Reprint: The Note that Kills

Still away, so this is another craft reprint.

MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE I'm in the middle of the second complete re-draft of an outline, and I've only seen the four feet around my computer for about two days, but I was thinking a lot about notes. From other writers, from network execs, from whoever might be reading.

There are notes that are good and bad, as we've heard before. The one truly excruciating, where is my .22 note that writers get is the truly evil "DB" (for "Do Better." Wow. Thanks Brainiac.)

But there's another kind of note (and here I want to stress that I'm not talking about my current outline or circumstances, merely that the process calls back all the evil notes of outlines past -- kind of how the smell of cooling tollhouse chocolate chip cookies makes one think of random gunplay, the smell of sulphur, burning chlorine in the nose and the salty taste of children's tears. Wait. What? Really? Wow, that day camp I went to as a kid sucked, dude. For reals.) that kind of powers them all in terms of determining if you have a good story or not.

First of all -- everyone is bad at reading outlines. If it was up to me, you wouldn't send em. Networks would approve a verbal pitch and then see an early draft. Outlines would be for internal use only. They're hard, because they're neither fish nor fowl. If a script is a blueprint for a finished TV show, then what the mighty F is an outline? A napkin? A notional approximation in prose of the final script? So, like, a scale model of the skyscraper built of spam rather than concrete and steel?

Yeah, not getting the aesthetics off that one, dude.

Anyway, in script, in life, in outline, clarity is important. You will often get notes asking for something to be made more clear. And nine times out of ten that's the right note.

But here's the thing...

There's clear, and then there's clear. Sometimes, the point of the scene is to get the audience to the point where you are confused. You don't know what's going on, necessarily. Or what you thought was happening, isn't. This is good. This confusion breeds curiosity. It might seem troubling on the page, but the question to ask is, "is it the kind of confusion that will cause someone to turn off the show, or keep watching to see what happens next?"

Too often, in this damnable tenth instance, clarity is the enemy of storytelling. I've seen outlines and scripts that were 'fixed' so that you always knew what was happening as you went along, where everything was totally clear and understandable...

...and the story was as boring as a dog's ass.

Remember -- clarity is great -- but only so far. Confusion that breeds curiosity equals momentum -- for the viewer to keep watching, and for you to keep spinning your story. When clarity is a threat to that, you need to defend your material, and push back, and say, "yes it's not clear, but it's the good kind of 'not clear.'"

Of course, sometimes that's hard to see in an outline.

Then again, what isn't?

If you'd like to comment, please click through to the original post.

Reprint: The Tyranny of "Why?"

I'm away for a few days. The following is a reprint from last November.

SO AS I alluded to the other day, a return to development means questioning a whole bunch of stuff about how you work and how to focus a new concept. Luckily, that means being able to have conversations with smart people.

One of those smart people is the Producer who I'm working with on one of my development projects. Al Magee has been praised elsewhere, so let's dispense with that one right off the bat. A few weeks ago, we're having a meeting about this project, and after I talked in circles for a little while, Al said something that I found unbelievably trenchant:

The Brits used to make movies about "what happened." The Americans make movies about "what happens next." And we tend to get pushed into movies about "why it happened." Which as box office shows - nobody really gives a shit about.

What happened. What happens next. Why it happened. Three simple phrases.

Two of them can lead to pretty good, or even great -- films and TV shows.

But the "Why..." The Why will kill you every time.

Canadian TV is forever about the why. Most of the time you will spend in a meeting with the network, they will want to talk about 'the why.' What you're saying, why the characters are doing this and that. We employ freelance 'story editors' on film, and even development TV projects. And if they've been raised under the Canadian system and they're doing their Telefilm best, they'll steer you clearly toward the shoals of "Why it happened." In the unlikely event that you do manage to score a scintilla of press coverage for a show, you're probably going to get asked questions about the why, and most creators who get a show will blather about the why given half a chance.

It's all specactularly wrongheaded.

Why?

(Oh come on, you knew that was coming.)

Before I unpack why 'Why it happened' leads us down a bad road, let's examine the reasons why the Canadian system has evolved that way (and for those who aren't Canadian, this is still instructive if you're a newbie writer because a lot of newbies play this game too):

1) The Desire for 'Cultural Importance.'

Many Canadian TV shows and movies, traditionally, have been developed by people who look at the dominant U.S. culture and find it wanting. They want to do shows that look as slick as U.S. shows but have "higher aspirations." That's why you couldn't swing a Dead Cat in a Development Pitch at a network a few years back without hearing "Six Feet Under." It's why FLASHPOINT getting on CBS is the most important thing everrrr... and why the P.R. for that show goes to great pains to point out how a straight-up CBS procedural is very different from U.S. cop shows.

Sometimes the people wielding the power in these situations are Producers who chafed under the industrial model, where U.S. creative would come up here and boss all the Canadian Line Producers around. One day, they vowed, we will do better.

Writers, too, usually see the writing on the wall. Those who want to sign up for the 'loftier sell' stick around, and those who have a more 'commercial bent' -- traditionally -- have lit out for L.A. at the first opportunity.

I could get into a cultural sidebar here and point out that every person I've ever met who talks about wanting to 'do better' than the U.S. culture generally reveal the more they talk, the less they really understand about the United States or Americans, and also how they fold in some pretty elitist ideas about Canadians, too...but that's a digression too far this morning.

The Desire for Cultural Importance is one of the main reasons why an actual, very Canadian show that's a huge worldwide success -- Stargate -- is never mentioned in the press here as a Canadian show. Even though ALL the key creative behind it are, in fact, Canadian.

It's also why everybody gets skittish about praising Trailer Park Boys. Look at Rob Salem having to defend his praise for the show in the Toronto Star because of 'outraged readers.'

Notice that both Stargate and Trailer Park Boys are shows that actually draw a dedicated audience. A measurable one, I mean. They have actual 'fans.'

The disconnect between shows that people watch and shows that fulfill the Desire for Cultural Importance is key.

