesn't make a profit the business folds.

No matter how brilliant that last episode was or how insightful the protagonist's dream was about the nature of man, if nobody watched it and the advertisers are complaining survival means you have to put Old Yeller down. In the end nobody likes this, so it is in the executives' best interest to see that their money is well spent, budgets are kept, and the show gets finished by Sweeps. Often this means vetoing ideas, or dictating that certain elements be added in. So when the organization behind the creators takes a hand in creation you get this trope.

Unfortunately creating a successful work of fiction, television shows in particular, is a crapshoot. Nobody really understands what makes a hit. You can never predict what the audience will like until they actually see it. However certain element of success are more universal then others. As a result, executives tend to be both conservative and imitative, trying to make every new show like one or more previous shows that were successful (see X Meets Y).

One way in which these traits manifest themselves is for the executive to force changes on a show which he feels is too different or edgy, in order to make it "less risky" or "more appealing to the audience" — in other words, garner higher ratings. "More appealing" often translates into "more action-oriented" or "sexier" or, in the immortal words of Woody Harrelson as Steve Martin's producer in L. A. Story, "more wacky, less egghead." Often the executive wants to reach the Lowest Common Denominator for better or worse. And far too often this can edge over into denigrating viewers' intellect or that their memory is comparable to a small fish species. And of course if you stick to what "works" too closely it can be hard to stand out. Which can be the surest death sentence of all.

The results can be positive, especially if the imposed limitations force writers to think more creatively. Not to mention, executives aren't always wrong. But, well, since when does someone doing their job right get any attention? The prevalence of this trope leads people to think any retools or "Jump The Shark" ordeals are a result of outside influences. There is something of a bias, as the times where Executive Meddling works are rarely reported — no one complains when the system works. However, when something breaks, everyone knows about it. After all, what director would say "my original idea wasn't that good, but some guy behind a desk gave me one that worked better" rather than "The guy behind the desk is responsible for that pile of crap because he prevented me from doing my original idea".

Problems can be created just as easily from Creator Breakdown, Protection From Editors, Writer On Board or Author Filibuster — things that a responsibly meddlesome executive can prevent from ever coming to pass. Quite often whoever you think is responsible is merely Misblamed.

If the show itself escaped executive meddling, but its time slot is changed around and has zero promotion, then it's Screwed By The Network.

Examples

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Anime & Manga

Executive Meddling by the editors of Shonen Jump resulted in some drastic plot changes to Dragon Ball. For example, they're the reason the Cell arc kept constantly changing villains (first it was Android 19 and 20, then 17 and 18, then Cell, then suddenly Cell had two more forms that looked completely different and quickly transitioned from the second to third). The editors basically kept telling Toriyama the villains he picked for the arc weren't good enough, so he kept having to shoehorn new villains or new looks for the villains in.
Similarly, Yu Yu Hakusho was supposed to end with the climactic Chapter Black arc, but one last arc was created due to editorial request.
- And later ended prematurely at due to editorial request.
Ikumi Mia blames part of the failure of Tokyo Mew Mew a la mode on her Nakayoshi director limiting her to two volumes and telling her not to focus on the previous series' characters.
- Executive Meddling actually produced the original series as well; Ikumi-sensei wanted to do a horror series focusing on a much darker catgirl, without a colourful cast of Kemonomimi friends. Ichigo's predecessor wasn't even a Magical Girl.
In Digimon Savers, there is an episode where a bomb-shaped digimon called BomberNanimon attempts to blow up an amusement park by throwing bombs everywhere. When dubbed, its color was changed to orange, the bombs were turned into ''fruit juice'' and it was re-named "Citramon." English producer/writer Jeff Nimoy stated that he had to do this or Disney would cut the episode.
- However, once you get past the utter randomness; it becomes a fitting homage to Don Patch of Bobobobo Bobobo, which ended its dub a few weeks beforehand.
Rumor has it that Yu-Gi-Oh GX was cut short because Yuki Judai's voice actor was fired and the show's developers didn't want to spend the extra cash to replace him in the middle of a season; as a result, the show was forced to wrap up half-way through its run, and its successor, Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds was rushed to air to make up the difference.
- At the beginning, Yu-Gi-Oh wasn't about the infamous card games, but since the game was quite popular (not to mention conveniently marketable), Kazuki Takahashi had to continue with the card games.
The translators working on Initial D originally wanted a straight translation, but Tokyopop executives demanded various changes, resulting in the translators writing an open letter to the fans in which they joked about releasing the manga shrink-wrapped with White-Out and a felt-tip pen.
- The big, big beef was the "Fast and the Furious"-ization. You can see it in the hip-hop dialogue and cheesy nicknames (graudally done away with in the later volumes). Given the Love It Or Hate It nature of FaF, this is understandable (although still a bit extreme). Strangely enough, without this executive meddling, it's unlikely that any American manga company would've taken a chance on a title as unusual as Initial D at all.
Code Geass suffered this from Day 1; the initial series plan involved an idealistic rookie soldier and his ideological conflicts with his battle-hardened C.O.; when Sunrise rejected this concept, the creators took it back to formula and, with input from CLAMP, made it the show it is today.
- More recently, the show's director/co-creator stated in an interview that thanks to being Screwed By The Network and having the show moved from its original timeslot to an entirely different one (forcing them to try to appeal to the old fans as well as a new demographic that hadn't even seen the first season), they essentially had to throw out their original plans for the show's second half, adding in a one-year Time Skip and starting from there.
The entirety of the "Blue Knight" saga and the subsequent story arc in Astro Boy were the result of executive meddling. Apparently Astro's willingness to work with the police and try to change the social order from within made him unpopular with the new generation of student radicals in the late 60s who believed that modern society was corrupt beyond all redemption and called Astroboy a hopelessly idealistic anachronism. Tezuka's editors at Shonen magazine noticed this and ordered him to make the series Darker And Edgier and have him fight against the forces of law and order. Tezuka handled this fairly well, however. Instead of simply turning Astro into the sort of violent, twisted, anarchic Anti Hero that was popular at the time, he created an engaging story driven by a charismatic Anti Villain antagonist and gave Astro reasonable motive for his actions. Tezuka had him waver back and forth between accepting and rejecting Blue Knight's extremism before denouncing him once and for all. In the subsequent "Astro Reborn" story, however, he becomes a more destructive Anti Hero due to losing his memories, but eventually reverts back to his old self, partially due to the Darker And Edgier Astro Boy not selling well after all. This may be one of the rare cases where Executive Meddling actually did some good, as the Blue Knight saga is one of the most well-liked stories by modern fans and was highly influential in later adaptations; then again, Tezuka himself always regretted letting Astro abandon his pacifist ideals to embrace the Blue Knight's extremism, however briefly.
Saint Seiya ended prematurely because of this. It was planned to have two more big story arcs which would focus more on the Gold Saints, but the series was canceled and it took the anime more than ten years to finish afterward.
The executive meddling in the English dub of Sailor Moon resulted in the transformation of the lesbian couple Haruka and Michiru into the implied incestuous lesbian couple Amara and Michelle by making the two cousins in an attempt to get rid of any homosexuality. The dubbers did make them cousins, but didn't bother to remove any of the romantic implications between them, possibly as a Take That to the executives.
- On the other hand, Sailor Moon owes its very existence to executive meddling. When creator Naoko Takeuchi was trying to think of a new series, it was her editor who suggested the heroines wear sailor suits (he had a thing for them) and thus began Sailor V. However, they had a fight over the length of the skirts — her editor wanted longer skirts, but Takeuchi fought for the short length they have today.
  - Moreover, Takeuchi originally only planned the manga to last one year, and the anime was also intended to only be a 46 episode series, ending with the deaths of the main characters at the end of the Dark Kingdom arc. The popularity of the franchise led to the anime getting more series and naturally, Takeuchi being required to keep stretching out her storyline from series to series.
One might consider the entire post-Raou Fist of the North Star story, as covered in the manga and the Hokuto no Ken 2 anime, a product of a desire to keep the story going. Unfortunately the result couldn't keep up to the legendary status of the original, and almost all subsequent licensed works (with the possible exception of a single PlayStation game) have been set in the first half of the manga.
Ken Akamatsu got hit with this hard while writing Mahou Sensei Negima! After Love Hina, he wanted to try something new and do a Shounen series, but the executives wanted to capitalize on the success of Love Hina with another Unwanted Harem series. As a result, Mahou Sensei Negima! looks like an Unwanted Harem, but starts adding Shounen elements around volume 3, which increase in frequency until it pretty much is a Shounen series with some Unwanted Harem elements still hanging around. According to some fans, the combination of genres actually benefits the quality of the series.
In a minor example, the author of Skip Beat wanted a minor character to be a middle-aged man, since the character was a successful director and therefore logically should be of a respectable age. The editor said no, "This is a Shojo manga, damnit!", and the character ended up about 30.
Another minor example: in Death Note, the editor confused Near and Mello's character designs, so Near became the deceptively young-looking man with Shonen Hair and Mello the androgynous youth.
- Not to mention that due to this error, it lead to their personalities (as Ohba and Obata first envisioned) being rewritten for the plot with the design swap: The one who became "Near" was meant to be the darker and more vengeful one (and be the elder), while the one who became "Mello" was originally envisioned as being calmer, younger, and more effeminate.
Weird example: Originally, Clefairy was to be the mascot of Pokémon, but Pikachu was chosen because of one of the editors' personal preference for it over Clefairy.
- Interestingly, Clefairy is the protagonist's partner in the obscure Japanese gag manga "Pokémon Pocket Monsters", making it something of an a Canon Foreigner. It also makes a brief cameo in the anime.
One could say that Sasuke owes his existence to this status; when Masashi was working on Naruto, the Editor told Masashi that Naruto needed a rival, thus creating the divisive character we all know.
- In a (arguably) positive example, Masashi Kishimoto, author of Naruto, stated that he originally didn't plan to have the members of Snake/Hawk besides Sasuke fight on-screen, but Shueisha ordered him to.
  - It was positive, because the team is more developed as well as decreasing Sasuke's plot hijackage, whereas if these fight scenes were skipped altogether, nobody would really grow on them. Besides, if all their fights were said to be awesome and they did not prove it, they probably would have developed into characters the fandom would consider pointlessly stupid, and question why they're even in the plot if they're not going to do anything.
- Kishimoto was also forced by editors to speed various arcs up, thinking they were taking too long. As a result, characters like Hidan, Kakuzu, and Tsunade were shafted and didn't get fights to show off their abilities in their latest appearances.
Shaman King was hit hard by this. Apparently, due to a decline in popularity, Hiroyuki Takei was ordered to HURRY IT UP. So he ended up rushing through the later chapters, resulting in a convoluted mass of plot points and character deaths (which is meaningless as the characters in question usually come back to life shortly thereafter or immediately come back as a ghost), and culminating in a cliffhanger ending. Fortunately, due to fan outcry, Takei eventually finished up the series properly and fixed the rushed chapters.
- Of course the ending we got, in a way, we got due to a case of meddling that got fans involved. Rather than just release it in volume form, the executives decided to first hold a survey for fans to request the final volume. This final volume was made, and was just the chapters they hadn't collected. The executives then told fans that they had to rebuy the series in new volumes to get the ending, and that if the sales even began to fall they'd be canceled. Let's just say fans were not amused....
Somewhat surprisingly, the opening theme of Neon Genesis Evangelion is the result of this. Originally, Anno intended to use a piece of the Polovtsian Dances for the opening, but the studio came to the conclusion that it would be too confusing for the viewers and thus had "Cruel Angel's Thesis" made to replace it with modern J-Pop.
- Confusing? in my Neon Genesis Evangelion? More likely then you'd think.

Art

It is said that the Greek sculptor Polykleitos was making a statue once, and people constantly instructed him about how it should look (in some variations, it was an official commitee). He made such a statue, while in secret, making another the way he wanted. In the end, he showed the people both statues, and explained the difference between his creation and theirs...

Card Games

In an example of distributor meddling, Upper Deck Entertainment has pressured Konami into letting them rearrange the rarities, severely alter the construction of the Structure Decks brought over, and create their own cards for the newest Yu-Gi-Oh collectible card game sets. Why would they make such a drastic move? Simple: the head of the YGO branch of UDE thought he could make the game better than Konami could, and demanded the chance to prove it, thus separating a game that had just begun to be unified.
- Honestly, Konami is just as bad. Chaos, the new "Psychic" monsters, introducing new concepts with weak backup, neglecting the Thunder, Fish, and Plant types although they are getting better at supporting those. That doesn't go into the rulings of the cards themselves, targeting and non-targeting, and a whole bunch of complicated rules. A popular phrase to describe a justification of a ruling that makes no sense? BKSS, because Konami said so.
  - Unfortunately, this has recently exploded into a legal shitstorm between the two, with Konami attempting to take back the distribution rights of the TCG and Upper Deck suing them for breech of contract. The battle is still ongoing, and already the distribution schedule for North America has become the first casualty.
  - And that's over, thanks to a revealing legal moment of Too Dumb To Live where UDE had outsourced the ability to reprint some cards which were deemed counterfeit. Konami still releases North American exclusive cards, but getting its beloved game out of the hands of UDE was a step in the right direction.
WWE Raw Deal suffered from this several times, due to the fact that everything had to be approved by the WWE. The broadest rule was that wrestlers no longer with the company could not continue to get card support, which would eventually cause that wrestler's cards to be difficult to find and also cause them to lag behind other wrestlers in viability. At times changes in the roster would force a change: Muhammad Hassan was planned for the Unforgiven set, but after the infamous terrorist angle and his subsequent departure, he had to be pulled and replaced with Gene Snitsky. At times even actual CARDS were changed: Road Dogg, X-Pac, Billy Gunn, and Kane had a card called "Tori Enters The Fray", but after she departed, it could no longer be made. It eventually was remade as "Help Is On The Way", which did not have nearly the same context as the original, though the cards were the same.

Comics

X-Men: The original conclusion for the Dark Phoenix Saga called for Dark Phoenix being psychically lobotomized; however, then-Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter ordered writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne to come up with something more drastic as punishment for her crimes, and she was killed off. This is a positive example, as Jean's death is remembered as one of the most poignant and touching moments in all the Marvel Universe.
- Comic book legend says Claremont's script originally provided proper punishment for Jean Grey's actions; however, when Jean consumed the star for power, John Byrne threw in the planet of plant people that died as a result of the cataclysm. That's why Jim Shooter demanded her death.
- But they did plan on bringing her back, just not having committed such a horrible crime.
- It was meddling when writers were forced to kill her off again, even though it had nothing to do with the DPS at that time. They later tried to drop a bus on Jean to make sure she can never come back with "Endsong", but ironically the "final solution" (rumored to be the wholesale destruction of Jean's body) was changed by executive meddling to leave things so that Jean may one day return, assuming editorial changes.
- Another X-Men example dates from the beginning of the series—Stan Lee wanted to call it "The Mutants," but the bosses said that very few readers would know what a mutant was. Lee's protest that nobody, including him, knew what an X-Man was had no effect.
- While on the subject, Chris Claremont returned to the titles in 2000, and since his return he has fallen victim to this trope numerous times. Exiles was re-packaged as New Exiles and Claremont was told he could only use characters he created, or wrote, during his first run on X-men, as the protagonists. Igor Kordey was replaced as the artist on New Excalibur, while already working on the first issue; nobody informed Claremont, the writer, at the time of the change in artists. During his third, and latest, run on Uncanny X-men, Claremont had to drop an ongoing plot, namely the formation of a new Hellfire Club, while the story was in full swing. He was told to abandon the story because a different writer at the time professed interest in using the Hellfire Club. Eventually it turned out to be all just a dream, making the forced abandonment of the plot in Uncanny X-men a jarring example of executive meddling.
  - The exact polar opposite has occurred with Claremont's X-Men Forever, where Quesada has apparently assured Claremont he can do absolutely anything the title's rating will allow with his characters, starting with rebooting the series to just after X-Men (vol.2) #3 and killing Magneto and Wolverine permanently — word of Claremont says they will never, under any circumstances, return in X-Men Forever (indeed no dead character will come back from same again) — and having a Big Reveal that makes the mutant gifts of the X-Men a death curse that will burn them out before they're 50.
Originally, Watchmen would have involved the Charlton Comics superheroes whose rights DC had acquired. They would not permit Alan Moore to do his proposed storyline with the actual Charlton characters, so instead he created Expies of them. Even before The Movie, many more comics readers will have heard of the Watchmen characters than the Charlton originals.
- Somewhat justified in that Moore wanted to kill off Peacemaker and the Question, whereas DC still had plans for them.
  - Moore himself has said that he agrees with DC's decision, as his story was much more effective as it was written. He was able to do more with his own characters than he could have with the Charlton characters.
- Proving once again that Tropes Are Not Bad.
DC Comics executives decided they needed a newer, hipper Green Lantern, so they gave the writer of his series three issues to get rid of the old guy and all related characters. The result was Emerald Twilight, one of the most controversial comics of the Dark Age and a character (Kyle Rayner) who became The Wesley for a good chunk of GL fandom, at least at first.
'SatAM' Sonic The Hedgehog is very different from the games, the titular character being the only perfect match between them. Unfortunately, Sega doesn't quite understand that SatAM is an Alternate Continuity, and so has caused sometimes painful Executive Meddling in the Archie comic based on it to attempt to use it as a merchandising vehicle for the almost-completely unrelated game series.
- The last issue of the comic's EndGame story arc was intended to be a 40-page extravaganza, with a different ending which left Sally (who was dropped from a tall building by a Freedom Fighter tricked into wearing a Sonic costume and taking out what she thought was one of the gang's mortal enemies) stone dead. However, fan reaction to Sally's fate and Sega's push for using her as a marketing device forced the story to be cut down to the normal 27 pages, and changed Sally's death into a coma. The re-release of the arc in the Super Special anthology rectified most of these problems. Of course, then Sally's Chickification came along, which may have been a Fate Worse Than Death.
- The British Sonic book, Sonic The Comic, was brought to cancellation because of Executive Meddling: the publishers did not have faith that the book would continue its popularity, despite selling more than 2000AD at one point, and began decreasing the budget and demanding that there only be one new story per issue, the others being reprints of older stories. Then the comic became 100% reprint, the cover illustrations being just about the only new thing in them, until finally, the comic was axed completely.
  - These publishers operated under the bizarre, nonsensical idea that some comics won't last beyond a certain time despite what all sources and sales figures might say; they even considered cancelling 2000AD, Britain's most popular sci-fi comic and the "birthplace" of Judge Dredd. Fortunately, the computer game company Rebellion bought the title, which continues to this day.
  - Amongst the other comics they did cancel at around the same time was Red Dwarf Smegazine, which was canceled just at the point when a sales spike from the 1993 series might have been expected.
- In recent years, the layers of Executive Meddling are starting to be peeled away, showing just how screwed up the comic really is. Some notable ones being:
  - Fans complaining that, ever since the Love Dodecahedron involving Sonic and Sally, these two lovebirds don't get back together in the main comic. New writer Ian Flynn not liking the relationship? No, an editorial mandate by Sega refusing to let Sonic have any sort of steady romance.
  - Does this makes the Scourge's Hannibal Lecture about Sonic romantic failures is a Take That against the editors?
  - During Ken Penders' run, a storyline involving Eggman and a group of militant Mobians called the Dingoes laid siege to the Echidnas in a devastating war. Unfortunately, it petered out and vanished shortly afterward, leaving readers with No Ending to resolve the issue. Turns out, poor communication between the writing staff and an editor who didn't know what he wanted out of the story rendered the whole thing moot. This, among other similar incidents, are what drove Ken to leave the comic after 15 years of service.
  - Ken Penders didn't leave willingly; he was forcefully "let go." Karl Bollers, however, left of his own choice due to conflict with other staff.
The Spider-Man storyarc "One More Day", in which Spider-Man's entire history for the last twenty years has been Retconned out of existence after a Deal With The Devil, seems to have been written almost entirely on the direction of Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada for the sole reason of removing Spider-Man's marriage to long-time love interest Mary Jane Watson from continuity, thus prompting a healthy debate (to say the least) amongst fans questioning not only whether this plot development was necessary, but also whether a method of staging it which was less convoluted, ridiculous and both out of character and at odds with the overall tone of the series could have been devised. Writer J Michael Straczynski agreed with the general idea and had been part of the planning process, but he and Quesada fought fiercely on the execution; when Quesada eventually vetoed him, Straczynski wanted his name out of the credits.
- Before One More Day, there was the infamous Clone Saga in 1994. It was initially supposed to be a six-month arc, but after sales were good, Marvel's marketing department forcefully stretched out the story by almost two years, ending in 1997.
  - According to That Other Wiki, it was far more complicated than that. ^*
    ^{"Our plan was to structure the clone saga like a three-act play. Act One would climax at or around Amazing #400 — when we revealed that Pete was the clone and Ben was the real guy. Act Two would last around three months and follow Ben's adventures. In Act Three, Peter would triumphantly return as the one, true Spider-Man. Mark and I were hoping the Spider-crew could make Ben a viable character during his turn in the spotlight, and we planned to star Ben in his own monthly title after Peter returned. It was kind of like what I had already done with Thor and Thunderstrike — two very different titles based on a single concept."}
    Unfortunately, it quickly escalated into several meddling executives — a changing roster of them, too, with some major overhauling of the editorial staff going on the whole way through — each pulling in their own direction and sometimes changing their minds (in drastic ways, such as going from "make Ben the true Spider-Man and write Peter out forever" to "make Peter the true Spider-Man"), and then you throw in the marketing department, which had more control than the writers at this point (writers' creative control by this point: veeeery little), keeping it going because it was selling well. When you take Executive Meddling Beyond The Impossible and never, ever have the right hand knowing what the left is doing at any point along the way, you get this perfect storm.
- One More Day and the Clone Saga are perhaps the textbook examples of Executive Meddling gone wrong on the comics pages; unfortunately for Spider-Man, they weren't the only instances. This three-part essay describes the whole ordeal for those who want a particularly detailed, opinionated history.
- And apparently One More Day has now extended into the daily newspaper version of Spider-Man as well. Or at least it did, until apparent fan outrage caused them to do an Authors Saving Throw.
Bob Budiansky, original writer of the Marvel Transformers comic book, was continually forced by Hasbro to introduce new characters during his run, causing him to burn out as the quality of the stories took a nosedive. Eventually, a burnt out Budiansky passed the writing duties on to Marvel U.K.'s Transformers writer Simon Furman, who brought to the American title the pseudo-religious/supernatural themes that would eventually lead to concepts such as The AllSpark.
- Simon Furman later got hit by this. He spent a few years writing a series of epic Transformers stories for IDW publishing that featured Loads And Loads Of Characters, as well as interesting new concepts like the Dead Universe and a plausible Decepticon invasion plan that made vehicular disguises relevant to the story. Then, due to falling sales, IDW decided to truncate Furman's twelve-issue Grand Finale into four issues of the Spotlight series (necessitating each chapter focusing on a single character's thoughts in addition to all the action), and a five issue "Maximum Dinobots" series so that they can put their publishing power behind All Hail Megatron. Given the limited page count afforded him, Furman did an admirable job of wrapping up all his far-flung storylines.
- In 2010, the Transformers Collector's Club dropped their "Nexus Prime" plotline which had been running for about five years across various continuities. This is because Hasbro themselves have taken charge of stories regarding the Thirteen original Transformers.
In the DCU Crisis Crossover Infinite Crisis, Nightwing was very nearly a victim of Executive Meddling, since Editor-in-Chief Dan Didio didn't know much about his character beyond "not Batman or Robin." Eventually he was convinced that a character that had been published consecutively for more than sixty years shouldn't be killed on a whim, so he was spared.
- Didio is notorious for imbecilic ideas like this, earning him the fan nickname "The Didiot" on the forums. He has other names but there may well be young tropers reading this.
- The biggest example of this may be that Didio and the editorial staff had complete control over the storyline for Countdown to Final Crisis specifically because Didio hated everything about DC's previous weekly series, 52. Of course, many comic fans liked 52, while Countdown...
  - According to an interview with Mark Waid, Didio declared Countdown to be "52 done right." His tastes obviously differ from the fanbase's.
  - Though it has been said that by 'done right', Didio was referring to the fact that Countdown told the story it was supposed to, while 52 quickly went off in a completely difference direction, hence forcing DC to create a side-miniseries to do what 52 was technically supposed to do (explain the changes that had happened to the DC universe during that one year period). The fact that Countdown turned out to be a rather poor story in the end might just be the results of other factors altogether.
- What makes this crazier is that, when it doesn't involve controlling storylines, Didio seems to have made quite a few good moves. Yes, he fired Chuck Dixon, but he also hired/retained talented writers like Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison and Gail Simone (and now J. Michael Strazynski). When those writers are left to their own devices, the results are usually positive among the readers.
In the original Batman comics, The Joker started out as a sadistic serial killer; in the first two years he was used he killed close to 30 people. Eventually the editors decided that allowing him to kill so many made Batman look bad — and not just bad, but incompetent, for not being able to stop him. As a result, for the next twenty years the Joker became a laughing idiot who robbed banks, built wacky gadgets, and pulled harmless pranks. Then in the 1970s Dennis O'Neil revived the character and made him a psychotic murderer again, even more dangerous than he was before.
- They did and do have a point, admittedly. Batman's inability to permanently stop the Joker while simultaneously fighting gods and demons does make him and the Gotham legal system look bad. There's a thin line to walk.
  - An even stronger example is Batman himself. In some early issues of Detective Comics Batman himself would shoot criminals to death on a regular basis, until DC editorial director Whit Ellsworth asked the writers to tone it down and make it kid-friendly. This sounds incredibly jarring to modern audiences because Thou Shalt Not Kill has been Batman's defining moral principle for so long, rendering this early facet of his character almost unbelievable.
  - While the general summary is true, it's an overstatement to say that Batman would shoot and/or kill criminals "on a regular basis" in the early days. There were two instances of Batman killing with firearms in the early days — he shoots a vampire, and kills Hugo Strange's Monster Men with an aerial strafing run. Both fit categories where killing is arguably acceptable, even under a traditional heroic code against killing.
  - Let's not forget that Batman killed a Russian gangster in those early, pulp fiction days. And I quote, "There is a sickening snap as the Cossack's neck breaks under the mighty pressure of The Batman's foot." The picture is easy enough to find if you do a quick image search on any decent search engine.
  - The Bat-Man's original attitude was "lawbreakers deserve whatever comes their way." In his debut, he threw a thug off a roof to his death and punched the mastermind through a railing into a vat of acid. Not just Batman, either. In Detective Comics #50, when Dick Grayson was about a dozen issues old, Robin throws a murderous jewel thief off of a bell tower.
Cassandra Cain is an irritating example. Her Face Heel Turn was forced by the EiC, which is bad enough, but the story could've been salvaged if the writer of that story bothered to do any research about the character he was about to write at all! After the damage got a band aid it was decided that Cassandra'd get a new mini series of her own. It could've been good, but executives gave the job of writing that mini series to the same writer who flocked up her character to begin with.
- Which also leads to some serious Fridge Logic: if Batgirl is able to beat Batman in a fight and Tim Drake could defeat Batgirl does that make Robin a better fighter than Batman? Also, how come they chose the one female member of the bat family (who still fights) to turn evil even though she has even less of a reason to than Batman himself?
- Let's be honest here: this is the "One More Day" of the DCU.
Most of Dwayne McDuffie's run on Justice League of America. Despite writing what is supposedly DC's flagship title, issues he had to deal with include not being able to use ANY of the Big Seven, and having to constantly rewrite stories around the plots of other books. In one instance McDuffie was informed that Hawkgirl was to be killed off in Final Crisis, but at the last second was informed that she wouldn't die after all. The latter news came after a scene reacting to her death was both written and drawn.
- For the curious, that scene was in issue 31, where Roy Harper and Black Canary are talking about Roy's losing Hawkgirl to Hawkman. The dialogue rework is handled alright, but still inexplicitly takes place in a cemetery.
The entire company of Image Comics is perhaps one of the quintessential examples of why Executive Meddling is not always a bad thing. Image Comics was founded in 1992 by a coalition of former Marvel comic creators, mostly so they could have greater financial and creative control over their work (Marvel's policy at the time was to merchandise the crap out of their characters while only paying artists freelance rates and modest royalties). Now in fairness, the success of Image did lead to a lot of changes in the structure of the comic industry, many of them for the better, and Image itself has changed a lot over the years. On the other hand, the early history of Image Comics in many ways practically personifies all the things modern comic fans despise about the Dark Age of Comics. The company's success only exacerbated the growing popularity of infamous Dark Age comic tropes like Darker And Edgier, the Dark Age Of Supernames, and the Nineties Anti Hero. Many of the more reviled icons of the Dark Age originate from or were associated with Image Comics. And all because someone thought it was a good idea to found a company based entirely on Protection From Editors.
A Mini Marvels backup feature in an issue of Marvel Adventures jokes that this is what the Skrull invasions of Earth are attempts at — for the Skrulls, Earth is a popular reality show that they've gained ownership rights to, and now they want to exercise creative control. Unfortunately, Earth has turned out to have rather extreme Protection From Editors.
Bloom County had this as a favorite target.
The Death of Superman storyline was an indirect result of this. Clark and Lois got engaged in 1991 so 1992's big event was to be their marriage but by that point, Lois and Clark was in development and they wanted the couple to get married at the same time in the TV show and the comics. Now struggling to fill the gap in their storyline, one of the writers, as was often the case during story speculation, joked, "Why don't we just kill him?" — he was taken seriously, and the rest is history.
Stephan Pastis of Pearls Before Swine has talked about several strips over the years that his syndicate has asked him to change for one reason or another, and he has usually agreed(with the strips in question usually being so edgy that the risk outweighs the reward). In the latest treasury Pearls Sells Out, Pastis writes about a particular strip that his syndicate wanted changed because it showed the characters drinking beer. Pastis flat-out refused to do so, arguing that he wasn't "gonna keep looking over...[his]...shoulder" every time he submitted a strip and worrying about their attitude. With the exception of a few minor edits, Pastis says that the syndicate has since left him alone and that he understands most other syndicates wouldn't have even published Pearls to begin with.
In the early days of Dilbert, Scott Adams was planning on adding Satan to the strip's cast. The syndicate wouldn't let him, so he ended up creating the character of Phil, Prince of Insufficient Light, the ruler of "Heck". An example of Executive Meddling having good results since even Adams agrees that this was much funnier than his original plan.
- The subject was Played For Laughs in a strip where Dogbert tells a writer to make a few changes to his manuscript so it can be more publishable:
  Dogbert: Make the main character a purple dinosaur instead of a detective. Add some upbeat songs and eliminate the murder.
  Writer: It's a murder mystery!!
  Dogbert: Oh, that's original.
Spoofed in Diary of a Wimpy Kid, in which Greg's comic strip Creighton the Cretin is edited so instead of the character eating his math test, Creighton the Curious Student is asking the teacher a math problem and saying to visit during office hours.
A couple strips of The Perry Bible Fellowship have been removed because they were offensive. (Namely, a strip in which a boy gives a girl a pair if ballerina slippers and the final frame shows her in a wheelchair. Even the author admits it was rather offensive.)
The Muppet Show comic book was hit with meddling and an Executive Veto in it's Family Reunion arc, especially on the reintroduction of Skeeter, Scooter's twin sister. Another arc, "Guest Stars" was scrapped by a veto, forcing Family Reunion to be pushed up to fill in the gap; however, the Disney executives had not decided whether to make Skeeter a full cast member, or to bring her in at all, so they told the writers to make the story ambiguous. The arc was framed by two celestial beings, who are NOT Statler And Waldorf, who throw in various characters as a way of livening things up a bit, leaving it open if it was canon or not.

