I took a break from pounding out the outline I'm on right now to go and take care of my carpal tunnel issues. I broke down and bought the Ilap. It was a bit of an odyssey finding one. First, the place I went to pick up my new computer bag was out. For some reason, every time I go to pick up more than one thing from this store, they're out of something. I have bad store mojo. All my life. It's my curse.
So then I trundled off to the Apple Store in the huge tourist trap downtown mall, The Eaton Centre. They didn't even stock it. I called two more stores and they were out and finally took three buses to find an Apple dealer with one in stock. (By now I was committed.) Right now I'm sitting in a lovely, mostly empty bar. The guys from the kitchen are freaking out over the World Cup match on the Telly right now...I'm chortling as I read about England managing to eke out a win through no apparent effort whatsoever, and my laptop is gloriously supported. My posture is much better. This rocks.
So why do I give up?
While I was in the Eaton Centre, I happened to wander into one of our chain bookstores, because someone I know was working there. I browsed the magazines a bit, and noticed that in front of one rack there were women, about a dozen of them, stacked four deep, all reading multiple copies of one magazine. People Magazine.
A dozen women, gathered to see Brad and Angelina and their baby Cletus, or whatever its name is. I watched this for about five minutes. The minute a People went back into the rack, there was another woman to snatch it up, fingers trembling as she flipped to the photos.
Pre-internet, a boy of a certain age could sometimes be caught in a variety store surreptitiously flipping through a Playboy with the exact same expression on his face.
For every woman that bought one of the People magazines, ten more just wanted to browse. Eventually, after a few minutes, the magazines were gone. And so were the women.
But then the stock guy brought out more. And within a minute, there was a whole new crowd of women, five or six, gathered 'round. I can't be sure, but I think a few of them were carrying gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
I give up. I officially do not get it anymore.
Bonus points: At a film industry gathering Monday night, I was talking to a woman and she asked, "You were in South Africa for a while, right?"
"Yes," I said.
"That's near Namibia, isn't it?"
"Uh, yeah."
Her eyes glazed over.
Guess what she wanted to talk about next?
I give up.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Friday, June 9, 2006
How Much Time Do You Spend Thinking About Gender Justice as it Relates to The A-Team?
Jaime J. Weinman's blog is one of my favorites, (see the sidebar) because we share a lot of the same cultural obsessions (Hello, WKRP!) but also because there's plenty of room where we diverge.
Writers are weird, and we tend to like weird things. Developing a writer's worldview, I believe, has to involve being on the fringes, or feeling on the fringes, and developing a dispassionate passion for something that others wouldn't give a secont thought about.
Even when it does intersect "mainstream" culture, writers bring a level of detail and attention that can only come from an outsider. Friday Night Lights chronicles how football is more important than anything else in a Texas town, but it took Bissinger -- not one of those people involved -- to bring it to the nation, first as a bestselling book, then a movie, and in the fall, a TV series.
Al Gore is a weird geek, so we get a great movie about Global Warming. George W. Bush was a popular fratty coke-snortin born again Christian silver spoon legacy jock, so we get the worst President ever. Life's funny that way.
We writers are all the product of our obsessions. I find Weinman's obsessions endlessly fascinating. See if you do, too.
Writers are weird, and we tend to like weird things. Developing a writer's worldview, I believe, has to involve being on the fringes, or feeling on the fringes, and developing a dispassionate passion for something that others wouldn't give a secont thought about.
Even when it does intersect "mainstream" culture, writers bring a level of detail and attention that can only come from an outsider. Friday Night Lights chronicles how football is more important than anything else in a Texas town, but it took Bissinger -- not one of those people involved -- to bring it to the nation, first as a bestselling book, then a movie, and in the fall, a TV series.
Al Gore is a weird geek, so we get a great movie about Global Warming. George W. Bush was a popular fratty coke-snortin born again Christian silver spoon legacy jock, so we get the worst President ever. Life's funny that way.
We writers are all the product of our obsessions. I find Weinman's obsessions endlessly fascinating. See if you do, too.