2) The Government in the System

Telefilm, the CTF, all public funding of TeeVee and Flim requires you to blather on and on in documents about what this project does to further Canadian culture. Bureaucrats like reading about how this show will explain Canada to Canadians. The "Why," then, becomes the most important thing in the project to secure your fundings. The more time you spend talking about the why, the more it feeds back into the DNA of it. Why is also an easy thing for people to talk about. It's way easier to talk why than to talk story or character, because that discussion requires some level of craft or writing knowledge.

This pear-shaped discussion process leads to meetings where people tell comedy writers, "oh, we know it will be funny, but we want to talk about the heart," as if nailing the funny was the easiest thing in the world. And as if people tuned in to shows to see 'the heart.'

3) Unfamilarity with the Medium

There are a whole lot of people who make TV in this country who don't watch TeeVee. And a whole lot of people who make films who only see films at Film Festivals -- which is not how 90% of the viewing audience sees them.

The Tyranny of "Why this Happened," separates the makers of filmed entertainment from the consumers of filmed entertainment. It's one of the big reasons why so many shows fail to find an audience.

Why Why Sucks:

Tell me if this happens to you. Last week, watching a TV program with my Dad, I quietly endured the usual outbursts. My dad likes to try and 'figure things out.' In the opening scenes of a show, if a mystery is set up, my Dad will spend the next fifteen minutes saying, "he did it," or "I think it's her" or, sometimes, "they're related." -- whatever it is. Point is he's trying to figure out the mystery.

It doesn't matter that he's almost always wrong. The truth is that the only difference between my father and everybody else is that, um, he doesn't use his internal voice. We're all trying to figure things out all the time. That's how we derive pleasure from watching a show. In a comedy, we laugh out of anticipation, and then we laugh again out of surprise when it goes somewhere different from where we think it's going. In drama, one of the reasons why procedurals are so popular is that desire to figure out why. The reason why they're satisfying and hold our attention is because most people try to figure it out, and delight when they can't. That's what keeps them watching.

In both cases, what do you notice about people? They're not the monolithic couch potatoes they're supposed to be. They're engaged in the process. They're trying to imbue meaning, and their search for that meaning is the thing that makes them like the show. LOST is entertaining because we all try to figure out the mystery, and never quite get there.

Marshall McLuhan famously deconstructed his visions of media, and described TV as a 'cool' medium, meaning that we need to do more work to extract meaning from it. That, in fact, is the point.

The problem with making a show about 'why it happened' then, is that you are fundamentally robbing the audience of their part in the transaction.

They're the ones who get to decide what it means.

If you remove them from that process by making your show all about explaining, or lecturing, or hammering home the why and the theme, you are actually forcing the audience to disengage, not further engage in your presentation.

A light sprinkling of theme helps to focus you -- but only if you're focused on the what happened, or what happens next. If you spend all your time thinking about 'why,' then you are almost guaranteeing that you'll wind up with something that's not engaging to the viewer.

Which, by the numbers, seems to be most scripted Canadian TV.

Sounds simple when you put it that way, don't it?


If you'd like to comment on this post, please click through and add it to the original post.

Writer & Creator talk "Being Erica"

THE EARLY BUZZ for the CBC's new series "Being Erica" (premiering tonight at 9pm) is huge. With notices like this one by the Globe's John Doyle standing up as fairly typical:

Being Erica (CBC, 9 p.m.) is very fine TV drama. It's entertaining, smart, serious and nuanced. It's definitely not silly chick-flick material, which is a relief, though it is obviously intended to please female viewers, especially twenty- and thirtysomethings. It fetishizes high-school experiences a tad too much but, in the three episodes I've seen, there are no letdowns, no segments that feel false. Its strength is that it has an emotional heft that feels authentic, not contrived.

And that means it's not just for those women viewers that CBC lusts after.

That's the kind of review any creative type would lust after. But reviews were still weeks away when I met up with Series Creator Jana Sinyor, and Executive Producer Aaron Martin at a west end Toronto social club that advertises itself as being for artsy types, but every time I go there it's ad knobs and bankers...It was actually refreshing to be there for something where you weren't being muscled by some event for the Fraser Institute.

We were ushered into a dark and cozy screening room, which made for an odd and vaguely Planetarium-like vibe.

I warned Jana and Aaron -- who both spent time on Degrassi: The Next Generation, where Aaron was head writer -- that in Sticks' tradition, this was going to be a crafty kind of interview about the process nitty gritty. They were goodnatured and forthcoming, as they talked about the challenges of taking a pilot to series, nailing and communicating the tone and the essential appeal of the show.

Excerpts from our conversation follow.

DTOS: I remember seeing this pilot back in March, I think. It was a few weeks after I ran into you at the coffee shop before you were going in for a meeting about the potential series. I'm not sure they'd picked it up yet, and when I watched it, I thought, "why was she nervous? This is totally going to get picked up." It really seemed like a world you just wanted to return to. So I'm interested in how that came about.

JS: The first thing is, I've always wanted to go back in time. I love time travel shows. And I was interested in the universality of not being able to hit certain milestones in your life as a woman: meet the guy, get the career going, get pregnant; if you don't meet those milestones you feel like you're falling behind your peers. I knew a lot of women who were attractive, talented, and for whatever reason, just weren't able to find that person, or didn't have a clear and obvious career goal. And I guess I combined those two things.

AM: Jana called me up and said, "I got a pilot, and they want someone to come aboard as sort of a creative partner, and help develop it." The minute I watched the pilot I felt the same way you did, I thought it was really good. So I jumped on board.

DTOS: The whole pilot thing is still pretty new in Canadian drama. We used to just develop and go straight to series. So with the blueprint out there and more developent after, I'm interested to know what changed from Pilot to series?

AM: We kept the core of it, in that she goes back to re-live a past regret. But there's also an ongoing story in the present -- each past visit informs a little of what she's going through in the present day. I think the pilot is weighted more in the past than the series. So in the series, she's facing a problem with her family, or her work life, or her love life, and when she goes back into the past, she finds a problem from her past that's somehow thematically linked. She fixes that, and then applies what she learned to her problem in the present day--

JS: -- And usually the regret, on first blush...it looks like it has nothing to do with the problem in the present.