Films — Animation

Parodied in Film, Film, Film, showing how at the end of the production, there is little left of writer's original work.
Ralph Bakshi's Cool World suffered from perhaps the more extensive cases of Executive Meddling. Originally, the movie was supposed to be about half-doodle/half-human Debbie Dallas, out to kill her human father for causing her to exist. The executives secretly rewrote the script and handed it back to Bakshi, changing the animated horror/thriller story to one about an artist getting trapped by his own creation. Bakshi also intended to have Drew Barrymore as the female lead, but instead they stuck him with Kim Basinger, who thought that it was a children's movie.
Happy Feet: An early cut of the film involved a subplot regarding actual extraterrestrial aliens, whose presence was made gradually more and more known throughout, and who were planning to siphon off the planet's resources gradually, placing the humans in the same light as the penguins. At the end, through the plight of the main character, their hand is stayed, and instead, first contact is made. This was chopped out during the last year of production at the behest of the studio executives, and has yet to see the light of day in a finished form, although concept art is available, and certain shots from these sequences do remain in the film, those of space being the most prominent, having become instead a constant visual motif. The film would've been somewhat longer, by extension. There is some rumor that these elements may be reused for the sequel, although it's far too early to tell, at this point.
- That would explain the bizarre opening credits, in which I believe the names of the cast and crew were displayed over various planets and stars.
Disney ~~has had a few cases~~ may be the Most Triumphant Example of this. One of the most notorious victims was The Black Cauldron. Michael Eisner axed nearly twenty minutes off the finished film before it hit theaters. The film certainly has other problems — movies in Development Hell for twelve years tend to accumulate them. But anyone with even a vague knowledge of animation production can see how insane this decision was.
Toy Story was almost the victim of this thanks to (you guessed it) Michael Eisner. Eisner continually pushed for a more more adult, cynical Toy Story, making Woody even more of a jerkass and relying heavily on insult humor. The result backfired horribly; at a screening for the Disney execs, Roy Disney declared it the worst thing he'd ever seen, and Disney was ready to scrap the whole project until the writers were finally left alone to write the story they wanted to write. The rest is history.
- Actually, it wasn't Michael Eisner but instead Jeffrey Katzenberger who pushed the "edginess" of Toy Story. This eventually led to his resignation, and Disney replaced him with Michael Eisner. However, during the Disney v. PIXAR negotiations, Eisner did create Circle 7, which would have churned out horrible Disney Brand Cheapquels to PIXAR films including Toy Story 3. Thankfully, he was fired, the studio got shut down, and PIXAR retained the rights to their characters.
Robin Williams signed with Disney to do the character Genie in Aladdin, even receiving lower paychecks, demanding that his name wasn't used in advertisements, and that the ads didn't feature the Genie alone, or not feature him in over 25% of the space. (He had a prior commitment premiering around the same time and didn't want to screw the minds behind it.) As Disney executives realized the Genie was the soul of the movie, the second condition was promptly discarded, and by the time of Academy Award nominations, the first as well. Williams got angry and refused to work with the studio again, with the Aladdin sequel and TV series featuring Dan Castellaneta as Genie. Disney's change of president made Williams rethink, and he returned as the voice of Genie in the final Aladdin sequel (although it is rumored that a $20 million dollar Picasso may have also helped Williams change his mind).
During the making of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which features cameo appearances from characters from both the Disney and Warner Brothers animation studios, it was mandated by executives of both companies that their characters could only be used as long as they received the exact amount of screen time as their competitors. For this reason, every time that Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, the two figurehead representatives of WB and Disney respectively, appear on screen they are together — originally, Bugs had a solo scene, but for the reasons above, Disney raised a stink and it was cut. Fortunately, the writers were imaginative enough that viewers tend not to notice this unless it is pointed out to them. It is also rumoured that the question mark that should logically form a part of the title was removed after the results of a market survey indicated that movies with question marks in the titles were more frequently failures at the box office. Evidently someone at the meeting table concluded, "Correlation may not equal causation, but why take chances?."
In a case of the meddling actually working out for the better, The Emperors New Groove started out as a Prince and Pauper movie called The Kingdom in the Sun, heavy on the aesoping. Due to heavy production issues and poor reception from test audiences, the plot of the entire movie was ordered to undergo an overhaul. The whole film was retooled in the space of about six months, becoming a zany buddy comedy with more in common with Looney Tunes than typical Disney fare. The only thing it really lost in the retool was a rockin' Villain Song sung by Eartha Kitt, though the curious can still find it on the official soundtrack.
- That said, many fans are still rather curious about the original version of the film. Sting, who had written all the songs — which were later trashed in the new version, had made a documentary entitled The Sweat Box about all the Executive Meddling during the making of the film, and it's one of the few chances one would have to see cuts from the original version. Thing is, Disney owns the rights to that documentary, and you can imagine how well it went over with them...
- Although it was done pretty well, there was also some negative results from the change as well. For instance, because of their rewriting the story from scratch, Yzma became a fusion of a stereotypical backstabbing royal vizier and a mad scientist, when in the original tale, she was a vain sorceress who intended to bring about everlasting darkness to regain some beauty. This decision infuriated animator Andreas Dejas due to feeling that this was a step backwards, causing him to quit not just the production of The Emperor's New Groove, but also Burbank entirely.
The ending of The Lion King is an example of executive meddling done right. The original (like Hamlet) was going to be a total Downer Ending, but it was not liked by the execs.
- The sequel, however, got several short, but fairly important scenes axed, including the original (much more emotionally charged) last moments of Nuka and Zira. These were removed due to being perceived as child-unfriendly, and others... for no particular reason, it seems.
Similar to the Black Cauldron example above, somewhere out there in cutting-room floor land are the legendary million dollars' worth of finished animation cut mainly for time from The Land Before Time. Except for a few tantalizing clues, and edits that are awkward and obvious if you pay close attention, few fans have any idea what these scenes might have included.
Aardman Animation's Flushed Away suffered from meddling from the get-go; Aardman originally pitched it to DreamWorks as being about pirates, but they claimed that there was no market for pirate films and were forced to modernize the idea. The movie was postponed for work to be done on The Movie Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Ironically, when Flushed Away was finally released, Pirates of the Caribbean already had its first sequel under its belt.
- DreamWorks weren't done with their meddling there; the singing/whistling slugs that recur regularly in the movie were originally just in one scene, but the producers apparently thought it was comedy gold and insisted that if a significant amount of time had passed without any big laughs, they were to slot in the slugs in some way. This becomes an Overused Running Gag by the end of the film. The experience working with DreamWorks was enough to make Aardman Animation break off from them completely.
It wasn't just Flushed Away they meddled with; Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit had many attempts at meddling made towards it. DreamWorks wanted Wallace's voice actor to be changed to a well-known American, which Aardman quite rightly fought against. Luckily, DreamWorks dropped the issue.
Perhaps the most extreme case of meddling in an animated film happened to Richard Williams' masterpiece, The Thief and the Cobbler. There is no nice word for how this film was treated. It was butchered. Shelved for years, altered to make it look more like Disney's Aladdin, redrawn by different animators... the film has never gotten the respect it deserves. The only way people know of these injustices are through the effort of film editor Garrett Gilchrist, who compiled multiple versions of the film into a "Recobbled Cut", which he distributes freely online.

