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Who is the Colin Trevorrow/Max Landis/Akiva Goldsman of Showrunners?
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Who is the Colin Trevorrow/Max Landis/Akiva Goldsman of Showrunners?

By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 8, 2017

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We have documented the upwards failure of three prominent white men in the last year:

1) Colin Trevorrow, who parlayed a small indie flick, Safety Not Guaranteed, into a disappointing Jurassic World sequel, the terrible The Book of Henry, and Star Wars IX

2) Akiva Goldsman, who has repeatedly been given opportunities to ruin movies like The Dark Tower, Batman Forever and Winter’s Tale.

3) Max Landis, who turned the failures of American Ultra and Victor Frankenstein into a $3 million screenwriting gig to write this atrocity.

But what showrunner is the best example of the ability of white men to repeatedly fail upwards? What showrunner continues to miserably fail into one terrible high-profile project after another?

His name is Scott Buck.

Buck got his start as a sitcom writer, toiling away on series like Coach and Everybody Loves Raymond, before landing in the writers rooms of Six Feet Under and Rome.

His career took off, however, after he became an executive producer on Dexter and eventually took over as showrunner in the final three seasons. Does anyone remember the final three seasons of Dexter? Has any show fallen as hard and as fast as Dexter in its final three seasons? Has any once great show had a worse final season than Dexter?

Does anyone need to be reminded of this:

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That final season of Dexter is also responsible for the worst television scene of the decade.

Before Buck became the showrunner, Dexter’s head writer was Melissa Rosenberg. She left after the fourth season. That’s when things began to go downhill. In the years after Dexter, both Rosenberg and Scott Buck landed Marvel series. Rosenberg became the showrunner of Jessica Jones and Buck the showrunner on … Iron Fist, the most reviled, critically lambasted Marvel series to date.

Until now.

Because yes, after the disastrous final three seasons of Dexter and the pitiful, weak link in the Marvel Netflix universe, Iron Fist, Scott Buck was nevertheless given the reins on another Marvel series.

Here’s the trailer for Inhumans.

And if you thought the trailer was bad, the pilot episode was so awful that television critics who screened the pilot were left feeling unbearably awkward about having to ask questions of Scott Buck, et. al, about a show they clearly neither liked nor could make sense of:

The first review? Not good.

Footage from the series was not received well by fans at Comic Con, either:

And yet, if there is anything we have learned from Trevorrow, Landis, and Goldsman, Buck’s career will surely continue to fail upwards. Inhumans probably will not survive until December, and by January, Scott Buck will probably be running yet another high-profile series. Maybe they’ll give him one of the Game of Thrones spin-offs.