DTOS: You've got that great fantasy premise. People sometimes get a little squirrelly about that kind of stuff. They start to fear the very thing about the idea that's cool. They get scared of it. How did CBC deal with it?

JS: There was some of that in the beginning, for sure. We really overcame that and wound up feeling really supported in making the show that we wanted to make. Down to putting in some... questionable content in there. Stuff they've never done before on the CBC. The whole mystery of who Dr. Tom [Michael Riley, This is Wonderland, Power Play] is and where he came from, and how he knows so much about Erica...is something we're going to explore over the course of the season, and hopefully future seasons.

AM: When we started out...(laughs)...We went down a road that was sort of 'over-the-top-Time-Travel.' And to their credit, the CBC said, "this isn't the show we want. We don't want all time travel." Our first concept was a really complicated sort of puzzle, all about Erica falling in love with her past....there was this guy in the past that she kept seeing in the present and it actually became way more about Time Travel than what it's now about. And what we wound up saying to the writers is that even though there's this fantastical element -- she's able to travel in time, but everything else in the show has to be grounded in reality. Real emotions, real conversations and situations. And it was CBC who steered us back to that...We had trouble in the first episodes in not really hitting the tone the CBC bought. And it's a hard thing to do. You have to keep the writer trick stuff with the time travel and the past and keep everything else real, and when you read real sometimes on the page it seems really--

JS: --Flat.

AM: -- But it's not flat---

JS: --That's what we want.

AM: And the thing is, we have an incredible actress in Erin Karpuk [who plays the titular Erica Strange] who can take any line that sounds flat and make it sound fun. So I think when we first started up the writing room we were veering off the tone a bit. And it was a process. And we caught it early, and brought it back, and that tone is what Jana set in the pilot -- a real woman's life in her thirties.

JS: There's a desire on the part of writers that sometimes we need to rein in -- specifically on this show, I mean, a desire to "be funny in the writing." Because the way the show works is it's not the writing that's funny, it's more the performer that makes it funny.

AM: The situations are funny. Not the dialogue.

JS: Yeah. So the writing on the page does not end up looking very....funny. (Laughs)

DTOS: But that's not an unusual circumstance with a lot of pilots. They're great and then you try to replicate them and you lose your way a bit...lots of shows go through that. It happens in Hollywood and it happens here, you do a pilot, they say, "that's it, that's the show we want." And then it's hard to replicate that tone at first. Why do you think that is?

JS: I think it's a failure on our part to communicate the tone. I was not as confident at going into this in how well I did know the tone of my own show, and I was more collaborative in my approach saying, "let's find it together." But if you know the tone should be the tone in the pilot, and it's not about going a different way or trying something different..it's really about the ability of those who know the tone to communicate it to everybody else. And as we go through the process we find ourselves able to break it down in more and more specific ways. Like getting really particular about how characters speak, how they don't speak, the way it should look on the page...you don't know how big it is, but it's this huge, invisible thing...it's what makes the show feel like itself.

DTOS: So now, at the end of the first season, what else do you know about the show that you didn't know then?

AM: I think even just structurally, we didn't know then, and we do know now, that you have to go back to the past by the end of Act One. It sounds simple.

JS: (agreeing) Mmm hmm.

AM: But we were like, "sometimes you can go back in Act Two, Act Three." No. You really have to go back in Act One. Sometimes we don't -- and it doesn't make the episode suffer, but...it's just better when we go back in Act One.

JS: We know how to use our characters better. There's that.

DTOS: Do you find yourself writing to the actors more? You know there's that point where the characters are you, they're in your head, and then there's this person playing them and you see what they're really good at. Has that helped you at all? What they're good at and what they're not good at?

JS: It's funny. There are two characters on the show that are easy for everybody to write. Any writer that comes into the department has a really easy time with these two characters. And then, everyone else is more challenging.

AM: The one thing I've found, and not to say Jana is Erica, but I do find myself saying, "how would Jana say this?" Jana is open and says what's on her mind, and Erica says what's on her mind, and it's very hard to write that at times. My first pass on my first episode I'd fall into the trap other writers fell into in not making Erica sound like Erica. And it got to the point where I'd send her scenes and say, "Does this sound like her?" And she'd go "no no no no," -- scratchy, scratchy, scratchy-- [Mimes crossing stuff out.]

So it was a process. And any writer has to go through this when you're taking on someone's vision. You have to make your voice sound like their voice.

JS: And the thing is, now, I think Aaron is actually better at explaining the tone than me. When you create a show it's really easy to make the main character sound like you, because then you just write the way you talk. But you don't realize that it's quite difficult for another person coming in to try and write the way you think and talk. And Aaron is incredbily analytical, and good at figuring out that sort of thing, and breaking it down and explaining it. So he sort of explained the tone of my show back to me in the way that I've never thought of it before, and then went on to explain it to others. In the beginning I was just speaking too generally. I remember you kept sending me the teaser and I kept changing it and you said, "Oh. So Erica never makes jokes. She never says a single funny thing. She's not funny." And I was like, "Yeah! She's NOT funny!" (Laughs)

AM: She's not ironic, she's not cynical, and a lot of things that I think are "go-to" places for writers. Cause it's fun to write people who are fun and ironic. Like Juno, that whole character. That's one of the main problems I had with Juno. I didn't believe her. And whenever we'd try to make Erica sound like that she just became a robot. And even Erin noticed it and didn't like it. She'd say, "I don't think I'd say this, I just don't." And this is early in the process for that. And Erin is a very good bellweather.

JS: She's very similar. Grounded, down to earth, salt of the earth type woman. She's very plain spoken-- which is the character.

AM: I think when you're doing high concept, you have to have very clear rules. Like one of the things we'd ask is, "what is Erica doing wrong that triggers Dr. Tom's visit?" And I don't think we were conscious of that at first, but now we're like, "okay what does she do in Act One that makes him say, "Aha, now you need a session with me.""

