Seventy Thirty?

DAMNIT. LOOKS LIKE The New York Times giveth and taketh away, depending on your perspective. There's a piece on the new Adam Sandler film, You Don't Mess With the Zohan. When I started reading the article, I think it's fair to suggest that I had less than zero intentions of seeing the film. But Damn you, Dave Izkoff. It actually sounds interesting. Some excerpts:

About eight years ago Mr. Sandler conceived of the Zohan character, an Israeli assassin who has been trained to hate and kill Arabs; exhausted by the ceaseless bloodshed, he fakes his own death and flees to New York to become a hairdresser. There he finds Jews and Arabs living together in grudging if not quite harmonious tolerance.

At the time, Mr. Sandler (who rarely if ever gives interviews to the print news media) delegated the script to Mr. Smigel, who had frequently written for him on “Saturday Night Live,” and Judd Apatow, a former roommate of Mr. Sandler’s, who was not yet the one-man comedy juggernaut of “Knocked Up” and “40-Year-Old Virgin” fame.

Both writers found “Zohan” a subversive, somewhat improbable assignment. “There was always this question of, can you make this movie?” Mr. Apatow said in a phone interview. “Because it is making fun of the fact that people are so mad at each other.”

In revisions of “Zohan,” the Mideast nations cited in the script were given fictitious names, and their ancient territorial feud became a dispute over orange groves.

However, Mr. Sandler and his team ultimately returned to a draft that did not disguise the political subject matter, believing that some filmgoers would be upset by it no matter how subtle their approach.

“Any time you do any version of comedy that has anything to do with race or prejudice, you’re always going to make some people mad,” Mr. Smigel said. “Whether your intention is pure or not, they’re going to find something to be angry about.”

To the extent that “Zohan” deals with the intractable cycle of violence in the Middle East, it is careful not to take sides, and mocks itself for making such perilous source material a subject for comedy. In the midst of elaborate fight sequences, its characters debate the region’s complex history of aggression and retribution, even as they continue to act it out. (“I’m just saying, it’s not so cut and dried!” an assailant shouts as he falls off a balcony.)

The movie does not dare to suggest solutions to these conflicts, or to offer false hope that they will soon be resolved: in one scene, three Arab New Yorkers attempting to take down Zohan call the “Hezbollah Phone Line” for instructions on how to make a bomb. In a recorded message, they are told the information is not currently available during peace talks with Israel, and are instructed to call back “as soon as negotiations break down.”

Even in satirical discussions of race and ethnicity, Mr. Smigel said, a certain amount of self-censorship might be prudent. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that people can’t freely call me a dirty Jew, like they might have been able to 30 years ago,” he said.

For now, advocacy groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations are taking a wait-and-see attitude with “Zohan.” Given Mr. Sandler’s previous work, “I would say I’m a little worried,” said Ahmed Rehab, that organization’s national strategic communications director. He added that Mr. Sandler, like all artists, has a right to freedom of expression.

Mr. Badreya, who was recently seen playing an Afghan terrorist in “Iron Man,” said that by offering Arab or Muslim characters that are in any way divergent from the usual Hollywood stereotypes, “Zohan” is a step in the right direction.

“The movie presents what happened to me,” said Mr. Badreya, who grew up in Port Said, Egypt, during the 1967 and 1973 wars and emigrated to the United States in 1979. “Since it happened to me, it will work for someone like me.”

Mr. Badreya said that the comedy in “Zohan” was not quite evenly divided between ridiculing Arabs and ridiculing Jews. “The jokes are not 50-50,” he said. “It’s 70-30. Which is great. We haven’t had 30 for a long time. We’ve been getting zero. So it’s good.”

The Best Self

WOW. A GREAT profile of Salman Rushdie by Patricia Cohen in today's New York Times, which ends with a quote that made me clap my hands in joyful recognition. Which was unfortunate as I was holding a coffee at the time.

“There’s a writing self which is not quite your ordinary social self and which you don’t really have access to except at the moment when you’re writing, and certainly in my view, I think of that as my best self,” he said. “To be able to be that person feels good; it feels better than anything else.”

The Political vs. The Personal: Elijah meets Recount

ONE COMES WITH a chad, the other a feather. Both make their points with grace and a little humor. And both are richer viewing experiences for knowing the context which follows.

Canadians have a rare viewing choice this weekend. Two movies about politics. It's a measure of how colonized our culture truly is that the homegrown story might seem the less familiar.

First, then, to RECOUNT (TMN/MOVIE CENTRAL, Sunday) a classy HBO Films retelling of the debacle that ensued in Florida after the botched 2000 Presidential Election. With star studded performances from Kevin Spacey, John Hurt, and Denis Leary, clearly this is the film that's got the higher pedigree.

All the queasy ins-and-outs of that election (doesn't it seem 1000 years ago?) are here...Gore turning the limo around, the first hint that thousands of elderly voters in Florida mistakenly pulled a lever for Pat Buchanan, the Bush/Cheney bully boys airlifted in to play the part of "activists."

What's interesting about this film is its authenticity in all the public details. The State of Florida has something called "the Sunshine Law" which forces an incredible degree of openness on the government there (Florida may leave a bad taste in your mouth for what happened there in 2000, but this law is exemplary, a model of its kind.) so the filmmakers were given access to many meeting rooms, locations, and the tapes of most of the relevant meetings and committees.

But since the drama is so familiar in what played out on CNN, the film rises and falls on its postulations of what went on behind closed doors. And for the sake of verisimilitude, they largely pull it off.

First, there's Laura Dern's performance as Katherine Harris, a woman who during and after the debacle aptly proved herself to be an over-her-head wingnut thrust into something she was clearly unprepared for. Warren Christopher, the leader of the Gore legal team, is portrayed as somewhat feckless -- a man concerned with propriety and honor, not willing to go the extra mile to win it for his guy. Christopher has come out and complained about his portrayal in the film in recent days, but I have to say that he comes off as honorable -- but too concerned with history. The rules of dramatic convention kind of demand a price from Christopher -- he did leave halfway through the process (a sick daughter) and he also lost.