Canadian Pay TV: New Series Offerings
Movie Central (west) and TMN, (east) Canada's equivalent to HBO, have announced their 2006/2007 lineup of domestically produced TV series. There are two new ones:
Durham County
Six hour miniseries, produced by Laurie Finstad-Knizhnik, Janis Lundman and Adrienne Mitchell of Back Alley Film Productions. It's about a detective who moves his family to a peaceful town hoping for a new beginning. (Sounds a little Everwood-y, no?)
Then the serial killer shows up.
Eeep.
ZOS
Eight part series, produced by Whizbang Films, with exec producers Paul Gross, Frank Siracusa, Mario Azzopardi and Malcolm MacRury
(Yes. Thanks to Canadian Television Policy 434195-9-T, Paul Gross (Due South, H20, Men With Brooms) is now required to be involved with everything.)
Set in the near future, follows peacekeepers trying to keep the peace in an UN enforced ceasefire in a fictional Balkan town split down the middle between Christian Serbs and Albanian Muslims. Sounds like this one might be dark comedy -- I certainly hope they go that route rather than maudlin drama. Canadian series often have a surfeit of earnestness. If they can resist that impulse, this could have some promise.
Other programs include a three part thriller Bon Voyage, a 90 min Just For Laughs special, The Nasty Show, and a third season of ReGenesis from Shaftesbury Films.
Durham County
Six hour miniseries, produced by Laurie Finstad-Knizhnik, Janis Lundman and Adrienne Mitchell of Back Alley Film Productions. It's about a detective who moves his family to a peaceful town hoping for a new beginning. (Sounds a little Everwood-y, no?)
Then the serial killer shows up.
Eeep.
ZOS
Eight part series, produced by Whizbang Films, with exec producers Paul Gross, Frank Siracusa, Mario Azzopardi and Malcolm MacRury
(Yes. Thanks to Canadian Television Policy 434195-9-T, Paul Gross (Due South, H20, Men With Brooms) is now required to be involved with everything.)
Set in the near future, follows peacekeepers trying to keep the peace in an UN enforced ceasefire in a fictional Balkan town split down the middle between Christian Serbs and Albanian Muslims. Sounds like this one might be dark comedy -- I certainly hope they go that route rather than maudlin drama. Canadian series often have a surfeit of earnestness. If they can resist that impulse, this could have some promise.
Other programs include a three part thriller Bon Voyage, a 90 min Just For Laughs special, The Nasty Show, and a third season of ReGenesis from Shaftesbury Films.
Can Sitcoms Be Funny and Real?
A reader writes:
Hmm. An interesting question. My instincts say no -- but before we get to why, let's take a short look at the traditional place of the half-hour comedy.
Half hour comedies have been the engine that drive television for a very long time. Even when, as now, they're in a cyclical trough period in terms of popularity or heat, they're still hugely important.
That's because they're repeatable; and way more marketable. Even a middling half hour comedy with enough episodes to syndicate makes far far more with off-prime syndicated sales to local stations, than even the best one-hour drama. Also, when they're repeated in prime time, they do far better than repeated drama episodes.
(I would love to see how they compare in DVD box sets sales; my guess would be beyond the major hits like Friends, or Family Guy or Simpsons, that generally hour boxes do better, but that's a hunch not backed up by data. Anyone have the data?)
We have to surmise from this that people are far more willing to see an episode of a sitcom that you've seen before. Rather than the reaction you have watching a drama, "I've seen this one, damn," the reaction is more like, "Oh man, this was a good one." I don't care how many times I've seen the Seinfeld episode "The Contest," if I flip by it, I'll watch. When Ross shouts out, "We were on a Break!" it's still as funny as the first time I saw it. Then add in The Simpsons, where the first act usually never has anything to do with the rest of the show, and you're nine minutes in before you realize, "oh, right, this is the monorail episode!"