JS: And then there's "the false lesson."

AM: (sighs) Yeah. That one's really hard.

By this point, we heard shuffling outside the door, and my digital recorder battery was flashing. So I moved on to give them a chance to step up and make the sale! By answering that all-important-question: Who's the audience? (Beyond that Holy Grail 'women in their thirties?" Sinyor thinks a moment before answering. "Anybody with regrets. Anyone who looks back on something in their past and wonders what life would have been like if they'd made a different choice or taken a different path."

So in a word, I guess....everybody? (We all could use a chance to better identify the "false lesson," methinks.)

JS: It's also nostalgia. We go back a lot to the nineties, which haven't really been done in Time Travel shows. You go back to the 60's, 70's or 80's... But for a lot of people in their 20's, 30's, 40's, the 90's were big for us.

AM: There's a lot of stuff in the 9o's that's really cheesy and funny.

JS: You don't even really know how far we've come til you try to do the 90's every week.

* * *

More from that interview in the weeks to come, when I get around to transcribing it.

A program note. I leave you now for a few days for a bit of a getaway. We'll have a few choice reprints. See you next week.

Be It Resolved...

ROB SALEM, WRITING in a Toronto Star article about things that could make the cultural life of Toronto better, took some serious pokes at the Canadian nets yesterday. Seriously delicious stuff:

I have no personal New Year's resolutions. I mean, my job is watching television. As far as quality of life goes, that's pretty much as good as it gets.

I do, however, have some worthwhile suggestions for the various Canadian networks and their corporate media masters:

CTV (CTVglobemedia): What is with you people? You throw all this money at the CHUM channels, then gut them like a Christmas turkey. You do a spectacular job topping the original American So You Think You Can Dance, wisely retire the coma-inducing Canadian Idol, and yet can't come up with a decent variety/reality/game show of our own? What you paid for the Hockey Night in Canada theme just to blow a raspberry at the CBC could have financed an entire season of Flashpoint and the retiring Corner Gas — shows that millions of people avidly watch. More of that, too, please.

Global (Canwest): C'mon now ... Howie Do It is the best you can do? What's that you say? The Guard? Are you serious? You want to fill your Canadian content mandate, give us smarter shows like Billable Hours. Rebrand E! into something other than a deceptively dubbed dumping ground for American fluff and spillover you can't fit on the main network schedule. And please do not touch the specialty channels you acquired from Alliance Atlantis. They are just fine as is.

Citytv (Rogers): Why did you buy this once-distinctive franchise if all you wanted to do was turn it into OMNI 3? If you're smart, you'll take it back to its roots as funky, street-level guerrilla TV — your new street-front studio at Dundas Square? The operative word here is "street" — and restore the local entertainment coverage this city's vast cultural community deserves. Amortize the format through the other City stations across the country; maybe add some regional talk shows and magazines to the mix. And at least put the shuttered Speaker's Corner online. On the other hand, yay to you for backing Less than Kind.

The Movie Networks/HBO Canada (Astral Media): Slings & Arrows, Terminal City, Durham County ... Resolve to keep doing what you're doing (The Line), financing high-quality, highly exportable miniseries. Sliding worthy Canadian content under that new HBO Canada banner, where it has a second chance of being seen, is a welcome vote of confidence in the industry.

CBC (Us): No one can touch you for documentaries (I should know, I get about a half-dozen delivered to me every day). But take another look at your light entertainment: This Hour has 22 Minutes, Rick Mercer Report ... remember Made in Canada? Come to think of it, just hand the whole thing over to Mercer. That being said, your promising, if unlikely, time-travel sitcom Being Erica (starring Erin Karpluk, left) is already generating serious buzz (as long as it isn't Being Sophie).

Pretty sharp, eh? Nice to see Salem throwing the heat. And most of his comments are seriously on point. (We're all going to quibble about various shows. I think I've stated in the past that personally I wasn't a huge fan of Billable Hours or Terminal City. But whatever. That's just personal taste. The drift of the piece is the thing.

And I'd never thought of the Hockey Night in Canada theme debacle that way. It's true, though.

There's no question that if you're sitting around asking, "who was the smartest broadcaster last year?" that the answer would come back Astral, in partnership with their partners out west in Movie Central. (I don't know exactly if they're as good to deal with since I'm east and deal with TMN.)

Astral's TMN seems to be getting everything right, right about now. A little while back, they redesigned their monthly magazine for Pay TV subscribers. It's slick, easy to read and great-looking.

Their development slate has started to reflect a homegrown quality mandate that's equal to their acquisitions from HBO and Showtime. The January debut of ZOS continues that trend.

Astral also has figured out the P.R. thing - which is the bane of just about every other Canadian broadcaster. Not that they should get massive points for this, since it should fall under the "cost of doing business" side of things.

Yet Astral and TMN were among the first to recognize that TV bloggers had a voice in the reviewing firmament. Their press materials are accurate, and screeners are always sent out with plenty of lead time. You contact them, and someone contacts you back nearly immediately. It's hard to overstate how night and day this is when it comes to other Canadian outlets.

At this point, I can't understand anyone not having the Pay Channels. They're the best value on TV.

And finally, this year, the company scored a coup by their clever rebranding of one of their multichannels as HBO Canada. The extra programming and one-stop destination for that HBO programming has made a big difference.

* * *

Now, while we're on the subject of resolutions. I'd like to take a little moment to talk to you about "TV, eh?"

Over the last couple years, the Tv, Eh? website has become an invaluable clearinghouse for the kind of information you never used to be able to find anywhere. Articles on Canadian shows.

I don't think there's a creative anywhere in this country who hasn't used the site as a resource, or research for a job interview, to keep tabs on potential partners, to check your own press or to simply stay current. It's probably the single greatest resource portal for Canadian Television.

It's so great to see that the Canadian Association of Broadcasters..er...no, the Canadian Film and Television Production Association...um....the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Televis.....uh....the creative guilds... Film Centre and NSI...what?

Um. Wow.

No.

Nope, none of those organizations, with membership fees and fundraising and any other sources of revenue, pulled it together to start Tv, eh?

