The Vault – TrueBlood-Online.com

True Blood’s Alan Ball had his conversation with Wil Anderson at the Sydney Opera House last night. According to the writer of this article, it was a great event and everyone enjoyed themselves.  The author has one item wrong however.  In #10, it says, “Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer started hooking up by the second episode of season one of True Blood! But apparently they aren’t together anymore, which was news to me. ”  I think the author misunderstood, I’m sure that Alan or whoever said it, meant “Bill and Sookie” aren’t together anymore.  Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer are happily married and just celebrated their first wedding anniversary.

Here are a few of the things Pedestrian.TV learned from an evening with Alan Ball: Vampires, Death and the Mundane:

1. Alan Ball wanted originally to be an actor. However, he and his friends were never cast in the college productions to which they aspired, leading him to writing, which he realised (in his second year at college) was what he wanted to do. I think I can speak for everyone in attendance last night when I say, thank God he couldn’t act.

2. One of his first writing jobs was for a sitcom called Oh, Grow Up, which involved a talking dog whose thoughts were communicated via subtitles. The idea was universally hated. Sound familiar, Mike Mills? The talking dog went on to become something of a conversational motif throughout the evening, ensuring many a laugh was had.

3. Death obviously featured prominently throughout the evening. When asked how he’d like to go, Ball replied that he would like to have his cremated ashes stuffed inside said talking dog. Again, many laughs.

4. When HBO first came to Ball with the proposal for Six Feet Under during his time at the critically-panned sitcom, he instantly clicked with the concept of a ‘family living in a funeral home’ but couldn’t commit at the time. Having been confronted with death head on very early on in life, Ball immediately identified with the horrible (I think he said ‘fucked up’) suppression of grief and emotion experienced in funeral homes, his own mother having been whisked off behind a curtain at the first visible sign of her grieving at her daughter’s funeral. His own experiences with his sister’s death and her subsequent showing in an open casket would later go on to inform his time writing at Six Feet Under.

5. Again, when first optioned by HBO, Ball was still attached to Oh, Grow Up. When ABC ‘graciously’ cancelled the flailing sitcom, Ball was free to resume writing the pilot for Six Feet Under so that when HBO got back to him, they asked him to ‘make it more fucked up.’ So he did. Everyone liked that bit.

6. The final scene from Six Feet Under makes everyone cry. Even if you haven’t seen any of the episodes leading up to it. Also, Wil is friends with Sia Furler and cried his eyes out when he watched it alone in a hotel room. Everyone agreed.

7. The plastic bag moment from American Beauty actually happened to Ball in real life. Ball was walking back from Sunday brunch through an empty World Trade Centre Plaza one day, and this bag was, like, dancing with him. Like a little kid begging him to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that’s the day he knew there was this entire life behind things, and… this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted him to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever.

10. Australian (and presumeably other international) actors have less hang-ups about nudity on-screen than their American counterparts. Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer started hooking up by the second episode of season one of True Blood! But apparently they aren’t together anymore, which was news to me. That doesn’t matter, though, because they are ‘consummate professionals.’ Although apparently things can get a bit weird now that their characters have started hooking up with other characters on-screen. Including Alexander Skarsgård, who Wil would turn for, repeatedly. Again, everyone agreed.

To read all 13 things, go to: pedestrian.tv

The creator of True Blood, Alan Ball is travelling in Australia right now and, as we previously reported, will be seen in his appearance at the Sydney Opera House tomorrow. Best known for True Blood and Six Feet Under, as well as American Beauty, the film that earned him an Oscar, all that counted for nothing as his neighbour Quentin Tarantino went ballistic over his noisy parrots.

In Sydney, Ball tells The Australian he is amazed Tarantino didn’t even bother to get in touch before calling in his lawyers, who then sued him in March.

“Not only did he sue us but he leaked it to TMZ at exactly the same time,” he says. “It was a very aggressive move.”

The macaws ended up in a Santa Monica sanctuary as part of a rehabilitation program for returning war veterans, with Ball paying Tarantino’s court costs.

His comments come ahead of a pair of public talks to be given by Ball in Sydney and Melbourne about his life and work.

While he admits the popular obsession with vampires is probably peaking, True Blood, in its fourth season, shows no signs of slowing down.

