Messing With Male Minds: A Decade in TV, & Don't Shadow My Script, Man..

I'VE ARGUED BEFORE on this blog that one of the things ailing network TeeVee today was a dearth of realistic male characters.  As the audience tipped ever-more toward the distaff side*, so too did characters become ever more like caricatures -- feminized men who acted more like, well...women.

(All while the opposite happened with women's roles; outside of sitcom-land, the "wife" "girlfriend" "mother" roles for women enjoyed great expansion over the last while, in no small part because of the emergence of strong female writer/showrunners.)

Let it not be said that we don't rope in all opinions here in Sticksville. And in today's New York Times, Alessandra Stanley makes a pretty convincing case that the entire last decade of TeeVee was totally concerned with the male psyche.

So many dramas, good and bad, focused narrowly on the male mind. Every cop and fireman came with a set of complexes; witness “The Shield” and “Rescue Me” on FX. Fictional detectives have been eccentric and unorthodox since the days of Sherlock Holmesand Arsène Lupin, so it’s not unusual for television cops to be freakier than the robbers (and rapists).

But TV’s romance with the masculine psyche can be found even in the most prosaic network crime shows, including the evolution of “Law & Order” spinoffs. The original, which started on NBC in 1990, was conceived by its creator, Dick Wolf, as an antidote to crime shows like “NYPD Blue,” which fastened onto the psychic distress of antiheroes like Andy Sipowicz. For a while, at least, “Law & Order” kept crime and punishment in the foreground and gave viewers only sketchy details about the private lives of its detectives and prosecutors.

But even Mr. Wolf’s template gave in to the times. In 1999, on the cusp of a new century, came “Law & Order: SVU,” a procedural about sex crimes, but it soon turned out that some of the most lurid moments were found in the romantic and psychological entanglements of its central characters. By 2001 the lead detective on another spinoff, “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” was a former altar boy burdened with a schizophrenic mother and a disturbing ability to bond with criminals and the criminally insane. In an episode titled “Untethered,” the detective (Vincent D’Onofrio) implodes and is suspended for psychiatric evaluation.

Female detectives are messed up as well, but in a welcome reversal of gender roles they are far more repressed about their feelings and failings. Nowadays they tend to follow the classic Raymond Chandler model, notably those played by Kyra Sedgwick, Holly Hunterand Mary McCormack on their shows on TNT. All three crime fighters are tough, dedicated loners who shirk help and hide their vulnerabilities under flip banter or bossiness. They are closer in spirit to Philip Marlowe than Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher.

On the other hand, one of the most beloved private eyes of the decade was Tony Shalhoubin USA’s “Monk,” as a San Francisco detective with near crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder forced to leave the San Francisco Police Department.

I still think she uses a lot of Cable examples -- where male interest and eyeballs fled this decade. But it's a pretty good wrapup -- and hey, since I punted when it came to contemplating the same task, I think Stanley's take deserves more than a little consideration.

But it's actually in one of the Times' other decade-wrap articles that I found a line I'm still turning over and over, for its implications for screenwriters.  In his summation of the rise of digital music,  Jon Pareles writes:

For indie-rock bands like Arcade Fire, or for a rapper like Wale building a reputation on mixtapes, a mention in the right places online — accompanied, likely enough, by a free MP3 or a link to a YouTube clip — can be the makings of a national and perhaps international tour circuit: a star is blogged. And what once was a post-gig discussion among a handful of friends can now be a worldwide colloquy, complete with photos and video as documentary evidence. Less and less takes place behind the scenes, even if it belongs there.

This lack of a "behind-the-scenes" space has profound implications for screenwriters who fumble through multiple drafts (as we all do) til you get to a finished form.

Earlier this year, a site sprang up that started reviewing "in process" drafts of scripts that were circulating.  Screenwriter John August ran a couple of great pieces about why Scriptshadow wasn't such a wonderful idea.  The argument for the site seemed to be that it was just bringing a wider eye to something that happened anyway...scripts get passed around by assistants all the time.  There are even codified "buzz" lists such as The Black List that legitimize this process.  So what's the difference? As August put it:

In between answering phones and trying to get their bosses on flights out of Kennedy, bright underpaid aspirants have the opportunity to read almost every script in town. Impromptu networks of assistants pass around their favorite screenplays, in the process picking the next generation of hot writers.