The great thing about the film -- and Danny Strong's capable screenplay, is that it manages to portray the leader of the Bush team, James Baker III (Tom Wilkinson) as likable, affable, and even in a way, principled, even as he outmaneuvers the Gore team and perpetrates one of the most awful miscarriages of the popular will in American history. "We're in a street fight for the Presidency," is Baker's first piece of advice. And from the get-go, you have the sense that this is an essential truth about Republican politics for the last several years. You've heard it before -- it's pure Rove: all that matters is the win. As a primer and a caution, Dems should watch this film, and watch the likable Republicans clean their clock once more.

The outrages are too painful to recount, but they're here: the African Americans stricken from the voter rolls, the uncounted votes, the mealy mouthed Supreme Court decision that handed the Presidency to Bush but sidestepped making precedent...the whole sordid mess. And lurking in the background is your knowledge that once the fight was over, the tough but pragmatic Republicans like Baker, they were shoved immediately aside so we could get Wolfowitz, Cheney, and the fantasy of the neocons. The pain may have cooled, but the most searing thing about election's dark comic take on the whole 2000 thing is this:

The punchline, seven years later, is 4000 dead American boys, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, a wrecked economy, and oil at 130 dollars a barrel.

Street fights never end well.

What a delight, then, to take in ELIJAH. (CTV, Sunday) It's a retelling of an important footnote in Canadian history, when a single MLA from Manitoba, Elijah Harper, used parliamentary procedure to scuttle the Meech Lake Accord, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's attempt to broker a Constitutional Deal with Quebec.

Harper is a shy figure, the first treaty Indian ever to serve as an elected MLA in Canada. We see his early life, kidnapped and forced into residential schools. The POV and narration is darkly comic, with captions from the Indian Point of view.

A delicious early scene shows Harper's political philosophy forming when he wanders into a presentation on the Indian "White Paper" being presented by a young Indian Affairs Minister from the Trudeau Government. The man's name is never said, but from the moment he opens his mout' an you here dat voice, you know who you're listening to.

The film is full of deft touches like that -- and it gets points for explaining some complicated constitutional concepts through the use of inventive Python-esque animations. There's a bit of mawkishness in the middle, but the performance of Billy Merasty as Harper and the fierce Glen Gould as Phil Fontaine carry you through.

Like in Recount, the big pols are mostly seen as figures on the TV screen, which adds to the realism. And it's in the human moments as Harper's refusal to budge ticks the days toward ratification away, where you really get to see the nut of the story. The sense is strongly put across that the impasse might have been solved, if only Mulroney came to meet the natives. Mulroney says he can't because he has to meet Nelson Mandela. You think that's a flourish too far for the script -- no way, no way could that have happened without anyone seeing the irony in the situation and the parallels with the Native struggle...

...and then they show the footage of Mulroney and Mandela on the tarmac.

Ultimately, we know that Canada didn't break apart -- and what's more, Harper's actions finally got Native issues onto the front burner. The quiet man with a feather and the word 'no,' accomplished more than a team of democrats counting undervotes and dimpled chads ever could. Harper makes a cameo near the end of the film that's unbearably moving.

It's nice to have a guy named Harper in a Canadian story who you can actually be proud of...anyway, if you've gotta pick one film, I'd say go with Elijah. It's well told. Screenwriter Blake Corbet and Director Paul Unwin pull off a dynamic story far better than many of CTV's recent real life films. I've been hot and cold on this CTV Programming stream, but when they put out a film like this, you have to give them props. It's relevant, it's Canadian, and it's interesting as hell.

What If Everyone Hates Their Homegrown TV?

REMEMBER SCREENWIPE? That's the BBC Four series starring presenter Charlie Brooker. If you've got any grounding in TV at all, you've probably been forwarded one or two YouTube clips dealing with "How TV Is Made."

(Those links are courtesy of Will Dixon, who originally posted them. See Beavis, you do good!)

Anyway, along about sometime on my cottageless Holiday Weekend, last weekend, I managed to go back to YouTube and try to find some more Brooker I'd missed.

And that's when things got really interesting.

See, a couple years ago now, Brooker took Screenwipe to the USA, and did a show from Hollywood, focusing on American TV -- from a British perspective. What follows in the clips below is not always what you think; it is an outside survey of the medium. (ON YouTube, the special is posted in six parts...I've embedded the most relevant ones below, and linked to a couple of others. Part One is mostly forgettable filler and setup.)

Part Two is where it gets really interesting. Brooker compares American Format sales to British ones -- delving back into pre-history for All in the Family and Sanford and Son. He makes the point that transfers the other way don't work, and shows a short clip of a British version of Golden Girls as proof.

Now, those of us more familiar with the American oeuvre might be sputtering, "well, wait...the American Coupling was dreck, and the American Cracker didn't work, and don't even get me started at the Fawlty Towers thing with Bea Arthur..."

...but that's the point, you see. And as we all nervously contemplate the American version of Life on Mars, what this special does a really interesting job of is showing just how a slight shift in perspective changes ... well ... your entire perspective.

The commentary on the grinding down of the American sitcom practice is good, but the really juicy bits come when they show a bunch of British format shows to an American focus group.




But just when you think you know where it's going, look what happens when the Americans get their view of the less prettified English version of the Soap Opera...



Let's just skip over the next couple -- you can go watch them on YouTube on your leisure, and while they're interesting, they don't really do anything to make my point. (Which I'm getting to.)

Part 3 -- On the "Fear" sold on American TV

Part 5 -- Comparing British & American Reality Cop shows, & "The Wire,"


Finally, let's watch the last segment -- and go right to the end and check out Brooker's wrap up.



Did you catch it? Sure, mixed in there is some very interesting social commentary (especially when comparing how Americans are fear-soaked in their TV presentations) but the baseline Brooker comes to in his wrapup is that British TV lacks imagination.

He thinks, to put it in Brooker's own vernacular, that it's shit.

Now I know that's going to come as quite a shock to several different constituencies of Canadian Television viewer. There's a anglophilia at work in TV circles here that's sometimes breathtakingly unhelpful. In fact, the whole reality of having American TV pumped in over our networks 24/7 has made Canadian tastes weirdly schizophrenic.

But not really in the important ways. Brits run down their homegrown cop shows with the same epithets and dismissiveness that Canadians do theirs. Brooker bemoans that British programmers don't take chances.

And here we look at TV and say, "why can't we be more like British TV?"

