Requiem for a Jane

SO GLOBAL has canceled The Jane Show after two seasons.

From the Playback Daily article:

Global Television will not renew the homegrown sitcom The Jane Show, which starred Second City alumnus Teresa Pavlinek, for a third season.

A spokesman for Global tells Playback Daily that a mid-season replacement for the Shaftesbury Films comedy has not yet been chosen.

The second season of The Jane Show, which featured Pavlinek as Jane Black, a struggling artist-turned-copy editor in an advertising firm, aired on Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. on Global.

Christina Jennings, executive producer at Shaftesbury, expressed disappointment that the comedy was not picked up for a third season for want of sufficient viewership. The second season averaged an overall national audience (2+) of 147,000 -- down 13% from season one, according to Global.

I have to admit that I drifted away from The Jane Show early for the usual Canadian TV reasons -- pre-emptions, they kept moving it around, wasn't sure when it was on due to lousy promotion, etc...

I wrote about it when it first premiered, but only saw about 4 or 5 episodes after that -- and only one from the second season of the show.

But I will say this: I had basically the same conversation with two Canadian TV writers I know, who both work for shows that get watched. And they both related how they tuned in an episode of the Jane Show and found it really funny. So I'll take that and file that away.

The real issue here, of course, is who are the people involved and what are they doing now? In Canada, very often we all start over from square one every time. The writers of the Jane Show now have experience under their belt, or more experience, and whether you think it was the best show in the world or not, those writers, I guarantee you, are better than when they started. In the USA, they'd be free to go to other shows and they'd be seriously being looked at. But in Canada, it's more likely that they'll be left twisting in the wind while more "new writers" are given a chance; so that in two years, those "new writers" who aren't so new can be the ones to twist, lather, rinse, repeat...

Is there a half-hour in development, or getting greenlit somewhere for them to go to? I don't know. But I hope so. I remember hearing from several places that when Traders shut down, the scattering to the winds of everyone who learned on that show set the Canadian TV industry back five years.

We have to stop starting over.

Bye Jane. Probably not enough people watched the show to say convincingly, "you'll be missed," But I sure hope everyone connected with you doesn't end up with a 323 area code...

I Am Curious, Yellow

IT NEEDS a few more options (like Glasses! And different hats! C'mon!) but at least it's a start. And it's well worth you wasting five minutes.

At the Simpsons Movie site, there is a create your own Simpsons Character game.

Awesome.


At left, Springfield me, "Hey! Does anyone want to quote me in something?"


UPDATE: Okay, what's sadder about this -- that I went back in and changed the character to give it a more realistic receding hairline, or that I actually opened it in Photoshop so I could draw in glasses?

Why Does David Chase Hate Me? And Why Even if the Call IS Coming From Inside The House, That Isn't Necessarily a Bad Thing...

I'M HOPING that sometime over the next several days I'll get into more "slice of writer's life" posts. I've been fighting bad headaches and trying to give the gig my full attention, so I need a bit of a breather.

I will say, however, that it's a good feeling when that draft finally gets kicked back from the network, and everyone goes around the horn at the production meeting, and even though you know it's all going to change anyway -- there's something very special about the first time on a new show when you get to type those magic words on a cover page:

"PRODUCTION WHITE."

Yessss.

In lieu of anything major from me as I give notes, wait for location scouts, screen actor auditions and all, I want to point you to a couple of very interesting articles I've read in the last couple of days:

The Long Con

Now that it's been a few weeks, Emily Nussbaum weighs in with an excellent, thought-provoking article in New York Magazine about the real legacy of Tony Soprano. And she kind of puts David Chase on the couch about it.

I found myself forming many of the same thoughts that Nussbaum expresses so well in the last couple of weeks when I tuned in some first and second season episodes of the Sopranos, in reruns. I was struck, as she was, by how much broader and lighter the show was in the beginning. I put that together with all those interviews with David Chase over the years, the ones where he talked about his real ambivalence toward the TV medium and how he always wanted to make movies, and I got to roughly the same place Nussbaum did: Chase's brilliance came not just from his self-loathing, but a little bit from his loathing of us.

In one passage, she has a lovely description of TV auteurs:

But he [Chase] was willing to give us what we didn’t want. There are many breeds of TV auteurs: the great mythologizers, Buffy’s Joss Whedon and Lost’s J.J. Abrams and The X-Files’ Chris Carter; the quirky dialogists, like Gilmore Girls’ Amy Sherman-Palladino and the maddening David E. Kelley; deadpan craftsmen like Dick Wolf and sadomasochistic visionaries like Tom Fontana and California dreamers like Alan Ball. There are the utopian solipsists (okay, just Aaron Sorkin). But they all share an essential love for their characters—a natural side effect, one might imagine, of building one story for many years. Their protagonists suffer, but they rarely corrode.

