‘Arrow’ Promotes Beth Schwartz to Showrunner for Season 7

See, I think there may have been a bit of nuance to Doyle's exit. From what I've read, I get the impression that the whole thing of it being "planned" to write him off was mostly to save face; and I think I even read that Joss didn't want to give Glenn a bad reputation if he could get the help he needed and could go back and work.
What it really boiled down to was that Glenn wasn't showing up on time, possibly at times not showing up at all, not being prepared; and overall his substance abuse started impacting production. But it was still a difficult decision to make, at least in part because Glenn and David were very close; and there was concern that David might react badly to Glenn being written off. Ultimately though they just didn't have much of a choice, but they didn't want to torpedo his career by publicizing the real reason he was written off, in the event he could turn things around, so the official word was that it had always been the plan - even though the plot development seemed to come out of nowhere.


For Arrow - I had seen one of those Screen Rant type lists of what the change in the show's creative team means; or at least what the author hopes it mean. I'll probably post it at some point, and some of the points were fair, like at least backing off Olicity and the angsty romance crap, if not outright ending the relationship between Oliver and Felicity. Some of it though went into the weeds a bit; like the author seemed to have a hard-on for Laurel/Black Canary. I would say half the list were about her, and some of them seemed redundant; like it was the same idea said a different way. And I get it, Laurel got a raw deal, and Black Canary should be much higher profiler character in the Green Arrow story, but man... it was a whole different level of conviction.

I can't guess whether or not it would be something the new creative team will do, but I would personally like to see them steer the season towards more episodic stories. Not so far as making the season 100% unrelated, but the season (for all of the DC shows) focuses too much of the season on the long arc; and over the course of eight months or so and two dozen episodes, that gets to be tedious. The important thing with one off episodes is to still tell a story worth telling; those are opportunities to build the mythos and develop characters. If you look at other classic series, most of the best things that people remember about them are the episodes that had a beginning, middle and end; and some of them may not have had long lasting ramifications that were talked about by the characters afterwards, but sometimes they did, and when they did it was often in profound ways. Buffy's "Band Candy," on the face of it, just seems like an excuse to make some of the characters behavior unusually; Giles gets to be a bad ass, Joyce is basically a fun house mirror for Buffy see shades of herself in, Snyder's a spaz. But it's also only the second time that the Mayor, the season's primary antagonist, appears; and you get gems like Buffy later learning that her mom and Giles had sex on a cop car - twice. Even better is how this episode changed the nature of Joyce and Giles' relationship; and something as simple as Giles listening to the record he played for her after her death has such incredible emotional weight to it. Buffy's Zeppo, TNG's The Inner Light, DS9's Far Beyond the Stars, DS9's Pale Moon Light (which, ties in with the arc of the show at the point as it relates to the war and the role the Romulans play in it, but it's still a very different and insular type of episode). And the list goes on. So much can be achieved in 45-50 minutes.