That's when we're not trying to be more like American TV.

For me, the most interesting thing is how I keep coming back to that American focus group. Sure, Brooker sets them up to react with incredulity to verrrrrry boring clips from Cop Shows and Bullseye. (Yes. Darts. On TV.) But the moment they're shown something different -- a paradigm shift away from what they're used to -- gritty British Soap Eastenders, they're intrigued.

The same thing happens with Canadian shows, too. Exactly the same. The pale US imitations fade and fail and are utterly despised.

But the moment they catch a glimpse of a Slings and Arrows, or DaVinci, or Intelligence, or Trailer Park Boys or Corner Gas, they're intrigued. They recognize not just that it's good -- but that it's different than what they're used to seeing.

Where British self-hating TV trends and Canadians diverge is that there does seem to be a recognition of what is done homegrown that's good. You don't see Brooker taking the piss out of Bleak House or Cracker or Prime Suspect ... Whereas here, it's not unusual to hear people running down Corner Gas or Durham County or - okay, it's self serving, sure -- The Border just because it doesn't stand up to some imagined quality bar in their head -- a quality bar that's distorted not by their own self-hating -- which I may have claimed here on more than one occasion, but by the schizophrenic thinking that anything, from anywhere is better than their homegrown fare.

We don't even judge our own shit right, because we're overrun with another country's shit.

In Britain, they see ALL of what they produce -- whereas we only get the best.

BUT, we see pretty much ALL of what the Americans produce. When Canadians go down and buy programs each spring to be simulcast? They're the only ones snapping up all the shit that gets canceled after two eps. The rest of the world waits a season to see if the show's any good. So yeah, they see CSI. [Insert flop here] not so much.

Still, it both gladdens and perplexes me to see the same critiques being set up -- it looks cheap, it looks like this, it isn't daring. The grass is definitely not greener. That being said, the fact that we have eight or ten series currently being exported....for a nation of 30 million, only 23 million of which speak English.....you know, maybe we're not the best judges...maybe we're actually doing well?

I don't know anymore.

I just know I don't want to watch darts.

Food for thought, anyway.

When Does a Show Peak?

IN THE MIDST of an entertaining paean to one-season wonder show Square Pegs, Jaime Weinman of Macleans came up with the following wonderful digression, breaking down various types of shows and when they peak:

My theory is that shows that are very premise-dependent are usually at their best in the first season, while shows that are character-dependent are never at their best in the first season. A procedural show is often, not always but often, at its best in early episodes because the writers are using their best ideas early and the formula is still fresh and new. Whereas a sitcom, or a very character-dependent hourlong show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, always improves in the second season when the characters’ relationships have developed further.

Apologies to Chris Haddock, but if anybody's gonna run the CBC and pick shows, shouldn't it be a guy like this? Weinman consistently shows an incredibly detailed, trenchant understanding of the TV medium. His disquisitions and analyses of genres and TV series shows a sensitivity to both audience trends and issues of craftsmanship. He has watched more drama and comedy than any network executive I've ever met (and I've met some who've seen a lot of tv. A lot.)

Last time I checked, the CBC job was filled, but any time somebody moves on, if they decide to make "knowledge of television genres and trends" a premium -- here's a guy to take a long hard look at.

A smart network would make him a creative consultant a la the deal Al Magee had with Showcase. Just sayin.

The Question and The Answer

I HEARD THIS week from a few fans of the show I worked on in Vancouver last year, BLOOD TIES, that they'd heard from Lifetime, the U.S. Broadcaster, that the show was not going to be picked up for a second season; that the reasoning was that it had not performed up to ratings expectations.

Which kind of closes an open secret door. It's been pretty clear that Lifetime wasn't going to pick up the show for the longest time now. Since I was just a hired hand, and it wasn't my show, I kept mum whenever anybody asked me about it because that's what you do.

But now that it's official, and coincidentally, because I got more than four emails this week asking essentially the same question in essentially the same way, now I'm gonna answer it.

The question I've been asked this week is: Do you think that BLOOD TIES is going to come back, that someone else will pick it up and more episodes will be made?

The answer is No. No I don't.

Because there's more than one Vampire show that's been shit-canned recently, I should also answer the email that I've gotten from a couple of Moonlight fans: Do you think that Moonlight has a chance to wind up somewhere else?

No. No I don't.

I put those two things together because I'm now leading into the larger point: I'm not the guy who owns either property, and the dude who's doing the negotiations, so I can't really say for sure. I don't know for sure. I'm not involved. Take that with any grain of salt that you want. (And I'll get back to this, too. Remember the salt.)

I would say that Moonlight probably had a better chance because it had been on CBS, but since they passed, and since the sets have been struck, and since the Jericho thing worked out so well, I'm gonna say full page ads or no full page ads, that show's probably toast. And if the network version's done, then the cable version's definitely done. (Again, all this is my-- you know what? Can we just take as read for the rest of this post that at the end of every paragraph, I'm silently mouthing that warning that appears on every DVD now about the opinions not necessarily reflecting the opinions of anybody other than the people making the statement, and not the corporation that owns the show? Can we just take that as read? Good, cause qualifying this shit is exhausting. )

I think it's a shame that Moonlight and Blood Ties are both toast. Because I think vampire stories are fun and I love'em and I think there should always be some sort of Vamp show on the air. (Although, seriously dudes, that whole can go out in the day thing is MONUMENTALLY fucking cheating. NOT cool. It makes the tragic scary vamps seem like my redheaded friends. And trust me, none of them are particularly scary. Okay. Maybe K-Mac. But still.)

Blood Ties is tragic for me because it was fun to work on, and I think it was a fun show, and a different take on the whole thing because no matter what the fangirl squee, the vamp was actually the sidekick. I think that was the genius part of the world that Tanya Huff created in her books and that Peter Mohan brought to TV. The central figure was the girl. That's a different spin.

There's a couple of other perplexing things about BT going down, and some bad timing things. The show was not helped by the fact that by the time we'd shot the only season (and it was not two seasons, that was just marketing) the originating Canadian Broadcaster who had started it rolling, CHUM, essentially ceased to exist when it was split in twain and sold off to two companies. The show kind of got lost in two differing agendas.

