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And in September 2019, Amazon announced a deal with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who had just swept up six Emmys for the second season of Fleabag. The plan was for Waller-Bridge to collaborate with Donald Glover on a Mr. and Mrs. Smith series, based on the 2005 film. But within a few months, Waller-Bridge departed the show due to clashing creative styles.
This is, by far, the funniest thing to come out of The Hollywood Reporter's article on Amazon Studios. Even funnier than the revelation that their Lord of the Rings show had a 37% domestic completion rate. "Clashing creative styles" is perhaps the mildest way you could phrase what would obviously happen when you put Phoebe Waller-Bridge (granddaughter of an English baronet) in a writers' room with Donald Glover (working-class kid from Atlanta). The only person who might possibly have thought this was a good idea is someone who has heard of both Fleabag and Atlanta but has never watched either and figures they're basically the same thing—i.e. your average Hollywood executive.
This is happening everywhere in media, by the way; Amazon isn't special. Nobody knows what "success" looks like anymore. All the previous methods used to determine what was and was not a successful show no longer apply. So execs just cobble together ideas based on bits and pieces of whatever was popular last year, throw a budget at it, and hope this somehow pays off in the form of a money bin big enough to swim in.
On the creative side, this is a terrific state of affairs if you want to be paid an obscene amount of money for basically no work. If you want to actually make something interesting, you might be out of luck.
