Even though there are hundreds of great stories about producers and showrunner's I rarely write about them unless they also involve some celebrity because it's hard to describe a showrunner to a point where you could even garner a guess. This story was so crazy though that I had to write about it. The show is an almost television show. Did really well so it was renewed for another season with some conditions. The studio wanted it to be less depressing. Honestly, that was probably a pretty good note. They also wanted production to move at a little faster pace. The showrunner said sure and shooting began. Except that it didn't really begin.
Our showrunner, instead of speeding things up was actually running things even more slowly. Entire days of filming were wasted because of the sets he was having built. Massive sets from scratch built in public places that were taking days to build instead of hours. The scripts were no less depressing and if anything, were even more of a downer than the previous season. This led to a confrontation between the studio and the showrunner. After lots of yelling and screaming, things seemed to have been worked out. Nope.
Our showrunner just kept doing what they had been doing. So, after another week of this, the studio started e-mailing the showrunner. No response. Calling. No response. texting. No response. That left other members of the production team to deliver all of the messages which put the team on edge. Then, the suits came to town again to talk personally to our showrunner but he barricaded himself in a room on the set which was inside a television studio. He stayed there for eight hours refusing to come out. Finally he emerged, but only because he had to use the restroom. He was escorted off the set and fired from the show.
A replacement was brought in, but the showrunner had destroyed so many files about the show it took a long time before everything could be pieced back together as close to the original way as possible.