End of an Epic: Part 2: Decline and Fall
Some rumour and speculation on reasons for the cancellation of "Destan"
If you haven’t seen Destan I’d strongly encourage you to go watch some of it. There are at least Seven Good Things about it, as I listed in my last post, and if you read any further you will encounter spoilers.
**Serious spoilers after this**
Insider Birsen Altuntaş posted on 01 August the following tidbit (Google translated):
The "Destan" series of ATV, in which Ebru Şahin played the leading role, was planned to continue in the new broadcast period. However, Mehmet Bozdağ, the boss of producer Bozdağ Film, announced that he would make the final with a sudden decision. Bozdag, who had a meeting about the series recently, announced to the team that worked on the project that the scripts of "Destan" did not turn out as he wanted, so he made the final decision to leave the project as it was.
And yes, I have to agree with Mehmet; the scripts didn’t turn out as I wanted, either. Here’s what I think happened.
The first rumours start circulating back in March of 2022. News site televizyongazeteci.com, which is completely obsessed with ratings, begins noting that Destan has lost its number 1 ratings position in Tuesday evening viewing to a rival on another channel: the romance/drama Üç Kız Kardeş (“Three Sisters”). I can’t actually find a good ratings summary site to link, so instead I’ve graphed the weekly results for Destan in my own charts, firstly “total viewers” and then “ranked position”.
AB and ABC seem to be separate ratings sources, and “Total” does indeed seem to be “all viewers”, but I don’t know much more than that about the sources of the data.
You can see Destan has been sitting near the top of the charts (blue line in the second chart; all viewers), before losing ground slowly. It is displaced firstly by Üç Kız Kardeş, which broadcasts its first episode on 22 February and climbs to the top position by 15th of March. After that, the two shows trade places for a couple of weeks with Survivor All Star (which was actually the most-viewed show on the 5th of April) before settling into their final order of Üç Kız Kardeş in first position, and Destan in third.
Now the combined picture from the three rankings in the second chart suggests Destan is overtaken by “better” shows, and then stays pretty stable in third place for a couple of months. The absolute numbers in the first chart though, do show a slow decline over that time for both shows. Nevertheless, the producers of Destan are not happy about the drop in ratings, and begin changing things up to regain the lost ground.
If you’re losing viewers to a romance on another channel, that might suggest your own romance is not as compelling. This seems to be the hypothesis that the producers were running with, and I tend to agree: my own list of good things about Destan didn’t even feature the supposedly central love-story between Akkız and Batuga.
In fact, I’d say Temur and Tutkun had better chemistry than the main pair, and a lot of social media would agree (see my last post for a little on the #TemKun fandom). Did killing off Tutkun crash the ratings? Maybe, and maybe not: episode 14 (top rating; 08 March) ended with Temur ending the relationship (see picture), and that kinda looks like an inflection point on the “total viewers” graph; the show immediately dropped to the number 2 position and the trend maybe tilts downward a little. However, the death of Tutkun happens at the end of episode 18 (05 April, 2:12:47), and the loss of viewers after that episode is actually milder than the drop immediately before it. More importantly, the trends for both Destan and Three Sisters stay roughly parallel during late March and April, with both shows losing viewers. This isn’t the picture I’d expect if #TemKun was driving viewers towards Three Sisters in huge numbers.
By the end of April, viewer numbers are dropping towards half of their earlier peak, and the producers act accordingly. On 06 May we get a flood of rumours via Birsen Altuntaş: Edip Tepeli will no longer play the part of Batuga, the writers have changed, and several new characters have been introduced.
Swapping out Batuga seems to be an attempt to find someone with better chemistry with Akkız. However, this leads to such outrage on social media that the change is immediately walked back the next day:
Google translated:
The news that Edip Tepeli, one of the leading actors of our epic series, who gave life to the character of Batuga, will leave our series does not reflect the truth. All of the claims on some news sites and social media are false and untrue.
Unfortunately, the change in writers sticks, and Nehir Erdem and Ayşe Ferda Yılmaz are gone (I would leave too, if such meddling in my work was occurring). There is no episode broadcast on the 3rd of May, and the first episode under the new writing team led by İhsan Yıldırım comes out on May 10.