But -- and this is something that we all point out every time we who worked on it get together -- the show did good numbers in Canada -- better than the lead in and the lead out. Better than what was in the timeslot before it premiered, and better than what they put in there afterward. And it sold everywhere -- well. I'm told that the international sales guys were clamoring for a second season.

But that just goes to show you how hard it is to finance a TV show if you don't have one of those big six media corporations behind you. That's just how it is, I guess. I think they may even still be trying. And if they did somehow bring it back, I'd whoop de doo with everyone. Believe me.

Okay, I'm halfway through this thing now and I'm starting to lose my nerve, because I'm starting to get the spidey-sense pounding in my head that tells me that the batshit crazy fans are going to bombard me with all the weird hate-on messages. And the BT crew is fine, but Moonlight was a network show and ... some of you 'Murricans are a little crazy... but I'm almost to the salt. Be patient.

I think there's also a weird bias against genre stuff at channels these days. Scratch that. I know there is. It doesn't get respect. And neither does its fans. And that sucks. It does. I think the problem is so many of these shows reach the diehard geeks and people who like this kind of stuff, but it doesn't widen out. And that bigger audience is what they really want. And they're convinced that genre shows are too narrow. Nevermind that they're also the ones that have the ability to branch out and touch everyone if they truly hit. See Heroes, X-Files, Star Trek -- should I go on?

But when it doesn't hit that magic branch out, the genre fans feel burned. And they think that they shouldn't watch shows because they're just going to get canceled. And they don't realize that hey, that's true of like 7 out of 10 non-vampire or werewolf or space opera shows, too. Most shows fail. That's the reality.

I feel the need to validate all that fan love and support because, well, it starts early and it's just so passionate. I mean, there were BT fan sites up weeks before the show premiered. I'm sure there are Dollhouse sites popping up even now. That's awesome.

So to not acknowledge both the depth of feeling and the unlikeliness of success at this point, in all the "save the show" campaigns, just seems to me to be cruel. And the fans deserve better than that. Blood Ties fans, and Moonlight fans too. A lot of people will keep silent because they just don't want the grief of the crazier side of fandom. That side is indeed fearsome. But that's not enough of a reason to keep everybody hanging forever. So the only thing to do is to try and do the impossible and explain it a bit.

Now. Here's the salt part.

Part of the problem of the fan campaign, as I've said before, is that the internet makes it seem like there's so many of you that it makes it even harder to imagine how a show could be not popular enough to go on. What do you mean it's not popular! Look at all of us here!

It's at these times that I say, "I want you to imagine rolling coins." You know how there are 50 pennies in a roll? Well, you know how big a roll of pennies is, right? How much space it takes up? Got it? Good. Now, how easy would it be to store 100 rolls of pennies? That's 5000 pennies. That's gonna take up space, right? Probably a whole drawer. Okay, now say we're talking, oh, I don't know, 5 million viewers. That's a level of viewership that gets you totally canceled. How many rolls is that? Well, it's um...5000 is 100..uh...Holy cow.....can that be right? 100 000 rolls of pennies?

You're going to need more drawers. And a reinforced floor.

Do you honestly have that many posters, fans, on forums, posting regularly? I've never seen the forum where a thousand people post regularly. Ever? Maybe. Regularly? Nope. At that level it would become noise. That's an unmanageable number.

Oh, By the way. What they really want is American Idol numbers. And that's like, 25 million. 30 million. 4, 5, 6 times that. I can't even do that math. Because I'm a dumb bad-at-math writer.

Point is, it's not your fault. The shift to a focus on "save our show" campaigns sets up a dynamic where it's just easier to feel like you failed. It's not a failure if there was never a real hope of success to begin with. You can't help it if the show didn't catch on, and if what seems like a ridiculous number of fans to you STILL ISN'T ENOUGH.

Now....here's where the salt comes in. Because some of the people out there are licking it right now. How dare I? I mean, really, How FUCKING DARE I say that they won't succeed! How dare I say JPOD's not coming back! Or that the NUTS THING WITH JERICHO DIDN"T TOTALLY WERK WHO DO YOU THNK U R, ANYWAYS?????

I'm gonna get a lot of those emails. I know it. I'll take it. It's fine. Bring it on, baby. My back is strong.

I just feel bad to see people building up false hopes. And not moving on and remembering the thing you loved for what it was.

In the case of BT fans, and I've said this before -- you can at least go back to Tanya Huff's original books to see where the story goes. (It's pretty great.) And if you're feeling burned because you're a Moonlight fan and you were thinking, somebody's gotta pick up the show, right? And now here's this asshole in CANADA saying, "probably not going to happen. And oh yeah, DO NOT SEND BLOOD PRODUCTS TO CBS!" and maybe you're bummed.

Cheer up. Don't be bummed. TV and movies are cyclical and weird. You never know what happens down the road.

Judd Apatow was a guy who failed with two TV series -- Freaks & Geeks and Undeclared. F&G broke my heart when it was canceled. Now he's the biggest Director in Hollywood. Seth Rogen, who starred and wrote for Undeclared, is a freaking sex symbol, for heaven's sake. I loved those shows, but hey, maybe he was meant to make movies like 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up instead.

David Schwimmer was on some failed show the season before Friends. If that had gotten picked up, No Ross. Lisa Kudrow was originally cast in Frasier. She was fired and replaced by Peri Gilpin, and if that didn't happen, no Phoebe. I don't even want to think about what would have happened if Jennifer Aniston had kept her original nose.

A show that I loved that failed big in the 80's was this one season wonder called Almost Grown. It was this trippy show tracking a family in three time periods. Starred Eve Gordon and Tim Daly. The guy who wrote it was named David Chase. He'd go on to create The Sopranos.

My So Called Life -- a beloved show, canceled after 19 eps. Claire Danes is a star and Winnie Holzman went on to write the Broadway smash musical WICKED.

The point is, you just never know.

The people who made Blood Ties and Moonlight sure loved bringing them to you. And you never know, who knows what comes next. Maybe this is all for the best. Or maybe it's random.

Anyway, my point is, the people who make these shows are always humbled by the depths and the lengths fans will go to support them and not lose faith and not lose hope. And we'd hate to see failure and silence make you turn away from that. And sometimes, when you know it's not going to work, even if you know you're going to get crazy mail, you just gotta man up and say that. 99% chance it's not going to work, so you might want to think about the time you put into it. Just saying.

