One thing that frustrates me immensely about tv fandom is that when something goes horribly wrong with the story it's extremely difficult to know who to blame. When things got wacky with Harry Potter, there was clearly exactly one person who was responsible for most of the problems. But the huge number of people involved in the production of a single television episode makes it tricky to properly assign blame. To my knowledge we don't have comprehensive accounts of who made which decision in the writers room (and this discussion seems to have highlighted some instances in which writers and actors may have been valuing appearances over veracity when giving interviews that do discuss these issues), and that makes it terribly easy for people to guess and get it wrong, and to apportion blame according to who gives the most obnoxious interviews.

I would be terrified to attempt to write a history paper discussing exactly who decided what regarding season six of Buffy because I'm skeptical of the sources that we have - interviews and commentaries. This makes me hesitant to assign blame to particular people involved in the creative process, as opposed to saying "this aspect of the text didn't work." We can give kudos to people for writing particular episodes, but when we turn to the larger creative process I'd like a lot more evidence about who contributed what before I went around blaming people in a serious way.

TV makes me get very, very postmodernist about authorial intent.