So the question of topicality in sitcoms faces an uphill battle right from the start. If you reference what's going on in the world in anything but a general way, you're going to ruin repeatability. You can see this for yourself if you ever see old episodes of All in The Family. It's a show, viewed through the lens of a few decades' space, that's easy to admire, but hard to love. Most of what they reference directly is so tied to the politics of the early 1970's (like jokes about Nixon, and the ERA) that it seems a bit impenetrable now. Compare that to a show that's more than ten years older, like The Dick Van Dyke Show, and it's strange to see that a show that's even older can seem a bit fresher -- because it sticks to its world and doesn't try to stick a foot into ours. (I'm not talking about things like fashion or social convention here...those things do seem dated, but somehow they're more acceptable than a character who's concerned about something, really concerned, that is barely a footnote now. And you don't need to go back to D.V.D. or Archie Bunker to see dated stuff - check out some of those first season Friends eps.) You seem to acknowledge this point near the end of your question, so I'm not going to belabor it.
The second reason why I think too much topicality in the sitcom is bad has more to do with the form itself.
We've talked several times before about comedy characters and how they're different than dramatic characters. I go back again to paraphrase comment a writer acquaintance of mine made on a panel a few months ago: Your average comic character takes about six seasons to change as much as a dramatic character does in one.
Sometimes this is structural. That 70's Show got 8 seasons or so out of the years 1976 - 1980. Happy Days did the same thing with the 50's. I'm hardly the first to note that M*A*S*H ran three times longer than the war it portrayed. (And became a drama in the end, anyway.)
The point is that a comic world is a very careful construction. It's like a souffle, and you don't want to introduce anything into it that might ruin the recipe. Introducing elements of the real world in anything but an offhand way threatens to create a dissonance between your characters' insistence on pursuing their blind obessions and never changing, and the realities of the world outside of Dog River, or Wisconsin, or Cheers, or KCAL radio, or Cafe Nervosa. People seek out comedies for escapism. You want to laugh with, or at, the antics of the characters in their constructed worlds -- not see how they react to the crushing or trivial elements in ours.
So while there's nothing wrong with Corner Gas characters complaining in a general way about taxes, equalization payments would be a stretch. (And a little out of character, too, no? Aren't they mostly concerned with what happens in Dog River, and maybe that other place -- Wolverton? (spit)) If Friends was still on, I suppose you could have someone date someone from Homeland Security, but that would have to be funny -- they couldn't be on the phone Jack Bauer-ing a couple of terrorists.
Finally, if you look at what people are really concerned about these days -- pictures of Brad Pitt's baby, whether Jen is still happy, Britney's bump and dropping the baby issues -- well, if they're not following the news in the news, do you really think they'd accept it more if it was coming out of Grace's mouth?
Or...shudder...Jim Belushi's?
Is there anything inherently wrong about bringing in real current events to a sitcom? What's wrong with having the cast of Corner Gas discuss equalization payments? Or Chandler Bing realizing that he can't run away to Ireland because of a new Homeland Security squeeze? Is there any room for the real world in the sitcom world? Standup seems to incorporate the two quite well (to the point that some standup loses its edge after only a month or two) - couldn't the same success be achieved on the set?
Hmm. An interesting question. My instincts say no -- but before we get to why, let's take a short look at the traditional place of the half-hour comedy.
Half hour comedies have been the engine that drive television for a very long time. Even when, as now, they're in a cyclical trough period in terms of popularity or heat, they're still hugely important.
That's because they're repeatable; and way more marketable. Even a middling half hour comedy with enough episodes to syndicate makes far far more with off-prime syndicated sales to local stations, than even the best one-hour drama. Also, when they're repeated in prime time, they do far better than repeated drama episodes.
(I would love to see how they compare in DVD box sets sales; my guess would be beyond the major hits like Friends, or Family Guy or Simpsons, that generally hour boxes do better, but that's a hunch not backed up by data. Anyone have the data?)