But if you say that, you also do the fucking disclaimer. Here it comes again: Yup, I'm not privy to everything. You want to grasp at straws, grasp away. GRASP AWAY!

But to the rest of you: don't stop loving what you love, and don't ever apologize for the shows you love. And know that people who make the stuff really, really do appreciate you. And don't write angry letters to Lifetime. They're a business and they made their decision for a reason. And don't bombard CBS with fake fangs. TV is expensive. You know how many pennies you have to roll to pay for it? A LOT.

Focus on the thing you loved, and let go. Cause I guarantee there's something else coming just around the corner. And the people who met and forged relationships on that show you loved? You never know what they're gonna cook up next.

Thanks for watching. Don't be discouraged. You're awesome. And one of these days another show you love will break through and be a hit, and then a couple seasons will pass, and you'll get to complain about it jumping the shark. I promise.

Oh, one more thing.

Please don't send me hate mail. I'm really quite a nice fellow.

Late Night Is Dangerous!

OOH. JIMMY FALLON? Whither Conan? And will Jay go to ABC, and gawrsh, what about Letterman and Craig and all the others?

You know what? Sod it. It's all the same, innit?

But When Will You Go to the Bathroom? Joss Whedon and FOX's "Hail Mary" Pass...

PROBABLY THE MOST interesting thing to come out of the upfronts weren't the choices of any of the new shows, but the following announcement from FOX:

At its upfront presentation Thursday, the network announced it will air two new drama series, J.J. Abrams' "Fringe" and Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse," with dramatically reduced commercial breaks.

"It's a simple concept and potentially revolutionary," Fox Entertainment Chairman Peter Liguori said. "We're going to have less commercials, less promotional time, and less reason for viewers to use the remote. We're going to redefine the viewing experience."

Both "Fringe" and "Dollhouse" would have network commercial loads of about five minutes per hour, about half the usual. The commercial pods would also be shorter and they would have about half the promo load as well.

In an interview after the presentation, Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly acknowledged that "Remote-Free TV" was a risk but there needed to be a "paradigm shift" in network TV.

Cutting down commercials will make the two already pricey sci-fi series even more expensive as they have to produce longer episodes. To offset that and the reduced commercial inventory, the network is planning to charge advertisers a premium.

Ad buyers were generally upbeat about the idea, and said they liked the two shows picked.

This ripples through on a few levels, and I'm coming a bit late to this particular party. From the Canadian TV perspective, Jim Henshaw points out how the headache unaccustomed buyers from the Canadian nets are having trying to pick shows based on pilots they haven't even seen may have just gotten worse. After all, the Canadian nets just went in the OTHER direction -- demanding (and getting) MORE commercial time per hour from the CRTC, plus asking for "carriage fees" from Cable Companies (which will be passed on to cable customers.)

The two series will have to either be edited to fit the Canadian format or allowed to overlap into the next time slot.

The former approach would likely alienate an audience who will know they can purchase the full show the next day on iTunes or stream the unexpurgated version from another source.

The alternative is probably even more terrifying to a Canadian network suit -- because overlapping the hour will create a conflict with whatever American series they've scheduled to simulcast following "Fringe" or "Dollhouse".

Remember, these guys aren't usually buying full nights from one network. They're mixing and matching from all of the Big 4 (and elsewhere).

Therefore that overlap could allow viewers a few minutes to sample the American feed from its original source before its usurped by the simulcasting Canadian channel -- and most remotes go searching if the first five minutes of a show haven't grabbed the viewer.

To additionally compound the problem for Canadian broadcasters, FOX is placing a premium on the ads for "Fringe" and "Dollhouse" feeling they are two of their "must see" shows of the season -- and of course to pay for the additional content of the programs and the fewer commercial slots.

That'll likely mean a certain amount of branding, like Ford has done with the season openers of "24".

I'm not sure those same sponsors (or a Canadian equivalent) will be willing to lay out larger ad fees to reach the much smaller Canadian audience.

Boy oh boy -- wouldn't it just be easier to make Canadian shows instead?

For my money, though, I think as interesting as the business implications are, the creative implications are even moreso. Jaime Weinman raised some good points in this Macleans "TV Guidance" entry:

Will this “fewer commercials” idea work? I hope it does, because I think that some of the problems of network television today are related to the too-short running times. People used to point to many reasons why premium cable could do things that network TV couldn’t, but they rarely pointed to one of the biggest reasons of all: premium-cable episodes are longer than network TV episodes, and therefore have more time for pauses, character development, and all the other stuff you can’t put in if you have to chop the show down to 42 minutes (minus 30 seconds for the main title and another 30 seconds for the closing credits, and also some time for the “previously on…” segments). Comedies especially would benefit from longer episodes, since 21 minutes just is not enough time to tell one story, let alone the two or three you get in most comedies. But on the other hand, Dollhouse and Fringe don’t seem like the type of shows that are guaranteed, or even particularly likely, to become big mainstream hits, and if the network takes a hit on one or both of them because of the need to charge more money to advertisers (which they may not be willing to pay for a “cult”-y show), it may sour them on the idea of reduced commercial time. Which would be too bad, because it’s high on my list of things that could save TV.

I'm with Weinman on how commercial creep has damaged network TV. I think the 21 minute half hour is the single greatest thing that's destroyed sitcoms. The need to jam the story into that short a time has meant that all human moments have been shaved off, leading to a situation where the half hour looks even more artificial than it otherwise is.

I've also decided that in my relatively short career, where I've seen the move from the four act hour (or four act + tease, what some people called five act) to actual five acts with long first acts (w/o teasers) and even six acts, that that format simply doesn't work as well, for a slightly technical reasons.

It's not my form, but I was once taught that the MOW -- a format that's all but disappeared from network TV -- was usually written in 7 acts. At least one of the nets in Canada used a 9 act structure. All that seems daunting, but let's remember that Act here is just a unit that connotes length between commercials. In the old 7 act MOW structure, you would have a long, long first act, much like you do sometimes now with the 5 act tv shows -- the idea was that you got at least 12 to as many as 18 minutes of story before cutting to commercial so that you hooked everyone in and they didn't have a chance to tune out.