In this sense, Chase was a true iconoclast, a prophet of disgust. He seemed determined to test TV’s most distinctive quality, the way it requires us to say yes each week. To be a fan, we needed to welcome Tony Soprano again and again into our homes, like a vampire or a therapy patient. Chase gave that choice a terrible weight.

I do think somewhere along the line, Chase started to really hate what he created. And he hated how much we loved it. Now, how much of that was based in this resentment toward him not being able to do what he really wanted to do (make movies) and how much of it was rooted in just a general cant of Chase's character, I can't say, having never met the man.

And in the end, it's not relevant anyway. Artists are notoriously poor at judging their best work, or at least coming to terms with the pieces that the audience loves. Woody Allen is forever perturbed that we preferred him funny; Alec Guinness went to the grave hating being beloved for having played Obi Wan. Ingrid Bergman was lukewarm on Casablanca. Miles Davis spent a good part of his career with his back to the audience, daring us to hate him...and didn't I read somewhere that Mozart hated The Magic Flute?

Still, there's something in Nussbaum's article that fills me with a kind of cognitive dissonance: "David Chase is a genius." "He hates the medium I love, and he's not crazy about we who love his work." I dunno. I dunno.

More from Nussbaum:

Over the course of the show, Tony’s sessions with Melfi have taken on many metaphors. They are like sessions with a hooker: She takes his money and plays a seductive role. (In one sequence, he dreams her office is a bordello.) They are like sessions with a priest: She hears confessions and guides him toward meaning. They are like sessions with the FBI: By talking to her, he’s betraying his family, putting his livelihood at risk, and violating omertà.

But most unsettlingly, they became a metaphor for our relationship, as viewers, with the show. Like Melfi, we began openhearted, proud of our empathy, and thrilled to have a character so rich to explore. Then came the counter-transference, the audience crushes, the endless articles on James Gandolfini, sex symbol. And slowly, as years passed, one could feel an insistent chill, even as Melfi herself receded into the background and message boards flooded with fans aping mobspeak. The violence was growing more intense: the assassination of Big Pussy, then Adriana, that brutal scene where Ralphie killed a pregnant stripper (a brilliantly sick sequence that caused a wave of viewer protest), the curbing of Coco. Dread, not excitement, began to feel like the show’s signature emotion.

The full article's really worth the read. Go here to read it.

Secondly, Will Dixon's got a fun and interesting post up about the problems of "The Telephone Cheat."

Most people carry a cell phone these days, so the "We can't reach them." or "We aren't able to call for help." complication always seems a little convenient. Most often it's solved with 'No Service' on the call display or whoever is trying to be reached is 'Out Of Range', but both are feeling more and more like a cheat or a cop out.

I tend to come down on the side of, "you gotta cheat sometime," but I hate it when those cheats grow lame. In The Ice Harvest, the whole thing doesn't work if John Cusack can be contacted by cell, so one of the first things he does in the movie is drop his cell phone and fry it. It works.

In the script I'm working on for The Border, we establish right off the bat that "cell phone service is being jammed." Because something getting out is a plot point, and you can't make it easy to get out or there's no tension. The fact that everyone's got a cell phone camera and access to YouTube is wreaking havoc with the news cycle and celebrity image-making, (not to mention "macaca") but boy, when you're trying to plot out a story where people can't know something is going on, it is murder.

Answering machines. Now this one's a biggie. I mean, my mom still has a 'push the Play button' model that creaks and whrrrs and needs a cassette tape, but EVERYONE else I know has Message Manager or Talkmail or some variation thereof. This makes the plot device of leaving the warning like "Pick up, Laura. Pick up! Well, I hope you get this message...the killers your husband!" (for the killer to hear and/or erase), or the exposition message where the audience gets to hear the crucial information (either as it's recorded or when its played back) a lot more difficult to execute with voicemail. Especially since not just anybody (a friend, the detective, the killer) can access and play back a voicemail.


I've been involved with two rewrites recently that included answering machines and faxes, plus no one in either script had a cell phone. Now I acknowledge these were rewrites of movies that have been in development for many many years, or are based on books written years ago, but regardless, they aren't period pieces. They're supposed to be set in the present. But if an entire plot turns on someone hearing a message or not able to be reached by phone...what to do, what to do?