Since its inception, the site has been maintained and updated daily on a strictly volunteer basis by Diane Kristine, a Vancouver-based web publications manager who doesn't even work in the television industry.

You know, I still get the questions all the time about why I write this blog and I can't always give a good answer. It can sometimes be a pain in the ass. Some of it's ego-driven, of course, and even the part that's an attempt at good passionate citizenry and industry boosterism is cut with an undercurrent of self-interest. The less secretive and more vocal creatives in our industry are, I firmly believe, the better our product will be, and the greater our strength. So in the end, that's why I do it. Because I can, and because I think it helps.

But none of that applies to a woman who runs a volunteer site just because it bugged her that she'd never heard of any of the Canadian shows that I and others were blogging about.

So now I'm addressing the insiders here -- writers, producers, directors, and self-interested others who've gone to TV Eh? in the last year or so to find an article, or see what's being said about your show, or some show you're interested in. If you go to the site now you'll notice there's a "Donate now" button.

The bandwidth and all other costs associated with the running of the site are paid for by Diane herself. I think that's admirable. But I also think after two years of getting that service for free, maybe it's a good time to think about giving something back. Hit the donate now button, and give anything. Even 10 bucks. I know times are tight. But so's the margins by which we get people to watch these shows. How many viewers do you think Diane's activism has bought you? Show your appreciation.

And thanks, Diane, for doing the publicity job that few of the paid people in this industry seem capable of doing. See how easy it is to be a powerful industry insider?

The hard part is being a powerful industry insider who doesn't have to wear a nametag and ask if you want fries with that.

Doctor, Doctor, Give Me The News

AS MY FRIEND David Antoniuk said just moments ago, "we're ready for a black President of the USA, but not a black Doctor Who?"

WTF, People! W.T.F.?

Dead Like Me Again

WELL HERE'S A weird one, especially if you're one of those still pining for Bryan Fuller's now-canceled Pushing Daisies.

While flip-flipping around last night, I managed to come upon the new Dead Like Me movie, which is coming out on DVD in February, and -- if it sells -- might be a precursor to resurrecting the cult series. (The first of Bryan Fuller's whimsical creations that was canceled too soon.)

After a quick bit of surfing around, I'm starting to think that there's a distinct possibility that this broadcast might have been a world premiere, on Super Channel, the high-on-the-dial other Canadian Pay TV channel that I think only me and Will Dixon have. They did such a great job promoting their channel that a guy who writes about TV every single day didn't know about it! Wow guys, congrats. In the bad Canadian P.R. department, I think we have a new champ-een!

I always had a soft spot for Dead Like Me. The series was one of the shows I took with me to South Africa in 2004. There's something about Ellen Muth's sardonic delivery, and the show's treatment of death that I found moving. (The show's a strange combo of the cynical and the sentimental. For instance, there are child grim reapers who run around taking the souls of pets. That's right, kids. Catholic dogma be damned. In this show, pets have souls! Say it with me -- "Awwwwwww.")

Not returning for the film -- Grumpy Mandy Patinkin, who played Rube, the mentor of the group, and Laura Harris, who played Daisy. (Daisy is in the movie, but she's played by Sarah Wynter -- who played Laura Harris' sister on 24. Weird.)

Judging by the credits, the movie also shifted filming locations from Vancouver to Montreal (though the city still stands in for Seattle.) Wynter is fine in the role, if a little less effortlessly bitchy, and at least Montreal doesn't look like Vancouver. (Calm down Vancouver, I don't mean that as a slight, I just mean, you know, every fifth TV series with that Vancouver look always kind of hurt Dead Like Me, when compared to some of its higher budget U.S. rivals.)

Set five years after the series ends, George and her fellow reapers are adjusting to change. They discover that their old gathering spot, Der Waffle Haus, has burned down. Rube is also AWOL, and in his place is Henry Ian Cusick, trying his best to make you forget Desmond on LOST. The Reapers' new boss has traded in post-it notes for text messages -- and his work ethic is a bit suspect as well. Far from Rube's lectures on accepting fate and not trying to get around the machinations of death, the movie quickly becomes a sort of Death Takes a Holiday adventure, where the characters take on the taboo.

For George, that means revealing herself to her now-16 year old sister, who's grown into a teenager without shedding any of her awkwardness and alienation. George and her sister have great chemistry. And the turn in the sister's plot, while telegraphed early, is surprisingly effective.

The movie is sweet and not quite as sharp as some of the better episodes of the series, but the desire to upgrade the look bears fruit for the DVD market -- the special effects are way better, it's more cinematic, and there are some great and satisfying set pieces. Even a high speed car chase! The comedy and pathos mix well, and it's fun dropping in on these characters again. Especially George's daffy boss at Happy Time temps, Delores.

The ending clearly springboards for the possible resurrection of the series. But the heart of the story is really George and her sister -- which was always the heart of the TV show for me, too.

I'd be pleased as punch to see this show return from the dead, so when the movie comes out in February, be sure to check it out. Or if you're in Canada, consider subscribing to Super Channel: the Witness Protection Program of Pay Channels.

Here's the trailer, which was apparently put out by the "viral" people at Super Channel. Note to Super Channel: you should try a little non-viral promo, too.



Oh, and the best part about this? It makes one of my examples in the Save Our Shows Campaigns post moot. Sigh. You know what? Somebody else can explain the whole exception proves the rule thing...I'm out!

(but still, getting a show -- or at least part of a show (2 cast members gone) up and running five years later? Pretty awesome achievement. And don't worry, the Dead Like Me movie is about a million times better than ... shudder ... the New WKRP. Brrr.)

Standards

SO YOU'VE PROBABLY heard by now that Scrubs is moving from NBC to ABC. There's lots of corporate-y stuff about that that can be covered elsewhere. But in an article I read noting the network change, this was my favorite part:

Attentive viewers may notice some other changes. [Scrubs creator/showrunner Bill] Lawrence said a popular character nicknamed the Todd is no longer allowed to wear the thong-style swimsuit he occasionally wore on NBC. "That was an actual edict from the head of standards at Disney," he said.