The new material is cut in as a very jarring break in the main plotline, which has to be the most annoying scene of the entire series. At the start of episode 22 we have the Khan’s judgement in progress, which promises to tie up the most interesting storyline so far: what will the Khan do when he finds out the identity of the real baddies? Having wrongly executed his favourite wife for treason, what will happen when his second wife is shown to be the true traitor? Can he go through with another execution, or will he defy the Law on the chance that he could be wrong again?
Instead we get this (S01E22 24:55). Some monsters show up (the Itbaraks), forcing everyone to work together against the new threat. Judgement for previous crimes is reserved for the future, neatly distracting the Khan from having to face up to his problems, and denying the viewers the denouement that has been building since the start of the season.
Thing is, I would have been ok with the Khan being in denial about facing up to his previous actions, and delaying punishments rather than consider defying the law. That would have suited his character just fine; a good leader who made a fatal mistake, and has been tortured almost to breaking point by the consequences. The problem is that this was just done so poorly, with such a jarring transition; you could almost see the old writers clearing their desks and the new ones moving in in the space of a few seconds.
The new writers’ plan for fixing the ratings quickly becomes clear. Batuga must become more attractive! He starts wearing a lot more eyeliner, and his hairstyle changes. Worst of all, the Great Shaman Arçuray magically rebuilds his body, curing him completely of his congenital deformities.
Its hard to overstate how much this removing of Batuga’s disability completely changes the plot of the show. The whole point was that Batuga was not meant to lead on his own, but as part of a team. If Batuga is no longer flawed, why does he need his brothers? If he is now an excellent warrior in his own right, why does he need Akkız as his claw? Does she get demoted to brood-mare now? (only half joking…)
A few viewers were lured back when the new enemy was introduced. However, a full 740 thousand of them, or 14% of the viewership, tuned out after Saltuk was killed off at the end of episode 24, and didn’t tune back in again. I was pretty disappointed myself, but you can’t blame the man for leaving the sinking ship. Another 800k viewers haemorraged away the next week. The season finale was watched by only 3.32 million people, far from the maximum viewership of 8.89 million for episode 03.
To summarise the rumours and speculations regarding the cancellation (these are not really different, more just re-stating the same themes):
Rival show Üç Kız Kardeş (“Three Sisters”) took the number one ratings slot, and this was considered to be unacceptable
Üç Kız Kardeş was considered to be stealing viewers, as it supposedly had a more compelling romance
Akkız and Batuga were lacking in chemistry
The storyline/character of Alpagu Han was overshadowing the supposedly central romance
The ratings were declining unacceptably
For me, none of the above are satisfying enough, as they are unrelated to the things I enjoyed about the show. I can see that if the ratings get low enough, then a show becomes unprofitable to produce, but damnit, they didn’t get really low until you started messing with it.
In the previous post I mentioned that Ebru Şahin had been nominated for “Best Actress” at the Seoul Drama Awards for her role in Destan. The show itself was nominated there for “Best Drama”, alongside Aziz and Mahkum. (*update* Destan and Mahkum shared the award!) Since then the nominations for the 4th International İzmir Film Festival have come out, and we can add “Best Actress of the Year” for Ebru Şahin, and “Best TV Series” for Destan, to the list. Everyone seems to agree that low ratings were uncorrelated with the overall quality of the show, and I think the first chart above confirms it: the supposed biggest rival Üç Kız Kardeş was losing viewers at a roughly similar rate, after its initial success.
The problem certainly shouldnt have been fixed by firing the writers/allowing them to leave (whichever is the case), which in my opinion led to a significant decline in quality. The writers have fallen on their feet though; check out the banner for their upcoming show Ateş Kuşları (“Firebirds”):
The wording at the top is not “From Bozdağ Film”, or “A Mehmet Bozdağ Production” or the like. Instead it says “From Ayşe Ferda and Nehir Erdem”, the original writers for Destan. This again reassures me that their abilities are well-regarded in the industry. I think we are all eagerly looking forward to seeing what they come up with.
In the meantime, there is still no official announcement of the cancellation of Destan. This leaves things in limbo, but maybe the damage has been done. We will have to see what happens.
(Edip Tepeli certainly thinks its over, anyway, as told to a goat on his Instagram. I think there’s something in that for all of us.)