Ball, 54, says he enjoys tapping into his audience’s subconscious primal urges. “I think the show gives people an hour in the week when they can let their minds do really bad things, like the [True Blood] title song,” he says, referring to Jace Everett’s Bad Things.

But it’s not just the mythical creatures or the toned bodies that make the characters of True Blood so attractive. Ball wants to show their depth as well. He describes himself as an “elementary student of Buddhism” and says all beings deserve compassion.

He believes, by writing in a way that does not judge the characters, he creates more interesting story-lines that engage audiences. “I feel so much of pop-culture entertainment is delineated by heroes and villains. We want the heroes to succeed and we want the villain to be punished,” he says. “I’m not interested in judging characters, I’m interested in trying to show why these characters do the things they do.”

Openly gay, Ball grew up in a “very repressed home” in the southern US state of Georgia. He says much of his personal journey towards self-acceptance is reflected in his work and the characters he develops.

“Growing up as a WASP, you repress feelings until they come out as a heart attack or tumour,” he says. “Embrace the feelings, embrace the things that are not perfect, embrace the messiness, warts and all. Embrace it and don’t be afraid of it.”

source: theaustralian.com.au

Alan Ball

Below is a portion of an article with Alan Ball where he talks about True Blood and the differences of working in film vs. TV. He also comments about those that aren’t happy that he hasn’t completely followed the Sookie Stackhouse books for True Blood.  He says,  ’I don’t really pay too much attention to it,”  and goes on to say, “If we did that first of all there would be no surprises and second of all poor Anna Pacquin would work five days a week, 12 hours a day.”   

Alan has worked in both television and film, and he says the small screen is able to tackle more sophisticated story lines.

“Partially it’s because the economic models are different and partially it’s because you have hours and hours to tell a story where as in a movie you just have two hours and you have to simplify everything down to its pure essentials.

“I also feel that in America, at least, movies are all targeted at 15-year-olds and there’s nothing wrong with that, they’re the ones that are buying tickets, but as an adult I feel that TV is a much more welcoming place for complicated, adult writing.”

And Ball believes the move to more complicated, adult issues on television isn’t just limited to the US.

He says he’s recently discovered the Australian ABC series Rake, starring Richard Roxburgh, and has become a big fan.

“I love it,” he says.

“It’s so complicated and messed up and the character is such a screw-up that I get excited every time it’s on and I look forward to watching the episodes.”

While his gauge for all his television shows is whether he would like it, he says there’s no way of knowing if it will be a hit.

“I have tried in the past to work out some kind of formula and it just doesn’t exist,” he says.

“I’ve done plenty of things that I thought would work like gangbusters and they didn’t and I had no idea that True Blood would become the phenomenon that it has become.”

ALthough True Blood is based on Harris’ novels, some of the storylines and characters do deviate from the books.

This has raised the ire of some die-hard fans of the novels but Ball says he’s creating a film version of the books which has different requirements.

“There are some people who feel like we’re not true enough to the books but I don’t really pay too much attention to it,” he says.

“Ultimately I just work with the writers on the show and we just try to do what we think is the best film version of her books.”

Besides he says, the novels are all from the point of view of Sookie Stackhouse which would mean lead actress Anna Pacquin would be working around the clock.

“If we did that first of all there would be no surprises and second of all poor Anna Pacquin would work five days a week, 12 hours a day,” he says.

read the rest of this article by going to: nz.news.yahoo.com

For all of you who might be able to either live in or be in Sydney Australia on September 8, here’s your chance to win tickets to see Alan Ball’s appearance at the Sydney Opera House.

Meet the creative force behind ‘True Blood’, ‘Six Feet Under’ and film classic ‘American Beauty’ during a fascinating talk with Wil Anderson.

Academy and Emmy Award-winning writer/producer/director/playwright Alan Ball has mastered the American suburbia psyche. He is making his Australian debut appearance at Sydney Opera House on September 8; this is your unique opportunity to gain real insights into the mind and methods of the man behind it all.

To win a double pass to Alan Ball: Vampires, Death & The Mundane at the Sydney Opera House on September 8, tell pagesdigital.com what your favorite piece of work from Alan Ball has been to date.

You have to be a pagesdigital member to comment, so sign up now! Or if you’re a fan of Groupie on Facebook, you can also leave us a message over there.