Films — Live Action

Kingdom of Heaven... one of the biggest examples on how Executive Meddling can ruin a film. Originally more than 3 hours, the studio forced Ridley Scott to cut the running time, cutting out complete elements of the story. Many characters and much of the plot was altered with this move, none more than the character of Sibylla. King Baldwin V, Sibylla's son, was cut completely from the movie. Depth for many characters were cut, such as much of Balian's backstory. When this movie opened in theaters, it was met with mostly poor reviews.
- The Director's Cut however, was critically acclaimed, some calling it the most significant DC of all time. Ridley Scott has disowned the theatrical version and calls this version the "real" version.
While we're on the subject of Ridley Scott, the same thing happened with Blade Runner, although not to such an awful extent. Amongst the things the executives tried to change was adding narration by the protagonist, Deckard, to explain the story, because they felt the viewers wouldn't understand the movie otherwise. Harrison Ford protested loudly to this, and he was basically forced to provide the narration. To show what he thought of it, he deliberately dubbed the narration in a boring, horrible way. Executive meddling also changed the ending to have Deckard and Rachael driving off, using footage from a different movie. Luckily, several versions have since been released that removed all these changes.
- Harrison Ford denies ever making the narration deliberately bad, instead arguing that the narration itself that he was given to read just plain sucked in the first place.
- An informal, unscientific poll conducted locally suggests that plenty of folks find that the narration adds to the film, rather than subtracts. It certainly fits as a film noir trope.
- Well, yeah, but to keep it in perspective, the narration uses the revolutionary method of describing something completely different compared to what's happening onscreen.
The movie Hellboy was almost a victim of Executive Meddling. While the movie was in its infant stages, executives felt that Hellboy should be changed from an out-and-out demon to a human who was somehow inexplicably born in Hell, or a human who turned into Hellboy when he got angry, a la the Hulk. Thankfully, the director vetoed all attempts to change the character.
- Executive Meddling succeeded in destroying Guillermo Del Toro's earlier film, Mimic. He compared it to "... having a beautiful daughter and watching her arms get cut off," possibly a Titus Andronicus reference.
Guillermo Del Toro has got a pretty good track record for sticking to his guns whatever the executives try and tell him. He almost couldn't make Pan's Labyrinth because studios wanted him to set the story in Nazi Germany instead of Franco's Spain.
- He's not the only one: Keep in mind that he's Mexican and Mexican directors are famous for sticking to their guns (or at least trying), especially toward higher-ups and very especially towards American movie companies due to cultural, racial and historical reasons. That's the reason why only three Mexican directors (the other two are Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro González Iñárritu) work in Hollywood. Other Mexicans either didn't accept any kind of American meddling or hate Hollywood with a passion.
Alan Moore has had no direct involvement with film adaptations of his comics. However, film executives have made changes, to the point where, early on Mr. Moore has not only distanced himself from any further attempts to make film translations of his works, he has also voluntarily relinquished all rights to the profits from them. (He has also asked to have his name taken off the adaptations. Starting with Watchmen, they seem to be listening.)
- Speaking of Watchmen, Fox's version certainly counts here. The film was updated to take place during the War on Terror, it went from a character study to a straight action flick, and Ozy's big plot went from killing half of New York to bring about world peace to simply going back in time to kill Dr. Manhattan, thus somehow transporting the characters into the "real world", where they're known as comic-book characters. Be thankful for Development Hell, folks; Love It Or Hate It, WB's version is certainly more faithful, challenging, and involved than it could have been.
  - Even that movie was close to suffering extreme Executive Meddling. Originally, they wanted to set it today, and Snyder said "If you change anything, I'm out." He was also the one who insisted on using David Hayter's script (which was endorsed by Alan Moore while he still believed that Hollywood could make a good movie), though it was amended slightly by Alex Tse, and he cast Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach.
After almost finishing production on Superman II, director Richard Donner was fired by producer Alexander Salkind, who wanted a lower-budget movie with more camp. The result on the franchise was disastrous — many of the stars, including Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman, refused to work with new director Richard Lester, and the third and fourth movies in the series were so critically disliked that Superman Returns ignores them entirely.
- The production of what would eventually become Superman Returns was similarly fraught with meddling from above. When Kevin Smith was recruited to write a screenplay for the film in 1997, he eventually gave up after being ordered by producer Jon Peters to write a scene where Brainiac fights a polar bear; listen to him talking about it here. J.J. Abrams, also at Peters' instruction, created a treatment featuring Superman as an ordinary human being who got his powers from his suit, a living creature that crawled out of a tennis ball tube. (It is said that Peters is not a fan of comic books, which may explain his apparent unawareness that he had ordered Superman to be turned into Venom.) It wasn't until Bryan Singer was handed the project in 2003, and steadfastly refused to make any alterations to the mythos, that production actually got underway.
Speaking of Jon Peters' involvement in Superman, there's the legendary Saga of the Giant Spider. He seems to have something of an obsession with monstrous arachnids:
- Peters had requested of Neil Gaiman that Dream fistfight a Giant Spider, among others, in the proposed and quickly abandoned original The Sandman adaptation attempt.
- Peters finally got his Giant Spider fix when he produced the movie of Wild Wild West.
- The saga of the giant mechanical spider would later be spoofed in the animated movie Superman: Doomsday. Supes really does fight a giant mechanical spider while a bystander who resembles Kevin Smith (and is voiced by him) calls the whole affair "lame".
- In Comic Book The Movie, Mark Hamill's character at one point interviews Kevin Smith about the film adaptation of his favorite superhero, where Smith mentions how executives wanted him to add a scene with a giant mechanical spider. Later, he acquires a copy of the shooting script with one shot of him looking up after reading "Scene 37: The Giant Mechanical Spider".
- The giant spider would also make a brief appearance in the comic Superman: Birthright, which managed to do the impossible and make it spectacular.
- And possibly due to Jon Peters' ridiculous request for Brainiac to fight a polar bear, the miniseries Superman: Kryptonite has perhaps a very subtle joke where Superman is outside his Fortress of Solitude, talking about his relationship problems with Lois Lane. His lone listener, as it turns out, is a resting polar bear.
Russell Mulcahy, the director of Highlander II: The Quickening, has blamed the incredible crappiness that is the film on the fact that the film's insurance company took over production after he repeatedly came in late and over-budget. They made numerous changes to the movie, including changing the Immortals' Back Story, and merging together the two fight scenes between MacLeod and the villainous Katana. Mulcahy tried to salvage the movie later by re-cutting it to match his original vision as best he could and releasing it as Highlander II: The Renegade Version. The movie was still pretty terrible, and future movies ignored it.
Producer/distributor Harvey Weinstein is infamous for recutting films without the consent of their directors, to the point that he has been derisively nicknamed "Harvey Scissorhands" and "Darth Weinstein".
- One of the most infamous cases is the film Fanboys. You can listen to its director recount the entire spectacular debacle in this podcast. Basically, the version of the film on DVD is as close as we'll ever get to the original cut — which the director still has a print of that he is not allowed to show anyone. It is unspeakably frustrating. The version on DVD is still pretty good, but it is ridiculously obvious which scenes survive from the original version and which scenes were ordered from the executives; there are whole swathes of subplot that make zero sense unless you ignore them.
The traitorous Lt. Valeris in 1991's Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was originally written to be Lt. Saavik from the three previous films, so that her betrayal would have a more profound impact. However, Gene Roddenberry overruled writer/director Nicholas Meyer in what was by all accounts an epic battle of rank-pulling, and forced the creation of a "new" protege for Spock. In this case, it was Creator Meddling!
- However, Roddenberry had been a victim of pretty extreme executive meddling himself (though many might say the franchise was better for it) after the quasi-failure of The Motion Picture in 1979. Paramount execs, enraged by the first film's price tag (one exec, when interviewing Harve Bennett for the job of replacing Roddenberry as Executive Producer flat out asked "Can you make it for less than forty-five-fucking-million dollars?") and outraged by a script Roddenberry was shopping which would have had the Enterprise crew have to ensure the assassination of John F. Kennedy, kicked Roddenberry upstairs, taking him completely out of the day-to-day running of the next three movies. Helmed by two people unfamiliar with Star Trek, they are commonly considered some of the best movies in the series.
An example of Executive Meddling having a positive effect; when he completed Clerks, first-time director Kevin Smith initially experienced a lot of trouble raising interest from a distributor in order to sell it. It was suggested that he remove the unnecessary and out-of-place Downer Ending in which Dante is killed by a robber. The rest is history.
Spider-Man 3: Sam Raimi wanted to do a movie focusing on a hero with negative qualities and a villain with positive qualities, while wrapping up sub-plots involving Mary Jane and Harry "Goblin Jr." Osborne. The story was packed as it was, but producer Avi Arad insisted that fan-favorite Venom also be added into the film. Sam Raimi, who disliked the character, at first refused but eventually gave in and shoehorned Eddie Brock and Venom into the script. The result? Three villains, a cluttered story, and many unhappy fans. If you look closely, there's still parts where the story seems to make no sense at all unless you pretend Venom's not in it.
- One has to consider, though that even if Venom hadn't been put in, the Vulture was going to serve Venom's role anyway. Therefore, Spider-Man 3 may have just simply been doomed anyway.
  - And without Venom, it would still have been left with one villain who was an amnesiac for most of the movie and one who was made so sympathetic it's like they weren't trying to make him threatening.
- Now, things are even worse: Raimi was not satisfied with the scripts offered, production had to start soon... and since Sony wanted a new Spider-Man no matter what, Raimi and Tobey Maguire were left behind and a Continuity Reboot is on the way.
As part of the movie's general spoofing of "underdog sports hero" movies, the script for Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story originally had the likeable underdog heroes lose the final dodgeball round to the Jerkass villain, but nevertheless recover some of their losses thanks to one of their number winning big in Vegas. The suits forced them to change this to an ending where the heroes ended up winning after all. In response, the director turned this into an over-complicated Deus Ex Machina-strewn ending, and later had a scene over the credits with the villain whining about how he only lost because "audiences can't cope with anything challenging, can you?" It's also spoofed on the DVD, which features an "alternate ending" which, if it had been genuine, would have been the cruelest ending ever.
- They even play with the Deus Ex Machina ending: the movie even puts a small sign that says "Deus Ex Machina" on the treasure chest at the end!
The Daredevil film is a pretty clear version of this: the director filmed one version of the movie, only for Fox executives to think that Jennifer Garner's Elektra had potential as a spinoff once they saw early footage. So the movie had a hacksaw taken to it as a result, with an entire lengthy subplot revolving around Matt Murdock defending a murder victim removed (with the consequence of the movie's ending now making no sense and leaving virtually no mention of the iconic Nelson & Murdock law firm in the movie), Elektra given prominence, and most of Daredevil's origins shunted to the side. As a result, the theatrical cut was panned, and then Elektra also didn't do well in theatres. Thankfully, the director's cut has become quite popular on DVD, and holds up as one of the better Marvel movies.
- It still doesn't explain why defence attorney Matt Murdock was prosecuting a rape suspect or then kills that same rapist later in the film, but even the best director's cut can't fix everything.
  - Well, technically, he didn't kill him. He just didn't save him from becoming "Jose Quesada... and the rest of Jose Quesada" if you get my meaning.
  - He wasn't prosecuting, he was defending the druggie found with the murder weapon by pointing to the real killer.
  - No, at the start he's somehow representing a rape victim in a criminal case. The subplot with Dante Jackson, restored in the Director's Cut, leads Urich and Nelson to the Kingpin.
It seems that quite a lot of the film adaptation of The Golden Compass resides somewhere on the cutting room floor, mainly because the studio was dead set on making this their new PG-13-rated fun-for-the-whole-family blockbuster franchise (H.D.M. fans take a minute and let that sink in). Can't have anything remotely edgy in a PG-13-rated fun-for-the-whole-family blockbuster franchise, can we? Therefore, among other things, the books' notable avoidance of Infant Immortality has been done away with — never mind that the characters' deaths are very important to the plot. Indeed, Roger's death sets up the book's shocking cliffhanger by providing the very means by which Lyra and her father cross over into the other world — and the setting of the second book.
- About the scene in the spoiler tag: it wasn't Executive Meddling. It was a decision by the director and scriptwriter. They wanted to end the movie before the climax of the book so they could include it in the opening scenes of the Subtle Knife movie. So, Roger WILL die in the next movie.
  - Except, of course, there won't be a next movie. That's hubris for ya.
  - It was claimed they wanted a good way to start the second movie, but it was later released that there was a lot of pressure for a happy ending.
Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale bowed down to a lot of Executive Meddling in order to get Back to the Future made, but they stopped short of renaming the movie Spaceman from Pluto. Steven Spielberg handled this by answering the memo that suggested the new title with another one that basically read: "Thanks for the joke memo, guys: it's the funniest thing ever. We're still laughing about it." It actually worked, as the executive behind this was too proud to admit he was serious.
- The sequels only exist because of this. After the runaway success of the first film, Zemeckis and Gale were basically told "We're making more and either you'll make them or we'll get someone else." They opted to do the sequels.
In The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers had wanted to have the machines use the humans plugged into the Matrix as a gigantic neural network computer. However, executives thought that the audience wouldn't understand this, so they changed it to using the humans to generate electricity, even though this violates the laws of thermodynamics and creates several plot holes (though some fans find it decent as a metaphor).
- An idea that Joss Whedon would later use on Dollhouse, which he probably was only able to do because the show had just been cancelled, and he could do whatever he wanted.
In the stoner flick Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, one of the main focuses in the movie is about the subtle but ever-present racial issues that the racial minorities face in a hilarious manner. The execs wanted the director to change their ethnicity to them both being Jewish, which would have effectively nullified the central concept of the characters and, at the same time, ironically proven the point of the film. The director/writer said no and, as a compromise, placed a Jewish buddy duo into the movie as the lead characters' close friends.
- Perhaps as a reaction to this, the film's sequel places the racial issues completely front and center, with a plot that involves Harold and Kumar being arrested as terrorists simply for getting onto an airplane.
  - Simply for smoking pot in an airport bathroom, out of a rather bomb-like bong. They wouldn't have been arrested if they hadn't been minorities, that's certainly true, and the accusation of terrorism is portrayed every step of the way as unreasonable prejudice, but their arrest is not nearly as Anvilicious as if they were "arrested... simply for getting onto an airplane."
Fight Club has two noteworthy examples of Executive Meddling which are generally agreed to have improved their subjects. The scene where the narrator severely beats another member of the club out of jealousy for the apparent attention he was getting from Tyler Durden originally focused more on the beating. Censors deemed this unacceptable, so the scene was altered to focus more on the narrator's face. Many considered the alteration to be more disturbing than the original scene. In an even more extreme example, during the scene where Tyler is discussing with the narrator the night of sex he has just had with Marla Singer, there was originally a flashback line where she intimately whispers to Tyler that she "wants to have [his] abortion". Studio executives were outraged by this line and demanded that it be changed. The director complied; and the studio executives begged for it to be changed back when it turned into Marla nostalgically exclaiming that "[she] hadn't been fucked like that since grade school".
- Fight Club also has a notable example of director/writer meddling which was considered an improvement. The films ends with the success of Project Mayhem and what appears to be a sort of reconciliation between Marla and Tyler, which differs rather greatly from the novel's ending. Even the book's author, Chuck Palahniuk, is said to have liked it better than his own ending.
  - Notably, though, Palahniuk mentions in his book "Non-Fiction" that the process of watching the book become the movie was deeply depressing, most especially in the amount of actors who just decided to write in their own bits of dialogue, including Pitt & Norton. It's more likely he preferred the ending simply because it wasn't a crap Hollywood ending.
The Alien series has the distinct honor of having one example of this spread over two media: with both the original movie's Adult Alien action figure and the "Newborn" Alien in Alien: Resurrection, the sculptors and director, respectively, wanted to add actual genitals to them, but were slapped down as being "too much".
- In fairness, heavy meddling by Walter Hill and David Giler turned the Dan O'Bannon/Ronald Shusett from crap to great.
- Alien³ had even more meddling: just to start, after some meddling in Aliens, Sigourney Weaver didn't want to return, but the studio president disagreed on removing her character. The script by Vincent Ward suffered many changes, the biggest being turning the setting from a wooden monastery planet to a prison planet with monk inmates. And after director David Fincher finished the movie, the studio reworked it without his consent.
  - As Fincher was interviewed for the "Making of" documentary of the Alien series, his constant criticisms of the production company (which was also behind the documentary) resulted in him being completely cut from the finished product.
The World Is Not Enough had an ending early in production featuring a poignant scene in which James Bond visits a mental hospital to cheer up Fallen Princess Elektra King, who has been institutionalized to treat her Stockholm Syndrome. This was nixed for unknown reasons, and replaced with a much less satisfying comedic ending featuring very bad puns and Dr. Christmas Jones.
The planned ending of the 2007 film of I Am Legend tested poorly and, at the studio's insistence, was replaced with one that was both nothing like the book and completely against the point of the original film. Among other things, it introduces some serious plot holes, skips the shocking twist that made the book so successful (while still heavily foreshadowing the now-nonexistent twist), and removes the reason for the movie to be called "I Am Legend" — Which, really, seems to be par for the course of every adaptation of the book.
A planned adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Mort was nixed when producers wanted to "lose the Death angle". Here is Pratchett's comment about it:
"What you have to remember is that in the movies there are two types of people 1) the directors, artists, actors and so on who have to do things and are often quite human and 2) the other lifeforms. Unfortunately you have to deal with the other lifeforms first. It is impossible to exaggerate their baleful stupidity."
- Thankfully, the adaptions of Hogfather and The Colour of Magic remained faithful to the material.
  - Despite marketing The Colour of Magic in the film and TV tie-in section of bookstores. Someone must pay.
- There was also a film version of The Wee Free Men in the pipes, but according to Terry the script he was shown "had all the hallmarks of something that had been good, and then the studio had got involved," and the project is now mired in Development Hell.
- The BBC wanted to do seven series of thirteen episodes of the Watch novels. Unfortuntaely, according to Terry, they had the attitude "We cannot be bound by anything in the books because we are the BBC." So a Bible was written, which contained the absolute immutables. And back came the letter "Thank you for the Bible. If we feel the need to change anything in it, we'll be sure to let you know afterwards." The Watch-Novels-as-BBC-series has been canned.
In The Day the Earth Stood Still, Klaatu was initially supposed to survive the barrage of bullets via the Applied Phlebotinum that brought him back to temporary life in the final cut to reinforce his God-like powers. Unfortunately the censors didn't like the ending, suggesting it was too left-wing of a movie, forcing the line, "That power is reserved for the Almighty Spirit." Given that the new Klaatu is Keanu Reeves, who did the same thing in The Matrix, someone must love irony...
Another positive example: Forbidding Ingrid Bergman's character to leave her husband for the Bogart character in Casablanca led to its classic Bittersweet Ending.
- Although this was a product of the Hays Code, and was not specifically directed at Casablanca.
- Ingrid Bergman was always going to get on the plane; the ending that was changed was Bogart's character getting arrested by his French police friend (changed to him saying: "Round up the usual suspects" instead.)
Airplane!: The studio wouldn't let the producers use a propeller plane as the airliner, so the producers gave the jet a propeller plane sound instead.
The movie of Robert A Heinlein's The Puppet Masters suffered from this. Executives who wanted to change the slugs to spores from space and other disgraces are listed in this essay by the script writer.
Babylon A.D., which evidently made sense at some point, was reportedly disowned by its director over an egregious example of this. The full story can be found here. The studio in question? Fox.
"The film's production was reportedly riddled with problems, from vast delays to budgetary concerns to weather setbacks. Kassovitz points to the studio, 'Fox was sending lawyers who were only looking at all the commas and the dots,' he says. 'They made everything difficult from A to Z.' The last stroke, Kassovitz says, was when Fox interfered with the editing of the film, paring it down to a confusing 93 minutes. Diesel too was astounded at the film's length. Having just completed production of the fourth installment of The Fast and the Furious, he had not seen a cut of the film in six months. 'Am I even in the movie any more, or am I on the cutting room floor?' the actor joked. Fox could not be reached for comment on this story."
The Hitman movie was severely meddled with, at least according to well-substantiated rumors. If you watch the trailers (and promotional stills) carefully, you can see the remains of a different "train station" scene. It is said that the producers ordered the editor (Nicolas de Toth) to actually direct the re-shoot (the infamous swordfight scene) without even notifying the director Xavier Gens about it. Also, the leaked near-final script contains scenes that could be matched to the remains seen in trailers and promotional photos. The studio in question? Fox. Again.
Shusuke Kaneko originally wanted to use Varan and Anguirus for a Godzilla film he was directing. However, the Executives at Toho Studios made him use two more popular monsters instead. And, thus, we ended up with Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. Though, this is a case of Executive Meddling being a good thing since GMK is one of the better films of the franchise.
- Although the weird thing is that King Ghidorah is the villain in all other films that he appears in.
The original plans had Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian being the narrator. The suits didn't like that, therefore Mako became the narrator.
- Which, again, just goes to show that Executive Meddling can have positive effects, because Mako's narration is so high on pork content it's impossible not to like it.
  - Not to mention how much worse Arnold's voice would be as the narrator.
Logan's Run had loads of important scenes cut. The reason? The studio suddenly decided it had to be a PG movie. A PG-rated movie based on Logan's Run.
One of the wonderful defiances is from Tim Burton in Mars Attacks! He was told he couldn't kill Jack Nicholson's character. The solution? Cast him twice, and kill him twice.
Enemy Mine suffered from this one. The studio executives believed the title would confuse audiences who wouldn't realize "mine" was the first person possessive, and so insisted on the addition of a subplot involving a mine. Run by the enemy.
While the Ed Wood "masterpiece" Glen or Glenda? would have been a horrible movie regardless, the suits pulled the strings behind the scenes, adding softcore bondage so the film could draw more publicity as an adults-only extravaganza. Ironically this meant that the film didn't make much of a profit and only gained national attention when it was re-released in theatres in the coming decades.
The Orange Cinema adverts reference this. In a recent one Macaulay Culkin (the actor who played the boy from Home Alone) is acting in a deep-sounding film about a guy in jail writing a diary/letter about his experiences/history. Then a director comes on, and pitches a Home Alone sequel. Next thing we know people are thumping into each other and paint cans are knocking their heads (like in the movies). Mac is not amused. (The advert could also be in reference to Home Alone's Sequelitis.)
The first draft of the Super Mario Bros. movie script was actually quite faithful to the games, containing such things as King Koopa as the giant turtle we all know and love, Luigi with a mustache, actual mushroom-shaped goombas, Toad as the familiar mushroom we all know from the games, piranha plants, chain chomps, cheep-cheeps, hammer bros., big pipes sticking out of the ground, thwomps, and a scene featuring Luigi using the racoon power-up. Unfortunately, the project was handed to a director who wanted a more hip, adult, action-oriented film, and we all know what happened next.
A Streetcar Named Desire had a fair amount of this going on during production. Some of the jazzy, brass-heavy music was deemed "too suggestive" and re-scored with strings. The ending was also changed, to show Stella leaving Stanley after he rapes Blanche.
The movie version of the stage musical 1776 — which was actually commissioned by the US government as part of the runup to the bicentennial — was subjected to executive branch meddling: Richard Nixon disliked the modern-day parallels/implications of the Villain Song (or at least Antagonist Song) "Cool Considerate Men," which was an ode to the wealthy, risk-averse conservatives who opposed the Independence movement ("To the right, ever to the right! Never to the left, forever to the right!"). He pressured his old buddy movie producer Jack Warner to not only expunge the number from the film but to destroy the footage as well. However, Warner was no longer directly in charge at the studio and the negatives were simply packed into unmarked boxes. The song was restored to its rightful place in the movie for the Special Edition DVD release.
- And it wasn't the first time he'd tried to have the song killed. Nixon had earlier attempted to pressure playwright Sherman Edwards into removing the number after seeing a performance of the play at the White House, but Edwards refused.
According to the commentary on the extended edition DVD, the creative team behind Underworld was pressured by the studio to keep Viktor a sympathetic character throughout, and have Lucian be a straight villain. (One wonders what would have actually happened in said meddled-with movie, since that would have basically negated the entire story and the bulk of the action.) The writing/directing team luckily prevailed, keeping the revelation of Lucian as a sympathetic figure and Viktor as a lying murderous jerk.
Brazil. Dear Lord, Brazil. Universal tried to hack this film — now considered one of the greatest, most intelligent sci-fi films ever made — down from 142 minutes to 97 (that's 45 minutes there, folks) give it a happy ending, turn it into a love story, and replace Michael Kamen's orchestral score with hit rock music to "attract the teens". Director Terry Gilliam fought for and secured a theatrical release of his preferred 132-minute cut, without the studio's permission, and it is this version which is the standard on home video as opposed to the studio's "Love Conquers All" cut.
The Watcher in the Woods was a major victim of Executive Meddling:
- The film's original screenplay, which was written by Brian Clemens, was deemed too intense by Disney; the company hired first Rosemary Anne Sisson and then Gerry Day to revise it.
- It didn't help the film that producers Ron Miller and Tom Leetch would argue over some of the film's scenes, with Miller wanting to tone down some of the film's more intense moments. An example of this includes a scene where the film's heroine receives a Bright Slap from her mother, which was toned down to have the mother shake her shoulders instead.
- The film's intended ending was to have the Watcher appear and take the heroine to his spaceship, which contained the girl who was haunting the heroine throughout the film. However, Disney wanted to rush the film's release to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Bette Davis's acting career (Bette Davis played the role of the missing girl's mother). As a result, the scenes involving the spaceship, which weren't even finished at the time, were left out of the film, and the ending became unintelligible. After receiving a poor response by critics, the film was pulled from theaters and wouldn't be officially released for over a year.
- Rather than finish the special effects shots required for the film's intended ending, Disney instead changed the ending in which the Watcher is now a pillar of light (instead of an insectoid alien), with the events of the missing girl's disappearance and the Watcher's presence being explained by the heroine's younger sister (who is possessed by the Watcher). In the process, Disney also cut twenty minutes off the film's run time and changed the film's opening credits sequence (the original sequence was darker and featured the Watcher scaring a girl and incinerating her doll, with the credits appearing on screen while the doll's head was melting).
- When Anchor Bay was releasing Disney films on DVD, the company enlisted the film's the director, John Hough, to re-edit the film, with the plans being to release a two-dsic version of the film that would contain the original 1981 release and a director's cut, which would include the original opening credits sequence and a finished version of the film's intended ending. Disney showed great resistance to this (with most of it probably being due to the fact that Anchor Bay's releases of Disney films were of much better quality than Disney's own DVD releases). In the end, while Anchor Bay was eventually able to release The Watcher in the Woods on DVD, only the original 1981 version of the film was used, with a rough cut of the spaceship ending appearing on the DVD as an ?alternate ending? (along with a second ?alternate ending? that is an approximation of the ending that appeared in the original version of the film). Both endings would eventually appear on the Disney DVD version of the film.
Times Square was a victim of this. The original cut contained lesbian content, which the producers wanted removed. Additionally, the producers wanted additional songs added so that the soundtrack would be a double album. Director Allan Moyle resisted, and ended up getting fired. The deleted footage is apparently lost.
Rob Zombie's 2003 horror film House of 1,000 Corpses was initially filmed while Rob was negotiating for Universal Pictures to distribute it. When Universal execs saw the final cut, they turned pale and refused to release it, though it was eventually picked up by Lion's Gate. Rob groused to Guitar World Magazine shortly thereafter that "I called it House of 1,000 Corpses; what did they think it was going to be about?"
Dino De Laurentiis pared Dune down by hours and the result was a confusing mess to many people who didn't read the book.
- Some might say the result was a confusing mess to those who ''did'' read the book, as well.
A rare good case occurred with Monty Python's Life of Brian. The initial studio abandoned the film just as the Pythons were getting ready to shoot ("when they finally read the script," according to Michael Palin). Enter former Beatle George Harrison, who happened to be a) extremely rich and b) a total Python fanboy. He founded a production company for the sole purpose of financing the film and more or less let the Pythons do whatever they wanted. When asked why, Harrison said, "Well, I wanted to see the movie." Eric Idle later called it "the most expensive movie ticket ever purchased."
The first Dungeons & Dragons movie is a textbook case of this. I forget the names involved, but an individual purchased the rights to produce a film based on the D&D game. The intention was to find a good director watch how they did things and learn a bit about the movie industry. However, being a newcomer to the industry, he gave too many rights to TSR, such as director approval. At the time, TSR was owned by what sounds to be a moron who alienated or turned down every director presented. I can't say for certain, but I believe that Francis Ford Coppola was one of the directors tapped and that said moron executive asked him "What makes you qualified to do this movie?" or something similar. In the end, Wizards of the Coast bought the D&D rights and decided to get rid of the whole situation by insisting that the would-be producer who wanted to watch a master actually be the director as well as insisting on the use of an older version of the script that had been previously thrown out of consideration. All told, it seemed as if they really just wanted to dump the extra baggage.
The original Army of Darkness ending had Ash drinking too much of a sleeping potion and, instead of waking up in the present, arriving in the post-apocalyptic future and screaming through the credits. When test audiences complained about the ending, meddling executives stepped in to request a new, much happier ending be filmed in its place. It does make a case for Tropes Are Not Bad, though, as the theatrical ending's counted by many fans as Ash's Crowning Moment of Awesome.
The Friday the 13th series has suffered a number of Wall Banger moments due to this. One particularly glaring example was in Part VIII, which was supposed to be one-third on the boat, and two-thirds in New York, and the studio forced the director to reverse the ratio.
- The main reason the studio forced this decision was because they simply didn't enough of a budget to be able to film all the New York scenes. Another one is in Part VII, when the protagonist's dad pops out of the water and drags Jason down with him, he was supposed to look all gnarly and decayed, like someone would after being at the bottom of a lake for ten years. Instead, he looks he like just fell in a puddle. (Unintentional) Hilarity Ensues.
Batman Returns did relatively worse than the original film thanks to the one-two punch of a mature, depressing story that didn't appeal to parents who still thought that Batman was for kids. Burton was booted off and replaced with Joel Schumacher who made the series more Camp and kid-friendly. Schumacher went on to singlehandedly kill off not only Batman but superhero movies as we knew it during the 90's.
- Not singlehandedly. Schumacher was also plagued by Executive Meddling and lamented that the higher-ups used Batman as a series of toy commercials. As a matter of fact, he wanted to take the series into Darker And Edgier territory; his first movie was a planned adaptation of Frank Miller's Batman: Year One. Unfortunately, this was shot down by the studio in favor of the aforementioned toy-friendly films.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine: The Fox executives decided that it would be a brilliant idea to take Deadpool, the Merc with the Mouth and possibly the most popular character appearing in the movie (people are getting tired of Wolverine), introduce him and then remove him quickly, and then sew his mouth shut. Because he would be too entertaining and take attention away from Wolverine or something (no-one knows the exact reason), even though Wolvie had already had three movies to himself.
- Director Gavin Hood and top Fox executive Tom Rothman reportedly had clashes over the film's creative direction. One infamous incident happened while Hood was off-set, at which point Rothman took it upon himself to have one of the sets repainted from Hood's original Darker and Edgier theme into something more Lighter and Softer.
The 1967 spy comedy In Like Flint has agent Flint uncovering a plot by a group of powerful women executives (in those pre-liberation days they were heads of cosmetic companies, fashion houses, etc.) who commandeer and arm a space station to take the reins of power from men and run the world their way. As originally scripted, Flint argues with them that even though they had been dealt an unfair deal in life, their plan was simply the other side of the coin, adding that "if it's a slug on one side it's a slug on the other". Someone in the studio hierarchy trimmed his eloquent case down to "Ladies...forget it!" and the movie's producer quit in protest.
Terminator 2 goes to great lengths in its introduction to imply that Arnold is the bad guy again and Robert Patrick John's protector. The production crew were rather disappointed when the advertisers decided to make a point of stating outright that Arnold was the good guy in just about every trailer.
- Considering that you still find out that the Terminator is the good guy in the very first third of the film, it probably wouldn't have made much of a difference.
Executive Meddling is often blamed for the general stupidity of the Johnny Mnemonic movie despite the fact that the script was written by William Gibson himself.
Erich von Stroheim's Greed reduced to five hours and a half (!) to 2 hours by MGM.
There are two different cuts of Cimino's Heaven's Gate, none of them seemingly accurate, and the ExecutiveMeddling didn't avoid the fall of UA.
The Slumber Party Massacre from 1982 was written by a feminist activist and it was supposed to be a spoof of the slasher genre. Thanks to the higher-ups it was shot as a serious film. The end result is a mixed bag with more Fanservice than any other slasher film of it's day.
The film of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was intended to be entirely different. Apparently, a version of the original script is available in one form or another, and is considered canon in the continuity of the series. However, the meddling was so bad that Joss Whedon reportedly walked off set one day and never went back. As several entries in the TV section suggest, Whedon is a regular target for Executive Meddling.
The TV Set takes executive meddling as its focus. A fellow whose brother has just committed suicide wants to make a TV show that would serve as a fictional account of their relationship, and a way of coming to terms with suicide in general. A particularly pushy executive gets involved, and it gets turned into a lighthearted comedy called Call Me Crazy!
Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers suffered terribly from this when it was released in America. For starters, America is the only country in which that was the title. In Europe, it was released under Polanski's original title, Dance of the Vampires. But the executives didn't stop there: they also cut out 20 minutes of footage (from a film that was only 107 minutes to begin with), gave all the characters bad dubbing to make them sound American, and added a cheerful little slapstick cartoon short to the beginning, which clashed badly with the tone Polanski was reaching for. The finished product was so bad that Roger Ebert would simply say that, in the screening he attended, no one laughed even once, although a couple of people cried.
Independence Day removed a very important scene where Jeff Goldblum's character explained a bit about what was going on with the TV signal, as it gave an early hint as to how the Aliens are going to attack Earth, because Harvey Fierstein's character placed an ad-libbed kiss on Jeff Goldblum's character. Apparently, this was Roland Emmerich's decision as it would have apparently angered the MPAA if he kept it in, despite the fact that the kiss in question wasn't even close to being long enough to carry ANY romantic implications from Fierstein's character and another acting career that he did allowed him to get away with kissing another guy despite TV stations being even stricter in regards to content than Movies. I mean, I'm straight, I don't really support homosexuality, yet even I see that that's going a bit too far.

Literature

Daniel Keyes' first attempt to publish Flowers for Algernon almost ran afoul of this; the editor he took it to demanded that he give the story a happy ending where Charlie keeps his enhanced intelligence. Fortunately, every writer Keyes asked about it told him to refuse.
In an odd case, TSR told R.A. Salvatore to bring back Wulfgar, or they would do have someone else do it for them. What makes it odd is that Drizzt was clearly the breakout hit character, with Wulfgar as a mostly unneeded sidekick. Salvatore did the best he could, though, and in the end got some good stories out of it and wrote the character out again (this time much as he had written out the barbarian tribes the character belonged to shortly after the character's "death").
- In another case, Salvatore was told that he would have to kill off Artemis Entreri, as the game was eliminating the assassin class and all assassins in the setting were going to be killed off as part of a ritual to empower the dark god Bane. Salvatore, not wanting to lose a good character, countered that Entreri wasn't an "assassin", but a fighter/thief who killed people for money. TSR backed off.
The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories, a short story by Neil Gaiman is not an example, but it is about Executive meddling, plus truly epic amounts of Adaptation Decay. A writer is called in to Hollywood to work on a film adaptation of his hit novel, Sons of Man, which is a speculative story about Charles Manson being possessed by a demon, and the children he sired of the women in the Manson family coming under the power of that demon, with a sole daughter he had trying to stop them. By the time the ever-changing Hollywood executives are done with it, it's a slasher plot called When we were Badd about a serial killer named Jack Badd who posessed a video game after execution and possessed the kids who played it, with the now-male protagonist saving the day by burning the electric chair the killer was executed in.
- It ends with the writer's offhand quote of a song lyric being taken out of context and used as the plot for a completely different movie about a woman trapped in a loveless marriage. At that point he gives up and goes home.
- Gaiman has a long history of Hollywood stresses; in addition to the aforementioned Jon Peters run at Sandman (resulting in what Neil described as "the worst script I've ever read"), he was approached on an adaptation of Anansi Boys. Y'know, the book where the main characters are the children of African deity Anansi, and thus they (and a lot of their acquaintances) are black. The first question asked was apparently, "Is there any way we can make them white?"
Writers in the Star Wars Expanded Universe have editors going over work and vetoing what they don't think fits into canon. Some of them aren't all that bright. Timothy Zahn, in a panel summarized here, complains about editors claiming that R-2 can't fly Luke's X-Wing in Specter of the Past.
"So," Zahn said, with absolutely the driest expression and tone of voice you ever saw, "I pointed out that way back in Heir to the Empire, Artoo flew the X-wing to Coruscant on his own. 'But Artoo can't fly the X-wing.' Okay, in ESB, one of your own movies, Luke's X-wing was inside the Hoth base, but Luke meets it outside. 'But Artoo can't fly the X-wing.' Then later in the movie, Luke tells Artoo, "No thanks, I'll keep it on manual for a while." Manual indicates that there must be an automatic. 'But Artoo can't fly the X-wing.'"

"Finally," he said, "I figured out what it was that bothered them. It wasn't Artoo flying the X-wing; it was his docking the ship with the Starry Ice without the aid of tractors." He added exactly three words to the existing scene, with Faughn now telling Luke that the Starry Ice had a pair of half-ports "with tractor assists". The editors were happy, and all was well.
- One that did work out was that LucasFilm shot down Timothy Zahn's original name for the Noghri which was Sith, to explain why Darth Vader was known as the Lord of the Sith. The reason, of course, was that Zahn didn't realize that George Lucas already had something very different in mind for the meaning of that title.
- In the New Jedi Order novel series, Anakin Solo was killed halfway through at the insistence of George Lucas. Lucas had decided that since there were prequel-era novels starring Anakin Skywalker being published at the same time, and Anakin Solo was set to be the main hero of the second half of the NJO story, readers would be confused by both eras having a main character with the same first name.
Legendarily, Robert A Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land was pared for both size and content to meet publisher demands. Thankfully, the editing was done meticulously by Heinlein himself, so the novel came out more or less as intended. Following his death, the unedited version was released by Heinlein's widow. Your Mileage May Vary on which version is better.
Harry Potter: The first book, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, was meddled with to become ... and the Sorcerer's Stone in the United States. Executives argued that kids "wouldn't want to read anything with 'philosopher' in the title."
- Lindsey Davis' Falco novels suffered similar fates of Americanisation, or would have, had she not been adamant. See here for her very funny article about it all. Read "A Gentle Corny Rant" on this page.
- The British publisher did their own meddling on the first book. They were the ones who insisted the author go by JK Rowling since it was felt boys wouldn't want to read a book written by a woman. They also wanted to cut the troll scene where Harry and Ron save Hermione.
  - They wanted to cut the troll scene for the first film as well, but Rowling refused to let them, arguing that it was integral to understanding how the trio came together.
Terry Goodkind's book Wizard's First Rule had at least one instance of the use of the titular rule scratched out by the editor. Maybe it was for the better, since we all know where it went from there...
The final book in the third Warrior Cats series had it's name changed from Cruel Season to Sunrise because Harper Collins felt the original title was too sad and not appropriate for the younger readers. Not only does this cause a lot of confusion with the final book of the second series (Sunset), but changing the title still doesn't change the fact that the book is sad. To make things even more mindboggling, the authors were allowed to use the phrase "cruel season" in the blurb of the very next book.
In something of a case of Tropes Are Not Bad, The Andalites of Animorphs were originally Rubber Forehead Aliens, to make it easier on the inevitable TV series. However, Scholastic asked for a more imaginative one, resulting in this design.◊ It also led to just about every alien looking bizarre. Unfortunately, Applegate was proven right, when the TV series only featured Andalites a few times a season with laughably bad animatronics.

