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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 216646" data-attributes="member: 22">The network ultimately has control of the final product. If an actor is considered sufficiently important to a series, the network might well overrule the producer in any conflict between the two. David Jacobs has said that one of the advantages of Knots Landing being less successful than Dallas was it wasn't subject to the same interference from the network; it was able to fly under the radar and was generally left to its own devices. How that interference in Dallas from the network manifested itself I don't know -- these things are rarely made public -- but it's one of the reasons I've never been very comfortable with the "everything that [allegedly] went wrong with Dallas is automatically Leonard Katzman's fault" line of thinking. I know from British television that the producer does not necessarily have control of every decision, whatever the tabloids would have people believe.When I interviewed David Paulsen [clang], he said that he and/or Katzman would take a pass at any script commissioned from an outside writer to the extent of rewriting the whole episode if necessary (uncredited), before it was put in front of the actors, so such an instance probably wouldn't have arisen. From what I understand, that's pretty much standard practice.</blockquote>