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source: pagesdigital.com

The art of storytelling is part of Alan Ball’s genius. From Six Feet Under to True Blood, writer-director Alan Ball has helped change how television tells stories. It’s either that or open a lost dogs’ home, the Oscar winner explains.

The sickness is back. Yet again, the vampires have sucked the life out of Alan Ball. ‘‘I just wrapped season four of True Blood and came down with some sort of serious fever,” Ball says. ”That always happens at the end of a season, where my body says, ‘Right, now you can afford to get sick.”’

The edgy vampire drama has sapped the strength from its creator for four years. But even as he coughs and shuffles around his Los Angeles home, Ball knows the sickness is a small price to pay. After three hit seasons, series four of the HBO program is attracting positive reviews and big ratings. The series, starring Anna Paquin seems unkillable.

More significantly, it has cemented Ball’s place as one of the age’s defining storytellers. After the film American Beauty and his previous HBO series, Six Feet Under, revealed his talent, True Blood has revealed his versatility. It was probably the last thing Ball’s fans expected. Fangbanging? Really? In an era when Twilight and The Vampire Diaries have made bloodsuckers mainstream?

‘‘Alan has never been a big vampire fan,” says Stephen Moyer, who plays the vampire Bill Compton in True Blood. ”It wasn’t something that informed his way of being but he just loved the book [series by Charlaine Harris]. He just saw a world within the book.”

Above all, he just likes a good story, no matter what it’s about. This is the beauty of Alan Ball: both his storylines and his career are eminently unpredicatable. In the film American Beauty (which he wrote), the story of a suburban midlife crisis culminates in the image of a plastic bag swirling on a breeze. In Six Feet Under (which he created and co-directed), the story of a family of undertakers opens with the patriarch dying in a car crash. In the film Towelhead (which he wrote, produced and directed), an Arab-American girl struggles with her identity and sexuality during the Gulf War.

Each one was rich and layered, and so is True Blood. It’s more than just a romance that revolves around Paquin’s part-fairy telepath and her immortal paramours, played by Moyer and Alexander Skarsgard as the viking vampire Eric Northman.

‘‘I think Alan’s very clever like that,” Moyer says. ”At the heart of it, I think it’s a really romantic love story [but that] doesn’t mean it can’t be 20 other things as well. I couldn’t believe it when I read the script. I couldn’t believe how much he’d packed into it.”

With his themes, plots and characters, Ball has helped to change the way stories are told on our screens. He favours depth with narratives that encourage long attention spans. And he’s done it mostly on the much-maligned medium of television.

Ball, who has made death a recurring theme in his work. As each season passes, Ball is even more convinced that’s true. In particular, the HBO cable channel – which spawned Six Feet Under and True Blood – fosters great writing, he says, unlike the traditional network model.

‘‘When you work on a channel like HBO that is not driven to be a platform for advertisements, then there is less of an impetus for a show to grab as many eyeballs as possible right out of the gate,” Ball says.

”It’s a different business model altogether. They rely on subscriptions, so the audience tends to be older. In America, the moviegoing audience is about 15 and they’re not particularly interested in stories that are ambiguous, nuanced and really force you to engage in characters who are flawed.

”And then you add to that the fact that if you’re working on a series, you actually have 12, 24 or 36 hours to tell a story, to really track a character or characters as they grow and change. So it doesn’t have to be that simplistic three-act – set-up, inciting incident, action builds, denouement – kind of movie, which is what most studio movies seem to aspire to be.”

Ironically, this comes from a man who wrote one of the most celebrated movies of modern times. On its release in 1999, American Beauty had limited prospects. It was directed by first-timer Sam Mendes and depicted repressed homosexuality, domestic violence and a middle-aged moper lusting after a teenage cheerleader. Nonetheless, it won five Oscars, including one for Ball’s screenplay.

He still doesn’t know why. ‘‘I think it was an anomaly,” he says. ‘‘I don’t think any of us who were working on that movie thought it would be anything other than a little art-house movie. But for whatever reason … it was charmed.’‘

It was a drama that revealed beauty in the unlikeliest places. And its central image of a plastic bag dancing on a breeze can be interpreted as Buddhist.