Live Action TV

Dark Angel, to the sadness of its fans, was canceled after the cast were informed they got a third season. Jessica Alba was even in the airport to fly out to film the series when she got the call. And then, irony upon irony. Fox replaced it with a show that lasted only one season (Firefly, also sunk because of Executive Meddling), causing an outbreak of fan wars on the internet.
Virtually all American television shows produced before the late 1960s were subject to a particularly malevolent form of Executive Meddling. It was common at the time for stations in the Southeastern United States to edit shows to remove black characters who weren't in stereotypic roles — maids, criminals, sharecroppers, etc. If the black characters were pivotal to the story, then the episode, and in some cases the entire show, would simply not be broadcast in the southern market. There was therefore a tremendous amount of pressure on producers to not cast a black actor unless the character he or she was playing was a demeaning stereotype, because losing out on the southern market meant losing out on a lot of money.
Lois and Clark suffered from two instances of executive meddling:
- The first instance was between seasons one and two, when ABC forced the writers to retool the show. They added more action (the show was about Lois and Clark, not so much about Superman), more sex (because men are pervs), less Cat Grant (despite being a nymphomaniac gossip columnist, they'd rather sex everyone else up than have an extraneous character in a show that was becoming less and less about the Daily Planet), and they switched Jimmy Olsen out for a younger actor (some fans think it was because the first guy looked too much like the lead; it was likely both).
- The second instance was their insistance on removing focus from the relationship. Clark couldn't reveal his Secret Identity. They could only kinda sorta hint that she already knew. When he proposed to her, they gave them a whole arc devoted to their wedding. The executives made them switch Lois out for an (evil?) clone at the last minute. They finally got married towards the end, and found a foundling. And the Execs canceled it because it had "run its course." It would not have "run its course" if not for the fake-out wedding, after which they lost a large amount of their viewership.
The Nickelodeon Sci-Fi series Space Cases had two examples of Executive Meddling in the Season 1 finale. First off, Catalina was meant to be killed off. However, Nickelodeon decided that was too dark for kids and had the writers add a new ending at the last minute that showed that she had survived by being shoved into another dimension. It's an understandable change, but it completely ruins the scene before it and death had already been brought up on the show before, so the logic behind the decision is a bit questionable. The second change was the removal of the character Elmira. You see, following Catalina's Disney Death the creative team was going to bring Elmira to the show as a full-time cast member. This made perfect sense as she was already introduced in the past season, had a connection to the crew and the central story line and was liked by fans. However, Nickelodeon felt she was too alien and would keep kids away from the show. So, instead they brought in Suzee, a character previously only seen by Catalina and was utterly unlikable. Fans hated these alterations and season 2 is widely viewed as inferior to the first because of them.
Arrested Development had attempted Executive Meddling all over the place. After a first season in which it won Best Comedy at the Emmys, the ratings still weren't good so they asked the writers to dumb it down. David Cross angrily rants about this in the DVD commentary, saying that if the show is so critically acclaimed and won awards, and it still doesn't have enough viewers, maybe they should market it better.
Executive Meddling almost stopped the Daleks from ever appearing on Doctor Who. Sydney Newman, one of the several creators of the series and the then-head of drama at The BBC thought that bug-eyed monsters like the Daleks smacked of lowbrow Sci-Fi rather than the more cerebral Science Fiction approach he wanted. The series' first producer, 28-year-old Verity Lambert, remained steadfast and the Daleks appeared. As we all know, though, Doctor Who never again resorted to having the Doctor fight a Monster of the Week or stooping to fight People in Rubber Suits.
- For his part, Newman admitted during an interview years later that opposing the Daleks hadn't been one of his better ideas, contrasting it ironically with his reputation as a "brilliant" TV producer.
- Originally the Doctor would merely have a young companion, but that might seem "improper" unless they had a familial relationship, so Susan turned into his grand-daughter. (Obviously this particular attempt at Executive Meddling also got abandoned.)
- Ironically, a few years later, however, Newman's boss, the head of BBC TV, suggested the 12 episode story featuring the Daleks, allegedly because of his mother liked them so much, much to the displeasure of Verity Lambert's replacement, John Wiles.
- Modern Doctor Who isn't necessarily free of this, by all accounts; it has reportedly been mandated from above that every story must feature some kind of monster, regardless of whether it is appropriate to include one. The episode "Father's Day" was reportedly meant to not include any monsters at all, before this executive degree mandated the inclusion of the Clock Roaches that power the plot.
  - This explains the invisible alien in Vincent and the Doctor, despite the fact that the episode is actually about Van Gogh dealing with depression.
- Executive Meddling really whacked the franchise upside the head in the mid-1980s as well. The head of drama at the BBC decided he didn't like Doctor Who and essentially decided to have the show put on hiatus for 18 months... scrapping pre-production on an entire season of the franchise, including three fully-scripted and partially-cast episodes. The series was allowed to come back at a drastically reduced episode count (14 episodes at twenty-five minutes each, compared to the 13 45-minute episodes they had the season before the hiatus, and the 26 25-minute episode count of most earlier seasons) and with a lower budget. The series survived to have another Doctor, via Executive Meddling, and three more seasons on the air... but even more Executive Meddling put the show against another network's incredibly-popular series without bothering to note it to the general public... and then the series was put on hiatus one more time in 1989 until the 1996 movie and the 2005 revival series.
In the pilot episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the character Willow wears drab clothing that her mother picked out for her. Network execs told creator Joss Whedon that they wanted Willow to "look more like Buffy" who wore brighter, preppier, and more stylish clothing. This had a positive result, however, as Whedon decided to give Willow colorful, if geeky clothing, leading to the famous fuzzy sweaters and silly clothes.
- Willow's character was the subject of a lot of meddling. In the unaired pilot, she was played by Riff Regan, who actually looked like she could be a geeky social outcast, as opposed to... say... Alyson Hannigan. She wasn't recast for this reason, however — she frequently flubbed lines and generally played the character as too nervous.
- But the most famous example of Buffy meddling involves The WB's notoriety for jumping to ridiculous conclusions about what would upset the audience (see also the X-Men Evolution example below). Remember when the "Graduation" season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer almost didn't air in the wake of the Columbine tragedy? True, it involved the image of a class full of students coming to school armed to the teeth... to fight a giant demon-thing in a showdown between good and evil that had been set-up as the climax for the entire season. This was apparently considered Too Soon. Yeah...
  - The WB also postponed the Buffy episode "Earshot," as the episode involved a plot to mass-murder students (with a Red Herring that it would be by shooting). It was supposed to be the next episode to air following Columbine, so the network instead aired a rerun of "Band Candy". The irony is that Buffy keeps the character Jonathan from killing himself in "Earshot", which makes it all the more significant that he is the one to give her the Class Protector Award in "The Prom", the episode that was originally to air after "Earshot". Out of Order like that, it makes little sense.
  - To be fair to The WB, these examples aren't entirely as ridiculous as they're made out to be. Both involve potentially or actually violent confrontations involving members of the student body armed with lethal weaponry in a school, one of them has very very strong hints throughout the episode of setting up a school shooting (to the extent that Jonathan's suicide attempt arguably looks like a little bit of an Ass Pull to set up the Red Herring Twist; he's planning to kill himself with a sniper rifle in a clock tower for cryin' out loud), and the other of which involves the heroes actually blowing up the school, albeit as the only way to kill an extremely powerful demon. The mood immediately after Columbine (when both these episodes would have aired) was very on-edge regarding both media violence, especially material involving violence in schools. This public mood can be understood given that a lot of kids and teachers had only recently been murdered in one. In light of the content of the episodes, and the likely reaction of the Moral Guardians, the WB likely saw the postponements as the safe thing to do. Your Mileage May Vary as to whether, especially with the Season Finale, it was the right thing to do.
  - Joss Whedon's comments regarding the decision to postpone "Earshot" indicate that he agreed with it wholeheartedly. However, Joss was very angry about the delaying of the Season Finale, to the point of advising fans to "pirate the damned thing," a rare (maybe unique) instance of a producer encouraging fans to pirate copies of his own show. A key difference was that "Earshot" was not significant in the seasonal arc (likely why Whedon was okay with its postponement), but making viewers wait months to see the payoff of the season-long Story Arc was pretty cruel. TV would be much better without the Moral Guardians.
The John Larroquette Show started off as a quirky off-beat comedy focusing on the main character's 12 Step recovery from alcoholism. Network executives forced the producers to eliminate the 12 Step material after the first season, which took much of the original unique and edgy flavor away from the show.
- From there it turned into another "single people with relationship problems" type of show, the exact sitcom stereotype the series was trying to stray from. John Hemingway also lost his cool, brooding, intellectual demeanor in the process.
- Larroquette himself despaired when they moved his character, who worked as a night-shift bus station manager, out of his rat-trap boarding house to a nice apartment that he obviously couldn't afford with a couch facing the cameras. The hooker with a heart of gold character had to find another career, too.
Spock's pointed ears on Star Trek The Original Series were almost the victim of panicky NBC executives, who were afraid that superstitious hordes of TV viewers would think he was Satanic. They went so far as to airbrush the points out of a number of promotional photographs. Gene Roddenberry managed to save Spock's ears by promising plastic surgery for the character if audience response was poor. As we know, it was anything but bad. After Spock's popularity was established, no one at NBC would ever admit to being anything but for pointed ears.
- If rumours are to be believed, Spock was saved by his popularity with women.
- Similarly, Roddenberry's original plan for perfect 50-50 gender equity among the crew of the Enterprise was scuttled by nervous suits who said, "Don't you see? It makes it look like there's a lot of fooling around going on up there!" It was only with great effort that he was able to retain a 30% female crew.
  - It's worth noting that, according to Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, written by Desilu Studios executive Herb Solow and co-producer Robert Justman, half the reason Roddenberry wanted perfect gender equity among the crew was because he spent half the time an episode was filming hitting on the actresses. Solow also notes that there isn't a single female security officer aboard the Enterprise, as Roddenberry believed that women were "tools in a man's shed," or something to that effect.
  - This line of assertion is at best debatable given Roddenberry isn't alive to defend himself. There's no doubt Roddenberry was something of a womaniser, but Bill Shatner's book Star Trek Memories, composed from interviews with many of the relevant players of the time, has a different point of view. It speaks of how Roddenberry wanted a female Number One (played by Majel Barrett, who would later become Roddenberry's wife, as well as Nurse Christine Chapel in the series proper) who was cool and authoritative as a foil for Kirk's exuberance, and for sheer uniqueness value: it would have been unique for the time, and Roddenberry fought almost as hard to retain his female second in command as he did his Vulcan science officer. The network was demanding that he couldn't have a female Number One because executives thought it would turn off housewives, who wouldn't relate to a woman in a position of such authority. Roddenberry reportedly said "They told me I couldn't keep both Spock and Number One, so I kept the Vulcan and married the woman, because I obviously couldn't have done it the other way around..."
  - Also, Roddenberry controlled and aggressively spread his own mythology about the show during his life. Most people weren't in a position to contradict him (for instance, actors like Shatner had little or no direct involvement with the network, and would've gotten most of what they did know from their boss, Roddenberry.) According to Solow and Justman, the above story about Majel Barrett is also false: "[T]he NBC execs, for both financial and moral reasons, had always favored a strong woman as a series star. They just didn't want Majel, and they resented having her forced upon them for the first pilot." She was an unknown and viewed as a weak performer, AND she was known to be sleeping with the producer at the time (while Roddenberry was still married to his first wife).
- However, these combined into a positive example of Executive Meddling; shelving #1, the original, female 1st Officer, led to Spock being the emotionless second-in-command and the most popular character.
- Uhura, the most visible female character, was denied a chance to command the Enterprise in one episode because an executive flat out told Roddenberry "we don't believe her in charge of anything". Nichelle Nichols got a lot of crap thrown her way by the executives: for the first season, she wasn't a regular member of the cast, and her fan mail was kept from her. She almost left the show, until she met Martin Luther King at a party, who convinced her to stay on and serve as a black role model.
  - And it wasn't just females in such situations they disliked. The network, fearful of an outcry from the Deep South, put the kibosh on a scripted kiss between Kirk and Uhura in one episode, primarily because it would have been an interracial kiss. William Shatner in his book Star Trek Memories invites fans to look at the scene carefully — it is implied that the two do kiss, but in reality it didn't happen. Reportedly there were a bunch of suits in the room peering at the actors to ensure the shot didn't take place. Executive Meddling in one of its most immediate, physical forms.
  - Actually, the kiss did happen. The producers insisted on the fake kiss, while Shatner, Nichols, and Roddenberry wanted to do it for real. Eventually, they reached a compromise: the cast would shoot two versions, one where the kiss was faked and one where the kiss actually happened. Shatner screwed up every faked take on purpose (including crossing his eyes and sneezing) and then shot the scene with the real kiss correctly, so that in the end there was only one version available to use. The response to the kiss was also much less vehement than the execs feared; a man from the South who was opposed to racial mixing wrote in to say that he couldn't blame Kirk for kissing "a fine looking dame" like Uhura.
- The original pilot episode for the original series, "The Cage", was considered "too intellectual" by the executives, so a new one was made. Gene Roddenberry then created the two-parter "The Menagerie" as a Framing Device in order to utilize footage from "The Cage". "The Menagerie" won a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.
  - We should keep in mind, to be fair, that the original ratings for Star Trek, in prime time, were never much better than tolerable. They did do OK with some desirable demographics, but this show was not a breakout hit, social phenomenon, or anything of the sort, during its prime time run. The emergence of Trek as a legendary phenomenon came later, during syndicated rerun. As far as the original ratings went, the execs' skepticism was at least partly justified by the numbers.
However, when Star Trek The Next Generation had its pilot, the Meddling was a positive. "Encounter at Farpoint" was originally just about the crew visiting a strange starbase, in a one-hour pilot show. When the Execs wanted a "Two Hour Event", Gene and DC were forced to add in a new alien threat to pad the show out. This would be Q, one of the most beloved and important "villains" in Star Trek history.
The original series concept for The Mary Tyler Moore Show was about a young divorced woman, but CBS executives were afraid that viewers would think that meant Mary had divorced Dick Van Dyke (Moore having previously played Van Dyke's wife in The Dick Van Dyke Show). To protect their investment from the legions of morons they believed were watching, the execs forced the producers of the show to turn Mary into a young unmarried woman fleeing a failed romance.
- Some tropers may also not recall that in 1970, a divorced woman was usually thought to be morally suspect and deeply flawed (even at that late date, divorce was still thought to be almost always the woman's fault). Having a divorced young woman as the main character would have been a problem no matter who she'd been played by.
The series Homicide: Life on the Street was a repeated victim of Executive Meddling, with NBC pulling the series off the schedule so frequently that only thirteen episodes were aired in the show's first two years, and several episodes in the first season aired out of order. Critical acclaim and a vocal cult audience kept the show on the air. Later, NBC pressured the show to cut loose veteran actors Ned Beatty and Daniel Baldwin and add younger, more photogenic cast members, including two unrealistically glamorous female detectives in seasons six and seven. Similarly, the show's original gritty, idiosyncratic camera style became much more polished and traditional as the series went on. Even the original squadroom set was repainted and modernized. Finally, NBC agreed to renew the show for an eighth season... if the show moved to Miami Beach rather than Baltimore, became about a private detective agency rather than a homicide unit, and fired the entire cast save Richard Belzer and the two aforementioned glamorous female detectives. Luckily for all concerned, the creators of the show refused to play ball.
- Law and Order suffered from the same type of meddling, when the show was forced — in the name of expanding the demographic reach — to replace Lt. Cragen and Paul Robinette with Lt. Van Buren and Claire Kincaid, respectively.
  - Of course, this is arguably a positive example. Claire Kincaid quickly became one of the show's most popular characters (as well as the most well-beloved female characters on the show, to the point that the show repeatedly tried to recreate the character after the actress left the show) while Merkerson remained until the end, having stayed for 17 of the show's 20 years.
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a novel called It Can't Happen Here, about the election of a fascist government in the United States. In 1982, Kenneth Johnson adapted it as a possible TV miniseries called Storm Warnings, but it was rejected as "too cerebral". Eventually it was modified such that the American fascists became extraterrestrial invaders who ate people. The result was V.
- This almost seems too much of a stretch to be true...
- And yet.
In the second season of Babylon 5, The WB execs insisted on the creation of a hotshot fighter pilot character that they actually called "the Han Solo of Babylon 5", a phrase series creator J Michael Straczynski hated due to its implication that the viewer would be unfamiliar with any kind of science fiction besides Star Wars. Since it was the only way the show would survive past its first season, he went along and created Lt. Warren Keffer. However, he got his revenge by giving Keffer as little to do as possible, and at the end of the season, killed him off in a very painful manner. By this point, the executives had completely forgotten that they insisted upon the character in the first place.
- J Michael Straczynski's experience creating the Babylon 5 sequel series Crusade for TNT was full of meddling; Turner execs reportedly asked him to add more sex and violence, and write a second pilot directly under their oversight. They even forced changes in the color scheme of the sets and uniforms after filming had begun. A lampshade was hung on this in one episode, with a sarcastic comment about interfering higher-ups back on Earth. The series was canceled before it even aired, and to add insult to injury, the episodes were aired out of their intended order.
  - Straczynski has said that if the show had continued, he would've had the old uniforms restored after a few episodes while explaining it in-universe as a "laundry room accident".
The American version of Big Brother has had numerous cases of Executive Meddling. Obviously such cases would wind up slanting the game... but slanting it towards a few houseguests won't always work. (Janelle winning would have been best for ratings... yet Maggie wound up taking home the prize in the end.) But there were several notorious instances where it severely affected the outcome of the game on top of player stupidity.
- In the third season of Big Brother, they found out the hard way that letting the houseguests see what was going on in the house after they were evicted and would cast votes for who should win made a large impact on the game. Daniele was known for playing the best game and by all means, they'd vote for her to win, right? Well even if she made it with Jason in the finals, the other houseguests saw her insulting them in the Diary Room and obviously picked the girl who was nicer to them to win.
- The eighth season tried to keep the Jerkass and his whiny spoiled daughter around because they were good for ratings. The idea of "America's Player" wound up affecting the game in their favour because they loved to see Jerk Ass prank people and just be mean. There was also a time in which he was practically assaulting another player with cigarettes. If anyone else did that, they'd have been kicked out of the show in a heartbeat. Then there are also rumours of how they allowed Jerk Ass and whiny spoiled brat to break rules that would have earned other players reprisals because they were good for ratings, and how one player's machinery during a crucial veto competition was malfunctioning and they never noticed. If it was Jerk Ass or Whiny brat, they'd have stopped the competition in a heartbeat.
  - On top of this, America's player also revealed that when he could ahve turned the game around with a crucial veto win, he was ordered by producers not to use it. (Subsequently... his #1 ally was evicted the following thursday. oy...) Then there were other rumours about how he wasn't even in the option to play for Veto for similar reasons. ("But we can't decide who to use it on it without spoiling it ahead of time!")
- The ninth season also had a highly controversial head of household competition. One houseguest who needed that one question to win Head of Household (in the final four, the 2nd most important one in the game) managed to get it wrong...well that was her fault, right? Her fault for not being on the same train of thought as the producers. The question was "True or false...There were more than two pre-existing relationships in the house". She answered false, like pretty much every person who had been watching the show would have in her boots. But then there is a slight pause and Julie Chen reports there were three. What was this third relationship? Were two houseguests' lies about being a lesbian couple true? Nope....it was the guinea pigs that served as the house pets. Now how on earth was anyone supposed to figure that out? This of course wound up screwing houseguest Sharon.
  - Other conspiracy theorists believe that in the slight pause in between the houseguests revealing their answers and Julie Chen revealing the Guide Dang It answer that she was even told right there on the studio on live TV that it was three, and that for the MST-PST feeds that this was edited out.
- Some have also argued that the act of selecting people for reality TV is Executive Meddling in itself. The people in charge try and pick a diverse series of contestants (There is almost always at least one openly gay guy, one princess, one dimwit, etc) but they try and pick the contestants who are most likely to clash and fight with each other because that's what gives ratings. If they pick huge fans of Big Brother they won't pick the people who can practically predict the flow of the game a week in advance because they'll be sitting around observing...they want people who'll be up and about picking fights and confronting other houseguests. The same has often been said for other shows like Survivor or The Amazing Race.
  - Obviously in Survivor, if they picked people who really knew how to play the game, they'd be constantly trying to one-up one another and it'd turn into Death Noteand wouldn't be very interesting to watch, especially when players like Brett, Sandra, and Vecepia wind up in the end despite spending the entire 39 days sitting around the camp with their mouths shut. Crystal and Randy made Gabon.
Fox insisted that Firefly have a "space hooker" and required Joss Whedon to write a second pilot because they wanted more action and less drama. They also threatened to pan-and-scan crop, no matter how it was shot, necessitating reshoots. Then they aired the episodes out of order and pre-empted a bunch of them for baseball. The series didn't even get to finish its first season.
- The space hooker turned out OK; the second pilot, the reshoots, the out of order broadcast, and the general Screwed by the Network definitely count, though.
- Head Trip has a solution for this problem.
The first season of Dollhouse was heavily meddled with. The pilot was reshot because Fox found it too confusing. They also saw it prudent to make the writers focus on a Monster of the Week format for the first five episodes. They also decided not to air Episode 13, which is perhaps the most critically acclaimed of the series.
- Arguably, though, Executive Meddling saved Dollhouse. When notice came of Dollhouse's second season renewal, the press release stated that Dollhouse wasn't axed because Fox didn't want "floods of emails".
- To be fair, Fox didn't "decide not to air Episode 13." Whedon's contract with Fox was worded in such a screwy way that the unaired pilot actually counted as a 13th episode, meaning that Whedon was only contracted to air 12.
Tracy Torme was forced out of the Sliders staff by Fox executives, who wanted less political and philosophical exploration in the show, and more action and sex appeal.
Similarly, Andromeda executive producer Robert Hewitt Wolfe was constantly fighting with the Tribune suits, and he was ultimately fired halfway through Season 2. The plot and tone of the show changed drastically at this point; Dylan's attempts to create a new Commonwealth were rushed to completion so he could be at odds with them instead. The quality of the later seasons is debatable, but many fans wouldn't know — they were so angry at Wolfe's treatment they stopped watching.
- The plot may have changed slightly, but the tone? Not a chance, the show was cheesy action hour from the very first scene of the very first episode. Still fun though.
The Sci Fi Channel has apparently implemented a policy that any series that has only middling ratings instead of stellar ratings will be canceled, despite whatever vocal, devoted following it has. Three examples that jump out include Mystery Science Theater 3000, Farscape, and at the end of its 10th season, after being the longest running U.S. hour-long science fiction show ever, Stargate SG-1, which annoyed the two main factions of the fanbase for different reasons — half wanted it to continue, and half wanted it to have ended two seasons before it did. Note that each of these series replaced the last. They have more generally replaced cancelled shows with such things as Monster movies, Professional Wrestling, and whatever syndicated series they could get on the cheap.
- And when MST3K came over from the abusive Comedy Central, the execs decided that it needed more sci-fi movies (which is partiall justified, this was before their Network Decay started to kick in), and eventually feature wacky subplots during the host segments such as Pearl Forrester wanting to become a licenced mad scientist, because that's what the audience will care about. Proof that you can run a network with no clue about why people watch your programs. Luckily, none of this hurt the ratings and they made that stuff funny.
- Stargate Atlantis is now getting this treatment as well.
At least Atlantis got the dignity of a five-season run (which is more than decent, when you think about it). On the other hand, it would not be in the least bit surprising if Warehouse 13 didn't even get a second season.
ABC executives tried to meddle around with Lost a few times:
- At one point in the season 2 finale, the foot of an otherwise missing statue was revealed, sporting only 4 toes. As stated by executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse here, the statue was originally stated to have 6 toes in the script, but the network asked them to change it to 4 toes. According to their own words, Damon and Carlton didn't mind as long as it wasn't 5 toes.
- Lindelof also revealed here that ABC had mandated some changes to the original draft of the season 2 episode "Dave", which implies that all the events from the entire show had merely taken place inside the mind of Hurley, one of the main characters who had once been an inmate in a psych ward. Supposedly, ABC execs were afraid that the episode might offer an explanation for the mysteries of the show as a whole, years before it would actually end. Since the general implication is still included in the final episode, it's uncertain what changes, if any, have been made to the draft to accommodate ABC's concerns.
- Oh, no, they succeeded, all right. Originally, Jack was supposed to be a one-shot character shown only in the pilot (and played by Michael Keaton), who would be killed off by the Monster before too long. Instead of Jack, it would have been Kate leading the Losties. The ABC executives allegedly had a problem with this, protesting that it would lead to reactions of "betrayal, anger, and bewilderment" in the audience, and insisted that Jack be kept on as a main character, permanently altering the show's dynamic.
  - Wait, where do we know a Jack being played by a Jack in a movie staring Michael Keaton? I wonder if that was on purpose.
  - Before fans of Kate as she exists now get uppity about this change, it should be noted that Kate was going to be slightly older, not a fugitive and traveling with her husband who she believed was alive somehow even though he had been in the rear section of the plane. If this sounds familiar it is because those elements were incorporated in the recurring character of Rose.
- It's also alleged that Executive Meddling managed to pull the show out of The Chris Carter Effect. After "Stranger in a Strange Land" (which was all about how Jack got his tattoos from a mysterious Thai woman), the producers were supposedly told by ABC to get the show back on track and plot an eventual ending.
The Sci Fi Channel was unhappy with Battlestar Galactica's plot-heavy story arc-based episodes, since it required a lot of background and internal knowledge to understand and made it difficult to pick up new viewers. When the first two seasons didn't pull in the ratings Sci-Fi desired, the executives pressured Moore into creating more standalone episodes that weren't as plot-heavy. This plan backfired and the third season took heavy criticism from both fans and critics, particularly the infamous episode "The Woman King". Fortunately, the executives decided to let Moore call the shots in the 4th season.
- In one of the weirdest examples of Executive Meddling ever, a higher-up at Sci-Fi insisted that the show's intro tune be changed. This is why, on Sci-Fi's airings, season one has a different intro theme, for apparently no reason. The intro theme you hear on the Sci-Fi channel in later seasons already existed for season one everywhere else it was broadcast. The reason for the insisted change? The original music was deemed too depressing. Yes, for a show about the end of the world via nuclear holocaust, an ominous Sanskrit chant is just going to drive the audience over the edge for how much angst they can take. The original was changed back because of a negative fan reaction that surprised Sci-Fi by how disproportionally large it was compared to the actual issue at hand. Anyone who hadn't seen the first season of BSG via Bittorrent before it finished airing in the United States, but after it finished airing everywhere else, probably heard the original theme on YouTube.
When it came down to converting Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger into Power Rangers SPD, Executive Meddling caused a good chunk of the salary to go into the final episodes, meaning Disney didn't have enough money to, of all things, hire a live-action actor to fill the spot of Sam, the Omega Ranger. Their solution? Come up with some contrived plot about Sam crystallizing into a ball of light during his Time Travel trip, and just get a voice actor to play him. Sam only ever appears as a stuntman in the ranger suit or as the CGI ball of light, making interaction between him and the other characters exceedingly awkward; the creative team was apparently so frustrated that they just wrote around him more often than not, and probably would have sent him back to the future, if not for Stock Footage constraints. Not only was this move decried by fans, but they also gave them a sucker punch in the gut during the finale, where they do show Sam in his human form, albeit only for a few seconds. Sam rivals Cousin Oliver Justin as one of the most unpopular characters in the franchise's sixteen-year history. It's been pointed out that at least Justin was a character, as Sam was basically treated like a weapon or a Zord.
Two episodes of the Reality TV show Criss Angel Mindfreak, both dealing with gun-related illusions, including the infamous Bullet Catch trick, were kept from airing by executives due to concerns of viewers attempting the stunts themselves. This wouldn't have been too much of a problem... had the executives not gone so far as to remove the rights to the episodes from the show's Executive Producer and star Criss Angel himself to ensure they couldn't be aired. He recently regained the rights, and is attempting to gain permission to release them in upcoming DVD specials.
NBC's Green/Earth Weeks; weeks in November and April respectively where where every NBC show had to contain environmental themes. It was a great way for the suits to show off how "green" they were without actually doing anything.
- My Name Is Earl lampshaded this one when Earl is required to organize a "Scared Straight" Program and Executive Meddling forces him to include environmental themes. He protests, because it wouldn't have anything to do with the story and would just be awkwardly shoehorned in.
- 30 Rock lampshaded this one as well, when David Schwimmer's character who is initially a "Corporate-Frendly Enviromentalist" starts to assume his eco-hero personality even when off the set.
  - Lampshaded again for Season 4. When Jack explains that NBC probably won't do anything for Earth Day besides turn the logo green, Kenneth briefly glances at the lower-left corner of the screen.
- Thank god they never tried to drag Heroes into this — instead, they just forced them to change the logo to be green.
  - In all fairness the Heroes producers showed ecological awareness by recycling the exact same plot for Claire Bennett.
  - Actually, Claire's cheer during her audition had some ecological message.
- Meanwhile, The Office simply relegated its "green" moment to a deleted scene, available only on DVD. One wonders if that editing decision was made deliberately late into the process...
- Knight Rider kills two birds with one stone (Product Placement and lampshading): Dr. Graiman and KITT show off a 2010 Mustang concept to the visiting Eco-Friendly inspector as a ruse of it being KITT's next shell. It's made obvious to the viewers that the green statistics KITT gives are either a full blown Ass Pull, or, at best, a theoretical guess by Dr. Graiman.
- And they're doing it again this year! Executives never learn.
  - They are doing it every year!
- As for the other NBC networks (USA, Bravo, CNBC, The Weather Channel, etc.)...all it means is their corner logo turns green for a week and we get some PSA's about how it's easy being green, and maybe a lettuce quickfire challenge on Top Chef.
  - And why is NBC doing "Green Week" every year? Because their parent company General Electric is trying to make a ton of green products, therefore they are using all of the networks they own as a way of advertising their products!
- The Parks and Recreation episode aired during "Green Week" involved the characters going on a hunting trip. That is just an epic up yours.
As they have co-funded Degrassi The Next Generation, the "N" Channel has exerted more and more influence over the writers and producers of the show. Their meddling can be seen most notably in the opening credits for the seventh and eighth seasons, which have moved away from showing the ensemble cast during an average school day and towards emphasizing the individual characters, much in the style of Beverly Hills 90210.
Because of the general subject matter and dark sense of humor, Titus was eventually cancelled because of Executives who didn't want to worry about it any more. Christopher Titus was on the phone at least twice for every episode trying to convince an executive why the current episode works the way it is. "It's funny that we are having an intervention to convince my Dad to start drinking again."
- On Sirius radio, Titus also said that Executives wanted Titus and Erin to break up in the show, much like Dharma and Greg did at the time. But since real life truly wrote the plot here, Christopher had to say no.
You know that infamous episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun where a race of super-hot Venusians, all played by supermodels, attempt to take over Earth during the Super Bowl? Well, it's revealed on a DVD Commentary that that episode was the result of Executive Meddling. Yeah, we're not surprised either.
- Dude, what's wrong with hot alien babes?
Angel, in order to get a fifth season, changed location, changed their jobs from detectives to powerful corporate executives, shifted from a Arc based format to a Monster of the Week setup (for the first one third of the season; after that they managed to have at least somewhat of a Story Arc), and transplanted Spike into the show.
- The last one, however, was a frankly brilliant move.
  - Well...
  - At the very least, it's hard to argue that it was anything but good for ratings, given the popularity of Spike among fans.
  - Nevertheless, it got cancelled anyway.
  - For being too good.
The Vogler arc on House. An article in the New York Times described how ratings for the initial episodes were low, which led to executives proposing a "bad guy" who would conflict with House. The writers acceded, but before any of those episodes made it onto the air, the show was moved next to American Idol. Ratings soared, giving the writers enough clout to do away with Vogler. Given that fans generally regard the arc as a low point in the season, it was a fortunate break. And for those keeping score, the show is on (what else) FOX.
iCarly: Parodied in "iCarly Saves TV". iCarly was given a TV contract, but proceeded to be meddled with by a director fixated with a traditional sitcom and not the original idae of expanding iCarly into something of a variety show. This included replacing Sam, making Freddie an errand boy for the director, and eventually adding a talking Barneyesque dinosaur.
The firing of Brooke Smith, Grey's Anatomy's Dr. Hahn, for inexplicably offending network sensibilities by portraying a popular 40-something lesbian character, may well go down as one of the more offensive examples of Executive Meddling ever.
The commentaries on the DVD release of The Weird Al Show reveal the truly epic levels of stupidity that were constantly forced on the show, mostly from the network's constantly fluctuating standards of behavior they were worried kids would imitate. For example, one of Al's few victories was to keep a gag about sticking his arms into a barrel full of melted chocolate, by arguing that most kids wouldn't have a barrel full of melted chocolate on hand to imitate the scene.
Portrayed over the fourth season of Seinfeld, which features a story arc of Jerry and George trying to pitch a show much like Seinfeld itself to NBC, which is slowly ground down into another lame cookie cutter sitcom. Unusually, no one seems to notice and they seem pretty proud of the final product. The most notable is Jerry pitching an idea to spend an entire episode simply on the characters waiting for a table in a restaurant (the setup of one of the show's most popular and iconic episodes) which the execs don't get. A flustered Jerry then gives an alternate idea for a ridiculous story where a man is sentenced to be Jerry's butler after hitting his car, which cracks all the execs up and becomes the story of the pilot episode.
- In the last episode, where Jerry's sitcom is finally greenlighted, an exec forces him to make his character and the character based on Elaine a couple.
There is also the altering or pulling of reruns due to various rights issues would be considered executive meddling. This tends to mostly happen when they're released on DVD, usually manifested in changes to the show's soundtrack because the asking prices to certain mainstream tunes cannot (or will not) be met. Most infamously seen in the DVD release of WKRP in Cincinnati's first season, and pretty much any TV release to come from CBS DVD since the inception of CBS/Paramount.
- And how about Vanity Plate plastering?
  - And in recent years, there has been the extremely annoying habit of releasing Edited For Syndication episodes on DVD. Perhaps the most infamous example of this was Alf, where the arrogant studio executives continously ignored the complaints from fans and released the entire series in a butchered form.
- This as well happened to Mission Hill, where every single song that was played in an episode, except the theme song (Italian Leather Sofa by Cake), was replaced with license free music in order to be released on DVD.
  - This reason is probably the largest that Daria is taking so long to come to DVD. The show at the time used, literally, every single song played on Top 40 and/or alternative radio during the show's run. This meant that the show used hundreds of songs, most only 5 or so seconds, the longest being the credit closer. The two movies released, Is It Fall Yet? and Is It College Yet?, have their music intact; the two regular episodes included as bonus material are silent, beyond the opening, actual speech, and a generic closer.
Sexy Frasier character Roz Doyle was impregnated and turned into a single mom by uptight executives, who apparently felt that a sexually active single woman could not go unpunished on network television.
A rare positive example in Generation Kill: the first episode had major issues running over-time, partly because HBO kept re-inserting a lengthy scene that the director and producers were perfectly willing to live without and kept taking out of the cut. In the end, HBO simply allowed the episode to run over the original limit.
This was basically what killed Tech TV: Upon their "merger" with G4, the executives demanded that all the Tech TV staff either move to Los Angeles (where the G4 studios were already located) or simply get sacked. Less than a third of Tech TV employees, only 6 of which were actual cast members, picked the former option. To make things worse, all of two Tech TV shows — Anime Unleashed and X Play — survived the "merger" unscathed. (Three if you count The Screen Savers, which itself saw a ridiculous amount of Executive Meddling — see below. Though some fans say it doesn't exist.) The end result was massive Network Decay and a sharp decline in the network's ratings, both of which may be the fastest in the history of cable TV.
- The Screen Savers was also subject to heavy meddling during the merger. Practically overnight, it went from a tech show to... well, it was unwatchable and aimed at the Lowest Common Denominator. Yoshi DeHerrera's went from doing computer and electronics mods on the show to demonstrating a messy homemade blender and doing a report on drift racing full of rap slang and bikini-clad women. Mere months after he moved to Los Angeles to stay with the network, they fired him to Re Tool the show.
- G4 continues its downhill slide. As of this writing, the only Tech TV show to have survived is X-Play, and even it is beginning to show signs of this trope: It now resembles a sketch comedy show more than a video game review show.
The first season of Last Comic Standing nearly had this backfire on the producers. After the last round of auditions, the final cut for who was going to be in the house and actually contestants was supposedly going to be decided by a panel of celebrity judges including Drew Carey. When the final cast was announced, the judges stormed out because their picks for who were the best comedians had been overruled by the producers' picks for who would generate the most in-house drama. The producers managed to turn this around for themselves by turning the judges' anger into a drama spot.
- Actually, it was revealed later within the episode mentioned that the producers had votes themselves. While the judges were initially angry at the outcome, they were reminded of this fact and apologized for the outburst. It's still executive meddling, but not underhanded like is suggested above. This was how the voting system worked from the start of the show.
The Showtime executives objected to an episode of the Genre Anthology series Masters of Horror called "Imprint", directed by Takashi Miike, for its extremely graphic and disturbing content. Executive producer and creator Mick Garris made cuts to the episode, but it was shelved anyway, and is now only available on DVD. Another episode, "Jenifer", had several cuts made for violence, with the deleted scenes being available on DVD.
Another example that ultimately worked: Mel Brooks and Buck Henry originally wanted Tom Poston for the lead role in their spy comedy Get Smart. NBC insisted on Don Adams because he was already under contract.
One name in Toku is synonymous with Executive Meddling: Kamen Rider Hibiki. Originally it wasn't even intended to be a Kamen Rider series, but was shoehorned into the role. However, the unusually introspective and character-driven Hibiki quickly gained popularity — but not toy sales. So around episode 30, most of the head staff was changed and the series was retooled to be more action-centric. This also included Eiki and Shoki being Demoted To Extra, as well as the introduction of The Scrappy Kyosuke Kiriya. Shigeki Hosokawa, Hibiki's actor, reported that the new writing staff was "fraudulent" and harder to work with, to the point where they were re-writing the final episode while the final battle was being filmed. Just to cap it all off, the ending was changed at the last minute, denying Asumu the chance to become an Oni, the staff actually scrapping his costume in order to enhance Kiriya's; fans were livid at this revelation, and several Toei executives were upbraided for letting things go so far.
- As for the cast, Hosokawa has said that he'd gladly reprise his role as Hibiki, provided a more competent director were in charge; Kiriya's actor Yuichi Nakamura redeemed himself with his performance as Yuto Sakurai in Kamen Rider Den-O; and while Asumu remains screwed, his Kamen Rider Decade Alternate Universe counterpart (played by a different actor) receives the justice the original universe invarnation should have got, as he himself becomes Hibiki after his mentor passes on his powers to the boy.
Heroes may have had Executive Meddling declare that the characters can't wear superhero costumes, which may be another example of good executive meddling. (Alas, it's pretty much impossible to Google "Heroes" and confirm this.)
Heavily subverted by Kenny Everett; when he devised for his show a new character called Mary Hinge, he was ordered by Thames TV executives to change the name because the Spoonerism was "too blatant". So change it he did — to Cupid Stunt, which is far more blatant.
Comedy Central turning Battle Bots (a show about remote control robots fighting in an arena for a crowd of cheering fans) into nothing but shots of Carmen Electra in revealing outfits and crappy filler. It is disgraceful when the filler takes up more time during the show that what the game is supposed to be about!
Something's rather fishy about the recent season of Survivor. For some odd reason, Russell (the ratings machine) managed to get the hidden immunity idol... with no clue. Then, Russell played the hidden immunity idol, and another person with another hidden immunity idol was voted out. Then when he won a clue to the hidden immunity idol, they practically showed him right where it was. For some odd reason, they changed the rules about placing hidden immunity idols in the game after they played. If this pretty much why Russell wins, then CBS deserves every lawsuit for fixing the game.
- There's a precedent for HIIs being re-hidden after being used. And if Russell is as Dangerously Genre Savvy as he claims, then it would logical to search (and even find) the idol in landmarks within the camp, which would be the probable hiding place of HII with no Exile Island. It doesn't help that the other players are a bunch of Xanatos Suckers just lining up to get slaughtered.
  - Sure, Russell may be Dangerously Genre Savvy after all, but of course it's going to be very easy to win the game... when you're playing with a bunch of morons and the producers clearly know to try and slant the game to keep you around — after all, the Fan Favorite is what brings in the ratings, who'da thunk it? (Notice how when Jeff was evicted from Big Brother 11, the ratings for the show went down by half.) It's also easy when you're lucky enough to find secret fruit trees and are literally shown where the hidden immunity idol is and are pretty much the only one looking for it. (Did the others who saw the clue with him even try?) Rather ironic how CBS removed the "America's favourite player — $1,000,000 prize!" after Rupert won because they were afraid it'd change how people played the game (instead of trying to win, they tried to be the Fan Favourite), yet people like Russell seem to know that when you become the Fan Favourite, you get an advantage. (Including being able to come back twice... just like Rupert.)
- Quite a few fans are also suspicious that despite Russell supposedly running a very successful oil company, Googling his name results in literally zero hits not related to the show.
  - There's actually an address for his company called the Hantz Tankering Service... but that's so far the only thing you can find about the company — if there's any proof Russell actually owns and/or runs it instead of it being a family business, then it's probably been hidden or we're just not looking hard enough.
- You can also bet your bottom that none of the players in the Survivor: Heroes vs Villains actually saw Samoa.
  - They shoot the seasons back to back now, so what should their decision have been? To leave out one of the most entertaining players from Heroes vs Villains and bring him back in a later All Stars Season? If they did that then the contestants on that show would vote him out first, and with good reason. They want to make the most of him and they can't do that if he gets voted out first. You can't really blame them, it's a decision that makes a lot of sense.
  - There are also rumours of Parvati having a BFF in the production crew who fed her info about Russell in Samoa.
- Obviously Survivor's been showing a preference for the villains (probably because of Russell). Isn't it amazing how James had to sit out of a challenge, yet the challenge continued without the villains being asked to sit someone out or asking the Heroes to put Colby back in? They clearly don't want the heroes to win.
  - It's obvious that the game is borderline-fixed towards the villains this season. Not only was one immunity challenge much more easy for the villains (due to "Villains" having more recognizable fragments than "Heroes" on the box-stacking challenge) but the villains team is almost entirely composed of players who are good at Puzzles. And guess what all the immunity challenges have been? Puzzles. What a shocker.
- Russell somehow knew that he didn't win Samoa during Heroes vs. Villains...This is rather strange. Considering that the filming for Heroes vs. Villains begun less than a month after the filming for Samoa ended, and that the finale for Samoa didn't air until December. There would have been no way for him to know unless somebody in the crew told him.
Home Improvement actually depicted in-universe Binford Tools executives meddling with Tool Time, the Show Within a Show. Among examples were an executive threatening to fire Tim if he didn't promote an inferior power tool on Tool Time, making the cast wear tacky yellow jumpsuits with the Binford logo on them (except Heidi, who got a yellow bikini), allowing only Binford tools to be used on the show and confiscating all non-Binford tools, and finally trying to Trash The Set for a Grand Finale of Tool Time by staging an accident. (Ironically, the last idea was overturned, but Tim ended up accidentally starting a fire on the set, nearly trashing it except the firefighters were on hand.)
CSI NY (or at least, one of its characters) was a victim when Angell was killed solely due to budget cuts.
Positive example: When Penn and Teller did a special for ABC, a trick involving Teller "drowning" in a water tank came in the middle of the show, resulting in an uncommented-on "resurrection". The network suggested that the trick come at the end, leaving Teller "dead". As Teller would later tell The Onion AV Club, "I was amazed and stunned... I think they were absolutely right [about the water tank trick placement]. This may be the first time I've ever said that sentence in relation to some television activity. They were right."
Another positive example: Hill Street Blues, which was famous for stretching multiple intertwining plotlines over several episodes. (For example, the shooting of Officers Hill and Renko in the pilot wasn't resolved until the end of the first season.) One of NBC's conditions for renewing the show for a second season was a requirement that at least one storyline had to be wrapped up in each episode.
The original 60's run of Outer Limits was rife with executive meddling from ABC. First, creator Leslie Stevens wanted to do a serious science-fiction show, but the network wanted a "monster of the week" kind of show. Stevens and producer Joseph Stephano relucantly agreed, calling the monsters "bears", from an old vaudville saying "bring out the bear", as in when the audience is restless, bring out the dancing bear. The original air date for the episode "A Feasability Study" was delayed for months because a network censor objected to the ending where a community sacrificed itself to save the rest of Earth from being enslaved. The last straw for Stevens and Stephano was when the network decided to move the show against Jackie Gleason for the second season. They walked. The network then put one of their own executives in charge of the show, in a hope to keep the budget under control. It ended up being cancelled in mid-season.
The American version of Whose Line Is It Anyway came extremely close to suffering from this. The higher-ups wanted the show to appeal to a younger audience, so they were going to get rid of most of the cast (particularly Colin) and replace them with celebrities with no improv experience. Luckily, the producers of the show (including executive producers Drew and Ryan) managed to override all the ABC execs' ideas, bringing the show across the pond with nearly the exact same format as the original. The only meddling that remained was that the credits reading was removed for being too "weird"—but it was brought back in season 2 when the execs found out that people were switching channels during the vanilla credits.
- The finalized show suffers a more active form of Executive Meddling: the producers will step in and veto game ideas and order redos if they don't like certain elements. In one famous example, the audience suggested "Cosby and Hitler" for the name of an unlikely Sitcom pair, only to get shot down because of the Hitler reference. The rest of the episode is a Crowning Moment Of Awesome for the performers as they work in Take Thats against the director for the veto.
The X-Files suffered from this terribly, especially in later seasons. On the whole, the show was not supposed to go 9 seasons; it was originally supposed to go five seasons and then be completed in a series of feature movies. When Fox extended the contract, it was agreed that seven seasons was long enough. "Requiem", the season seven finale, was written and designed to be the series finale, pulling in almost every major character from the series and setting it in the same place the pilot took place. But executive meddling wins again, and the Chris Carter and Co. ended up with the terrible task of writing two more seasons when most of the plotline had already been resolved. New, confusing plotlines were developed, new characters added, and it pretty much dissolved by season 9. A bad end to a good show.
Practically the majority of reality TV shows, especially talent shows like American Idol. Some things that are staged are so blatant (such as shoving someone with almost zero skill in whatever the show wants onto the show) that it can feel like you're really just watching unpaid actors that are doing improv for a season. Not to mention that most reality and talent shows seem to have scenes that are filled to the brim with drama on screen due to careful editing. Of course, this all works as people keep tuning in to watch.
- They aren't even trying to hide it on American Idol anymore. The last 2 seasons, they've implemented a "Judge Veto" system. So if a fan-favorite performer gets voted off, the judges can veto the decision. To keep it somewhat fair, they can only use the veto once per season. Now Kara Diaguardi has been fired and Ellen and Simon quit without any confirmation on any new judges. The show is a train wreck waiting to happen at the moment.
Currently, Criminal Minds is in danger of this, as for "creative" (a.k.a. financial) reasons, executives want to fire A.J. Cook and replace JJ with a new character. To add further insult, they also plan to reduce Paget Brewster's role for the next season, completely upsetting the gender ratio of the show. (And this is the same network that is bribing Charlie Sheen to stay on Two and a Half Men, despite his tabloid behavoir). Naturally, fans are outraged by this sexist treatment, and they're doing something about it. Blogs are up in flames, people are emailing and calling complaints to CBS, petitions are signed by the tens of thousands to reverse CBS's decision. Even the actors (both male and female) are expressing outrage on their Twitter accounts. There's also talk of boycotting the network and its advertisers until the situation is righted. Hopefully this might resolve soon, otherwise Criminal Minds could suffer a fate similiar to that of a certain sci-fi show (Doctor Who) when it was in trouble twenty-five years ago...
Apparently the people behind the low rated Joan Of Arcadia were pressured to make the show "less talky" and stunt-cast in order to increase ratings.

