The Eyeballs of Men

This is a story, and within this story lies a tale.

A little over fifteen years ago now, I was dating this very nice actress. (I had yet to learn.) We had gone to school together. She was a peach, really, but I knew the whole thing was doomed from the start. She was too pretty, and I was too insecure. But anyway, that doesn't really figure into the story or the tale. One night, I went out with her and a couple of my good friends from high school came along. One guy was my roommate at the time; he was blowing off steam because he was studying astrophysics. (That's right, bitches, I know an astronomer. I expect a gas giant named after me any day now. How appropriate that would be.) My other friend was working on his history master's at a school a ways outside of Toronto, so I didn't see him too much. (Of course, I saw him a whole lot more then than I do now. Such is the nature of those college good times -- you never think they're going to end.)

Anyway, me and my girlfriend and my friends went out and we had a great night. She was genuinely interested in people, and they were nice to her, and I thought we had a great night.

So I stayed over at her place, and it took til the next day at breakfast for me to realize that something was horribly wrong. I was getting the Silent Treatment. Thus began an hours-long odyssey that every man dreads, and endures: the honey-what's-wrong? After the requisite punishment period elapsed, I was shocked (shocked!) to discover that for once I hadn't said or done anything to her. Nope. Finally, with frustration and maybe even a real fear in her eyes, she looked up and through heavy-lidded eyes spat out, "I don't know how you guys can be friends. You're so horrible to each other."

And then I replayed the evening. And yeah...I guess, in a way...well...we gave each other the dozens. Pretty heavily. My astrophysicist friend, when I was in high school and ran for Student Council, spearheaded a write in campaign for a parrot. That parrot just may have been my Ralph Nader. My other friend was going through his 'harsh' phase. Everything was about being harsh. Then there was me. I got thrown off the announcements in high school for refusing to stop saying "What the hell?" because David Letterman said it. (Jesus. This was a different time.) Anyhow, no matter how I tried to explain it, she couldn't get it in her head that giving each other shit -- sometimes mounds, and mounds, and mounds of shit -- was how we expressed friendship. We enjoyed each other by torturing each other. That was how we communicated.

This is by no means a rare occurrence in male friendships, by the way. Just as women share every secret, men haze each other. Go to a schoolyard and you can see it every day. It's one of those basic differences.

I've been thinking about some of those differences lately, and how they affect the way that I do what I do. There's one truism in animation that isn't too surprising when you think of it: when you make an animated series for kids, or tweens, if you're expecting a mixed audience of boys and girls, you must keep in mind the following, unfair truth:

• Girls will watch stories where the main character is a boy
• Boys will not watch stories where the main character is a girl

Is it fair? Hell no. But it is so. There aren't a lot of boys watching Kim Possible. And there never will be.

How does that change through the years? Turn the boys into men, and what's the viewing pattern, and how is it affected?

Well, there's the usual cliches. Guys will get dragged to date movies only through extreme coercion. And for a great percentage of women out there, I would say that they've seen probably about 120 percent more Ninjas, about 342 more decapitations, and 35 873 more torture killings than they otherwise would have chosen to view, thanks to their boyfriend picking the movie that night.

Gradually, the television audience has been shifting for years now, skewing ever more female. It's changed the ways stories are told, and it's influenced the kinds of shows that are a success. A few years ago, like the makers of cartoons, TV programmers were afraid to make any shows that didn't have male appeal built in. Then came Sisters, Gilmore Girls and Sex in the City and what do you know, that's not such a concern anymore.

Except...

Men have been disappearing. In droves. It's been a heady concern for a while now. Where have the men gone? Especially the young men? They've seemed to desert TV. Lost, Invasion, Threshold, Criminal Minds -- that's an attempt to lure'em back. Women and Men both like Law and Order and CSI? Thank the Christ! Let's order ten of them!

Where'd the men go? Well, the pointy-heads can give you a hundred answers for that. Some of 'em are watching more male-friendly shows on cable like The Shield, or Curb, or Deadwood, or Sopranos. Some have decamped for videogames or the Net. And a whole, whole great whack of 'em are watching Adult Swim. (Way more than they thought. When they finally started rating that block, Cartoon Network found their ratings were mondo-higher than they thought. All. Young. Men.)