”I don’t know that I sat down to write that and thought, ‘How can I have a visual metaphor for Buddhism?”’ Ball says. ”In reality, I had had a personal experience with a plastic bag in front of the World Trade Centre, of all places. I was walking home from brunch on a Sunday that was pretty grey and there was this plastic bag that literally circled me 15 times. I remember feeling like I was in the presence of something profound and yet at the same time something incredibly mundane.”

Ball was not born into Buddhism. He was born into southern Methodism in Atlanta in 1957. He said grace before dinner and prayers before bed, and in the summer holidays he went to Bible school. When he was 13, his older sister died in a car crash on her 22nd birthday. Ball was in the car when it happened.

‘‘She died in front of me,” Ball has said. ”She died all over me. Death stuck its big, old, ugly face in my face and my life changed. That’s why death seems to be a theme that appears in all my stuff.”

The tragedy not only infused his work, it also led to a split from God and an openness to Eastern philosophies.

‘‘I was just sort of non-religious for many, many years. And as I stumbled onto Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, it was the first time I had ever read any sort of philosophy that really made a tremendous amount of sense. What I liked that was missing from my experience of Christianity growing up was a sort of acceptance, a sort of being OK with being imperfect and not focusing on the sin.”

Apart from its Eastern influences, American Beauty featured a cameo from death. In 2001, Ball returned with a television series that gave death the lead role. Six Feet Under was bracingly original: its themes included mental illness, self-harm and, above all, mortality.

”Death is a companion for all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we’re aware of it or not, and it’s not necessarily a terrible thing,” he says. ”There’s a line in one episode where somebody asks Nate [Peter Krause],

‘Why do people have to die?’ And he thinks about it and says, ‘To make life important.’ There is some truth in that.”

Television is often lambasted as a shallow medium but Ball says it’s a great place to ask big philosophical questions.

‘‘For me, it’s been a very good medium. I don’t think anybody would ever have paid me to write the movie version of Six Feet Under. People would be thinking, ‘Well, who the hell is going to watch that? We’re not going to put a bunch of marketing money into that.”’

On television, Ball says, writers can spread their wings. As for content, he foresees zombies as the next big trend. Maybe.

”We have a line in the last episode of True Blood this season where it’s Halloween and they’re all dressed up, and somebody goes, ‘I’m a zombie. Don’t you know zombies are the new vampires?’ I’ve heard zombies, I’ve heard angels. I don’t know. That’s one of the great things about it all, nobody knows. It’s just going to be one person who does something from a place of pure passion and that’s going to catch attention.”

For Moyer, what differentiates Ball from other writer-directors is a rare combination of vivid imagination and an openness to collaboration. That has had a galvanising effect on his cast and crew.

”He’s one of the most inclusive directors I’ve ever worked with,” Moyer says. ‘‘He [shoots it] the way he’s written it, then once you’ve got it down that way, he will completely flip it on its head and do the antithesis of what you’ve just played … Usually, somebody who’s written it himself wants it exactly how they see it in their head and they haven’t got the imagination to say, ‘Right, I’ve got that. Let’s see what they can bring to the table.’

Moyer’s praise is par for the course. In Hollywood, backslapping and flattery are the norm. What distinguishes Ball is the volume of praise, and the way actors fall over one another in the rush to his auditions.

”The cast and crew would walk over broken glass and hot coals to do anything for him,” says Moyer. ”You just want to be brilliant for him.”

to read the rest of this article, go to: smh.com.au

The creator and executive Producer of True Blood, Alan Ball sat for an interview with Pedestrian.TV prior to his Australian tour which takes place in September.

The interview is very in depth and Alan talks alot about True Blood, and his other projects, American Beauty and Six Feet Under, etc. One very interesting thing I learned during this interview is that we’ll see a new way of “coming back” in Season 4. Alan says:

“After season four, people will know there’s a different way for them to come back. I guess True Blood can exist in this world where nobody really dies, ever. [Laughs] You can blow them up and behead them and explode their guts across the screen but they’re not really dead.”

Below are excerpts from this intervew that we thought would be most interesting to the True Blood fans.