The problem with the "long first act" in hourlong drama is that it frontloads so much action into that first act that it's hard to not make the rest of the episode seem unbalanced. There are tricks people use to combat this -- the J.J. Abrahms trick was to start at the ending. You set up the peril of the main character and then flash back to 72 hours earlier -- which has the advantage of establishing two timelines -- a very different thing than having to jam too much of your storytelling into the first Act.

What I've found with the move to five and six acts is a certain inevitability in having to accept things that a true craftsperson might not have stood for in earlier days. By necessity, you generally have to settle for one act being shorter than the others... but what goes in that act? You don't want to have an act without hitting all your various plots, so sometimes that means shoehorning a scene in there that would organically probably better go elsewhere -- but the math won't let you do it.

I also find that at five, six acts and 42 minutes, you have to settle for more shorthand than you might otherwise be comfortable with. That shorthand can take many forms, all of them slightly poison pill-y:

• An Act Out or Act Curtain that simply isn't up to snuff (ie: you go out 'soft' -- on a character beat that you might not otherwise go out on, rather than go out on a real twist or revelation of new information, which is always the preferred method.)
• A "convenience" or "coincidence" that eagle eyed people might drub as lazy storytelling, but really is a function of the fact that you only have one scene to do something that really should take two or three scenes. (This could also mean making a thematic point/counterpoint between two plots way more overt than you'd otherwise like, again, because you don't have the room to make the point more subtly.)
• Living with nightmare expo. It's hard to hide the pipe when you've got to open in three minutes. I've definitely done my best to conceal some setup handwaving that could have been handled more cleverly if only there was more time, more time, more time...

The really great - and hilarious - thing about this change for FOX is that one of the beneficiaries of the experiment is Joss Whedon. When we last saw Whedon, he was being deeply screwed over on Firefly by -- wait for it -- FOX! (Fox was also the studio that rich off the Buffy DVDs)

Joss got out of series TV before the big ugly transition to five and six act... and as Jill Golick points out in a couple of her posts on Dollhouse -- Whedon has, in fact, always made the most of pure four-act structure. In fact, his scripts for all his shows show you exactly what an elegant thing four act storytelling structure can be. As Golick puts it:

With only three act breaks to worry about, Whedon doesn’t have to force the drama up into unnatural cliffhanging pre-commercial moments. He gets into the story quickly and rolls it in out in four virtually equal-length segments.

By eliminating the short final scene or tag, Whedon can play out the real story right to the end, weaving together the final beats of the story with the final emotional moments, rather than playing them in separate scenes. This works really well for arced series like this one will be, where a single story is parsed out over the duration of the series.

There's a reason why his stuff inspires such diehard admiration, both from fanboys/girls (who may not geek out on the structure but grok the superior form of the storytelling) and scribes (who see how meticulous the story construction actually is.)

So, separate and apart from the interesting economics of this decision, Joss actually has a chance here to reclaim some of cable's coolness factor -- and if Dollhouse is a hit and more shows go back to four act, and 48 or 50 minutes, I will be the first one to line up and give all the Hosannahs to Whedon.

First he benefits from the birth of the weblet, then the calculus of DVD sales, now this. Either he's got St. Ann (Patron Saint of TV, don'tcha know) tied up in the basement, or being a nice guy does actually pay off in this business.

I'll take either one. Hope it works.

Paranoid vs. Naive: Which Side Are You On?

This government had an idea/And parliament made it law...

Which side are you on, boys?

-Billy Bragg

J. KELLY NESTRUCK is a Toronto arts writer, recently decamped from overseas to take a new gig reviewing theatre for the Globe & Mail. He's an affable enough guy, and all in all, a pretty sharp writer. I enjoyed reading his writing on the Guardian Unlimited site while he parked himself over in Blighty. A few years back, he even interviewed me about a little theatre spoof I did called Top Gun! The Musical.

A little over a week ago, a piece appeared in the paper detailing how dailies from a Canadian film called Love & Savagery were stopped by the Canada Border Services Agency. Apparently, an overzealous customs agent thought that sounded a little porn-y. There were some holdups and dark threats that maybe the film would be diverted to an RCMP lab for processing. Producers claimed a sort of chill -- a new attitude that might have been in response to the changing climate as exemplified by Bill C10. Kelly thought that was pretty ridiculous, and said as much here in the comments thread when I wrote about it.

I found myself thinking about that story again on the weekend, for a couple of reasons. One, because somebody forwarded me a kinda smug entry Kelly wrote about it.

It's when I read this article in the Saturday edition of Kelly's current employer that I started ruminating anew. Gloria Galloway files an interesting piece about how Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Minority Government has gone to war with the bureaucracy in several federal departments. It's an interesting peek into the Tory playbook and the ins and outs of governance in Canada, 2008-style:

In less than 2½ years in power, Mr. Harper has had what seems like an inordinate number of fights with senior advisers and heads of independent federal agencies, as well as with the parliamentary officers. He has:

Refused to co-operate with an investigation by Ethics Commissioner Bernard Shapiro, who was also discounted as a "Liberal appointee" by a representative of the Prime Minister.

Phased out the job of national science adviser, after Arthur Carty said he had been 'increasingly marginalized."

Fired Adrian Measner, president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Wheat Board, for defending the board as the sole vendor of Canada's wheat and barley.

"It is not a stretch," Trent University historian Dimitry Anastakis and Toronto journalist Jeet Heer argue in a recent commentary in The Guardian, "to say that Harper simply sees many Canadian institutions - Elections Canada being simply his latest target - as illegitimate, not just in need of reform but worth attacking root-and-branch."

The opposition has been just as scathing. "The enemies list now includes Elections Canada," Liberal MP Michael Savage charged. "We know the Prime Minister loves power. Can he tell us why he hates government so much?"

There's a lot of meaty philosophical stuff in the article, and Galloway takes a provocative tack near the end, fairly raising the point, should the will of the unelected bureaucracy be able to endrun and second guess the judgement of elected officials?

There's much that's currently dysfunctional in Canada's parliamentary system. Ever since Quebec decided, in essence, to drop out and vote for a spoiler party en masse, putting together a governing coalition that truly represents the nation has been all but impossible. It's nothing new that governments get into power here with the majority of citizens voting against them, but since the crackup that devolved to five increasingly regional parties, the electoral math really doesn't work at all.