Music

Big Boi of Out Kast fame was to release his first solo album "Sir Lucius Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty" as early as late 2008, however, Jive Records wasn't so sure the album would be able to sell. After having Big Boi rework the album once, and setting a 2009 release date, Jive once again decided they didn't like the album, telling Big Boi that his album was a "piece of art, and we don't know how to market that." Things took a turn for the worst when the executives suggested to Big Boi that he should make his own version of Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" so that they could sell the album. Big Boi packed up his things and left for Def Jam. To make things worse, Jive decided they won't let him carry over any tracks he did with group-member Andre 3000 to put on the album....so he's leaking them.
Seventh Star was supposed to be Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi's first solo album, but pressure from his record label forced him to bill it as an album by "Black Sabbath featuring Tony Iommi."
- Similarly, Black Sabbath's album "Paranoid" was supposed to be named "War Pigs". It was changed by studio execs at the last minute because they didn't want to offend supporters of the Vietnam War. Vol. 4 was going to be titled Snowblind, but also was changed at the last moment due to the title being a cocaine reference — on the back cover they managed to sneak by a thank you to "the great COKE-cola company" though.
Frank Zappa suffered this during his early Mothers of Invention days. First of all, their name was changed from "The Mothers" because it was a slang term for "motherfuckers". We're Only in It for the Money suffered the most: the Sgt. Pepper-parodying cover was relegated to the inner sleeve. "Harry You're a Beast" had the verse "don't come in me" censored, as was the line "I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me" from "Who Needs the Peace Corps?". "Hot Poop" was their way of Getting Crap Past The Radar: taking the verse "Better look around before you say you don't care/Shut your fucking mouth 'bout the length of my hair/how would you survive/if you were alive/shitty little person?" from "Mother People" and backmasking it.
Berry Gordy and Motown were infamous for denying artistic freedom to their acts and interfering every step of the way. Two well-known defiance stories: Stevie Wonder threatened to leave Motown when his contract expired unless he got artistic freedom and improved royalties. Gordy initially rejected Marvin Gaye's song "What's Going On" as a single, but Marvin went on strike until Gordy agreed to release it. It was a #2 hit and led to demand for a similar album.
Like many musicians, Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) has had his share of disagreements with his record label, but the release of Year Zero brought with it new and exciting forms of Executive Meddling. Trent's viral marketing/Alternate Reality Game promoting the album was largely an independent effort between him and 42 Entertainment (Yes, the company that made the I Love Bees ARG for Halo 2), where he purposely leaked tracks to the public; the RIAA reacted by prosecuting some of the people who posted these online. Additionally, Trent wanted to surprise the fans by pressing the CD with special thermal material that would make the disc a different color when it was removed from a heat-producing CD player; unfortunately, the marketing team got word of this and decided to advertise it as a special feature of the album, which spoiled the surprise. "Thermally reactive disc that changes color when you touch it!"
- The thermal material has a bit more executive meddling to it, as they also hiked up the overseas price of the album $10 because of it, despite the fact that it cost almost nothing, and Trent paid the money for it out of his own pocket. This is commonly accepted to have been the final straw leading up to his going independent.
Tony Wilson's Factory label became known for a complete lack of Meddling, or sometimes Meddling that made things more bizarre than the artists would have liked. For instance, the album sleeve for Return of the Durutti Column by The Durutti Column was made out of sandpaper, "to destroy all your other records from the inside". They also went ahead with releasing Joy Division's Closer with the planned tombstone cover, despite the whole lead singer suicide thing.
Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson recorded a solo album in 1980, which featured Tull guitarist Martin Barre, new Tull bassist David Pegg, an unknown American drummer named Mark Craney, and "special guest" keyboardist/electric violinist Eddie Jobson (Roxy Music, U.K., Frank Zappa). Tull's label, Chrysalis Records, was going through financial troubles at the time, so they asked Ian to release it as a new Tull album to raise sales. The album was called A, as the tape boxes for Ian's album were marked "A" for "Anderson", and it led inadvertently to the sacking of three longtime Tull members. Some Tull fans were not pleased with the synthesizer sounds on the album, meant to be a break from Tull's folk-rock sound, nor the line-up changes, and a slightly more traditional sound was used for the band's follow-up, The Broadsword And The Beast. Anderson's true solo debut, the very electronic Walk Into Light, came out in 1983.
An almost certainly positive example comes from an RCA executive to replace the cover of "Round and Round" on Ziggy Stardust. Is this where "It Ain't Easy" comes from? No, that was already going to be on there...in fact, the two were going to play back-to-back between "Moonage Daydream" and "Lady Stardust." That's right. Executive Meddling is is responsible for "Starman."
The Chad Mitchell Trio encountered this when attempting to release their version of Bob Dylan's Blowin' In The Wind as a single. An executive at their record company balked at this, saying that there had never been a hit song with the word 'deaths' in it. The song could remain on the album, but a single release was out of the question. Of course, later on, Peter, Paul and Mary's recording of the song became a huge hit. The Chad Mitchell Trio, meanwhile, changed record companies, and their only mainstream hit after this was The Marvelous Toy, which still receives airplay on radio during the Christmas season.
Upon hearing The Clash's debut self-titled album, the suits at their American record label decided it had too much filler, and decided to remove 5 songs and replace them with some of the band's British singles like "Complete Control" and "White Man in Hammersmith Palias". It is almost universally agreed by critics that this actually vastly improved the album, though some also note that adding in the mostly mid-tempo and more polished singles dilutes the UK version's Three Chords And The Truth feel a bit.
Another good example: Blur's single "Popscene" — now recognized as one of the first true Britpop singles — failed so poorly on the UK single charts that their label, Food Records, told the band to scrap their entire second album and write new songs including one surefire hit single. Upon hearing this version, the label told them to go back again and write another single-worthy song, this time targetted to American audiences. The resulting album was the critcally adored Modern Life Is Rubbish and the two singles were "For Tomorrow" and "Chemical World", which remain two of their most critcally acclaimed and popular songs.
- Upon hearing their album Parklife, the head of Food Records proclaimed it to be "singeproof" and "unreleasable". The band and every other executive on the board believed that this would be the album of 1994. The head of the label thought that the album would bomb so horribly that shortly before its release he sold the label to SBK Records and retired to the British countryside. The album sold fantastically and made Blur massive stars in the UK. The band later lightly satirized their friend and former label-head with the first single from their next album, "Country House".
In yet another example of Executive Meddling winding up to have positive endpoint, James Blunt gave 'Weird' Al permission to do a parody of "You're Beautiful". But after "You're Pitiful" was recorded, the executives at Atlantic Records — Blunt's label — told Al he couldn't release the song on his next album because they feared it would turn Blunt into "a one hit wonder" (Ironically, he has not had a Billboard Top 40 appearance in the US since). So instead he released it for free online, and performs it in concert. Part of said performance is wearing an "Atlantic Records Sucks" t-shirt. Yet, this still left his next record a bit short. Al went back to the recording studio and recorded "Do I Creep You Out" and "White and Nerdy". When released as a single, the latter song became the biggest hit in Al's three-decade-long career (and its video also takes a shot at the case, when he edits Wikipedia's entry for Atlantic Records...).
- A less positive example of Executive Meddling in Weird Al's career was his label's insistence that Dare to be Stupid have a Cyndi Lauper parody. Al disliked the resulting song ("Girls Just Want to Have Lunch"), and decided against including it on The Food Album.
  - The Food Album (along with The TV Album) were also both the result of executives wanting compilation albums. Although Weird Al didn't like the idea of The Food Album, he preferred it to the executive's original idea, Al Unplugged, which would have been a compilation of his songs, remixed to remove the electric instruments.
- Executive Meddling was the reason Al wrote "Christmas at Ground Zero". They kept insisting he write a 'christmassy' song for the holiday season. They eventually regretted it.
After the success of their 1999 pop-crossover megahit ballad "Amazed", Country music band Lonestar had big hits in the early 2000s with family-friendly, Tastes Like Diabetes songs such as "I'm Already There", and were (according to keyboardist Dean Sams) forced to record more of the same. Whenever they tried something different, such as "Class Reunion", it tanked. When their last two albums for the label both failed to produce a hit, the band finally got kicked from the label, and lead singer Richie McDonald went solo — only to record the same diabetes-tasting material.
K-Mart and Walmart refused to sell the Nirvana album In Utero until new packaging that listed the track "Rape Me" as "Waif Me" was created. The cover art, which features anatomical drawings of a naked woman, was also changed.
Eels were forced by their record label into licensing "Mr E's Beautiful Blues" for Road Trip, as well as doing a video for it that alternated between clips from the movie and scenes of vocalist E driving a van with most of the main cast as passengers. In his autobiography Things The Grandchlidren Should Know, E stated that he was none too happy to have the song associated with a "college movie", and that the only enjoyable part of making the video was a brief scene where he pretended to beat up the cast members.
- Not only that, they also forced him to include the track on the album "Daisies of the Galaxy." E felt like the song didn't fit the tone of the album, so he got his revenge by including it only as a hidden bonus track at the end.
Electric Six ended up reluctantly covering Queen's "Radio Ga Ga" on Señor Smoke because the record company wanted them to use it as a single. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's the only cover song the band has ever released.
Devo's record label insisted that the "Post-Post Modern Man" video feature a playboy model. Band member and director Jerry Casale found a tongue in cheek way to work her into the video concept he already had in mind — instead of just Devo getting lost driving through the desert, it became Devo getting lost driving through the desert while an increasingly miffed model waited all day for their return. Then, when the video didn't get picked up by MTV, the label decided the song itself was too electronic-based to appeal to a 90's audience. Thus, an entirely different video, parodying home shopping channel programming, was made for a different mix of the song without the band's involvement.
- Devo 2.0 was essentially a pre-teen Devo cover band marketed by Disney with a fair deal of input from Devo themselves. A lot of the original songs had substantially rewritten lyrics due to executive meddling. Some were pretty reasonable things like excising a repeated reference to a gun in "Big Mess" or changing "Girl U Want" into "Boy U Want" and making it about an innocent crush rather than lust. Other changes were a little weirder — in one interview Jerry Casale said "That's Good" lost the couplet "Life's a bee without the buzz / it's going good 'til you get stung" because of Informed Obscenity. Apparently someone took that lyric to mean "Life is a bitch when you're not high, so make sure that you don't get caught with drugs by the police".
The Beatles are one of the most notorious and sustained examples of this trope. It's said that the infamous "butcher" cover they did for Yesterday... and Today was because they (particularly John) objected to the way Capitol Records (their U.S. label) "butchered" their albums. On a more positive note, Capitol's treatment of the Magical Mystery Tour double-EP (expanding it into an album) was so successful that it has replaced the double-EP version, even in the British market.
- Actually, the butcher cover was actually part of a photo shoot for the single cover of "Paperback Writer" in the UK and had nothing to do with Capitol. But the "butchering" did affect the Beatles very much, making them sign a contract with Capitol which said that all albums (excluding special cases, like Magical Mystery Tour and Hey Jude) should be exactly the same as the UK versions.
- Famously, George Martin refused to let Ringo Starr — who had just replaced Pete Best as the band's drummer — play in the recording of the bands first single "Love Me Do"; having disapproved of Best's drumming, he wasn't willing to trust Starr blindly and they recorded the album with a session drummer, Starr reduced to shaking a tambourine. Martin later relented and let Starr record a version with the band, which later went on their first album.
A case from the 18th century: Mozart's Don Giovanni contains a deeply sad and lyrical soprano aria, which out of the blue ends in 9½ bars of the most spectacular virtuoso coloratura imaginable. It seems like a hastily-tacked on display of virtuosity, and was condemned by critics as early as Berlioz as a crime against art. The reason is probably that the opera director demanded a virtuoso cadenza for his prima donna.
Rappers get this a lot. If it's too hardcore and or socio-political there's a good chance the album will be either shelved or retooled. Same goes for the music videos; ironically, videos with Stripperific models are OK.
Positive Executive Meddling rescued Simon and Garfunkel's career. After their first, all-acoustic album Wednesday Morning, 3 AM tanked hard upon its 1964 release, the duo split and Paul Simon moved to England. During this hiatus, the song "The Sound of Silence" (note the singular) became popular among radio stations in Florida, while in general The Byrds had become popular as the pioneers of folk-rock, scoring hits with electric covers of Bob Dylan songs. In June 1965, producer Tom Wilson borrowed Dylan's backing band and had them overdub electric guitar, bass and drums over the original recording. The resulting single, "The Sounds of Silence", entered the charts and became the duo's first #1 single. Simon accordingly returned to the USA and reunited with Garfunkel to resume their career.
Death Metal band Deicide was rushed by Roadrunner Records to release In Torment In Hell. Because of this, the album sounds insanely generic compared to the rest of their work. Some rumors have even floated around that the band made the album that average on purpose so they could finish up their contract with the label.
The initial master tapes of The Jimi Hendrix Experience's Are You Experienced? album were rejected by Reprise Records because it was thought that the feedback was unplanned distortion. The tapes were sent back to Reprise with a note explaining that the distortion was intentional and should not be corrected.
A positive example: When Swedish hair-metal band Europe wrote the song "The Final Countdown", they had no intention of releasing it as a single — they were just looking for a cool concert-opener. One suggestion from Epic Records later, "The Final Countdown" was the band's biggest hit single of their career.
Judas Priest were royally fucked by Gull Records, their first label. For the first album they were given a producer who dominated the sessions and cut all of the fan-favourite songs out. After they left the label after two albums, the record company then proceeded to release half a dozen compilations of these two albums to cash in after Priest became famous. They have also messed up the track order for Sad Wings of Destiny, hence the track named "Intro" appearing in the middle of the album. Things are so bad that Judas Priest even have a section of their discography on their website warning the fans about them.
Aerosmith's "Janie's Got A Gun" originally contained the line "He raped an itty bitty baby," but the record company requested that Steven Tyler change it to "He jacked an itty bitty baby."
Another case of executive meddling gone right: Tom Petty was persuaded by his producer Jimmy Iovine to re-record "Don't Do Me Like That," a song he had earlier recorded with his former band Mudcrutch, for his album Damn the Torpedoes. It became one of the biggest singles of his career.
Metallica considered naming its debut album Metal Up Your Ass, but the label vetoed. The eventual title, Kill 'Em All, comes from Cliff Burton's suggestion on what they should do to record distributors.
Liz Phair suffered heavily from this, having run out of money during the recording of her self-titled 2003 album. The execs refused to release her album unless she worked with writers know as The Matrix (no, not that one), which produced her biggest Billboard hit, Why Can't I?, which sounds almost nothing like the works that made her famous, and got her a 0.0 from Pitchfork.
The so-called loudness war (which reduces the audio quality of CD recordings) is largely caused by executive meddling, and often done against the will of the artists and mastering engineers.