In the writer’s room when you’re blocking out and breaking a season where does it start for you? What are you trying to achieve and where is the usual starting point in the writer’s room for a new season? For True Blood? Well we start with the book, with the source material. And when we come in for the season we’ve all read the book, we talk about what works, what we feel doesn’t necessarily work, and then we start going from there. The books are all Sookie’s story because Sookie is the narrator of the books, we have a lot of free reign anyway because of all the other characters that we have on the show. And then it’s me and five others and we just sort of very slowly map everything out. We spend a lot of time just talking about what we want the season to be about: Who’s the big villain? How is it going to engage our characters in a way that we haven’t seen before? We have two columns and we start giving little one line descriptions of what happens to each character in each of those episodes and then we start breaking those episodes more individually and we come up with two or three beats for each character or each collection of characters or whatever way they are combined at that point in the story and then we map those out chronologically and then we make an outline and somebody goes off and writes the first draft.

You mention mapping out the character beats and relationships and the different permutations that you can work with from season to season. Is it hard to unravel those threads then connect them again over a season arc? If it was just me by myself it would be incredibly hard. But because I have five other people thinking about it, and I have someone whose job is just merely to keep a Bible of everything we’ve done and he’s the same guy who sits there and transcribes our thoughts during the writer’s meetings. There’s a whole organization in place so that you can say, ‘did this ever happen?’ Or when such-and-such was made vampire, what exactly happened? and then within minutes he’ll have an answer because he has a database he goes into and pulls all this stuff.

So there’s a True Blood encyclopedia somewhere out there? We call it The Bible. The True Blood Bible [laughs].

Is there a logical end for you for True Blood? I’m sure there will be, I just don’t see it yet. I mean, everything ends. And I don’t want it to be one of those things that goes on for more seasons than it actually could. You know what I mean? But I do feel like there’s definitely a fifth season. I’ve signed my name on a piece of paper committing to it. And I would imagine that it could go beyond that. Whether or not I will be a part of that is another question because there’s only so much you can do and I’m not as young as I used to be…On the other side of that I’ve never had as much fun on a job and it just keeps being fun, so, who knows?

Are there any rules in the writer’s room with regard to the logic of the universe – stuff we will never do, stuff we should always do, stuff we should consider… I think we try not to repeat ourselves as much as we possibly can. I think sometimes you have to do that. If we were a presidential campaign, we would have a sign on the wall that said, ‘Emotions, Stupid’. We work really hard to keep everything grounded in characters’ emotions and desires, their loves, hates and revenge and all that stuff. If we don’t do that then we just run the risk of it being arbitrary weirdness. And I think what makes the show so watchable is that weirdness, definitely, but there’s an emotional component to it too. At least there’s one of these characters that you identify with, that you’re concerned about, and I think that if we didn’t make that the foundation of everything the show would just be ridiculous chaos. That’s certainly not what any of us want to do. We all take the show seriously and we definitely have a cast of actors who are actually very good at playing out these outlandish situations – in a way we have to treat it like it’s real. And I think I’m less interested in focusing on the mechanics of the supernatural stuff and more about what it does to a character’s emotions. I would say that’s sort of our rule of thumb.

Having said that, once a True Blood character dies, it seems as if they enter some other kind of pantheon in the audience’s mind. Godric comes to mind as an example of that. Oh yeah. And they can always come back in flashback. After season four, people will know there’s a different way for them to come back. I guess True Blood can exist in this world where nobody really dies, ever. [Laughs] You can blow them up and behead them and explode their guts across the screen but they’re not really dead.

I think the casting of the show is amazing and the audience is obviously very engaged with these characters and the actors who play them. When you are casting what kind of things do you look for in an actor? There are two kinds of actors in LA. There are people who are trained and who have technique and there are people who don’t but they happen to be really gorgeous and charismatic and you can’t take your eyes off of them. If I had a movie schedule and I was going to spend an entire day on one person’s coverage, I might lean towards casting people out of that second group. But I work in TV and I work on a TV schedule. I need people who can come in, know how to play a scene, and who know how to play the details of the scene as opposed to ‘I’m just standing in a line.’ It’s like, that’d be great if I had 90 takes of you and I could cut together a genius performance. I need someone who can give to me a very solid performance on take one. So I definitely lean towards people who are trained. I don’t even think you have to be trained, I just think you have to have craft. Some people are born with it, some people just have an innateness about it. A lot of people out here don’t have it. Then I look at it like, here are these words on a page, make them come alive for me and if you can do that then that’s fantastic but if you can do that in a way that surprises me, maybe shows me something I never saw in the material, you’ve got the job.