So, what the hell's going on?

I have a bold theory about this. It's going to get me in trouble. It's going to make for a lot of defensive "but's...". I understand all this.

I also want to say up front that I understand, and deplore, and find creepy, the whole trend of the fat-guy-with-the-skinny-wife sitcom, and the arrested development (as opposed to Arrested Development) man-boy trope that runs through the shows that still do stalk the earth, looking for male eyeballs. I also think it's a crime that beautiful, wonderful actresses from Joan Allen to Julianne Moore to Meryl Streep to..well...all of them, have to endure a litany of "the wife" and "the girlfriend" roles on their way to "the mother." This is not a grand unified theory of television. But for what it's worth, from a writing POV, here it is...my theory:

1. Mars doesn't understand Venus.
2. Venus doesn't understand Mars.
3. Mars responds to not understanding Venus by either consulting Venus, having Venus on staff or in the room, or ignoring Venus.
4. Venus responds to Mars by declaring that Mars is fucked.
5. Er..that's it.

I'm working on a couple of shows right now that have female protagonists. I do this partly because I grew up in a house of sisters, and a strong-willed mom, and partly because my particular style of writing favors dialogue. And if you're going to do that, then you better be writing women, because men don't talk that way. (Unless you count Al Swearengen, and even then, you have to throw in a lot of c***suckers.)

I am still learning the female voice -- in writing as well as in life. I am constantly on the phone to my female friends, grilling them on "how would this play out?" or "you're in this situation...how does that work?" My sister is a total type-A who studied feminist philosophy as an undergrad and right now is doing a big, big high falutin fellowship in Washington, D.C. She's smart as a whip and occasionally cranky -- but the few times I see her, there's always some point of female wisdom that drops out of her mouth and I lap it up like I'm a dog and she's tossing dinner rolls under the table.

I don't know what I would do if I couldn't talk to my female friends and run things by them. I don't know how I could possibly consider working on a show if there weren't female writers in the room. I understand that their perception of the world, by design, is always going to be different than my own. I'm a guy who likes to talk, and I'm not shy with sharing what I think. But I damn well listen, and learn, and it makes my characters better and my writing richer.

Now, does this mean that women understand themselves way better than men?

Well, uh. Hell no. Women do share. Or overshare. They talk out an issue. A lot. And in subtle observations of people, often there is an edge. I have come to fear and trust female intuition implicitly. But at the same time, I've watched women compete in the workplace. Ugly...I've seen several of my female friends as they cycle through a new best friend every two years. (They burn them out, I guess. Most of the men I know, their friends are people they've known for a decade or more.) And it's not like men are the only ones who make the same bad dating choices over, and over, and over.

The difference is, unless he's a total ass, and doesn't care -- a Male in a development position will read a script and wonder at the female reactions. He'll want to know that they're accurate. He will not attempt to say, "women do this or women do that." Because he'll know he's probably got it wrong. At least, he'll want confirmation that it's reading true.

But now there are a lot of women in development positions, at production companies and networks. In Canada, it seems, it's nearly all women in those positions. (And here's the sexist valve -- I know, I know, in many cases they are not the final say -- the final say is ... ahem ... a man.) Naturally, a lot of those women execs are focused on correcting the years of sexist portrayals by making the female roles meatier, more meaningful. In fact, I dare say that I have yet to get a note about how a female character was portrayed, and could be portrayed better, that wasn't spot on. And great -- after all, TV is indeed about pulling in female eyeballs.

But when it comes to the story, and how the men are portrayed -- the cringing starts where will is imposed on how men actually think and act. The stories I've heard from various writers, and my owe experiences too, have led me to conclude that part of the problem with why men are fleeing tv is because it's getting harder and harder to get scripts past the process where men act like men really act, and do what men do, and bond how men bond -- because women don't like it.

And that's a big problem.

Remember the story at the top, about my girlfriend hating how horrible me and my friends were to each other? Well, I've had two separate conversations about two separate projects with two different creators where there's serious pressure to have the guys be nicer to each other -- because that makes them more 'likable.'

It makes them more likable to women...but to male viewers...uh...it makes them...um...aliens.

