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Executive Meddling
alt title(s): Meddling Executive; Meddling Executives
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"?
Female Executive: 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!
— The Simpsons, "Day of the Jackanapes"

What network executives do to justify their jobs: Interfere in the creative process that produces television shows.

Creating a successful work of fiction, television shows in particular, is — whether the execs want to admit it or not — a crapshoot. They don't really understand what makes a hit. Nobody does! You can never predict what the audience will like until they actually see it. 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."

Usually this guts the chosen show of whatever was unique and interesting about it just as it was hitting its stride and gathering an audience who appreciated its differences and direction. Sometimes it can even sink a show. In the absolute worst cases, Executive Meddling can lead to severe Adaptation Decay, involuntary Character Derailment and Writer On Board. It can even result in Too Good To Last if an executive somewhere in the chain of command takes a particular dislike to a series. Writers and directors may strike back in the form of Writer Revolt.

Sometimes this is the result of executives' apparent belief that television audiences consist entirely of superstitious low-grade morons who will flee from anything the least bit unusual. When the results are not what they expect, it results in rounds of finger-pointing and denial.

Network executives also meddle in shows for ego gratification and for the delight in exercising power. If a show they "improved" becomes (or stays) a hit, they will then take all credit for the program's success.

See also Executive Veto, Screwed By The Network, Media Watchdog, and Moral Guardians. Contrast Protection From Editors and Creator Breakdown: Executives aren't always wrong. (But that's the way to bet.)

Examples:

Live Action TV
  • Executive Meddling almost stopped the Daleks from ever appearing on Doctor Who. Sydney Newman, Who creator 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.
    • 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.
  • The John Laroquette 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.
  • 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.
    • 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.
      • Which means that the executives were right, and it would have implied the crew was promiscuous. You sir have just broken my mind.
      • To be fair, the role model for the crew was Captain Kirk...
    • 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.
    • 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.
  • 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. Mary Tyler Moore having 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.
  • 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 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. Merkerson is still on the show, having appeared in more episodes than any other cast member, and Hennessy lasted three seasons before getting her own show, Crossing Jordan. Florek eventually returned to his role as Capt. Cragen on the successful spinoff Law And Order: SVU.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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. 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.
  • Tracy Tormé 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 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, 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.
  • 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. Personally, this troper thinks that would have been significantly superior storytelling.
      • 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.
  • 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. Fortunately, the executives decided to let Moore call the shots in the 4th season.
  • 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 proper 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 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.
  • 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.
  • Soon after 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 durin, and Donald Trump causing Vince Mc Mahon'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.
      • Two words: [[Squick 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.
  • NBC's "Green Is Universal" week; one week 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 starts to assume his eco-hero personality even when off the set.
    • Thank god they never tried to drag Heroes into this - instead, they just forced them to change the logo to be green.
    • 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...
    • And they're doing it again this year! Executives never learn.
  • 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.
  • Many Torchwood fans believe the romance between Jack and Ianto was deliberately played up in the second series because the producer knew how popular it was among the show's fanbase. Seeming to back this up is an interview with John Barrowman after the end of series one, in which he stated he would have thought it more likely for Jack to end up with Gwen.
  • 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.
  • 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, and [[Transplant transplanted]] Spike into the show.
  • Vogler.
  • An entire TV movie of the show iCarly is based solely on the fact that iCarly got a TV contract and the director replaced the characters with a talking barneyesque dinosaur. They killed off one of the major characters in the show (in the movie) and got the original director to be the assistant to the new director.
  • The firing of Brooke Smith, Grey's Anatomy's Dr. Hahn, for 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 irony, of course, is that her last episode aired the same week as California passed a same-sex marriage ban.

