Some use the dawn of a new year to declare what they will be doing in the next 12 months, but Carrie Underwood has used this turn of the odometer to announce what she won’t. The singer took to social media Monday to tell fans that she won’t return as a co-host of the CMA Awards next November, after a successful 12-year run that began in 2008.

“It’s hard to imagine topping what we have accomplished together,” Underwood wrote on her Instagram account, “so I’ve decided that it’s time to pass the hosting torch (at least for now!) to others that will cherish it and honor it as much as I do. I’ve got so many exciting things coming in the new year and beyond, and I can’t wait to see what the future has in store for all of us.”

For the first 11 years of her duties, she shared the reins with Brad Paisley, in one of the most secure and longer-lasting hosting situations in modern awards annals. This year, change was in the air, as the CMAs dealt with declining ratings, as virtually all prime-time awards shows have in recent years.

Paisley exited and Underwood shared duties with Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire, in what was generally seen as a one-off situation for a 2019 show that was largely dedicated to celebrating the women of country music. Besides reinforcing the theme, the Underwood/McEntire/Parton teaming helped give the ABC telecast a 12% boost in viewers from the previous year.

“One of the highlights of 2019 and of my entire career so far was being on stage with the legends that are Reba and Dolly Parton,” Underwood said in her post. “I’m so proud that we could celebrate the incredible female artists that are part of the legacy of country music, past, present and future, and I’m thankful for the huge audiences all over the world that tuned in to see it. It’s hard to believe that it was my 12th year hosting and I will always treasure every show, from the 11 that I was so lucky to do with my partner in crime and friend for life, Brad Paisley, to sharing the stage with two of my all-time heroes. I’m so incredibly grateful to everyone involved with the CMA Awards all these years.”

The Country Music Association weighed in almost immediately with a response, also posted on Instagram: “We love you, Carrie! You’ll always be family to us. Thanks for 12 amazing years hosting the #CMAawards. We look forward to working with you in 2020 and beyond to help spread Country Music to fans around the world!”

A spokesperson said there would be no additional comment.

With the uptick in ratings this year, and the very positive reaction to the show among most country fans, Underwood can be said to be exiting on a high note. When Variety spoke with Robert Deaton the day after the CMAs in November, it seemed clear he wanted her back for 2020.

But Deaton also said he would like to have the whole team back — McEntire and Parton included — as he insisted that there didn’t need to be any “year of the woman” theme to bring that trio back for seconds.

“Sitting here where I am today, I would love to have the three of them back, personally,” Deaton said in mid-November. “I think that’s a magical combination, and that magic would not go away for a while. … Right now, today, with these ratings, I absolutely would love to have the three of them back and do this whole thing over again. But I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Could McEntire and Parton stay on, or McEntire alone? Clues to that may be found when hosting duties are announced for the genre’s other big annual awards telecast, the ACM Awards, to be broadcast from Las Vegas April 5. McEntire has an on-and-off history of co-hosting that show going back to 1986, and came back as a solo host in 2018-19.

The surprise announcement this year that McEntire would be handling duties on the CMAs led to natural speculation that she had traded sides and wouldn’t be back for future ACM hosting gigs — but Deaton insisted that he thinks of the shows as complementary, not rivals, and that there was nothing to rule out Reba alternating both going into the future, unlikely as that might seem.

Underwood is set to release her first book, “Find Your Path,” in March. A 60-city arena tour wrapped up in October. Her most recent album, “Cry Pretty,” came out in September 2018. It won the favorite country album trophy at the most recent American Music Awards, the sixth consecutive time she’s had an album release pick up the prize. She also won the AMA for favorite female country artist.

Bad movies often get blamed on the writers, but when it comes to big-budget studio productions, it’s more complicated than that. We think of “great writers” as visionaries, but many of the most sought-after writers are those who can solve problems, navigate multiple conflicting visions, and get the script done. Writing films can be an intensely high-pressure job, and the work often falls short of the writer's expectations due to one restriction or another. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker co-writer Chris Terrio told Awards Daily that, prior to Star Wars, he said he “would never ever go near a franchise again because there are so many compromises and so many chefs are in the kitchen.” 