Okay, Will, there I gotta disagree with your police work. I have a chip-based answering machine that's part of my cordless phone. Millions of these things are out there and all the big companies make them. I don't have the voicemail because why should I pay 8 bucks a month for something that I paid 60 bucks for, once? Plus, when I phone in to check my messages, if it rings more than twice I know I aint got any. And I get less spa...

Hey wait a minute. I think I was even on tv about this once.

Freaky. But this isn't about consumer electronics.

The larger thing Will's Calvinism on this issue raises is, "what is an acceptable cheat or shorthand, and what isn't?" Different writers will come down on different sides of this issue...Arguing about minutae is one of the things we really do well. (So long as you're arguing about minutae, you don't have to face the writing -- it's our version of going to long "strategic vision planning" meetings.)

For my money, the answering machine thing is an acceptable cheat. People on TV, by and large, have answering machines rather than voicemail. Just like they all have 555 numbers, and just like they can always find parking places, and live in $5000 a month Greenwich Village lofts on a waitress' salary, and have sex standing up with hair looking perfect and in place, and just like if they smoke, they're really evil inside.

Oh, and they have miscarriages, not abortions.

And if they really, really, really fuck up, they have to appear before the Female Black Judge.

And anyhow, help, she is on the way: the march of technology is slowly starting to help us poor, beleaguered screenwriters. These days, if your cell phone goes dead or something, it's actually harder to make a call than it used to be, because everywhere I look it seems that pay phones are disappearing. The days when there would be a phone in any greasy spoon are going away, at least in the major cities I've visited over the last while.

If we wait a few more months, "dead cell phone battery" may become something other than the "guy wakes up with a newspaper on his head and removes it to see an article on the front page that talks about exactly the thing he needs to find/see/realize/get"

Finally, Alex has got a good book recommendation.

Walter Murch is God.

And Somewhere, down in the Tropics, a Fat Roach is Macking on a Hottie Roach

IN THE FUTURE, after global warming, fundamentalism of all stripes, scorched earth politics, weird weather, unchecked capitalism and the metric system have finally murdered we rough beasts and rendered the planet a hot, gassy, barren rock -- only two things will remain:

1) The Cockroaches
2) According to Jim

Yeah, I know, I know. But people liked Jonathan Livingston Seagull, too. And c'mon. That book was bullshit.

William Hutt: An Appreciation

I MANAGED to catch William Hutt's performance as Lear at Stratford a few seasons ago, and it was a truly awesome thing. TV fans got a taste of that power in his featured role in the final season of Slings & Arrows.

Hutt died yesterday. He was 87.

From the CP obit:

Shakespeare remained a fascination for the actor throughout his career. When asked about the power of the Bard in a 2006 interview, Hutt said: "First of all, he froze the English language. Nobody has used the English language better than he has. Nobody. ... And also the world that Shakespeare creates with his language, his storylines, his characters, it's an incredible world."

With his rumbling voice and his lion-in-winter mane of white hair, Hutt commanded the stage well into his 80s, winning praise for his last turn onstage at Stratford as Prospero in 2005.

In honour of Richard Monette, the outgoing artistic director of the southwestern Ontario theatre company, Hutt agreed to return for a role in Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance" scheduled for this year.

He eventually had to withdraw from that performance, however, because of ill health.

Born in Toronto in 1920, Hutt served in the Second World War from 1941 to '46 with the 7th Canadian Light Field Ambulance and was awarded the Military Medal.

I can think of no better valedictory or legacy than that final season of Slings & Arrows. The gravity and tragedy of Lear, the few bits preserved forever on screen -- wonderful to behold.

He'll be missed.

Me and My Rock and Roll Mouth

APPARENTLY, I'M quoted in the latest Playback. For their "The Burning Question" blurb, they asked:

"Was Banff worth the trip?"

"What's missing here is actual writers and actual craft, not the usual suspects talking to the usual suspects. You've got so many people asking 'What's the web strategy?' 'What's this? What's that?'... We all get together at these industry confabs and everyone's talking regional bonuses and educational elements. Fuck that. I want to watch Trailer Park Boys. It's all about the water cooler."

Denis McGrath, Writer, Blood Ties; blogger, Dead Things on Sticks

You know, it's only a matter of time before someone comes up with a Denis McGrath Random Quote Generator.

My money's on my friend Colin Viebrock.

Lookie Here!

IT'S SHAMELESS Self Promotion Tuesday here at DTOS. It's kind of like Pancake Tuesday, only the syrup is made of hype.