Being Erica How, Exactly?

JAIME WEINMAN FROM Macleans picks up on the CBC's not-very-well-hidden flop sweat terror about promoting their new time-twisted comic drama Being Erica, which debuts this Monday at 9pm on CBC, (in The Border's former timeslot.)

This show is going for the same demographic as Sophie, but the promotional blitz for Sophie made the premise fairly clear. But Erica’s posters and tag lines don’t really tell you much of anything except that she’s “going back” to set things right — but the fact that the show is a time travel fantasy where she literally goes back in time to correct things in her past (call it a more self-centred version of Quantum Leap) is not obvious at all, at least in the print ads...

Networks, both U.S. and Canadian, sometimes seem to have this kind of reticence when promoting a show with a fantasy element; ...

I don’t know if it helps or hurts a show to soft-pedal the supernatural stuff, but I admit that it is very tricky to promote a show that has a fantasy aspect but otherwise aims to be realistic, like Life On Mars. The whole “magic realism” form seems to be more accepted in books, as well as movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But most TV shows are either “pure” fantasy or not.

Anything that muddies the hook of your show is a problem. The perceived solution (hide the premise) is so much worse than the problem it's trying to fix that I can't even imagine the thinking that goes into it. If people don't watch the show it won't be because of the premise. This is not spaceships in space shooting lasers. It's Peggy Sue Got Married.

None of this is new, of course. We talked about it on the blog last year. (And Weinman's covered the ground too, I believe.)

When you lose the clarifying ability of genre -- when you try to hide it, you lose sight, I think, of the mechanics of what you're doing -- and everything becomes softer and more slippery. If you're trying to run away from what kind of show it is, then how can you honestly talk about what needs to be in the show to reach -- never mind the audience that you want to trick into watching -- but the audience who would be predisposed to watch anyway?

In the network hallways, that leads to some frustrating conversations where they buy a sci-fi concept, and then fall over backwards trying to hide the sci-fi in it. You know how hard that is to write? Very.

Because there are certain expectations people have in watching sci-fi product, whether it's called that or not. Can you imagine a soap opera without any sex, either actual or implied? What about a murder mystery where they said, "maybe we should think twice about having a body." But these straitjackets are applied to sci-fi shows all the time. You get notes that just aren't consistent with the genre -- there's no sense making a Six Feet Under observation in a show that's just not built that way. You find yourself getting notes that you can't take -- because you have the wrong premise, the wrong characters, the wrong sets. And all this comes out of the idea that it's okay to buy one kind of show and then say you're going to make another.

In the end, the reason why a lot of sci-fi product winds up being anemic, dull, or retreaded and bled of creativity is because in that development process, you have the people paying the piper begging writers to run away from the thing that is the very essence of the show.

It's a shame that CBC has finally taken a show that has a good, solid populist high-concept premise, and muddied the sale because it's afraid of it. It's like FOX north.

Having seen the pilot of the show, I hope that viewers tune in and give it a chance. I'll have more on the show hopefully in time for Monday.

EDIT: I should say that what both Weinman and I bury here is that the on-air promo does a good job of explaining the premise. It's more like they're trying to split the difference with the print, so that you get a wider audience...kind of like how they sometimes cut different trailers for the male/female or white/black audiences. But considering the CBC's promo budget -- however big it is for CBC -- is a pebble in the bucket in TV terms -- that's a risky strateregy.

Don't Ask Me About My TV Series, Kay.

ALAN SEPINWALL has a very interesting interview with Battlestar Galactica's Ronald Moore over at his digs. Moore is one of the writers that noobs really should be tracking, just because in all his podcasts and interviews, he's just so refreshingly open about the process. That kind of openness can sometimes work to a writer's detriment, especially in the case where they use it in the endless "there's a plan," "no, they're making it up as they go along," argument.

The problem with that argument is that the answer is: they're doing both of those things. But that nuance, and the reasoning behind that nuance, is not something that's ever going to translate to the mostly-wisdom free province of the internet message board.

Moore is the guy who admits mistakes in the writing while watching the show for a podcast. He's posted long recordings of discussions from the Writers' Room, for heaven's sake. And in Sepinwall's interview, here's the key exchange about the whole, "planned out" aspect of series writing:

In terms of "Galactica," how long have you known how you were going to end it?

In general terms, over the last year and a half, somewhere in the middle of season three I started asking, 'What's the shape of the ending? What's going to happen at the end of the show and what's going to be the case when they meet up with whoever they meet up with?' As we got into season three, I started thinking of it more seriously, and last summer, almost a year ago, we had a writer's summit up in Lake Tahoe and said, "It's going to end here." But a lot of the pieces didn't fall into place until I was sitting at the computer writing the teleplay that I realized exactly how the cards were going to fall for different characters.

One of the things I find interesting is, on "Lost," Cuse and Lindelof have always claimed they have a master plan and know where it's all going, and fandom has been skeptical at times and said, "Yeah, right." Whereas you've been pretty candid about the fact that you'll throw stuff out there and figure it out later, and yet people assume there's some cohesive plan to "Galactica." How do you pull that off to make it seem like there's a plan?

To me, that's the job. The job is to figure a way along in a story but make it all feel like it's seamless, to make it all make sense. Hopefully, if I've done my job right, when all is said and done and the story's been put to bed and you've got the entire set of DVDs before you and you watch them, that it feels like a cohesive narrative -- that stuff we just threw up and decided to take a flier on without ultimately knowing where it would pay off, when you look at in hindsight, that it all tracks. You're painting this large painting on this big canvas, and you may not know what it's going to look like at the end, but when you're done, you want it to feel like it's a cohesive vision and makes perfect sense.

So, for instance, when you decided who four of the Final Five would be, how much thought did you have to put into it before revealing it in "Crossroads," and how much was, "Oh, we'll say this and figure it out over the hiatus"?