A half a dozen times in the last year I have found myself in a head-scratching position where I had to figure out a way for two male characters to have a conversation that they would never, ever have, because they would never, ever, ever talk that way.

It's really frustrating.

And it doesn't just extend to development either. Sometimes, you can see how the summary judgement based on female-skewed perceptions trickles down into the review process.

In the Globe TV guide this week, writer Ceciley Ross spends a whole column being mystified at what the appeal of Family Guy is. It's racist, sexist, homophobic, and juvenile. (I would add, 'she says,' but in truth, I can't disagree with any of that.) She kind of mourns the fact that anyone would watch this show. Meanwhile, her husband is on the exercise bike killing himself laughing, and in the end she has to admit she laughed, too. But she seems singularly ashamed by that.

I'm not. Family Guy is awful. And awful funny. South Park, ditto. Next.

Then there's the case of Love Monkey. I want to quote you a bit of the Entertainment Weekly review of that show by Gillian Flynn.

"The more mystifying tweak to the novel is the decision to switch Tom's occupation from tabloid headline writer to an earnest music A&R guy...Love Monkey seesaws awkwardly between this music biz intrigue (don't care) and Tom's big city social life (wanna care.)"

Sigh. To one hundred percent of men I know -- the A&R hook is the thing they most liked. Flynn name-checks High Fidelity early in her review, but she obviously doesn't understand the lessons of that book -- and how deeply that resonates with the male psyche.

She goes on, in talking about the heightened dialogue:

"One entire scene is devoted to explaining the curiously dated "Grant's Law" -- that all men are like Hugh Grant, who despite having a gorgeous girlfirend at home (Liz Hurley) will want someone, anyone else (in this case, Divine Brown.) A good comedy rule: If your joke needs a PowerPoint presentation, it's not working. The Sex In The City women spawned their catchphrases within the course of natural, witty conversation. It can be done."

Again. Every guy I know who watched the pilot - Grant's Law was their favorite scene. For my money, too, especially in the first couple of seasons, Sex In The City's "catchphrases" were mystifyingly forced. I remember scratching my head, wondering how in the hell women were responding to what, to my ear, was so obviously a gay-male parody of how women talk. It was only in later seasons, where Michael Patrick King took some truly heavy-hitting female writers and gave them power (Jenny Bicks, Alexa Junge, Cindy Chupak, and others) where the show started to sound authentically female to me.

But you know what? Whatever. I wasn't the target for it. And therein lies the difference. There's not a guy alive (at least none that's working, that I know) who would point to a scene where women were speaking and say, "Women don't talk like that!" At best it would be a question, "Do women really talk like that?"

The reverse is not true.

And I think until we fix that problem...male eyeballs are going to continue to flee the small screen. It's not so much that big, grown up boys don't want to watch shows built around women. It's that we're creeped out when we see men who don't act or talk anything like the men we know.

Our culture spends a lot of time telling men that how they interact is broken. But it's not. And if TV presents us with only that view too, well...we're gonna go somewhere else.

For an intriguing illustration of what I'm talking about, there's a book I really want to read, and that I think should probably be on the bedtable of every female development executive, too:

Norah Vincent's Self Made Man.

They printed an excerpt from this in the paper last weekend. Vincent tells the story of her interactions in an all male bowling league. The climax is a ritual that she at first finds puzzling: one guy is having a hell of a game, and one by one all the men stop bowling. They just sit down. Eventually he bowls a perfect game, and everyone whoops. Vincent's amazed by the lack of communication, how the men just stopped, and waited respectfully for the man to finish his game. It was a sign of respect, yes -- but it was also a communal action taken without having to talk about it at all.

Reading the story, I immediately knew what was going on, and I suspect most men would, too. It's nice to hear the refreshing point of view that just because we don't hyper-articulate everything, it doesn't mean we don't communicate.

It took a gay man to give women their voice in Sex and the City. I love the fact that maybe, just maybe, it takes a lesbian writer from California to give men their due, without the fooferal and crap of all that bogus Iron John stuff. I hope this book gets read in TeeVee land. (At least in Canada. I know none of you Californios read.) It may point a way to get some of those male eyeballs back.