New Media

Youtube's executives have the very annoying habit of taking down videos due to copyright violation, or muting videos that use music because the person didn't put up a disclaimer.
- They are totally doing to it just for laughs though. Nothing to do with the constant threat of litigation, no siree.
- To be fair, consider Youtube's side of it. Youtube was created to be an outlet for people to upload and broadcast their own self-produced videos; hence the slogan "Broadcast Yourself." It's since been hijacked by thousands of people using it to do nothing but upload and pirate copyrighted material so people don't have to buy DV Ds, turning it into the Napster of video. What's worse, some people are now taking advantage of Youtube's Google Ads partnership to MAKE MONEY for uploading copyrighted material.
- You Tube's executives also have a habit of giving the website updates that don't exactly go over well with the millions of users on their site. This ranges from changing the profile pages from a more customizable one to a downright disorganized one, changing video ratings from a 1-5 star rating system to a 'Like/Dislike' system, changing the comment section to one that looks like it was made in 1995, removing all scroll bars from view, and adding as many ads as humanly possible. If you're a long-time member of the website, these changes are like going from running around in an open field full of penguins to a cage full of grizzly bears.
  - Though, most non-purists actually like the Like/Dislike system, since pretty much everybody only voted either 1 or 5 stars.

Pro Wrestling

Soon after Kayfabe!Vince McMahon was blown up in a fiery limo explosion, confirmation came that USA Network executives told the WWE to perform a murder storyline, much to the consternation of the writing staff, Vince himself, and half the fanbase. This made them look like idiots, morons, and every other epithet in the book when news of Chris Benoit's murder-suicide hit the airwaves a few weeks later.
- Among other things USA has been pressuring WWE into: more celebrity involvement and 3-hour Monday Night RAW broadcasts.
  - The 'E did however work the celebrity involvement into some genuinely amusing moments (such as John Cena being beaten by Kevin flippin' Federline, Steve-O being legitimately beaten for laughing during his match, and Donald Trump causing Vince McMahon's infamous "bald moment").
- Of course, Vince himself is the source of much Executive Meddling in the WWE, such as when he canceled "The Blonde Bytch Project", a Blair Witch parody that was to star Stevie Richards and the Blue Meanie, on the grounds that he had never seen the movie, and therefore assumed nobody else had either.
  - He did the same thing to Paul Burchill because he had never seen Pirates of the Caribbean and assumed that a pirate should be a Heel. Later, he placed him into an incest gimmick character. That went about as well as could be expected — the storyline never really developed, and Burchill vanished fairly quickly.
  - This was at least Vince's fourth attempt to do an incest storyline. His first attempt was to portray Ken Shamrock and his (kayfabe) sister Ryan Shamrock in an incestuous relationship (Ken refused). Then, when Stephanie McMahon became pregnant, Vince suggested that he be the on-screen father. When Steph vetoed that, Vince suggested her brother Shane be the father instead. Both Steph and Shane nixed that one. Most recently was the repackaging of Paul Burchill and Katie Lea as implied incestuous siblings. Given that Vince suffered both physical and sexual abuse as a child, most fans are of the opinion that he urgently needs therapy. They just wish it could be done in a quiet office instead of on live TV.
  - Vince McMahon wasn't the only one to try an incest storyline in the WWE, however. Former head writer Vince Russo fought hard to get Beaver Cleavage, a hypersexual take on Leave It to Beaver, on the air. It lasted about two weeks before Vince McMahon himself pulled the plug.
  - The storyline was done in by yet more Executive Meddling. WWE embraced the PG rating for all their television programming around the time Burchill and Katie Lea started appearing on-screen. The incest storyline was one of the first things to be nixed, leaving both with nothing to do before being moved over to the ECW brand.
  - Katie Vick. (Vince's own DVD has other members of the WWE saying how unfunny it was.)
- Soon before WWE's ECW brand got underway, there were Internet reports that the Sci-Fi Channel had been trying to shoehorn sci-fi elements into this wrestling show. Cue "The Zombie" and other characters being soundly beaten by the Sandman upon the show's airing.
- And of course, there was Muhammed Hassan. This could be looked at as Executive Meddling on both sides, as Vince chose to still air Hassan's "terrorist attack" on the Undertaker the same day that real terrorists bombed London's subway. UPN's subsequent edict that Hassan would never appear on the network again forced Vince to not only remove the character, but possibly re-book the main events at two pay-per-views.
The Montréal Screwjob. Arguably, one of the most notorious cases of Executive Meddling in WWE history. How justified or effective it was relies a great deal on whether you believe Bret Hart's or Shawn Michaels version of the story, but as last-minute swerves go, it was a doozy.
It must be said that Vince is often the source of positive Executive Meddling. The reason the Attitude Era did so well was because Vince was there to filter out Ferrera and Russo's bad ideas.
One rumor floating around about the WWE right now is not so much executive meddling as much as TENURED Meddling. Some are arguing that younger talent is being buried so the older wrestlers (The Undertaker and Triple H especially) can milk the last few years of their careers for all they're worth. Some of it's minor (no one on the roster can have gear that looks like the Undertaker's.) However, some of it's more serious (some have argued that Triple H forced Chris Masters to keep doing the Masterlock Challenge, long after it stopped being entertaining [as if it ever was.]) People are wondering why guys like Evan Bourne and Shelton Benjamin got nowhere fast in WWE, and many think it's this.
- Raul D. Rice went into great detail to show just how much Executive Meddling Triple H did in the WWE, a few years ago.
- And yet Taker has received nowhere near as much flak for this, even though he's also helping hold back talent in the women's division by having the WWE keep that belt on his girlfriend Michelle Mccool. This might be even more egregious because it buried two Divas — Mickie James and Beth Phoenix — who were more talented, popular and experienced than Michelle.
  - Lol wut? Beth had to vacate the womens' title because of a torn ACL, not because of anything Taker did.

Puppet Shows

A positive example of executive meddling is with the creation of Thunderbirds. The production company exec, Lew Grade, liked the show so much that he demanded that the half-hour show have hour-long episodes. As a result, Gerry Anderson's company had to, at least initially, pad the time with additional plot twists and character development, which gave the series a sophistication that made the show a cult classic.
Further executive decisions resulted in the cancellation of Thunderbirds after The Film Of The Series failed to perform. This did, however, allow Anderson to develop his next show, Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons, which gathered a significant cult following of its own, if not as big as that of Thunderbirds. Grade made a less positive decision concerning Anderson's final Supermarionation show The Secret Service. Each episode featured Father Unwin, voiced by Stanley Unwin, bamboozling people with Unwin's trademark "Unwinese" doubletalk. Unfortunately, when Grade first heard this, he cancelled the show with only 13 episodes in the can, on the grounds that viewers wouldn't understand Unwinese — despite the fact that they weren't meant to.

Radio

The Howard Stern Show: Executives were trying to change Stern's vision of his show since his first day on the air. It's generally agreed upon by critics and fans that him fighting and being able to do his show the way he wanted completely changed the way morning radio shows were presented. However, whether or not Stern going through the actual process of fighting these battles was entertaining leads to a case of Broken Base.

Theater

In a literal case of "Executive" meddling, Shakespeare wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor in response to Queen Elizabeth I's insistence that he feature the character John Falstaff in a comedy. Falstaff's previous appearances had been in histories set in the 14th and 15th centuries; "The Merry Wives" arbitrarily plucks him out of time and places him in the contemporary 17th century.
Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House created enormous controversy for its time with its story of a housewife who realizes her husband has no real respect for her and eventually works up the strength to leave him. For its production in Germany Ibsen was forced to write a new ending where the husband drags her to see her children, and she realizes she can't leave them. Reading it, one gets the idea Ibsen deliberately made it as last-minute and unbelievable as possible.
Stan Freberg ran into a crazy example of this when he tried to adapt his successful comedy album Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America to the stage. The legendary (and infamous in theatre circles, at least partly for providing several examples of this trope) producer David Merrick became interested after hearing just the first third of Volume One. However, first he told Freberg NOT to record Volume II for a while, so that it wouldn't compete with the Original Cast Recording. And then there were arguments over the size of the orchestra; Merrick said the orchestra should be bigger, and then changed his mind and said it was fine as Freberg had originally conceived it. Merrick continued to play mind games with Freberg for a while, culminating in meddling with the script. Infamously, he told Stan Freberg to "Take Lincoln out of the Civil War. He doesn't work!". He also told Freberg to move Barbra Frietzche (of the Civil War poem of the same name) from the Civil War to the Revolutionary War. This was more or less the last straw, and Freberg (under advice from his wife) abandoned the project while he still had his sanity and integrity intact. The adaptation was cancelled, Freberg then devoted his energies to advertising, and Volume II of The United States of America would not be completed and released until 35 years later.
- As stated above, David Merrick was quite infamous for this. According to anecdote, he tried to cut "Meadowlark" from The Baker's Wife by going into the orchestra pit and tearing up the parts. "Meadowlark" became the show's best-known song after Merrick canceled what would have been the original Broadway production out of town.
The musical City of Angels is all about this trope. It involves the struggles of a crime novel writer named Stine, as he attempts to adapt one of his crime novels as a movie. Unfortunately, the film's producer Buddy Fiddler insists that he make all sorts of crazy changes to the script.
The authorities made Giuseppe Verdi completely rewrite A Masked Ball several times, because the original version was about the assassination of a king.
Gilbert and Sullivan were quick to shoot down demands that they rename their operetta Ruddigore something less offensive to Victorian ears.
Averted with extreme prejudice by most Fringe Festivals. Fringe Festivals are unjuried theatre festivals designed for maximum artistic freedom; as long as you have the legal rights to perform a play (either by way of securing said rights or writing the thing yourself) and your entry fee cheque doesn't bounce, they'll give you a venue and won't stop you from doing whatever you please onstage.
An in-story example: in Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, the theater managers refused to acquiese to the Opera Ghost's demands that Christine Daae be cast as the Countess in Il Muto, instead casting Carlotta as the lead and Christine in a silent role. The Phantom was displeased. He later confronted the managers when he demanded that they produce his new play, Don Juan Triumphant:
"And the managers must learn
that their place is in an office, not the arts."

Theme Parks

Disney Theme Parks went through a period of this in the Eisner-Era. Among the results are shutting down the Subs for the first time, the entire fiasco surrounding Journey into Imagination, the infamous cost-cutting that went into California Adventure, the Paris Studios park and Hong Kong Disneyland, and other problems.

Toys

The Transformers Binaltech and Alternators line were notorious for Executive Meddling in the form of the car companies whose car models they tried acquiring the rights to make figures out of; a good deal of these demanded that the guns that came with the figures were either modified or completely removed, or just flat out refused to hand over the rights period, in order to prevent them from being associated with "war toys". That doesn't mean that there wasn't plenty of in-company Meddling, though; in one memorable instance, Takara demanded that a new Dodge Ram figure Hasbro was making be turned into Optimus Prime, so they could sell it more readily in Japan. Since Takara was needed to front part of the cost, Hasbro agreed... only for Takara to market the figure as Masterforce's Ginrai, not Optimus. Then the figure was delayed for a number of months, prompting rumors that it had been canceled. The rumors turned out to be partially true; the Ginrai figure was canceled, but it got a release as Optimus Prime in the Binaltech line's Kiss Play sub-line, as well as a black repaint release as Black Convoy. The figure was ultimatley released in the main BT line, as Optimus like planned, as the final figure.
- The new Transformers Animated cartoon premiered on December 26th, 2007, with regular episodes starting in January. However, Hasbro executives decided against releasing the related toyline on the same date and instead released them in June, since the toyline of the 2007 film was still selling strong. This Shortpacked! strip (and this one too) comments on the delay.
The original 1960s metal Thunderbirds toys had a blue Thunderbird 2 — to Gerry Anderson's dismay — because the marketing drones said that "children don't buy green toys". Wait; what?
- To be fair, the original production run was green. The blue version was a much later re-issue, complete with "updated" packaging and the like. A small touch of irony comes from Derek Meddings' original concept sketch for "Rescue 2" (as TB2 was then called) specifying that the craft was blue.