The impulse to do it was literally an impulse. We were in the writers room on the finale of that season, always knew we would end season 3 on trial of Baltar and his acquittal, the writers had worked out a story and a plot, they were pitching it to me in the room. And I had a nagging sense that it wasn't big enough, on the level of jumping ahead a year or shooting Adama. And I literally made it up in the room, I said, "What if four of our characters walk from different parts of the ship, end up in a room and say, 'Oh my God, we're Cylons'? And we leave one for next season." And everyone said "Oh my God," and they were scared, and because they were scared, I knew I was right. And then we sat and spent a couple of hours talking about who those four would be. Surprisingly, it wasn't that hard to lock in who made the most sense and who would make the most story going forward.

To an element of the fanboy crowd, that is going to always be a maddening answer, because the only way to grok it is to think of it fully formed and ready to go. Which is weird, of course, since nobody bats an eye at artists' sketches or tests or studies for major paintings, or thinks that a demo of this song or that with different lyrics spoils the cohesiveness of the work. But there it is. You'll always be fighting the don'tgettits out there, who think that the ability to say, "this sucks" is the highest form of intellectual jousting.

But if you're trying to find your voice and your way, the combination of risk and doubt that suffuses every interview with Moore shows you he's the real deal. I learn something from every podcast he's done, and that's why, ultimately, despite off episodes and the occasional flaw, Battlestar Galactica is the show teaches me more about what I do than anything I currently watch.

Oh yeah, and the title of this post, I'm just being silly. I thought it was funny that he had the big writing summit for BSG up at Lake Tahoe. You know who else hung out at Tahoe...

EDIT: Hilarious. I go and write this post, and look what the VERY FIRST COMMENT over at Sepinwall's place is:

As much as I love this show, it really is frustrating to hear how RM just decides on a whim such major plot points as "let's make 4 main characters find out they are cylons". It really does call into question some of the earlier narrative and choices made by the writers and actors.

I appreciate Moore's honesty, but honest to Pete, maybe David Chase's "the work speaks for itself and I'm not explaining it" F-you is the right approach. Something to ponder...

Not So Hard, Is It?

WELL, IF YOU look at Alex Strachan's TV Preview for the January "Second Season," there's something to celebrate... Here's how the article looks in today's Canwest Papers (as culled from the Vancouver Province):

Some old, some new kick off second television season

CBC debuts two series, while Lost and 24 set to make big returns

Alex Strachan
Canwest News Service

Friday, January 02, 2009

Television unofficially launches its second season next week as a few returning favourites and some new series get ready to make their mid-season debuts. Here's a look at what to expect from networks on both sides of the border.

THE VIEW FROM CANADA

- Erin Karpluk, familiar to anyone who caught the sudsy, made-in-Vancouver kitchen drama Godiva's, will make her homegrown comedy debut as 30-something singleton Erica Strange in CBC's new romantic fantasy Being Erica.

Being Erica bows Monday on CBC. Pick up Sunday's Province for more about the Vancouver star.

- Wild Roses, CBC's new, adult-themed, female-driven take on its rural, cattle-country ensemble drama Heartland, follows the clash of wills between ranch-owning sisters, played by Sarah Power and Michelle Harrison, and a rapacious oil developer, played by Gary Hudson.

- SCTV hosers Bob and Doug McKenzie return in Bob & Doug, an animated version of their Great White North series of comedy sketches, complete with half-empty bottles of beer.

THE VIEW FROM NEXT DOOR

- Lost, which enjoyed a fine comeback season last year, will return with new episodes on Jan. 21. (article continues)

Okay, on first glance that's a pretty standard preview article right?

But it's not.

What Strachan's done is give homegrown shows something that they rarely get in this country: parity.

Not only are they mentioned in the SAME preview article as the returning or new U.S. shows, they're actually in there as the lede. And he manages to plug a future feature article on the Canadian actor besides!

I argued last month that ghettoizing Canadian shows in coverage was one of the major subtle signals that point and contribute to the "dismissible" mentality of "Canadians don't want to watch Canadian shows."

Usually in the paper it's treated as a thing apart. In fall preview articles, they spend lots of column space on U.S. shows, and if you're lucky, the Canadian stuff gets covered in a sidebar. In discussions of how the business is changing, Canadian writers may write all about Jay Leno, and the fortunes of NBC, but even for a Canadian audience they don't mention things like the upcoming CRTC license renewal hearings, and how that might affect what homegrown shows there are to watch.

To read an article on Canadian TV networks, in the Globe Report on Business, you'd think that one hundred percent of the point of broadcasting in Canada was to re-broadcast American shows. It's ninety-five percent, true. And Lord knows, they'd probably like for it to be 100 percent -- but it's not. Not yet.

By hiving off and making sure that Canadian TV is usually only talked about in this separate bubble, it subtly reinforces the point of view that it's something different, something, in the stentorian tones of my long-gone Catholic youth: something slightly unholy.

This kind of disconnect and separation is what allows a lot of the misapprehensions and fictions to keep bubbling through; it's what allows some people to turn up their noses at Trailer Park Boys and talk about it like it's an object of shame, and not a show that brings hordes of fans out every time the actors make a personal appearance. It's what allows a double standard where Canadian shows are judged (sometimes) by a harsher yardstick -- and 'judged' is probably the wrong word, what I really mean is "dismissed."

Strachan is generous in his editorial approach -- even I wouldn't say that you should necessarily put the homegrown shows first -- but he even has some fun with the view from here, view from there stuff.

Point is, it's all there, he lays it out, and the subtle intimation is that "your viewing choices are up to you, but here is ALL the information about what's coming up."

That's really all we Canadian creatives can ask for. Although there are those out there who go a whole lot further. Which only hurts us all. John Doyle wrote a couple weeks ago in his week of cranky, that newspaper writers were not Canadian TV's publicity arm. He's right. They're not. Neither should they put their fingers on the scale and lightly review shows just cause they're from Canada. In the long run, that helps nobody: it burns their credibility, excuses the sins of substandard Canadian fare (there is still much of that, and a lot of people making tv who maybe shouldn't be) and lets down the primary function of newspaper coverage of TV: to inform the audience as to what they can see out there. Now is not the time for anybody in the newspaper biz to be messing with the audience's sense of how well they're being informed.

