No Accounting For Taste

AND THANK God for that.

Finding a way to quantify art is a disastrous and persistent pursuit in some quarters. Every pilot done in the USA (and Canada, now that we've started doing pilots) is subjected to a battery of tests to predict and gauge how audiences will receive it.

And every year, you hear story about high-testing pilots that go nowhere, and low testing shows that run for years (like Seinfeld.)

All across America, thanks to Clear Channel and companies like it, you have robocalls calling random people three times a day and playing twenty second snippets of songs. Depending on how that sample reacts, that's the songs you get to hear on just about every radio station in America.

Quantifying art leads to bad art. And yet for some it's still the golden grail. I think it's retarded.

Anybody who's worked on a TV show or movie knows that it's as much work to make a bad work as a good one. And when you're working on something, you may get the vague idea of whether it's bad or good, but that's notoriously unreliable.

So, too, when product is put out there, and people finally get to judge it, reactions can be baffling and puzzling. Is Californication an interesting show? Or rather, is it

clear that it had been green-lit by some network BSD who's contemplating leaving his wife for an underage hottie and he thought YEAH, baby, YEAH, this series speaks the TRUTH!

When somebody you know and whose taste you admire says something like:

I couldn't sit through this one. I had it on DVD, and I tried to watch it twice, and both times it turned me right off.

I wonder what happens in the second episode? Because I didn't see a hook there.

What does that really mean?

My favorite kind of criticism is the kind where the people run down what they didn't like about something, and I can't really disagree with it. I remember feeling that way about Superman Returns. My agent ran down a particularly devestating critique of that movie, and I saw every one of his points. I couldn't really disagree with them.

Yet I loved the movie. I think it's in these moments that you see little things about yourself. Some good, some bad -- always interesting.

I'm having a similar reaction to Californication right now. Further down in comments there are several people left scratching their heads by Mad Men, another show I just love.

Yesterday, in the Globe and Mail, Arts Writer Kate Taylor (taking her crack at TV criticism) wrote about Seinfeld reruns, from the perspective of someone who never watched the show when it was on. (Yes, there are a few.)

Watching Seinfeld today, you can note with amusement plots that turn around answering machines but which wouldn't work with cellphones, but you can also observe that these are people who can afford to worry about pizza cooks who don't wash their hands because they aren't worrying about terrorist attacks.

Perhaps, after Sept. 11, we are simply living in a less funny era: The sitcom landscape is a desert these days and the only heir to Seinfeld is Curb Your Enthusiasm, the show in which David gets his kick at the can, building a series around the travails of a producer's life in L.A. On a smaller scale, it's a successful series - HBO recently renewed it for a sixth season - but it also has a much harder edge. David's bleak comic persona is one less able to shrug off his character's anxieties and embarrassments than Seinfeld's was. You can suffer the distinctly uncomfortable sense, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, that you are laughing at David, not with him. Perhaps it's no coincidence that none of the other spinoffs ever took hold: The Seinfeld moment is history.

Ooooh. Really? We're living in a less funny age, post-9/11? Knocked Up deals with terrorism head on, right? And the 40 Year Old Virgin had some amazing things to say about the war in Iraq. And, of course, that "No Blood For Oil" runner on Corner Gas was hi-la-ri-ous. Pffft.

The point is that this impulse -- to quantify, to explain, to debate -- we all do it. And the more we come at it from different perspectives, the more interesting our culture is. Thank God the banal assertion that "comedy is dead" that really was everywhere after 9/11 never took root and became canon, apologies to Kate Taylor.

Comedy on TV sits there in its periodic troughs, waiting for the next breakthrough hit. People praise John From Cincinnati while I scratch my head. (Even if Joss Whedon's little brother did write the finale.)

It's all good. It's all glorious.

The Nine -- remember that? -- It was the sure fire hit of last year. And now they won't even air the rest of the burned-off episodes, because it was too low rated.

Taken one way, this could induce an almost paralyzing fear in anybody who tries to pick something up and create. It can be used to support a lot of bad behavior (there's no accounting for the audience, so I'll do what I want, the audience is dumb so give them the lowest common denominator) and it can be used to glorify inaction (I can't figure out how to make this appeal to people.) It can send gatekeepers with no imagination to a batty and strange place.

I will never forget the weird meeting I had with the Canadian Network Suit who told me he'd passed on The Sopranos -- he wasn't telling the story as a "you know how I screwed up?" He was admitting that he'd seen the same show everybody else had and hadn't seen anything great in it...so he passed.
He told the story to show how much POWER he had -- he was able to Pass on the Sopranos.

People think in some strange ways. They think all sorts of strange things. They may hate the thing you love. You may agree with them and still love it, or think their critiques may be out to lunch. They may hate a show because of a woman's nose. You may love it for an irrational reason -- how it reminds you of your first babysitter or that goldfish Sam you had when you were a tot.

Whatever. It's all a big, fat, unpredictable ride, and the only thing we can do as writers or artists is keep seeking out opinions, and keep honing our instincts.

If your instincts are right, you'll do well.

If your instincts are off, you won't.

That's as quantifiable as things get.

In just a few weeks, the carnage will begin anew. People will make their choices. There will be winners, and losers, and once again as always, whatever they decide, the audience will be right.

Yes, even about Two And a Half Men and According To Jim.

Meantime, all I can do is tell you that Mad Men continues on AMC Thursdays at 10, Californication runs on Monday nights on The Movie Network (eastern Canada) at 9 p.m. ET and Movie Central (western Canada) at 10 p.m. PT. Watch em and judge for yourself.

And keep that debate raging, and don't let anyone put that opinion in a box.