Video Games

Sonic X-Treme is notorious for its Executive Meddling. First, the main game and boss levels were broken up and given to two different teams, which ended up building them into essentially two completely different games. Then, the team making the boss levels were shown a demo of the then-in production Nights into Dreams game, further inspiring the team to deviate the levels from the main game and causing Nights creator Yuji Naka to threaten to leave on grounds of plagiarism. Then, when Sega of Japan came over to check up on progress, they loved the engine for the boss levels so much, they demanded that the entire game be made with it, despite the fact that the team was dangerously close to deadline and short on men due to arguments about the game's direction. It finally took the game's director coming down with pneumonia before the plug was finally pulled. Oh, let's not forget how Sega replaced the entire voice cast of the Sonic The Hedgehog games with their Sonic X counterparts... without telling the original cast. Reportedly, Sonic's original voice actor actually had to call Sega to find out when he needed to be back in for recording before he found out about the switch.
- Or the fact that Sega decided that it was a good idea to release Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 without thoroughly bug-testing it and not editing the manual to remove mentions of half-finished game mechanics they had taken out so that the game could be released around Christmas and make a profit. (Not that there weren't other problems with the game. But making it work right when you made the characters do something could have taken the sting off a little.) Say, didn't Sonic X-Treme have the same deadline problem?
  - You know what I just heard? Sonic The Hedgehog 2006's original release date was in 2007. People could have waited, the could have let SEGA perfected it. But noooooo the fans just HAD to beg SEGA to release the game earlier because of how awesome the trailers looked and SEGA was force to give to the high demand. So isn't some much of Executive Meddling, it's Fandumb Meddling!
  - Releasing it on demands doesn't excuse Sega, because they essentially took advantage of the demands, and released the game probably knowing it was a buggy mess, and that people would buy it anyway, Sega's not excusable and the fandom aren't excusable, it's both their faults.
- Really, at this point Sonic Team have pretty much lost the passion for their eponymous franchise, with Sega of Japan hellbent on making sure they keep the new games coming regardless. But Sega's control over the team extends beyond just Sonic: Case in point, the Nights Into Dreams sequel Journey of Dreams, which Sonic Team originally wanted to develop on the Xbox360, until Sega came butting in and decided that the game would be shoehorned onto the Wii with its brand-new motion controls. And the results show too...
  - Not to mention it would've gone on Wii anyway if Yuji Naka was still at Sonic Team, he's gone on record saying that the Wii is the perfect platform for Ni GHTS. The IR pointer would've been perfect had it not been implemented so bizzarely.
In an example of Executive Meddling backfiring, BMX XXX was originally intended to be yet another Dave Mirra product, until Acclaim decided to go for risque and controversial by adding nudity and crude sexual humor, which instantly put Mirra off of the project with a demand that his name not be used to advertise the game. Acclaim did it anyway, and was forced to stop via a court order. Just to add insult to injury, Toys 'R Us and Wal-Mart refused to carry it, combining with the game's already poor quality to render sales ineffectual.
- There are other theories about how this game came to be...
There've been way too many movie-based games reduced in quality due to a rush to release them in synch with the release of the actual movie, not to mention video games in general being rushed to meet the holiday shopping crunch. The most memorable has to be E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, whose final fate in a New Mexico landfill and subsequent contribution to The Great Video Game Crash Of 1983 resulted from such a push. To be fair, they also produced several times too many cartridges even for a successful game. Did they honestly think everyone that owned the console would buy ET thrice?
Video games in general, and especially PC-based titles, also suffer from this. Obsidian's Knights of the Old Republic 2 was nearly eviscerated as a result of Lucasarts forcing Obsidian to rush it for the Christmas sales. It still ended up being a great game, but it only makes you sad about What Could Have Been.
- The TSL Restored Content Mod restores much of the Cut Content which was produced, but Obsidian didn't have the time to properly put it into the game. (This is not the infamous project by Team Gizka which seems to have stalled). While it helps a lot, it can't entirely rescue the ending, however, because some of the intended content never got produced in time and couldn't be restored.
Mega Man X had its share of Meddling. First, Keiji Inafune was forced to redesign the character of X because it was feared the drastic changes to the original Mega Man's looks would prevent fans from relating to him (the original concept would later evolve into Zero), and then the series was continued beyond X5, which Mr. Inafune had intended to be the definitive end to the X series, causing a bunch of irreconcilable Plot Holes as a result.
- But on the positive side, the villain of the first Zero game was supposed to be the real X, which would have been epic level Character Derailment. Meddling forced the change to Copy-X
- Than again, it's said Inafune originally planned to use the Zero series to explore Zero's past, using X5 to introduce the idea, and was forced to ditch that.
It is believed that the American branch of Sony's videogame business had a policy of rejecting licenses for 2D-based titles on grounds of "low quality", as the head executive there wanted only 3D titles. This was, in fact, the case in the PS 1 era, and is part of the reason that Capcom made Mega Man Legends; Sony would only let them make the 2D Mega Man games they wanted if they made a 3D installment.
- In addition to the "3D titles only" rule, Sony also has a standing rule that requires all games released in the United States to have an English voice track. Because of this, many popular low-budget games like half the Super Robot Wars franchise will never see the light of day in America. Sony seems to have lightened up on this recently though, with Yakuza 2 being in Japanese with subtitles, and no English voice work in sight.
  - Not really. Sony only allowed it two years after its Japanese release — in 2007, after the PS 3 had become Sony's main system and the PS 2 was relegated to secondary status. Sony now requires PS 3 games have an English track instead, which is one of the reasons Yakuza 3 is not getting released outside of Japan.
  - Except it has been, and without an English voice track to boot.
- Sony of America had this policy due to the antics of Bernie Stolar, a colossal jackass who refused to publish Japanese RPGs at all until Final Fantasy VII came out and made a lot of money. Then he was fired and went to Sega, and we know how well that turned out.
- Hell, the anti-2d policy is still in slight effect to this day. Not as bad as it was in the 90's, but Sony will still implement it time to time. Rumor has it that this is one of the reasons the recent Xbox Live ports of Garou and King of Fighters 98UM never made it to the PS 3.
  - And Little Big Planet fits into this theory how?
  - Little Big Planet is a 3D sidescroller. Not all Sidescrollers are 2D.
Developers for The Sims 2 complained about how executives pressured the team to use more particle effects in the game so they could put that as a bullet point on the box. So, we got people walking around with green smoke coming out of their arms when low on hygiene, green smoke coming out of food that had gone bad, and so forth. Unrealistic it may be, it at least came in handy as a visual aid.
- Ironically, many users find such effects "annoying" and there are multiple user-made hacks available to eliminate them.
Star Fox Adventures is the result of this trope. Originally, the game was to be called Dinosaur Planet and had no ties whatsoever with the Star Fox franchise. Krystal and a male fox were the main characters. But since Nintendo was behind schedule with a Star Fox sequel, they forced Rare into changing the plot and characters around. The male fox was axed, Krystal was aged up and became the Distressed Damsel, and Fox McCloud became the hero of a game that had little to do with what he does best: flying around in space and blasting bad guys. Suffice to say many fans of the franchise still hate this game — even though it's not a bad game per se.
- Well, Sabre, the character Fox replaced, is a reference to Sabrewulf (so he's a wolf) and Krystal was originally an orphaned cat back then. It was also supposed to be a Nintendo 64 game.
The end result from Inherit The Earth was defined by Executive Meddling. Originally intended to be a mature game, the publishers saw that the main character was a fox and forced the developers to cater to the 8-12 market at every turn (Because every Funny Animal story is kid-friendly, right?). Then refused to let the developers create a sequel.
The Sony Playstation game Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro had the final level originally take place on the top of the World Trade Center. This is confirmed by the original level title, "Top Of The World", and dialogue spoken by Peter during the original cinematic prior to the final level. After the events of September 11th, 2001, the game was pulled from manufacturing, and the level designers placed a bridge between the two towers to make the comparison to its real-life counterpart less obvious. Given the fact that Activision and Vicarious Games feared the content might be "insensitive" for families after the event, their meddling was obvious.
- And pretty well justified, since it would've been far Too Soon.
The story goes that one of the designers of Full Throttle, a game about a biker who kicked the crap out of people and was investigating the brutal bludgeoning murder of an old man by a ruthless Corrupt Corporate Executive who had also ordered the old man's daughter killed, and had further framed him and his gang for the foul deed, had an idea where the lead goes on a peyote-fueled quasi-dream sequence that took place inside his own head. The executives at Lucas Arts said no, as that would be inappropriate material. That designer nonetheless held onto the seed of the idea, and eventually created Psychonauts.
Whether it was a more executive decision or not is unknown, but apparently the 'Meat Flag' muliplayer game mode for Gears Of War 2 by Epic Games was renamed 'Submission' at the behest of the PR team at Microsoft.
The notorious Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros games on the Phillips CD-i system were a result of several years' worth of Executive Meddling. During the early nineties, just as Sega was coming out with the Sega CD/Mega CD, Nintendo decided to develop a CD-based addon of their own for the Super Nintendo with Sony, one that would be able to play new, 32-bit CD-based games in addition to the original SNES library. A while into their co-operation, however, Nintendo realized that letting just anyone develop games for the CD addon meant that Nintendo would lose their absolute control over the games released on their systems, so they decided to give Sony the cold shoulder and, completely by surprise, announced that they were going to work with Phillips on the CD-addon from there on. Nintendo's CD addon never saw the light of day, and to compensate for their hard work, they gave Phillips the right to publish games based on four or five Nintendo characters. The worst part for Nintendo? Sony continued the project by themselves, creating the Sony PlayStation, which pushed Nintendo into a slump from which they didn't recover until the Wii.
Tiberium was to be the second FPS set in the C&C universe. It had a solid, original concept at its heart: you play as a GDI Forward Battle Commander, actively leading your AI-controlled troops from the front lines. It had a terrific art style; everything in the game world had a realistic, hard sci-fi look to it. It had the fans of the series salivating with anticipation... and then was suddenly canceled with no reasoning cited other than "failing to meet quality standards." Shortly after the game's cancellation, several disillusioned developers of the game began posting on Gamasutra, and from these testimonies comes a rather depressing tale. It seems that the project was doomed by its leadership, or lack thereof. According to the posters at Gamasutra, many of the lead producers (and there were apparently several) were less experienced than many of their subordinates and were only recently promoted to their positions. There was much jockeying for power, with each producer trying to outdo or replace the work done by their predecessors (including gutting the FPS/RTS mechanic at its core). At least one poster claims these managers were actively trying to sabotage the project and thus save face rather than have a broken game released with their names attached. Even if only half of it is true, it's a fact that this game was in development for a good 5 years, getting nowhere, and no one seemed to want to save it.
For its American release, the European game Fahrenheit had its name changed to Indigo Prophecy to avoid confusion with the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 911, and to avoid the dreaded "Adults Only" rating, they excised the game's two sex scenes. Apparently, the cinematic, subdued sex is adults-only material, but opening the game with the main character hiding his tracks after unwittingly commiting murder is just Rated M for Money!
- Interestingly, the game's director has said on occasion that he actually likes "Indigo Prophecy" better as a title, and wishes every region carried it (not to mention the fact that the game continuously uses centigrade to signify temperature). As for the sex scenes compared to the violence, well, welcome to America.
- The apparent reason for the game's story taking a nosedive into Crazyland is that the developers ran out of time and money before the could finish it the way they wanted.
Super Mario Bros 2 came into being because Nintendo of America didn't think the original Japanese game of that name was different enough to the first one.
- Which it wasn't. It was a frigging level pack.
- Wasn't that because Nintendo of America thought that the real Super Mario Bros 2 was "too hard" for American gamers?
  - Not unreasonable. Have you ever played SMB 2? mario+ bros+ 2 Take a look.
  - Might be both. Either way, the decision ended up being for the better in the future if we look at all the things imported from that game.
  - Of course, thanks to the fans discovering what was the real Mario 2, now they argue over what is considered to be the true sequel to Super Mario Bros.
When the trailers for Resident Evil 5 featured a white man mowing down a sea of black Majini (zombies), cries of racism ensued, led by Newsweek game reviewer N'Gai Croal. Producer Jun Takeuchi and Capcom claimed not to be influenced by the moral panic, but the following trailer depicted racially diverse zombies, including Arab (if it's North Africa, fine) Majini, and later a new female African sidekick was unveiled.
- In the actual game, you fight spear throwing savages, so at least you can't fault them for being overly sensitive.
  - Wait, what? A white man mowing down hordes of Spanish peasants is A-OK, but Africans cause a major outcry?
  - It's because Violence is A-OK as long as it's white on white, but people cry foul when it's White on Black. As long as it's not interracial violence, everything's bueno.
Tetris: The Grand Master: ACE, as well as the TGM series in general, was a major victim of Executive Meddling. Since mid-2005, Henk Rogers of The Tetris Company mandated that to be licensed, all Tetris games must have certain gameplay aspects, including infinite rotation and the (extremely complex and unwieldy) "Super Rotation System". As a result, what was supposed to be a console port of the most challenging commercial Tetris game ever made ended up in a Porting Disaster that required developers to completely rewrite the engine to accomodate the Super Rotation System, resulting in a much easier, watered-down game that lacked virtually all the staples of the TGM series, including the famed difficulty that made it so popular in the first place. Since then, Arika has yet to make another Tetris game.
- And despite all of this, Arika is very stingy about fans making clones of their games to counteract the lack of a proper console TGM port. If you decide to upload a video of yourself playing the clones Heboris or Texmaster on YouTube, prepare to remove all references to TGM and either game's title unless you want Arika to have your video taken down. This video sums up Arika's and the TTC's meddling, and, as a Take That to said meddling, showcases a variety of Tetris clones in a catchy music video. Ironically, people playing Tetris clones have since then put "this fan game video will be flagged" in their videos' tags as a Shout Out to that video and as a secret handshake to other fans looking for TGM videos.
  - It Gets Worse in May of 2009: Arika is now asking YouTube to wipe out videos of Lockjaw, another Tetris clone. Even if said videos are of people playing the "40 Lines" mode, which has almost NOTHING to do with Arika or TGM. Cue the Wall Banging!
Tomb Raider had some meddling in its early life. After the huge success of the first Tomb Raider game, producers wanted to make Lara Croft more appealing to the male demographic. Toby Gard, the game and character's creator, hated the idea of changing Lara just to appeal to the fans and he felt like he had less control over his creative ideas. He wound up leaving Core in disgust, which may explain the series' decline over the Playstation and early Playstation 2 era.
- And then he returned to aid in the development of Legend and Anniversary, both of which saw drastic modification in Lara's character from the previous games. Your mileage will vary regarding whether or not this has had a positive effect on the series, as well as regarding the "decline" seen in the Playstation era.
Microsoft requires all Xbox 360 games to have a list of achievements for the players to unlock. This may explain on why some achievements are a waste of time or are super easy to get. In addition, any out-of-the-box game has to have exactly 1000 gamer points. Add-on content can up this.
- Ostensibly, this is a way for Microsoft to give gamers a permanent sense of achievement (no pun intended) in playing the games, though it's also become like leaderboards, where they matter mostly for bragging rights. Some games have well thought out Achievements that are unlocked when you complete a certain section of the game or reach a certain story event, some... don't. And then some games have intentionally ludicrous ones, such as the Achievement you get in The Simpsons Game... for pressing the 'Start' button (Though the game itself is an Affectionate Parody of the entire video game genre and industry.).
- Or the game of Avatar The Last Airbender, in which all of the achievements (worth 1000 gamepoints) can be completed in the first 15 minutes in the tutorial mission.
  - Some horribly cynical people have suggested that some developers put ridiculously easy achievements in games as a marketing tactic, as there's a small but obsessed group of gamers out there who will buy the game just for a quick boost to their gamerscore. If it's a naff licensed game that'll sell like hot cakes with kids but otherwise hold no appeal to the "hardcore", then it might just be a worthwhile ploy.
- When Sony announced Trophy support for the PS 3, there were cries that they'd be just like Achievements. Not so, cried Sony: trophies were entirely optional for the developer. Fast forward eight months, and Trophies are now required in all new PS 3 games. Although they lack gamer points, games that are released on the Xbox and PS 3 at the same time (or on the Xbox first) are exactly the same, requirements and all.
- This is arguably for the better, as achievements give players "tangible" results for what they do, breathing new life into a game they'd have put down otherwise. Also, requirements for achievements sometimes reveal things that are rather clever/interesting that a player wouldn't have thought to do otherwise.
  - On the other side of the coin, most people do achievements just for the sake of getting them and then never play in the new style again or put the game back down.
Xenosaga had heavy meddling done to the series. Of note: Xenosaga II where Ziggy's back story was removed and made into a cell phone game that was only available in Japan. Not to mention the strange decision on Namco/Bandai of America's part to remove blood in Xenosaga III despite the previous games having had blood with the same T rating.
As many gamers and reviewers have noted, the title of Beyond Good and Evil has little to do with the actual game (in which good and evil are pretty obviously defined, and there's nary a dying god or abyss gazing also in sight). The title, however, was a result of meddling. The game was originally announced as "Project BG&E", with the "BG&E" standing for "Between Good and Evil". The title was originally meant to be a reference to the way a photograph can fall anywhere on the sliding scale of Character Alignments. The higher-ups didn't like it, and the Nietchze reference was shoehorned in.
- The actual gameplay got meddled, too. The game was trapped in a mild Development Hell, and was originally intended to be much longer. It was intended to stretch to cover other planets, instead of the one (and the moon) in the final game. Concerns over development time cut the whole game short, so that the brand-new IP that no one knew how to handle could be released right alongside the highly-anticipated return of the Prince Of Persia series.
Perfect Dark Zero started out on the Game Cube, then Microsoft bought Rareware from Nintendo in 2002 so they had to restart the development of the game for the Xbox. When they were almost done, Microsoft asked them to transfer Development to the Xbox 360, and they wanted it to be a launch title. So, Rare was rushed while they were making the game, and they had to have 700,000 discs ready before the Microsoft certification was complete, to meet the Xbox 360 launch date. Rare also did not have the full Development Kits for the 360, and the one they had was only capable of around 1/3rd of the 360's graphical capabilities. Overall, because of all of this it took Rare 5 years to make this game.
DJMAX games from DJMAX Portable Black Square onwards (save for DJMAX Technika) have an "auto-correct" feature that will hit the correct note for you if you hit the wrong button. It's speculated that Pentavision implemented this feature to avoid legal issues with Konami.
At some point after releasing Tales of Eternia, Namco (and after the merge, Bandai Namco) decided not to localize any other 2D Tales game. For that reason, many great Tales games never got to America (except for Tales of Phantasia due to special reasons), such as Tales of Destiny 2, Tales of Rebirth, and Tales of Hearts. Tales of Eternia even got a PSP port in 2005, but despite the fact that said port was released in Europe no American version is in sight.
- Of course Europe has never seen 80% of Tales games, all they have had is Tales of Phantasia on the GBA (very slow compared to the PS 1), Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Vesperia. Those "cameo" battles must leave a lot of people thinking "What the hell are they cameoing from?".
  - Tales of Vesperia itself is likely a major source of a lot of meddling, when the PS 3 version was announced, even BEFORE the European version for the 360 was released, with ABNORMALLY high ammounts of new content, a lot of japanese fans decided to poke about the DVD and discovered traces of these "added" contents were present in the code already. Then there is the ingame remarks like this....and the new character having identifying marks all over the 360 source code. All fingers are pointing at Sony and Namco for this one.
- Regarding Tales of Eternia, there's actually a different reason for that — It was originally changed to "Tales of Destiny II" because of potential copyright infringements with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe toy lines. Some have suspected this was the reason for the PSP port not getting an American release, but on the plus side, at least the PSP is region-free; and it's possible to get an English version.
For a game that was born from Executive Meddling, we have the Spyro the Dragon franchise in all it's glory. In order to compete with the companies of Mario and Sonic, Sony realized that they needed to appeal to the "kids market" in gaming, considering most of the games in the late 90s for the Playstation were teen and adult oriented. So with the aid of Universal Games and Insomniac, they created a game that was basically Sonic as a dragon. Funny thing is, Insomniac never had full rights to the franchise (and apparently, didn't want anything to do with it, as seen in Year Of the Dragon), in which it was sold off to Universal only and it became a Franchise Zombie. Well, after the release of A Hero's Tail, long runner Sierra bought the franchise, in gave it a severe Continuity Reboot (The whole Legend of Spyro series), which due to insufficient man power and funds, created a controversy of the quality of the games. Needless to say, Activision bought out Sierra and let them keep the franchise in hopes "to have promising results," which of course, costs Sierra its better, older franchises like Kings Quest and Space Quest.
Sony America has a bad history of refusing to localize Video Game Remakes and Updated Rereleases unless they have a certain amount of new content added. Such was the case of the PSP version of Breath Of Fire 3.
Back in 2001, there were Pajama Sam, Freddi Fish, and Spy Fox remakes in development which looked promising. You know what the Humongous Entertainment executives did with them? The games were cancelled. The rights to the three series were sold off to Majesco, which eventually published them to commercial acclaim (dont' know about critical, as I have never seen critic's reviews of the games). In fact, Humongous wanted to sell all the franchises... but the MLB, MLS, NHL, NBA, and NFL did not let the Backyard Sports series get away.
A case of good Executive Meddling: Disney wanted to reinvent Mickey Mouse, so they asked Warren Spector to make a game with him in it. The result? Epic Mickey, which is quickly turning into Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
- Of course negative exists with this as well. One of the first screenshots released showed Mickey angry, and when news that he'd return to his mischievous nature started popping up parents got worried. In order to not alienate them, Disney asked that Spector tone things down a bit.
Nintendo of America in the early 90s. For example, the original US release of Final Fantasy IV had several important scenes inexplicably removed, a falling blade trap changed to a falling metal ball trap (apparently it's ok to get squished to death, but not sliced in half); Final Fantasy VI had a couple of female summoned creatures' sprites altered to show less skin, and both games had religious references removed (changing "Holy" to "Pearl", etc.). In fact, the latter happened with pretty much everything Nintendo of America touched in that time period.
Mortal Kombat received a neutering from Nintendo of America as well. The SNES version of Mortal Kombat had the blood changed to sweat, and the fatalities were severely weakened (in one example, Johnny Cage punches his opponent's head off in the original version... in the SNES version... he delivers a hefty kick to the chest). The Sega Genesis port was technically inferior, but ended up being the most popular because it contained all the gore that made the point of the game in the first place. Realising this, Nintendo of America released Mortal Kombat 2 on the SNES in all its gory glory.
The above Sonic-based examples are becoming just the tip of the iceberg, for those in the US and Europe: the recent (as of Jan 2010) cancellation of Phantasy Star Universe for the PC and PS 2 is one of the many nails in the coffin for fans of the series. SEGA cited the lack of subscribers... after the PSU team did everything possible to ensure that the developers outside of Japan received no support, no updates, and so on...even their paychecks would likely have been slashed, if it were legal. This is similar to the PSO: Blue Burst closings two or three years prior, too...
Turns out this is why the Dynasty Warriors (and in fact all of the KOEI Warriors games) have their infamous voice acting; the localizations have to be done on schedule regardless of quality, and the international subsidiaries need the permission of KOEI Japan to use the original voice acting; that hasn't been the case in America since Samurai Warriors in 2004, and Dynasty Warriors 3 before it.
According to recently-ousted creative leads Jason Ward and Vince Zampella, Activision demanded that Infinity Ward produce another Modern Warfare game. Given eighteen months to work on a title they didn't want to, we got Modern Warfare 2. That was supposed to be the whole title until Activision forced "Call Of Duty" onto the package to retain brand identity despite Infinity Ward intending Modern Warfare to be a Spin Off. Now Activision is farming Call of Duty out to other developers they own to pump out at least one more Call of Duty game a year. What Activision did to Ward and Zampella to thank them for making them a product that had the single biggest opening weekend of any entertainment product ever defines Corrupt Corporate Executive.
If it weren't for those meddlin' executives we'd be short one poker playin' hobo.
Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker was subject to executive meddling both in Japan and im America: For Japan, it ended up having to edit the torture scene so Strangelove would use a device called "Laughing Rods" that would essentially tickle the victim in order to keep its rating in Japan, and future references to the torture were either omitted or just vaguely referenced for the same reason as well, to which Hideo Kojima expressed disappointment in his twitter account. This actually leads to an interesting role reversal, as the countries outside Japan actually get the Torture scene unedited. Countries outside of Japan also have similar cuts due to executives, although nowhere near as drastic. You know the Tortilla Chips, Lime Soda, Zero-Calorie Soda, Spicy/Great/Future Curry, and Men's Cologne recovery items as well as the Solid, Liquid, Solidus, and Super Magazines? Well, in the Japanese version, those were actually real life products (Namely Doritos, Mt. Dew, Pepsi NEX, Bon-Curry/Bon-Curry Gold, AXE Bodyspray, and various Japanese magazines, respectively), but their names were changed because of the strict copyrighting laws outside Japan.
- Peace Walker actually has actual Executive Meddling in-game (or rather: Executive-Branch meddling.). In both EVA's discussion tapes and Strangelove's Memories, it delves quite a bit into the Mercury Project that The Boss participated in. For one thing: things were going smoothly for the project up until the Department of Defense, primarily out of fear and an extreme sense of competition against Soviet Russia due to recent intelligence suggesting that they actually will send a man into space, had the Mercury team install a window into the spacecraft that she was going to be launched in at the last moment (well, close to it anyways if [[ifyouknowwhatImean you get my drift]]), using the whole "She's been irradiated once, and thus she will be immune to the radiation in space" to justify their decision, to which Strangelove never bought since she knew due to her rational and logical nature that her being irradiated once would actually achieve the exact opposite effect. Turns out that the entire thing ended in complete disaster: While The Boss did end up seeing the Earth and ultimately spawned her will, the spacecraft due to their rushing the project to beat Yuri Gagarin into space ended up crashlanding far beyond the recovery point, nearly causing her death, and frying her a lot in the process, and she ended up in a coma for six whole months. This also meant that contrary to what The Boss stated in her final speech, she did not actually participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion, as she was in a coma during that time. Also, thanks to the DOD's failure, Yuri Gagarin was officially the first man in space, even though The Boss beat him by a few seconds, and as a result, the DOD and everyone else in the military brass/government started hating on her despite the fact that the whole failure was their fault.
Conker's Bad Fur Day was a rather infamous example of executive meddling. Originally, the premise of the N64 Conker game was supposed to be vastly different: playing out to be very similar to something like Banjo Kazooie, or in-series, Conker's Pocket Adventure. However, the executives at Rareware started to become fearful that fans may not like the platformer because it was too similar to Banjo Kazooie, and after a very negative critique during the testing stages, Rare retooled the franchise causing it to be aimed at a more mature crowd, including sex references, alcoholic beverages, and lewd behavior — which resulted in poor sales.

Web Original

Spoofed in the League of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions with the Evil K-NIT TV-47 Executive.
Parodied in the series Revisioned: Activision, which has an executive trying to force two writers to remake the Atari game Kaboom for modern audiences. At one point, he even flips through a guide of "Screenwriting for Meddlers".