Western Animation
  • Disney has had a few cases 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.
    • Robin Williams signed with Disney to do the character Genie in Aladdin, even receiving lower paychecks, demanding that his name wasn't used in advertisments, and that the ads didn't feature the Genie alone, or not feature him in over 25% of the space. 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.
    • Disney meddled heavily in the third season of Gargoyles as it transitioned from weekday afternoons to Saturday mornings — ultimately firing series creator Greg Weisman.
    • The Disney Channel's recent practice of ending production on any show that has reached 65 episodes. Kim Possible was popular for three seasons and still got ended. 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 as deliberately Anvilicious. Thus was the reason behind the creation of the episode "Grande Size Me."
    • 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.
    • 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...
    • 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! (What other planet was this executive born, where turning into a dragon and flying around is an imitable act?)
    • In the case of Lilo And Stitch The Animated 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.
  • The DC Animated Universe also has a few odd cases:
    • A peculiar case of executive meddling existed in Justice League, 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. The first season finale "The Savage Time" featured just about all of Batman's sidekicks in their civilian identities as members of the alternate Batman's resistance cell, and the Unlimited episode "Grudge Match" opens showing a shadow that is unmistakably Nightwing.
    • And how did Robin being in the Teen Titans cartoon escape this Embargo?
      • Because he's never explicitly connected to the Batman universe besides subtle clues. I don't know why that works.
    • Batman The Animated Series had its share of meddling early in its production. Executives did not think that young viewers would identify with Batman very well, so decreed that his sidekick Robin would have to appear in every episode, 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 Robin only made occasional appearances where they saw fit, but the team-up script was forever lost.
      • Black Canary later appeared in Justice League and Justice League Unlimited.
    • 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 that this made the scene much more effective. Oddly enough, however, a scene in the third season is allowed to show Batgirl falling to her death, including the impact onto the hood of a car. True, it was All Just A Dream, but it was still pretty surprising.
    • Similarly, when asked to do a show about a Batman in High School, creative interpretation of that concept gave us Batman Beyond.
      • So, Spider-Girl is "Spider-Man in high school after a sex change"?
  • 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.
  • The show Invader Zim was created when Nickelodeon asked Jhonen Vasquez to create a program to capture the edgier, older crowd's attention. When they got exactly what they asked for, they canceled the show for being too dark for little children.
    • Given how Nickelodeon treated John Krickfalusi, he should have seen it coming...
    • Vasquez later threw a harsh and very clear Take That at Nickelodeon in his comic "I Feel Sick", in the form of Mr. Nevers, the protagonist’s boss, who has had the creative centers of his brain surgically removed. Vasquez even goes so far as to make Nevers parting words a manic shout of “I'M GONNA RAPE YOU UP THE BUTT AND THROW YOU OUT THE WINDOW!!!!”
      • On a more humorous and depressingly ironic note, Vasquez originally planned to kill off Zim once it became clear the series was going to be canceled. Nickelodeon, however, forced him to change the ending and then canceled the series before the episode could air. The reasoning behind this was so the series could be picked up again in case Nickelodeon changed their minds. They didn't.
  • 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, Hasbro 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.
  • 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!", the ABCs being Megabyte's fleet.
    • At one point Enzo aimed a ridiculously large bazooka at Megabyte's troops, only to discover, to his disgust, that it fired a life raft labeled "BS&P Approved".
  • 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.
    • Such character depth and sophistication were absent from the live action movie, however.
    • Further executive decisions resulted in the cancellation of Thunderbirds after The Movie 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.
  • NBC adopted the Christian video series Veggie Tales to air on their new children's programming block qubo, but not before cutting 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.
    • This troper is confused as how Catholic references could be a bad thing. Were the network executives Satanists?
  • The parents groups forced the producers of Dungeons & Dragons to end every episode with An Aesop that "The group is always right, the complainer is always wrong", which resulted in presenting 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 De Leon 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? ..."
    • Not to mention that Pinky And The Brain was essentially killed by network execs, who demanded that the show be neutered and turned into just any other "talking animal show".
  • 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 Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Ironically, when the movie 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.
  • Not even Jem And The Holograms were 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.
    • And were these executives KKK members?
      • Just the opposite, this was actually a case of Politcal Correctness Gone Mad. 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 of Executive Meddling 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 rediculous conclusions like this. Remember that the "Graduation" season finale of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" almost didn't air in the wake of the Columbine tragedy. Apparently, we viewers would find the sight of a high school being destroyed by a giant demon-thing too similar. Yeah...
  • 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.
    • Having seen it, it doesn't glorify the occult any more than any other episode of that series does. The cultists were bad guys, so was Cthulu and so were his Star Beasts.
    • 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.
  • The "puppet mode" Stinger segments 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 (a practice becoming increasingly more common on television in the United States). The first time this troper was even aware such a Stinger segment existed on the show was when a Flash Forward Breaking The Fourth Wall sequence revealed a freeze-frame of the Stinger as part of the gag. Of course, the actual Stinger sequence was never shown during this airing. 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 for additional show promotion and advertising as well. It's a wonder anybody on Cartoon Network even bothers with Stingers anymore.
  • 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 unintentionally good effect was in the character of Morbius, a vampire. The writers weren't allowed to show him sucking blood through his fangs, so instead made him drain plasma through suckers in his hands. However, these suckers were so squicktastic that they made the character even creepier.
  • Vlad Masters, Danny Phantom's arch-rival, 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 many fans.

Film
  • 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.
    • Executive Meddling is also the reason why he can't get his At The Mountains of Madness script off the ground. Supposedly, the screenplay is religiously loyal to the H.P. Lovecraft original, complete with all the subtlety Lovecraft was known for, and no gratuitous sex scenes, with makes it anathema to producers. Nonetheless, it appears to be being made.
  • 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 1994, 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. A later screenwriter, 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, often robotic.
    • Peters had requested of Neil Gaiman that Dream fistfight a spider, among others, in the proposed and quickly abandoned original The Sandman adaptation attempt.
    • Peters finally got his 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 that resembles Kevin Smith 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".
  • 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 can 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".
  • The traitorous Lt. Valeris in 1991's Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was originally written to be Lt. Saavik from the 3 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 CreatorMeddling.
  • 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.
    • This is an example of Your Mileage May Vary, as this troper personally loved Spider-Man 3, especially the end of Harry Osborn's story and the depiction and ultimate defeat of Venom. And this troper absolutely freaking hates Venom in the comics.
  • 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 Jerk Ass 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.
  • 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 blockbuster franchise. Can't have anything remotely edgy in a PG-13-rated 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 can include it in the opening scenes of the Subtle Knife movie. So, Roger WILL die in the next movie.
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • The film 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, in spite of the fact that many considered the alteration to be more disturbing than previously. 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