If you go to the handy dandy Itunes Store, Podcasts section, and look up the Podcast for CBC Radio's Q, and download the June 13 edition, you'll be able to hear the pop I did from the Banff TV Festival. Good Times. Good Times.

Also, one of the best events in the summer in Toronto is the Fringe of Toronto Theatre Festival. It's the place where Tony-winning The Drowsy Chaperone started. Toronto's best theatre artists, and sometimes the young-up-and-comers-you-haven't- heard-about-but-soon-will get a theatre and slots to do whatever they want. It's mad and chaotic, and usually a lot of fun. I've had a number of plays in the Fest in the past, including Top Gun! The Musical, which I wrote with Scott White and which blew up rather ridiculously in popularity.

Well, earlier this year a friend of mine approached me with an interesting project. He's a fight choreographer, and he was putting together a number of dramatizations of famous duels.

So a number of writers have contributed short scenes in this vein. All this fun and swordplay too.

The result, DUEL OF AGES, opens at the Fringe next week!

All perfs are at the Factory Theatre, Adelaide and Bathurst Street.

Thurs. July 5, 6:30 pm, Sat. July 7, 11:00 pm, Mon. July 9, 1:00 pm, Wed. July 11, 7:30 pm, Fri. July 13, 9:15 pm, Sat. July 14, 12:30 pm, Sun. July 15, 3:30 pm.

The poster is below. If you're in Toronto over the Fringe, check it out.

Serial Killers

AT BANFF, I didn't get the opportunity to interview Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars, Cupid) because the only time they could offer me was during my panel. Diane Kristine did, though, and her surprising and interesting Blogcritics interview is here.

In my experience, I've found that TV writers tend to fall into two broad types. The introverts are the ones you imagine...they're quiet and nervous. They look like writers. They may be intense or funny or scabrous in the room, but at a party they tend to keep to the margins and observe. When they have to pitch, or schmooze, they force themselves to do it. But it's not easy and it's not fun.

Then there's the extroverts. The extroverted writers are people who like to talk to people. They enjoy performing, at least a bit. They generally have better relationships with the actors. They relish the opportunity to pitch and tell stories not just in the room, but in any social situation. I'm one of the extroverts.

The real unvarnished truth, of course, is that most TV writers probably fall on a continuum between those two poles. I've written before, I believe, about my impulse toward reticence with people I don't know and how I fight to overcome it. The truth is that if any writer was a complete extrovert, they probably wouldn't be able to abide the most important part of writing: the hours and hours you have to spend in your own head, or alone in a chair making something work.

That's a long explanation to get to a not-too-funny point: Rob Thomas is pretty much the grand high poohbah of writer extroverts.

In his master class session at Banff, moderated by Gillian Flynn of Entertainment Weekly, Thomas was relaxed and funny. He talked a lot about his post-Mars gig, running a new show for ABC starring Judy Greer. (Miss Guided) He repeated his highly improbable-but-true tale of how he got his start in the business (which you can read in the linked interview above,) and he even dished a little dirt. (Let's just say he's probably not on Kevin Williamson's Christmas Card list.)

Though it was highly entertaining, there was, of course, a bit of a funereal vibe over the session. I would say about 95% of the writer mafia at Banff was in the room, and a bunch of execs, and producers. It was also the least grey session I attended at Banff. The median age of the room was about 10-12 years younger than any other panel I went to. The room, in other words, was chock full of diehard, depressed Veronica Mars fans.

Thomas had obviously had time to work through his feelings about the cancellation. He was very gracious and understanding about it - while still pointing out that he thinks the Pussycat Dolls had something to do with putting the shiv in.

As I sat in the audience, seeing this tanned, good looking guy enjoy himself on stage, I thought, "remember to act that way when your baby is cancelled."

Truth is, Mars and Thomas has been a touchstone for me in more ways than just as a fan of quality TV (and quality genre TV, which is even harder to find.) For a couple of years now, when I've been pitching series, I've talked about the concept of "Veronica Mars serialization..."

What do I mean?

Well, if you take that first season of VM, there is definitely a season-long arc. But the interesting thing about the way the show was constructed was that the first couple of eps dealt very heavily with the mystery, and so did the last couple. But in the middle, there were all these strong and interesting standalone episodes, where a case walked in the door and was solved by the fade-to-black-vanity-card. In those episodes, there might be a serial element touched on -- but lightly. I really felt watching it that there was enough meat in the standalone ep to interest you, and if you weren't a regular viewer -- those little serial moments in the middle were so minor that you wouldn't be turned off.