Studios turn a blind eye to this because it helps the industry. You want the smartest people with the best opinions working for you, and you want them to have a good sense of what’s in development all over town. A boss at Disney isn’t going to lose sleep if an intern at CAA reads a draft of that Miley Cyrus comedy. It’s expected. It’s good.

So ScriptShadow should be a good thing, right? More is better.

It’s not. And the reasons become clear pretty quickly.

There’s a big difference between reading a script and reviewing it online for the world to see. Not only are you spoiling plot details, but you’re establishing a baseline judgment for a project that’s often still in its fetal phase.

And here’s the rub: just like the AICN reviews of screenings made studios much more reluctant to test their films, sites like ScriptShadow are making them clamp down much harder on the heretofore common practice of passing scripts around.

In other words, less and less happens behind the scenes, even if it belongs there.

If you read August's comment sections, you'll see a lot of howling outrage and charges of elitism -- from many of the same types who busted a gasket in the Great Josh Olson "I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script" Teapot Tempest of 2009.  Remember that, kids?

A local Toronto blogger gadfly summed up the anti-forces rather well in this post.

You know what's going on when someone starts talking about stuff in terms of 'castes' and 'elites.'  We're into the grand conspirian land again, where somehow the worthy are kept out through a cabal -- and the net's gonna bust that on out.

But to the scriberly among us, you and I know that's not really what's going on.

The self-same blogger above, it should be noted, generally has a kind of penchant for railing against anything where he feels he was "excluded."  I remember one post trying to whip up anger at not being invited to a pre-screening for WGC members of Being Erica.  That's right -- not a public screening...not even an invited screening...basically a coffee clatch for screenwriters to talk shop about an upcoming show.

Anyway, here's why I skeeve on this right now, despite the fact that the August article was at the beginning of December...

...I've just gone to a pre-second draft on a development project I have in the works.  The task for the first to second draft transition was to try and justify and bring up one of the secondary characters, and also to reframe some of the motivation for the lead character.  Because it's a pilot, there's also all the normal-challenge stuff of introducing the world and establishing the franchise.  Add to that the fact that in the first draft there was main-character voiceover, which I endeavored to remove.

Now, this winds up being quite an extensive rewrite.  And at the step before it's going to go into the network, it goes to the production companies and my partners for feedback.

And what comes back is -- what I knew would come back is -- that I've done a great job of bringing up the number two character -- but now that, combined with the loss of the "look-inside-the-head" quality the voiceover provided, means that I need to do further work on the main protagonist.

I knew this would be the reaction;  I'm fumbling toward a new show here -- this is not a production-ready script, this is very much a project in play, taking baby steps forward. And I've made it even harder for myself by trying to create something that's a genre hybrid I haven't seen before...so there isn't even the comfort of, "well it's like...." to fall back on.

Now, I say this with all humility and knowledge that there's likely to be a VERY low level of interest for an early draft of a pilot script of a potential Canadian TV series written by me... I am not delusional.  But nevertheless, If this half-step script got out somewhere and got reviewed, I'd be... well, I'd be pretty much paralyzed with anger and creative sturm and drang.

It's fun to see sketches and concept stuff, drawings of characters and wardrobe and whatever, when a movie comes out, because your first taste of the work is the finished work.  And that means somebody like me bashing a script's head against the wall til it comes out finished.  It's never pretty, and sometimes it's pretty painful. But it's the only way to do it.

If creatives lose the ability to do stuff behind the scenes, the art is going to suffer.

(Nick Hornby kind of explores this territory of finished/unfinished and the gulf between the art, the creator's intent and process, and fan interpretation, in Juliet, Naked.  Well worth picking up if you haven't already.)

An early draft that goes to a network or a producer or a trusted reader or even an agent's assistant is a very, very different thing than a draft that goes out into the world before it's ready.

I don't think writers necessarily expect everybody to understand that. I certainly don't.  But if you're wondering why most of us are pretty hostile to the concept of something like Scriptshadow, then there's your answer.

Early drafts are like the family catastrophe that you laugh about years later.   From a pleasing, far distance: hilarious. But Christ, there's nothing funny about it at the time.

* the derivation of this phrase, which I've used occasionally, apparently has to do with spinning, ie: "women's work."  As a progressive post-feminist man, does that mean I have to stop using it? Hmm. Readers, please advise.