To read the entire interview go to: pedestrian.tv

What does True Blood’s creator Alan Ball have up his sleeve, well it’s yet again another project.

Daniel Minahan – who has directed episodes of “True Blood”, “Game of Thrones” and “Deadwood” will be getting behind the camera for the tentatively titled “What’s Wrong With Margie?”

Written by Alan Ball, the film follows Margie, an odd, yet kind woman who is pushed past her breaking point and goes on a killing spree.

Elizabeth Banks (The Hunger Games, SLiTHER, The Uninvited) is attached to star as the title character.

source: bloody-disgusting.com

Alan Ball told Pedestrian.tv which TV shows he doesn’t want to miss.

“Well right now I’m watching Breaking Bad, I won’t miss it. I love Breaking Bad. I love Mad Men. I’m a huge Game Of Thrones fan. There’s a show on Comedy Central called Workaholics about three loveable loser slacker dork assholes that makes me laugh like nothing else since South Park. And I just recently started watching this Australian show called Rake…I gotta say I’m pretty intrigued by it. I just watched an episode where a former prostitute was telling this girl that she needed to forgive her father for having a three way which included a dog. People can be good parents you know? Everyone has something about them that’s weird but it doesn’t mean they’re not good people. That’s my kind of show.”

True Blood’s Executive Producer Alan Ball will now produce a new series called “Banshee” that will serve as a key plank in Cinemax’s original programming push.

The series will be set in a small town in Pennsylvania Amish Country (the titular Banshee), according to a person who was briefed on the project, and feature an enigmatic ex-con who’s also an expert in martial arts. Darkly comic in tone, the show will have the ex-con posing as a murdered sheriff, imposing his own brand of justice while also cooking up plans that serve his own interests. Unlike the sagas of Sookie Stackhouse, there will be no supernatural element to the series.

Cinemax is working out financing and casting details with the hope of shooting this spring, said the person familiar with the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the project publicly. Ball is developing the series with writers Jonathan Tropper and David Schickler, who brought the idea to him. The trio, along with actor Peter Macdissi, will all serve as executive producers. A Cinemax spokesman later confirmed the “Banshee” news.

“Banshee” is not expected to affect Ball’s schedule on ‘True Blood.” Ball recently told the Television Critics Assn. that he’s close to a deal for a fifth season of the Anna Paquin-Stephen Moyer vampire show. The fourth season is currently airing on HBO.

The addition of Ball, an A-list name with a prestige pedigree (thanks to “Blood” as well as longtime Emmy darling “Six Feet Under”) gives a boost to Cinemax as it seeks to become a player in the scripted game. “Banshee” was initially set up at HBO but moved to Cinemax as the network began ramping up its original programming.

Cinemax plans on developing Friday night as its flagship evening of programming, using similarly themed movies as a lead-in.

source: latimesblogs.latimes.com

Alan Ball -TCA Panel

Yesterday, we reported about Alan Ball’s statement where he said, Season 5, “It Will Happen.”  We also heard from him that he will be a part of it.  However, now we are learning that there might be a twist in that story.

Alan has signed a multi-year deal with HBO, practically guaranteeing a fifth season of the vampire drama that’s sucked in big ratings for the network and become legend around proverbial watercoolers. But there’s a hitch, according to Deadline Hollywood, Ball is currently only signed on to fill the role of showrunner for one more year and might take a backseat when it continues, in order to develop new series.

True Blood without Alan Ball? Can that work? Tim Surrette at TV.com says, “Ball’s witty and kinky stamp has been part of the show since the opening scene of Season 1, and is a large part of what makes the show work.”

It is true that Alan Ball single-handedly brought HBO back from the dead with Seasons 1 and 2 of True Blood and therefore, it’s hard to tell whether True Blood will succeed or suffer without him at the helm. While he is definitely the one steering the ship, this True Blood fan knows that he is also a good teacher and mentor who has amassed a group of talented writers that know his vision and are as witty and kinky as he is so, his stepping aside might not be such a blow.

Personally I want to see True Blood run as long as it can, but even with his great writing staff, I too worry a bit that without Alan’s vision, it might suffer.

What do you think? Leave us your comments below with your thoughts.

source: deadline.com and tv.com