Western Animation

Disney meddled heavily in the third season of Gargoyles as it transitioned from weekday afternoons to Saturday mornings — ultimately firing series creator Greg Weisman.
- Said third season, "The Goliath Chronicles", is considered so bad by Gargoyles fans that they regularly disregard its existence... save for the first episode of the season, which is legitimately canon thanks to the Weisman-helmed Gargoyles comic.
- An example of Executive Meddling that had a positive effect- the studio apparently told Greg Weisman that he needed to introduce a human supervillain who was capable of going hand to hand with Goliath and be a genuine threat (Xanatos, the most prominent and dangerous human villain, could only accomplish this feat with a special suit of Powered Armor]]). The resulting character was popular Gargoyles Anti Villain Macbeth.
Disney Channel's practice of ending production on any show that has reached 65 episodes. Kim Possible was popular for three seasons and still got cancelled. This was not the first time the 65 episode "limit" for kids' shows caused consternation among the fandom. It took an outcry of fan support and letter-writing to CBS to give Beakmans World more episodes.
- In the 4th season of Kim Possible, the animators were informed by Studio Executives that they absolutely had to do an Aesop-heavy episode about kids' health, so they complied, but tried to make it deliberately Anvilicious. Thus was the reason behind the creation of the episode "Grande Size Me".
  - This lead to a fairly subtle Take That in the stinger. Ron stood facing the camera, delivering the aesop. All the while Kim and Monique stood in the background trying to figure out who he was talking to and wondering why he was doing it.
- Here's another one. At the end of So the Drama, Kim, without provocation, kicks Shego into an electrical tower, which then collapses. Let me just say that again: the Disney hero kills the villain in cold blood. When test audiences thought Kim did kill Shego, the scene was ordered to be changed to show that she was not only alive but reletively unhurt. This was probably for the better, as otherwise Kim would wind up looking too unlikeable.
  - In an interesting twist, the network's interference was a good thing as Word of God says that the writers didn't originally come up with the concept of Rufus the Non Human Sidekick and he only appeared because the executives suggested the idea. Go Figure.
Many good cartoons on the Disney/Playhouse Disney channels kicked the can early because of said 65 episode limit, regardless of popularity. Even worse is when the cartoons are sent to a leper colony to die and sees virtually no DVD releases.
There's also a lot of rules imposed by Standards and Practices on their kid-aimed action shows. No fights in school, because school has to be a safe place. Characters must wear helmets and safety gear when engaged in any imitable dangerous act — they even tried to force the producers to put a helmet on Jake Long whenever he flew. In dragon form! (On what other planet was this executive born, where turning into a dragon and flying around is an imitable act?)
- American Dragon Jake Long had the episode "Homecoming" becoming a major victim. It was originally scheduled as the season finale, until it was made clear that season two would be the last. It was also originally a two part episode where Sun Kim was to be Killed Off for Real and it would reveal Chang as Jake's maternal grandmother. However, it was declared "too dark," and the idea that Jake's grandfather had a child out of wedlock was considered unacceptable, so it was shortened to a single episode. Also, originally the Huntsman's plans involving the skulls would have actually started before being stopped, but this had to be written out, making the Oracle Twins' prophecy inaccurate. Finally, Rose was supposed to stay in New York after losing her memory, but the Executives decided that this would confuse viewers who missed the episode, so she was relocated, requiring a very long-distance vacation for Jake to bump into her again in the actual finale.
In the case of Lilo and Stitch the Series, executives didn't like the character of Angel and didn't want her to appear again, but once they saw that her episode was the most popular in a marathon of the fans' favorite episodes, they relented, resulting in a cameo appearance in the Remy episode and a rescue episode dedicated to Angel and the other experiments Gantu caught earlier in the series.
Parodied in Darkwing Duck when executives try to mess with the show itself onscreen, such as trying to change the focus to villain Bushroot. If memory serves (when will they release the last of these on DVD?), the execs at least figured that killing Darkwing off should be vetoed.
A positive example from Phineas and Ferb: When Disney Channel executives heard the song "Gitchie Gitchie Goo", they asked the creators to make a song for each episode. This worked out REALLY well.
- Also notable is a Take That in one episode aimed at Disney's Standards and Practices department. Phineas and Buford seem to be gearing up for a fight — only to have it revealed that they have to thumb wrestle when the referee finishes reading off the exact policy required by Standards and Practices.
Recent animated shows based on DC superheroes have had a few odd cases. A peculiar case of executive meddling existed in the Justice League revival Justice League Unlimited, in the form of what fans called the "Bat-Embargo". The series writers were not allowed to use any sidekicks or villains from Batman's Rogues Gallery on the show, in order to protect them for another animated series that was running at the same time, The Batman. A silver lining in this and other legal entanglements was that it prompted the producers to dig deeper into The DCU and gave other interesting characters the Diniverse treatment for the first time. They still managed to slip a few past, however. Hugo Strange makes a brief appearance as a member of Cadmus and the Unlimited episode "Grudge Match" opens showing a shadow that is unmistakably Nightwing.
Note that in turn, The Batman was forbidden the use of Robin as long as Teen Titans was airing, resulting in the refreshing mythology mix-up of Batgirl coming first. Nor could they use Scarecrow, Ra's Al Ghul or Two-Face because of the Christopher Nolan films.
And Teen Titans had to go out of its way to avoid using the name "Batman", though "Gotham City" was still acceptable (though that worked out well, showing the friction between Dick and Bruce that was growing just before Dick took on the Nightwing mantle).
- An example with a big upside: the renaming of Deathstroke. Using his actual first name, Slade, he sounds a) more enigmatic b) more unpredictable and c) far, far more badass. His full name is actually Deathstroke the Terminator. As one contains "death" and the other would be a copyright problem, his real name was the best option (and probably unintentionally helps distinguish him from Deadpool).
Because of The CW's failed pilot for an Aquaman series, Mercy Reef, the character was not seen in JLU's final season, and his arch-enemy Black Manta was turned into Captain Ersatz Devil Ray. The episode "To Another Shore" was to feature Aquaman vs. Manta, but his role was given to Wonder Woman instead. Knowing this helps to explain some of the episode's serious WTF moments: Why is Wonder Woman at a meeting about global warming (yes, Themyscira is an island, but...)? Why did she give a very Aquaman-ish threat to the leaders of the free world? Most of all, why is Devil Ray so pissed at her?
- Speaking of Wonder Woman, current policy is that Wonder Woman and related characters are only allowed to appear if she's one of the main characters.
Plastic Man and the Blue Beetle were also forbidden from appearing due to media adaptation rights conflicts. Those conflicts have seen been resolved, so both now appear along with Aquaman and Black Manta in Batman: The Brave and the Bold.
Batman The Animated Series had its share of meddling in its production. Executives did not think that young viewers would identify with Batman very well, so decreed that his sidekick Robin (already meddled into an aberrantly college-aged version of the character) would have to appear in every episode in the second season, something that the creators did not want, as Batman needed some time alone as a solo vigilante. A proposed story involving a Catwoman and Black Canary team-up was axed when the executives noticed Robin was not involved. In the end, the creators won out, and by The New Batman Adventures period, Robin only made occasional appearances where they saw fit (this time as a young Tim Drake version, even), but the team-up script was forever lost. A similar plot was used instead in "Batgirl Returns". (Black Canary later appeared in Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, by which time Catwoman was ensnared in the Bat-Embargo, above.)
- Meddling and censorship sometimes led to the producers having to think of inventive ways of showing otherwise unacceptable content. For example, in the episode "Robin's Reckoning", they were not allowed to show Dick Grayson's parents plummeting to their deaths from a trapeze, so they instead framed the shot so that you simply see their shadows swinging out of view, then the snapped rope swinging back followed by the audience's shocked reaction. The creators conceded on a DVD commentary that this made the scene much more effective, and even thanked the studio for making them do it that way. Track down the book about B:TAS if you want to see many of the decisions Fox censors made for them. ("It must be clear that Batman is kicking thugs in the stomach." "Try to have Catwoman land on something other than her face or breasts." "For some reason, they didn't like the hyenas chowing down in the baby carriage." etc.)
- The BTAS episode "Over the Edge" was subject to one of the most ironically positive bits of Executive Meddling known to man. Originally, when Batgirl/Barbara was to fall to her death while hitting her father's police car on the way down, the camera angle stayed outside of the car, looking head-on at Gordon and Bullock as Barbara hits the hood. The network censors objected to the blatant on-screen violence and flagged the shot. The sinister bastards at WB Animation then set the shot of Barbara landing on the hood from inside the police car, using the conventional "back seat" shot seen in so many movies. This, of course, is a much more startling and frightening shot, as the camera angle is so common and generic that the violence is ten times more unexpected. However, the censors, in a remarkable show of Genre Blindness, only paid attention to the fact that Barbara's landing was technically further away from the camera and signed off on the more vicious shot. Those suckers.
  - An interview with Dini shows him saying something to the effect of "If the network wanted us to change a scene because it was too violent or scary, our policy was to follow their words to the letter, but at the same time make it much scarier," noting that they could get away with a lot of Nightmare Fuel if they followed the words to the letter.
Similarly, when asked to do a show about Batman in High School, creative interpretation of that concept gave us the Cyberpunk dark future of Batman Beyond.
Superman The Animated Series suffered from Executive Meddling as well, though not quite to the same degree. Bruce Timm said that for some reason, DC wouldn't give him permission to have Clark reveal his identity to Lois. Ever. And it came up again in Justice League, when Timm revealed that DC again squashed the reveal by forbidding him to say or insinuate that Clark and Lois were dating — when they'd been married in the comic for over ten years. It wasn't until the build-up to JLU's (first) Grand Finale that Superman (not Clark) took Lois on a date.
"Bat-Embargo" type decisions are nothing new. Back in the days of the Superfriends, when they got to the "Challenge" series, they could not have, say, The Joker or Catwoman on the Legion of Doom, since those characters were seen on Filmation's The New Adventures of Batman. Likewise, Riddler (outside of the opening, in a pink outfit!) and Scarecrow would not be seen on NAoB. And then there was the Black Lightning/Black Vulcan controversy.
On the Marvel side of things, Human Torch was not left out of the 1978 The Fantastic Four animated series because network execs feared children would set themselves on fire to imitate him. Rather it was because Universal had the rights to the character for a(n eventually unmade) project.
Transformers: Beast Wars story editors Bob Forward and Larry DiTillio stated, after the conclusion of the series, that they had no interest in working on toy-based series ever again, due to the demands of Hasbro executives, including which characters needed to be written out or introduced. For instance, Tigerhawk was shoehorned in only a few episodes before the series end and was promptly killed off in the finale. As it turns out, they both eventually did work on such series again, as DiTillio ended up writing for He Man and the Masters of the Universe, and Bob Forward for the Hot Wheels Alien Racers series.
Speaking of which, the 2003 He-Man remake was criticized as having failed due to a severe lack of promotion for both the show and toy line, an inconsistent air time, and — for the toys — a gross mis-distribution of the figures and several missed shipments to retailers, among other things. While most of these accusations are debatable, one isn't: even years after both show and toy line were canceled, the toy line's designers Four Horsemen convinced Mattel to allow them to continue to make merchandise for the series for free, extending it long after interest in it has died. In a bit of reverse-meddling, Mattel only agreed if the new merchandise were immobile statues instead of the action figures Four Horsemen wanted.
When Family Guy first aired in 1999, it was not extremely popular. As such, its schedule got shifted on an almost weekly basis. When it weren't moved around, it was put on right after football, which is considered to be the worst spot for a show since football can run on far longer than scheduled. After three seasons of this the show was canceled, only to be bought out by Cartoon Network.
Pretty much the exact same thing happened to Futurama — except they came back on a different network, since CN's rights ran out.
- The subsequent renewals of Futurama as a set of movies and then a relaunched series both began with some reference to the idiocy of the executives who shut down their business. The first movie spent about five minutes depicting the executives as complete and utter buffoons before describing how their remains were ground up to form a useful powder.
Reboot was the near-constant target of Executive Meddling from ABC. It got so bad that in one episode the network demanded that a shot of Dot kissing her younger brother on the cheek and saying she loved him be cut out for broadcast because it "promoted incest." One side-effect of this was the inclusion of numerous jabs at the Broadcasting Standards and Practices office at ABC in the show.
- In Argentina, Media Watchdogs tried to ban this show, showing the "Evil Dead" episode as evidence that it was not suitable for children. Thankfully, they never succeeded.
- The game portion of the first episode aired on Cartoon Network rather than ABC is more or less a non-stop series of "look what we can do now" moments.
  - In the episode where Enzo loses in a Mortal Kombat-style fighting game, the demon played by the user is clearly announced as Satan. His fatality is one-handedly grabbing his opponent's heads and crushing them — although the actual crushing part only happens offscreen, you still see him grab their heads and still hear it quite clearly. This is also the episode where Enzo's eye is slashed out onscreen. "Look what we can do now" indeed.
- And let's not forget the line: "It's the ABCs, they've turned on us! Traitorous Dogs!", the ABCs (Armored Binome Carrier) being Megabyte's fleet.
- At one point Enzo aims a ridiculously large bazooka at Megabyte's troops, only to discover, to his disgust, that it fired a life raft labeled "BS Approved".
- And for much of the episode about Enzo's birthday, an uptight female binome rejected most of the acts Dot was planning for the party. This was probably intended as a Take That, however, since the same episode then features Dot singing in a revealing red dress, with Enzo staring at her in what is, hopefully, surprise. Also, an awesome guitar duel between Bob and Megabyte.
NBC adopted the Christian video series Veggie Tales to air on their new children's programming block qubo, but not before bowdlerizing any and all references to Christ, God, the Bible, and Christianity. Public response eventually made them lighten up — the Biblical discussions before and after each story were still cut, but religious references within the episode could stay.
The parents' groups forced the producers of Dungeons & Dragons to end every episode with an odd, Family Unfriendly Aesop that "The group is always right, the complainer is always wrong", which resulted in presenting The Lancer Eric the Cavalier as a constant whiner, who does everything in opposition to the group and, thus, always gets into trouble.
According to the scriptwriter Michael Edens, the Disney Death of Alec Deleon in Exosquad was caused by Executive Meddling. Originally, he was supposed to be Killed Off for Real as early as in the destruction of Mars, as foreshadowed in in a Dream Sequence six episodes before that.
This gained a combined Take That and Lampshade Hanging upon the Re Tool of Pinky and the Brain into Pinky, Elmyra, and the Brain, in the form of the retool-explaining Expository Theme Tune: So Pinky and the Brain / Share a new domain / It's what the network wants / Why bother to complain? ...
- Brain even voices his displeasure, saying he deeply resents this.
- Also, spoofed in Pinky and the Brain in the episode "You'll Never Eat Food Pellets in This Town Again", where the titler characters are actually actors in a hit TV show about two lab mice who take over the world. After a ridiculously tiny drop in ratings, the executives of the show's network decide to alter the show beyond recognition, turning it into pretty much any other '90s sitcom. The whole thing turns out to be Brain's nightmare, but when you consider the genuine meddling going on behind the scenes of the actual show...
- Ironically, a year before the Elmyra retool, "new character" executive meddling was parodied (with a bit of blatant Three Stooges homage) in "Pinky and the Brain... (and Larry)". Larry does almost nothing but introduce himself repeatedly, he inserts his name into every conversation, his presence on the show is completely unexplained, Brain hates him, and by the end of the episode he gets kicked out, only to be replaced by... Zeppo.
Not even Jem and the Holograms was safe from Executive Meddling. The bosses asked Christy Marx, the creator and writer of most episodes of that series, to create a new Misfit for them. Christy attempted to make a black member for the Misfits, but the bosses rejected that, but offered her another idea: the new Misfit could be British — leading to the creation of Jetta.
- Their odd reasoning was since the Misfits were the antagonists of the show, the executives were worried that African American groups would take offence if one of the villains was black. Jetta was the best compromise that they could come up with ("ethnic," but still white).
X-Men Evolution had an example when the producers were forced to cut a scene where the character Lance Alvers saves Kitty Pryde from being crushed by a statue. Apparently, the WB execs felt this would frighten young children, not because the character was imperiled — but because it wasn't that long after 9/11. Even though this was a show where mutants with superpowers attacked each other and stuff blew up all the time. As a result of the cut, Lance is seen just holding Kitty with no explanation why, leaving viewers confused.
- The WB was horrible about jumping to ridiculous conclusions like this (see the Buffy the Vampire Slayer example). Anyway, Lance and Kitty didn't fare well with Executive Meddling at all. They were broken up in season 3 due to Kids WB complaining about too much romance on the show. Scott and Jean's relationship was spared though.
During his tenure as head writer on The Real Ghostbusters, J Michael Straczynski constantly battled with ABC execs. His tribute to HP Lovecraft, The Collect Call of Cthulhu, nearly ended up being unaired over fears that it glorified the occult. This one episode out of a horror/comedy-themed show!
- Especially contentious was the ongoing debate over the Ghostbusters' secretary, Janine Melnitz. A child psychologist hired as a consultant by ABC felt the character was too cynical and abrasive. Her personality should be more supportive and "feminine", instead. The consultant also expressed concerns that her sharp, angular glasses might scare children — and yet, all the grotesque ghosts and monsters running around were a-ok. JMS acquiesced to one of ABC's demands, making Janine a Ghostbuster for an episode. The execs had felt young girls needed a positive female role model and saw this an opportunity to do so.
- Other additions the executives wanted were more Slimer-centric episodes, and junior Ghostbusters, a group of children that followed the Ghostbusters on missions, including a handicapped member. Both were attempts to pander to different age groups. Eventually, JMS simply quit out of frustration. After his departure, all of these changes came to pass, including altering Janine's look, personality, and voice. JMS would come back in Season 6, Lampshade Hanging the changes made to Janine in the episode "Janine You've Changed". However, Creative Differences would soon drive him off the show for good.
  - In Extreme Ghostbusters, Janine is back to her original personality, Slimer is back as a minor supporting character, and no mention is made of the Junior Ghostbusters... Although the show does feature a token handicapped character.
The "puppet mode" Stinger segments that play during the credit sequence of Chowder were completely removed from their first run due to the current practice of Cartoon Network appropriating a show's credit sequence for additional show promotion and advertising with their blatant Credits Pushback (a practice becoming increasingly more common on television in the United States). Fortunately, the Stinger segments are now finally being shown, but only when the show is aired during "off-peak syndication".
Similarly, The Stinger sequences for Camp Lazlo were sacrificed via Credits Pushback as well. It's a wonder anybody on Cartoon Network even bothers with Stingers anymore.
It isn't just Cartoon Network, or even TV shows that suffer from Credits Pushback. Anytime anything happens during the End Credits you might as well write it off. Try watching The Breakfast Club on TV, really, try to. Three freakin' networks and they squeeze the end credits into a tiny box in the side (or bottom) of the screen.
Spider-Man The Animated Series also came in for a substantial amount of meddling. The writers weren't allowed to use the words death, die, or kill; hence, when Peter found out Uncle Ben had been killed, it was shown as a police officer shaking his head and saying "I'm sorry, kid." Also, realistic guns were out, so even petty thieves were armed with futuristic lasers.
- A case of executive meddling having an outright odd effect was in the character of Morbius, a vampire. The writers weren't allowed to show him sucking blood through his fangs, so he apparently has fangs for no reason, as he instead drains plasma (they can't use the word "blood" apparently) through suckers in his hands. The suckers were so squicktastic that they made the character even creepier, whereas his declarations of "I hunger for PLASMA!" were often Narm.
  - There's a joke about "making it a Blood Lite" in there somewhere...
- Another example is Carnage. In the comics, he was a mass-murdering psychopath, but in the series he wasn't allowed to kill anyone — instead he sucked out their "essence" through his hands, which was restored to his victims after he was sucked into a portal. In the scene where he acquires the symbiote he attacks some prison guards; he picks one up and makes some knives with his fingers but instead it shows him busting through a wall.
- Sandman was never seen because rights were tied up with the (unmade) original movie plans and instead Hydro-Man was used in their place.
- Spider-Man was also never allowed to throw a punch because it would make the show too violent. The writers managed to slip just one punch in the 65-episode series.
- They also weren't allowed to break windows, which also got snuck in, one wonders how they missed that.
- If that's not absurd, listen to these:
"When Spider-Man lands on a roof, make sure he doesn't harm any pigeons."
"Spider-Man can imprison a villain, but they can not be given a ticket to California to leave."
- Another positive effect occured when a mixup over villain names forced the writers to introduce the Hobgoblin in season one rather than the Green Goblin, to match the toys that had been ordered. This allowed Hobgoblin to become an engaging character in his own right and a precursor to the more dangerous Green Goblin, rather than the cheap knockoff of the character that he was in the comics.
Vlad Masters, Danny Phantom's Arch Enemy and Evil Counterpart, was originally going to be a vampire. This is pretty evident from his appearance, the fact that he's named after Vlad The Impaler (y'know, the guy who was the inspiration for the infamous Count Dracula), and that his supervillain name is "Plasmius" (as in Plasma, something you find in blood, which is what vampires feed on). Needless to say, the executives at Nickelodeon thought the idea was "too occult" (Never mind that the show is about ghosts...) and had him changed into the bitter yet still somehow appealing half-ghost villain we all know and love.
- One could argue its third season was a result of Executive Meddling; the main writer for the first two seasons was fired and Season Three resulted in heavy alterations that caused severe Discontinuity for some fans.
  - The third season was actually a cess pool of Executive Meddling. First off, the schedule kept changing, moving the show's time slot to odd times in the middle of the day. Also, some of the episodes were played out of order, and given how plots built during this season (with several major events like Plasmius becoming mayor and Danny gaining ice powers) this made the season hard to follow. Also, Nickelodeon decided that they wanted this to be the last season, despite series creator Butch Hartman wanting to make new seasons and that there was no drop in the ratings. This meant that all of the plot lines had to be wrapped up quickly.
One episode of the Beetlejuice cartoon show is basically a huge Take That to ABC's Broadcast Standards and Practices, featuring an annoying, fairy godmother-like character Goody Two Shoes who claims to represent the "Bureau of Sweetness and Prissiness" (yes, she does use the abbreviation at one point). The characters finally manage to shake her by being too Sickeningly Sweet even for her tastes, and the end of the episode lampshades actual censorship in the show, namely how the camera cuts to another character's reaction whenever Beetlejuice eats a bug.
- There's also the ratings-obsessed Mr. Monitor, who's practically the personification of Executive Meddling.
Given the three different companies responsible for the production of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) — toymaker Playmates, Mirage, and 4Kids — it wasn't surprising that this eventually crept in. Of particular note are the events surrounding the show's seventh season. After an intended follow up season to "Fast Forward" was aborted, a struggle between the three parties began over the direction for the cartoon. Among the eventually rejected suggestions were a card game-based series, a series with the Turtles caring for their infant past selves, and a completely fresh Continuity Reboot.
When a little boy burned down his trailer home and causing the death of his baby sister, the program Beavis and Butthead was blamed because Beavis was a bit of a pyromaniac. As a result, he was no longer allowed to shout "Fire!, Fire!", he was no longer able to carry around a lighter and set things ablaze, and many past episodes' fire references were edited out. As it turns out, the kid's family didn't have cable and there was no way the kid could have seen the show.
- It did lead to one memorable music video scene — the video was Wax's "Southern California", which famously features the Unusually Uninteresting Sight of a man on fire jogging down a street. Instead of Beavis saying anything about fire, he just goes into a catatonic daze of pure bliss.
- Beavis continued to hilariously lampshade this bit of Executive Meddling as the show went on. Upon seeing a monk in a video, he begins excitedly shouting "friar, friar!" while Butthead nervously prods him to stop. Beavis eventually mutters "oh yeah" and settles down again. Another time, he slowly and deliberately chants "liar, liar, pants on..." and then concludes with a distracted "whoa!"
Several aspects of the Darker and Edgier second season of Legion of Super-Heroes have the fingerprints of meddling. Superman X's existence seems to have come out of a pressing need to have a Superman with a warrior complex and even more superpowers:
James Tucker: They wanted a super-up Superman. They didn't care how we did it, but they wanted him to be more of a badass. For me, I didn't want to alter our existing Superman that much. So along with Michael Jelenic, we came up with the clone from the future. (More here.)
- More depressingly, Saturn Girl's season-long Convenient Coma and the near-disappearance of Phantom Girl seem to be the results of maximizing the ratings for the target 8-to-11-year-old male demographic:
  Stan Berkowitz: ... the network focus-grouped The Batman (and Legion of Super-Heroes) and found out that what our very young male audience wanted was more fights, jokes and costumes and fewer female characters. No surprises there... [1]
After Devil May Hare, the first Looney Tunes short staring the Tasmanian Devil was made, executive Eddie Selzer made it extremly clear that no more cartoons about him would be made, since Taz was, in his opinion, stupid and unfunny. However, Jack Warner himself liked the cartoon, so this was overturned.
- Not that the WB animators were likely to listen to Eddie Selzer anyway. According to Chuck Jones, once while he and his frequent collaborator Michael Maltese were brainstorming ideas for a new Bugs Bunny cartoon, Selzer stuck his head in Chuck's office and said that he didn't think bullfights were funny so he didn't want them to make any bullfight cartoons. They hadn't even mentioned bullfighting during their brainstorming session, but after Selzer left, Maltese waited a few seconds, then said, "Well, he hasn't been right yet..." They immediately produced Bully for Bugs, in spite of Selzer's orders, which turned out to be one of Bugs' better vehicles.
What about SWAT Kats? Apparently it was cancelled because "it was too violent". Sure people were killed offscreen, but only a few. It's not a violent as current kids action shows (cough, DBZ, cough). The executive producer, Buzz Potemkin, even tried to save the show, but Ted Turner got it cancelled anyway. It just proves that greedy executives cancel all the good shows.
- It was less about greed and more about ego; Turner believes his are really the only good ideas, and because he had the history of Captain Planet behind him, he was able to lobby against SWAT Kats after Turner Entertainment acquired it. It's possible he gained the rights simply to kill it.
  - The interview he gave for Entertainment Weekly not four months after the show had been canceled blatantly implies this is the case:
    Ted Turner: We have more cartoons than anybody: The Flintstones, The Jetsons, The Smurfs, Scooby-Doo. They're nonviolent. We don't have to worry that we're encouraging kids to kill each other — like some of the other cartoon programs do.
  - Which is hilarious given the level of comedic (and imitatable, most kids don't have jets with missiles to shoot at each other but can easily find heavy objects to drop on one another's little heads) violence in some of those cartoons he listed.
  - Even more hilarious (or infuriating) is the fact he's being somewhat hypocritical, because his show, while family friendly, often depicted things that weren't for children, despite being a kids show and educational, and stuff that was just outright frightening to children, and the show sometimes implied polluters are just as bad as terrorists, and they're not just making a mistake, can you guess which show I'm talking about? And honestly, why would you cancel a show because you think it's encouraging people to kill each other, when it has literally no acts of imitative violence, does he think that kids will suddenly build Jets in their backyard and try to shoot their neighbors down?
  - The real kicker? Can you name the programming that contain imitable violence, partial nudity, swearing, violence towards women, ethnic and gender stereotypes and despite protests was clearly marketed towards children, a show which Ted Turner personally lobbied for at almost every given opprotunity? That's right.
A positive example: originally, the Kids Next Door were to use high tech equipment to fight adult tyranny. The folks at Cartoon Network, however, asked this to be changed since Dexter's Laboratory had already done this. This resulted in 2x4 technology, which Mr. Warburton has called one of the coolest things about the show.
Ren and Stimpy was another animated show that benefited from Executive Meddling. The Nickelodeon suits made creator John Kricfalusi do some cartoons that were traditional and heartwarming, to help offset the extreme grossness of the show. Some of these mandated cartoons turned out to be the best in the series ("Untamed World", "Son of Stimpy"). Then they fired him... but in all fairness, if you're willing to see how horrible John K. could go without Nick's intervention, watch the Adult Party Cartoon episodes.
This trope was parodied in The Simpsons when too much meddling caused Krusty to retire for the umpteenth time.
Krusty: Folks, I've been in showbiz for sixty-one years, but now these jerks have sucked all the fun out of it. I don't need twelve suits tellin' me which way to pee!
Male Executive: Uh, for "pee," could you substitute "whiz"?
Lindsey Naegle: I don't know, that could upset the Cheez Whiz people.
Male Executive: I was just thinking that.
Krusty: I can't take it anymore!
- It was also parodied when executives came up with The Poochie.
  Meyers: No, no, no! He was supposed to have attitude.
  Silverman: Um... wh-what do you mean, exactly?
  Myers: Oh, you know, attitude, attitude! Uh... sunglasses!
  Lady: Could we put him in more of a "hip-hop" context?
  Krusty: Forget context, he's gotta be a surfer. Give me a nice shmear of surfer.
  Lady: I feel we should Rasta-fy him by... 10 percent or so.
In "Natural Born Kissers", treasure-hunting Bart and Lisa dig up an alternate (and implausibly happy) ending for Casablanca. The Old Jewish Man reveals he was one of the executives who insisted the happy ending be filmed, but he literally buried it after watching it.
Avatar: The Last Airbender creators Mike and Brian have implied this as the reason for their inability to resolve the Ursa subplot (among other things). Apparently, they had plans to give many things much more closure, but this trope, along with time constraints, forced them to the end the series the way it did.
- In the DVD commentary for one of the episodes, one of the creators makes a vague reference to "certain people" who objected to the show having such strong female characters. May have been an attempt at Executive Meddling that didn't take.
The first episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes was originally going to have Jimmy dying and ending up in Miseryville as the result of an administrative error, making the fact that the show took place in Hell even more clearer. Some broadcasters were disturbed by this, so in the end Jimmy's past was simply left vauge.
An in-universe example: An episode of Daria revolved around the school holding a contest where entrants would create health and safety posters. Jane and Daria collaborate on an entry, featuring a skinny blonde girl, and a poem explaining that she has achieved this supposedly angelic physique through the magic of bulimia. Mr. O'Niel and Ms. Li love the painting, but aren't too keen on the less-than-sugary poem, so they ask the girls to change it to one with a more sanitized and curriculum-approved message. The girls refuse, citing artistic reasons, which sets off a series of events which culminates in a very entertaining scene where Mrs. Morgendorfer threatens Ms. Li with legal action.
After the South Park episode "Jared Has Aides" premiered, the episode was banned from Comedy Central's airwaves until 2009 because it depicted Butters getting beat by his parents. The creators were forbidden from treating Butters like this ever again.
- In the two-parter "Cartoon Wars", remember the message stating that Comedy Central refused to broadcast an image of Muhammad handing Peter Griffin a football helmet? That was real; Trey and Matt tried to get the network to sign off on it, but they refused. (The episode remains censored to this day, even on DVD and the Internet.)
  - Makes the entire thing even funnier to me. Think about it: The entire second part was about getting the people at FOX to show Mohammed on TV for the sake of free speech, and when it's about to happen, they see it, but we don't because of our censorship.
- "200", the first episode of a 14th season two-parter, featured the Super Best Friends, a superhero team consisting of religious figures — including Muhammad (who was previously uncensored with no problems in the group's first appearance in Season 5, though that was made and aired before 9/11 and The War on Terror). This time around, Muhammad was portrayed as a giant censor bar, except for the scenes where he was in a bear suit. A New York-based Muslim group practically shat bricks over the portrayal of Muhammad in a bear suit, and warned Trey and Matt that they might very well end up like Theo Van Gogh (a filmmaker who was shot and stabbed multiple times by an Islamic extremist for making a documentary about violence against women in Islamic cultures) because of it. Comedy Central, fearing the worst, waited until Trey and Matt delivered the next episode ("201"), then heavily censored it prior to air; they bleeped out all instances of the word "Muhammad" in dialogue and even bleeped out the entire "moral of the story" speech at the end, which had nothing to do with Mohammad and was actually about intimidation and fear (an irony that was not lost on many people). The scenes depicting Buddha snorting cocaine and Jesus looking at pornography went completely uncensored.
  - Which was kind of the point, going back to "Cartoon Wars". Trey and Matt made a conscious decision not to show Muhammad doing evil/weird/really fucked up things, but rather doing stuff that would be considered "normal" by American standards (it's even remarked in "Cartoon Wars Part II" after Muhammad's "uncensored" appearance on Family Guy that he was just standing there, being "normal"). When you go back and watch "200" and "201", it's much the same way: while other religious figures are depicted in an awful manner, Muhammad is basically just there. He's not doing anything, he barely has any real lines of dialogue, and when he is doing anything, it's pretty innocuous. The whole point was to basically depict Muhammad without trying to be crass and insulting about it, and it could be argued that Trey and Matt succeeded. (Your Mileage May Vary with "Super Best Friends", though.) It should also be noted that after "201" aired, the episode was not placed on the South Park website as is traditional — Trey and Matt refused to put the episode up unless it was the uncensored version, and Comedy Central refused to sign off on it. "200", "201", and "Super Best Friends" were also pulled from the South Park website and many online vendors, and "201" was not re-aired later in the evening (an older episode was instead played).
After the Code Lyoko pilot, Garage Kids, was made, the changes made to the show's plot and setting angered co-creator Thomas Romain so much that he left the production staff.
Word Of God says this is why Least I Could Do hasn't been made into an animated series yet. Ryan Sohmer had signed a deal with Tele Toon for 13 episodes of Least I Could Do, when suddenly notes from the higher-ups started coming in. Notes that said the show needed to "feel more Canadian", that the setting should be specifically in Toronto, that Issa should be an Inuit, that Mick should wear a Toronto Maple Leafs shirt and that Rayne and Noel should go out fishing instead of on walks. Needless to say, Sohmer kindly told them where to stick it and backed out of the deal.
Parodied in Johnny Bravo. Weird Al, Don Knotts, and The Blue Falcon team up to revise the cartoon to make it more appealing to the audience. Naturally, the kids hate it and the previously mentioned trio turn the show back to normal before the episode's end.

Real Life

Apparently, the Olbermann/O'Reilly "truce" is also the result of executive meddling
- Olbermann denied this on the air and has frequently said his decision to stop talking about O'Reilly was because he believes Billo's rants against abortionist doctor George Tiller indirectly led to Tiller's murder and Billo could therefore no longer be considered funny. Say what you want about Olbermann, but given his confrontational history with executives (he nearly quit Countdown weeks after it debuted when they tried to put Michael Savage on the show), it's highly unlikely he would stand for such meddling.
  - And Olbermann has now returned to baiting Billo (which seems to be his main hobby, or otherwise....)