So much for that.

Terrio’s credits include both an Academy Award, for Argo, and a Golden Raspberry, for Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. People on the Internet seem to judge him on Dawn and Justice League. But what a lot of people miss, when judging writers on their IMDB credits (and this goes for any filmmaking craft), is that writing is a job. Terrio was hired to do a job on The Rise of Skywalker, alongside director JJ Abrams, and though the film’s critical reception has been justifiably negative, it’s important to remember just how hard their job was.

Abrams and Terrio joined the project in late 2017, just prior to the release of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi. Original Episode IX director Colin Trevorrow, hired due to Johnson not wanting to rush two films back-to-back, had been unceremoniously dropped for creative differences just prior. Now, Abrams and Terrio had to rush out the film, with a deck stacked against them. They had to close both a trilogy and a nine-film saga in just two years - eighteen months less than Johnson had - and though they scrapped Trevorrow’s draft, they likely had to work around pre-production assets that had already been created (like the Death Star wreckage sequence originally conceived for The Force Awakens). On top of all that, they then had to work around the death of an actor whose character had once been intended to anchor the film.

Realistically, the trilogy's problems started before Abrams and Terrio came on board. Longtime Pixar creative Michael Arndt's Episode VII script had been replaced with Abrams'. Johnson wrote and directed Episode VIII solo. Despite early reports that Johnson would write a treatment for Episode IX, Trevorrow and collaborator Derek Connolly forged ahead instead, only to be replaced themselves. Without a consistent creative voice guiding the story, this was always going to be a mess. Compounding the issue on The Rise of Skywalker, however, were the choices made by its new writers. Many pre-established character and story possibilities were abandoned or reduced to clumsy lip service in favour of new ideas. We don't know the entirety of that process, but we do know how it began.

Many reviews have criticised The Rise of Skywalker as a checklist of fan-facing callbacks and references. But what's shocking is just how literal that checklist was. Abrams and Terrio's most significant addition was the return of Emperor Palpatine, introducing his family's existence at the last minute, but that’s only the beginning. Speaking to Polygon, co-writer Chris Terrio outlined part of the writing process that, in retrospect, reads pretty tellingly: 

So we actually started with just a whiteboard. [...] Literally, just writing and asking, “What do we want to see happen? These characters, where do we want to see them go? What are the feelings that we want to have? What are the stories that we want to tell? What things do we feel were unresolved either from VII or from VIII or even from Episodes I, II, III, IV, V, VI?” [...It] eventually grew to be, like, 121 pages of things that we would like to see. Gradually, Darwinism takes over, and you cross out the things that aren’t quite making it.

[...] We went back and asked, “What about this strand? Was this little promise that was made in this episode ever fulfilled?” Or, “Here’s a little aspect of this character that seems kind of interesting and intriguing,” or, as J.J. would say, “There’s always been this line in Empire Strikes Back, and I always think about that line. What do you think that means?”

This outside-in, pushpins-and-yarn process sounds like a nightmare. Starting with payoffs to off eight other films is never going to result in a coherent movie. The Rise of Skywalker is a story constructed out of “moments,” held together by tenuous connective tissue, that does not emerge naturally from the characters and their needs. The payoffs are there, but they drown the movie.

Did everything The Rise of Skywalker pays off need to be paid off? Did Chewbacca need to be given a medal? Did Lando really need to return? Did the Death Star? Or Wedge Antilles? Did Palpatine’s story feel unresolved to...anyone? Would we have come away disappointed without knowing what colour Rey's lightsaber would be, or without proof positive of Leia training in the Force? Was a binary-sunset ending the best choice when The Last Jedi did the same thing two years earlier with a character for whom it was actually meaningful? And most importantly, was any of the above worth including at the expense of the characters the movie is actually about? No wonder the movie feels impatient.

And then there’s Leia.