Harper's war on the bureaucracy (as outlined in the Globe) is part of a pattern: ruthless 'on-message' discipline where cabinet members are not allowed to speak to their briefs; the most antagonistic relationship with the press of any government in the last twenty years, and, of course, sneaky agenda-furthering actions like hiding a poison pen censorship clause in a 600 page tax bill that sails through the House without debate, and then claiming that "the industry is divided on the issue" when the condemnation of the bill from the industry is the closest thing statistically you're ever going to get to universal. Just today comes word of a new feint by Harper's increasingly imperial government: an attempt to ram through virtually the same copyright legislation that was roundly rejected in a storm of public pique several months ago.

When you take this climate, and combine it with the idea that if you're a bureaucrat or a civil servant -- the word's out that you toe the line or they take you out, is it really such a stretch to believe that the ripples could cause a Border guard to be a little more vigilant than usual in "exercising his duty?"

Kelly thinks so. I think no.

Harper has been playing from the U.S. Rovian Republican playbook for years now. And we know how that goes: all science and policy must be politicized, and subsumed to the political agenda. Independent oversight is not allowed. Dissension is never tolerated.

It's worked so well, and had such a lasting positive effect on the United States over the last seven and a half years, it's no wonder that the battered frogs of the ecosystem see a connection to what's going on here.

That connection could be illusory. Or it might be real and insidious. Maybe I'm paranoid. Or maybe somebody who's spent most of the last few years outside the country hasn't quite gotten the full flavour of cultural life under the Unitary Executive, True North Division.

One more thing. One nice, random piece of info I found out, thanks to people I've been talking to who were part of that Love & Savagery shoot:

Their import paperwork was pristine.

So, what do you think? Bellweather of what's to come? A case of consolidating Tory power, or a random, isolated incident?

The problem with the former is that it does sound a little far fetched.

The problem with the latter is that it requires you to extend the benefit of the doubt to a government that's actively tried to slip things past not once, not twice, but if you count the Elections Canada scandal, a whole mess 'o times.

It's a government that, on the whole, is about as transparent as its leader's shellacked hairdo.

In the end, I really am not sure what's going on here. Inevitably, after twenty years in this business, you find yourself open to all sorts of cockamamie ideas -- because the truths you've heard that you can't talk about seem even less plausible, even when someone shows you the proof. Things get weird out here on the hustings.

I guess in the end all I'm really asking is,

Which side are you on, boy?
Which side are you on?

At the very least, it's a nice piece of theatre. You'd think people could at least appreciate that side of it.

C10 Redux: Or How Disney is More Important to Canada's Government Than You Are

REMEMBER THE GOOD old days in Canada, when the government of the day didn't try to ram through legislation when nobody was looking?

From Cory Doctorow @ BoingBoing. Canada once again marches in lockstep to special interests -- in this case, huge American media corporations, instead of enacting laws that actually benefit its own citizenry.

URGENT: Canadian DMCA about to come down again -- blitz your MP, the PM, and Minister Prentice now to save us from US-style copyright rules!

Posted by Cory Doctorow, May 20, 2008 11:35 AM |

Word on the street is that Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice is about to try to shove the Canadian version of the US's failed Digital Millennium Copyright Act through Parliament very soon, and very fast. He made plans to do this before, and the overwhelming public outcry caused him to shelve them, but now he figures we're all distracted and we'll let him get away with it (especially since he's made a couple of cosmetic changes to the bill that he'll use to show how much he really, really cares about us poor Canadians, rather than the US government and entertainment companies who are giving him marching orders).

The Tories promised that they wouldn't do any more treaty-law without public consultation, but Prentice stalwartly refuses to have any public consultation on his plans, despite outcry from industry (he's the Minister of Industry, remember?), artists' groups, library groups, educator groups, and public interest groups. He just keeps on ploughing ahead with his half-baked plan to follow the US off the same stupid copyright cliff it leapt off of in 1988 when it passed the DMCA, a law which has done nothing to reduce infringement, but which has screwed up libraries, competition, and education, and has led to lawsuits against tens of thousands of ordinary citizens.

So it looks like we're going to have to do it again: we're going to have to write to Prentice, rally at his office, phone him and let him know that we're still watching and still paying attention, and that we still demand that he listen to the public -- the way his party promised they would -- before he brings down this law.

Click here to hear what Michael Geist has to say.

Geist offers address links to write to the Government before they try to push through this pig in a poke, just as they did with C10:

With the bill seemingly only days away, now is the time to again tell Prentice and your local MP that Canadians will not be so easily deceived. Countries such as New Zealand and Israel have recently enacted legislation with far more balance than what Prentice has in mind. It only takes a few seconds to send an email to Prentice, the Prime Minister, and your local MP, letting them know that Canadians won't be deceived by a Canadian DMCA and that Canadian copyright reform should reflect fair copyright principles (and after you click send, print out the email and drop it in the mail without a stamp to House of Commons, Ottawa, ON, K1A0A6).

Has a Minority Government ever acted like this? Ever? Will NO ONE hold the Tories accountable for ANYTHING?

Heads, Hearts, & House

AFTER BEING RATHER "meh" on the whole post-strike TV output, the second part of HOUSE's two part season finale last night actually kept me awake. So upsetting, so pregnant with possibility, so beautifully written and directed; and the possibility of yet another re-invention for this show come fall.

As an added bonus, Diane Kristine for one night only returns to her once-must-read episode recaps!

We get inside House's head every week, when his thinking processes are made visible with every case. It's also hard to imagine there's an unexpressed thought in there when the man lets escape socially inappropriate utterances like: “Trust me, I want to do very nasty, demeaning stuff to your girlfriend.”

Wilson's heart is likewise usually on display, right there on his neatly-pressed sleeve within easy reach of House's mockery.

Yet we've never seen either body part quite like this before. House's rationality is confounded by his injuries and his emotions, and Wilson's heart is trampled by House's irrational self-destruction.

The power of these episodes comes from an understated but riveting performance by Hugh Laurie; from searing ones by Robert Sean Leonard and Anne Dudek; from the non-linear narrative mixing hallucination, fantasy, dream, and memory; and from the disquieting sense that, like House, if I only taxed my addled brain I should be able to fit the puzzle pieces together.