It seemed, in fact, to be a much better execution of a formula that had originally been tried on X-Files, where there were "arc episdoes" (usually during sweeps) and standalones. The problem with X-Files was that the break between those arc episodes always felt forced...I mean, you discover something about bees or black oil and then don't follow it up for weeks because...why, exactly? The whole thing was so amped during the arc eps that they clashed with the pace of the other stories. With VM the threads were still out there, (heh heh, 'the threads are out there' No? ....nevermind) and you got the sense that you were just reflecting the world -- where clues don't often fall into your lap and sometimes it takes a while to solve things.

Now, I know, most of this is academic, because VM was never anything even close to a hit. But from a construction standpoint, I thought this idea of "Veronica Mars style serialization" could point a way toward the cessation of hostilities between the serialization/standalone camp in series TV.

In other words, between the creators, and the network types.

So when it came time for questions in Thomas' session, I asked him about it:

ME: You've seemed to come up with this formula where you have heavily serialized opening episodes and closing episodes, and in the midddle there you manage to tell interesting standalone stories where you would just hit the two or three serial points an ep where if you didn't watch before you wouldn't get thrown out. So I'm wondering now...in everything that happened. What are your thoughts now -- serialization vs. standalone, and what do you think the secret is to getting people to buy into serialization?

The tough thing for me is I'm a writer who loves serialization in a market that doesn't. On this new show I'm on [Miss/Guided starring Judy Greer] I got the directive right from the network president: we want to be able to air these in any order we see fit. you know...we got this initial order of 6 episodes. And they've shuffled the deck. And it makes it really hard to even do the level of serialization The Office does, with the romance and Jim and Pam -- so it's hard...I feel like as long as we promised the network that there would be closed endings in Veronica Mars -- a case comes into the office in the cold open, and it's solved by the final act -- it bought us a lot of leeway in terms of allowing for an ongoing mystery. And yet at the same time, we were tinkering with that until the very end. Um, if Veronica Mars had come back for a fourth season, there would have been no arcing mystery. And the reason for that is we felt -- and I use that and I'm not sure who the 'we' is -- it was felt is a better way to say that -- was that people who were casually sampling the show weren't coming back because they feel like I'm missing elements, I can't figure out what's going on, I'm not going to come back -- in much the same way as, you know, the first season of 24 when I heard this is a good show a good show and I tried to sample it 8 episdoes in, it was...I have no idea...because we had run off our viewers in season one and season two. In retrospect, I don't even know what the best plan is, to answer your question. I love to watch serialiized things. I loved the Sopranos. I could watch that ongoing soap opera like thing forever. Um, and yet, you know, they will discuss in network meetings what their research shows--that the average viewer of any show will watch one out of four episodes. Therefore can you afford to sell a show that's that serial. It's a difficult question and one that I don't have an answer to. Creatively I love serialized shows...they buy and make fewer of those, though.

Sigh. Well. That was depressing, to be sure. I mean, I guess I knew all that. The new thing was the one-in-four. The last time I heard that bandied about they were saying that the average viewer watched half the episdoes.

But the more I thought about Thomas' answer and the whole question of serialization, the more something didn't seem to fit.

We've now fully entered this realm where you can't take a break. Heroes and Lost both took a bath in viewership after taking a long layoff in the middle of the season.

The challenge with serialization, of course, isn't just getting people to tune in in the first place -- it's avoiding the dropout. When I was in Vancouver in the winter, I broke up with Prison Break and 24 because I missed two episodes in a row. I didn't go back. In an on-demand world, or with plenty of viewing opportunities, like HBO or A&E offers with their shows, I'm not sure that breakup would have been as permanent.

Part of me also thinks that the malaise with the sitcom stems from the fact that they are so eminently missable. I'm a big fan of Scrubs, but when it comes to that show, I fit the average viewer pattern. I probably saw about 1/4 of the episodes this season.

The thing about the 1/4 rule is that it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If your show is designed so you only have to see 1/4 of the eps, does that mean you're holding yourself open to new viewers, or does it mean that no one is ever going to be passionate enough to see every ep?

Wasn't the success of Heroes this year tied to that idea of the "Heroes ending you didn't want to miss?"

Maybe it's the contrarian in me, maybe it's self serving, but I can't help but shake the feeling that as viewer loyalty in general shrinks, the solution is not more shows that advertise how much you can miss and still jump in any time; the secret is television you don't dare miss, where even if you PVR or TIVO it, you still want to watch it before anyone can spoil you or talk to you about it.

But if they're telling the grand poohbah no go on the serial, what chance do the rest of us have to prove them and their 1/4 theory wrong?

Any thoughts?