I don't always agree on Strachan's take on TV, but he is remarkably even-handed, and as near as I've ever been able to tell, he doesn't have one set of rules for homegrown product and U.S. fare. That's admirable.

This is one kind of parity with the U.S. that we should all celebrate. The rest is up to us.

(Sidebar: one other funny thing I haven't been able to work in to any other article I've written lately. A pretty constant thing I hear from colleagues is how discouraged they are when they read the comments on any article on Canadian TV, because they're always hateful, ill-informed, bleating the same defeatist or myopic B.S. So last month I started an experiment. I started reading the comments on all the news articles I read, too. And all the business articles. And you know what? We're not so special. It seems that most people that take the time to comment on articles are weird, reactionary yahoos. The content of the article seems to be irrelevant. Oh Internet! I kvell for those lost days when you were full of smart people talking about physics and Star Trek!)

Year End List, Fuel for Inspiration 2008: Part Three (This Time It's Personal)

FOR PART ONE, click here. For Part Two, here.


3) The House That Ruth Built

Part of being an Irish American is being aware of your deep seeded propensity for a kind of maudlin sentimentality. It can bubble up and get on you at anytime. Kind of like baby spit up.

Ritual and history become important. Maybe it's the writer in me too, getting slutty for any kind of symbolism you can seize upon.

But whatever the reason, one of the big moments for me this year came on a Thursday night at the end of June. I met my friend Matt at the Union Square subway station in Manhattan, and we climbed on the Number 4 for the trip up to 161st Street and River Avenue.

The last game I saw at Yankee Stadium was with my Uncle Christy. That's when my Yankees had names like Bucky Dent, Lou Pinella as a player, Catfish and Goose and Reggie Jackson and the Captain and Catcher, the late, great Thurman Munson. And yes, I know it was really the 2nd Yankee Stadium I went to -- the post '73 reno stadium...but it was still physically in the same place. It had the advantage of all the old ghosts. That's another thing we American Micks love...the old ghosts.

My Uncle's gone now, but I'll always remember being a ten year old, walking out from the grey halls into the light, and looking down on that field in wonder. My Uncle knew every cop, it seemed, and waved to a bunch of other types along the way. Matt and I sat in our box seats on the first base line, a couple sections back, and watched a reasonably lackluster game. The team wasn't in fine form. But it didn't matter. It was the stadium of my dreams, and when I closed my eyes, I still see and feel the roar of the crowd...all the crowds, stretching back to Mantle and Gehrig and the Babe.

I visited Wrigley for the first time this year, too, and felt a similar chill. It's the chill I felt the first time I saw a hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens.

All these new stadiums may be sleeker, and have more boxes for the big money. But when I close my eyes, all that vibrant color fades to brilliant black and white -- and the cheer goes down the line, through generations gone.

The Yankees lost. But it didn't matter. When the organ started and they played "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," I hid my Irish eyes in my palm, pulled the cap a little lower, and sniffed the air in that stadium for the last time. Spilling out onto the street after the final out, I looked around and it occurred to me, absently, "I was born not too far from here" The thought seemed otherworldly, almost inconceivably strange and so much less relatable than the ritual I'd just gone through.

A shuffle toward the subway. An express pulled up, we got in, and thirty minutes later I was back at the Hotel Bar in Grammercy -- like none of it had never happened.

But it did happen. And believe you me, that's one pilgrimage I'll never regret.

But there, that picture of the brand new stadium under the lights...mmm...well...

It's never too late for new memories, right?

Number 4 train, here I come...

2) The Genius setting on the New Ipods.

Because I don't know how it knows. But damn.


1) November 4, 2008.

I probably can't match my heartfelt here.

But if I had to choose just one inspiring thing from this year, the thing that will carry me forward through the tough time ahead, it's the fruit of that wonderful moment of 11PM ET, November 2008.

The rejection of the politics of smear and fear; the fiction of the Bradley effect, the turnout, the redemption, the feeling that maybe thought and thoughtfulness and wisdom would hold sway now, finally, after so long.

It's already changed some of what I'm writing, and how I approached one project. It will be interesting to see if my old show, The Border, rises to the challenge of transforming itself from a Bush-era conception of the Canada-U.S. relationship to that new reality. I'm rooting for them.

Meanwhile, optimism is in, as is pragmatism and sense.

It'll be wonderful and exciting to see what characters and situations TV writers come up with now. Just read the story of where this chapter of American history came from, and you realize that the stories we have to tell are more diverse, more exciting, more unusual, and more unlikely than we've dared to dream of before.

The dreams are different in a Yes We Can world. And Thank God for that.


Twenty more sleeps.

New Year's Roundup

KATHY GRIFFIN'S only good line was about whether Jack Cafferty ever gets so mad at Wolf Blitzer that he just punches him in the face. But Anderson Cooper and her were the most uncomfortable couple since Liza and David Guest.

Solange seems genuinely talented.

Step back Pussycat Girls. Not you.

Carson Daly is now, and always will be, a douche.

Dick Clark seems like maybe he's gone downhill in the last year.

Ryan Seacrest makes my neck itch. And not in that good way.

Tim Russert's son will not soon erase anybody's memory of his dad.

The Clintons' dancing was sweet.

There was one couple on one of the channels who seemed to make out for like, an hour.

Roger Hodgson got old. Seriously? Supertramp songs? Props to the guy playing soprano sax at minus 20. That shit aint easy.

So CBS has just given up on anyone under 60 tuning in?

Didn't see the chicken cannon. Didn't miss the chicken cannon. Sorry Bill.

Natasha Bedingfield = Yummy.

Fergie is still nasty.

Citytv at Nathan Philips....dude, you need some guests. And no, the touring cast of Jersey Boys does not count.

Wine with friends 1, New Year's TV, 0.

What's next?

EDIT, Jan 2: Great. Now, apparently Kathy Griffin's in trouble. Dudes, YOU HIRED HER! Geez!