Go to her digs and read it there.

Closing Up the Cottage

AS I WRITE THIS, it's the afternoon of a holiday Monday in Canada. Victoria Day in Canadian lore is known as the May-two-four (two-four being Canuck slang for a case of 24 beers; the calendar this year means it's a week earlier) It's also the traditional time of year when people in Central Canada flock out of the city en masse to a little patch of wooded ground, hopefully near a lake. Cottage Country.

In Montreal, they head out to the townships, and in Ottawa it's somewhere in the Gatineaus. Out of Toronto, it's bumper to bumper up the 400 highway to Muskoka and parts beyond. I'm reliably informed that in B.C. they go to "cabins," and I know a few friends out of Calgary who go to Revelstoke to go camping.

Whatever. In the great outdoorsy scheme of things, this is the weekend traditionally set aside for "opening the cottage." It's a ritual of de-winterizing and airing out and making ready for a summer of travels to that little patch that marks the beginning of summer.

(picture: when writers bowl)
Ironically, as lots of people contemplate the renewal that the opening-up entails, I'm thinking about closing down. Not the cottage -- I don't actually own a cottage. But like a lot of people who work in film and tv production, the crunch is about to start for me. My closing up the cottage is more of a metaphorical thing. This weekend's been largely about hanging about, seeing movies, drinking coffee and reading and listening to CD's, all in the service of what is likely to be the last time for a long time that I have any significant chunks of time to myself. There's also a closing quality to some of my interactions with friends. A conversation or a "see you later" comes with a proviso that later might actually be quite a bit later than any of us think. It's amazing how I've gotten to the point where I can go six months without seeing somebody. Not somebody I barely know, a Facebook friend, but actual, real life, "hey, I wish we saw each other more often friends."

It's been a bittersweet and fun ride ramping up for production season. A lot of my writer friends are also working -- an awful lot, which makes me wonder if there's slightly more going on or I've just been enjoying a statistical bubble.

When I look back on some of the first entries I made on this blog, I can remember clearly the palpable feeling of isolation I felt. There were no writing rooms, there were just development deals and single meetings with people. I didn't really know too many other people doing the same job. I didn't know what was "normal" practice, and what was an "outlier" or unacceptable.

I contrast that over the last few months, and it's like night and day. There's been a couple of fun get togethers that brought together staffs from CBC's shows The Border, The Session, and The Wild Roses (Seriously, is CBC afraid of greenlighting a show without an article in front of the title or what?)

Last week, we went bowling. And in between trash talk and stunning displays of athleticism, hard information was exchanged: about development processes, work methods, various ways of structuring the room, story breaking tips, and effective ways of handling notes.

Late into the night, fabulous arguments over alternate ways of distribution and how to keep production companies on their toes led to laughter and hair-raising, "can you believe they tried this?" stories.

If you're a shifty sort used to the bad old ways of doing business in the TV/Film Industry in Canada, that's probably why your ears were burning.

(photo: How J. Hurst (The Session) and S. Eriksen (The Wild Roses, AKA Cowgirls) lick story problems.)

Oh yes, the writers are talking. They were talking at dinner parties and at informal gatherings at writerly watering holes. And this staffing season (which in Canada is to the U.S. staffing season as a Mosquito is to the U.S.S. Nimitz) actually saw, for the first time, active competition for writers - with 'go' shows going after the same small pool of talent. It's ... an interesting development, to say the least. And instead of the usual for-me-to-succeed- you-must-fail Darwinism that's always prevailed, there's a genuine feeling of camaraderie and support that's emerged, largely in the last year, year and a half. More and more, it seems like maybe a rising tide actually does float all boats.

(Except, pssst, those Cowgirls writers are super-competitive. Shhhh.)

This is exactly what I was hoping for when I started spilling all these keystrokes onto the net a few years back. The 'writer mafia' thing, that was mostly a big joke when a journalist coined the metaphor last year, is actually happening, like, for reals. The cats are being herded!

And now, as production for all of us draws closer, all of that's going to fall off a cliff.

So Matt MacLennan and the Wild Roses/Cowgirls staff (photo above) drink in the west a bit while they ramp up the story breaking of their show. (MacLennan, by the way, is also an excellent amateur photographer and perhaps the official photog of the Canadian writer mafia. He's responsible for all the photos in this post)

The Session prepares their first outlines; The Murdoch crew cook up more mysteries, Little Mosque, Heartland, and Flashpoint are already shooting, their writers already lost to the mountain of work. Corner Gas' talented have decamped to Saskatchewan. We're all battening the hatches and loading for bear, and it's somewhat bittersweet. It seems like only yesterday we were freezing through the winter, and now the glorious spring and the fun of things like the Screenwriting Awards is fading into the contemplation of the summer of suck. Sorry. The summer of Living the Dream.

For me, the culprit will be season two of CBC's The Border. I'm a co-producer on the show this year (such is the peripatetic nature of the Canadian industry that you can find yourself as a co-executive producer on a show you create, and then as an executive story editor the next week. One friend of mine, in the midst of delivering his first season of shows he wrote and produced to the network, is taking a job as a fill in story coordinator for a week on another show. Why? "I need a new roof." Oh, we're having fun, sure, but don't accuse us of gettin rich!)

Anyway, the lay of the calendar means that the next six or seven weeks is going to be quite crazy. I have one ep that starts prepping next week -- and I'll be in meetings for that, then on set while it shoots, and then there'll be about ten days and then I start prepping my second episode.

The eagle eyed among you may notice I didn't build into that description any idea of when I would be writing the outline or drafts of that second episode. Yes. Well. That, as we say, is a work in progress.

All that, and my first meetings as a member of the Writers Guild of Canada council. June's gonna be a fun month.

Hand me that hammer would you? I gotta cover up these windows.

Writer peeps? See y'all at the Geminis.

Victoria Day Podcast Listening

I WAS REMISS getting this up earlier. I know you're all disappointed in the sudden crack in my solipsism. No matter. For the holiday, here's the Podcast of my appearance on CBC Radio's Q last Thursday. Listen as I come up with a way-better season finale for Grey's Anatomy. (Starts about halfway through.)

PVR Reminder!

DURHAM COUNTY, 10pm, Global. It's a show you really should see.

Happy Victoria Day!