There’s an improv game called Actor’s Nightmare, named for the Christopher Durang play of the same name, in which one improviser reads lines from a script while the other improvisers create dialogue around them as if they were part of the improvised narrative. It’s a fun justification exercise in an improvisational context, but you wouldn't write an actual script like that. You definitely wouldn't write a $300 million movie like that. Unless you're JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio.

Dealing with Carrie Fisher's death in Episode IX was always going to be a daunting task. Abrams' and Terrio's idea was ambitious. The pair created scenes for Leia based around outtakes from The Force Awakens: writing dialogue around Fisher’s lines and reactions, using body doubles for over-the-shoulder shots, digitally replacing Fisher’s costumes and surroundings, and using a prosthetic mask and dodgy CGI for one shot each. It's one of the film's most heavily-criticised elements.

That Abrams hyped this approach as a touching tribute is baffling in light of the dramatically inert, profoundly discomfiting end product. Watching the film, it's quickly and abundantly clear the filmmakers simply had insufficient material to accomplish their goals. Whole scenes are constructed around Fisher delivering vague single-word lines or handing off a lightsaber, clearly the only actual action they had footage of. The repurposed dialogue evokes Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid without the jokes; worse, Leia's static body language recalls Ed Wood’s wife’s chiropractor standing in for the deceased Bela Lugosi in Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Like the creators of Arrested Development, whose awkward fourth season was cobbled together in post-production after actors' schedules prevented them from shooting together, Abrams appears to have been so preoccupied with the technical possibility of his editing sleight-of-hand, he wildly misjudged how well it would work dramatically. The ultimate effect is the squirm-inducing opposite of what was intended: it actually comes out feeling disrespectful. What's more, the Leia material reflects the wider film's issues: a set of predefined notes, with a tune written around them solely to get from one to the next. 

Rise’s narrative chaos didn’t originate exclusively at the script stage, of course. Films often wrap principal photography only to discover they’re missing some coverage, or that certain story beats are unclear, or that a narrative choice simply didn’t end up working - so they rewrite, reshoot, and recut. The more rushed the project, the more fixes are usually required. The Rise of Skywalker bears all the hallmarks of big, unwieldy blockbusters made like this. Scene transitions are unwieldy. Characters bark dialogue purely to explain the plot. Sequences are created out of repurposed footage from other sequences. This is all normal practice, to varying degrees. It visibly happened on The Force Awakens, and probably The Last Jedi too, and those movies turned out pretty well.

The problem with Rise is just how many aborted story threads are exposed by the patch-up job, left over from screenplay drafts and workprints long abandoned. Abrams’ two Star Wars films bear so much evidence of post-production fixes that he comes across as the directorial equivalent of a cosmetic surgery addict, tinkering and tinkering until his film is more silicone than flesh. I’m desperate to see where it started. If the released version is genuinely the better one, it speaks to how thankless writing and editing can be. 

Conspiracy theories abound regarding this film, but the truth is probably dumber and more well-meaning than angry fans love to hate to believe. Terrio’s post-release explanations have only aggravated matters, failing to adequately explain the film’s perceived slights against The Last Jedi and exposing some weird leaps in logic taken by the writers. All the backtracking and re-explaining is testament to the fanbase’s willingness to nitpick, but also to the messiness of a film pieced together like a mechanical puzzle, where emotion is a mere tool to advance the plot. Like an improv scene whose performers keep having to justify random offers, The Rise of Skywalker came out feeling written backwards, reverse-engineered from a laundry list of micro-level goals.

We all make bad decisions under pressure. We don’t all have billion-dollar movie franchises riding on them. I don’t presume to know the full story, nor to claim that I could have done a better job - films are made under the circumstances they're made under. But Lucasfilm would be wise to heed the lessons of this film and its surrounding trilogy. Stories will always play out most effectively with an ending in mind, but they have to come from the characters, and they have to be given adequate time to gestate. The Rise Of Skywalker's whiteboard bullet points might have hit their targets, but they also shot the movie full of holes.