We have to surmise from this that people are far more willing to see an episode of a sitcom that you've seen before. Rather than the reaction you have watching a drama, "I've seen this one, damn," the reaction is more like, "Oh man, this was a good one." I don't care how many times I've seen the Seinfeld episode "The Contest," if I flip by it, I'll watch. When Ross shouts out, "We were on a Break!" it's still as funny as the first time I saw it. Then add in The Simpsons, where the first act usually never has anything to do with the rest of the show, and you're nine minutes in before you realize, "oh, right, this is the monorail episode!"
So the question of topicality in sitcoms faces an uphill battle right from the start. If you reference what's going on in the world in anything but a general way, you're going to ruin repeatability. You can see this for yourself if you ever see old episodes of All in The Family. It's a show, viewed through the lens of a few decades' space, that's easy to admire, but hard to love. Most of what they reference directly is so tied to the politics of the early 1970's (like jokes about Nixon, and the ERA) that it seems a bit impenetrable now. Compare that to a show that's more than ten years older, like The Dick Van Dyke Show, and it's strange to see that a show that's even older can seem a bit fresher -- because it sticks to its world and doesn't try to stick a foot into ours. (I'm not talking about things like fashion or social convention here...those things do seem dated, but somehow they're more acceptable than a character who's concerned about something, really concerned, that is barely a footnote now. And you don't need to go back to D.V.D. or Archie Bunker to see dated stuff - check out some of those first season Friends eps.) You seem to acknowledge this point near the end of your question, so I'm not going to belabor it.
The second reason why I think too much topicality in the sitcom is bad has more to do with the form itself.
We've talked several times before about comedy characters and how they're different than dramatic characters. I go back again to paraphrase comment a writer acquaintance of mine made on a panel a few months ago: Your average comic character takes about six seasons to change as much as a dramatic character does in one.
Sometimes this is structural. That 70's Show got 8 seasons or so out of the years 1976 - 1980. Happy Days did the same thing with the 50's. I'm hardly the first to note that M*A*S*H ran three times longer than the war it portrayed. (And became a drama in the end, anyway.)
The point is that a comic world is a very careful construction. It's like a souffle, and you don't want to introduce anything into it that might ruin the recipe. Introducing elements of the real world in anything but an offhand way threatens to create a dissonance between your characters' insistence on pursuing their blind obessions and never changing, and the realities of the world outside of Dog River, or Wisconsin, or Cheers, or KCAL radio, or Cafe Nervosa. People seek out comedies for escapism. You want to laugh with, or at, the antics of the characters in their constructed worlds -- not see how they react to the crushing or trivial elements in ours.
So while there's nothing wrong with Corner Gas characters complaining in a general way about taxes, equalization payments would be a stretch. (And a little out of character, too, no? Aren't they mostly concerned with what happens in Dog River, and maybe that other place -- Wolverton? (spit)) If Friends was still on, I suppose you could have someone date someone from Homeland Security, but that would have to be funny -- they couldn't be on the phone Jack Bauer-ing a couple of terrorists.
Finally, if you look at what people are really concerned about these days -- pictures of Brad Pitt's baby, whether Jen is still happy, Britney's bump and dropping the baby issues -- well, if they're not following the news in the news, do you really think they'd accept it more if it was coming out of Grace's mouth?
Or...shudder...Jim Belushi's?
Thursday, June 8, 2006
Hand Waving & The Gun In the Drawer
ON THE PROJECT I'm deepest into now, we've reached a point where we have an overall arc for the episodes. We're still adjusting on the fly as we write outlines, because that's what you do, and also because good ideas keep coming and you want to integrate them.
The show has a complicated weave, and a lot of different things to track. One of the most challenging things about it is tracking what the audience knows when. In some cases, the audience is ahead of our characters, but there are some key facts that the audience doesn't know -- that they won't know (hopefully) until we reveal it to them.
That requires a deft touch, because the contstruction issues are daunting. There's a lot of choices you have to make just because of the demands of the form. For instance, you need to play time cuts, because you have anywhere from 41 to 47 minutes to tell your story. (We're writing for 47 and I think it's still tight.) You also have to play the story in such a way that you never see the conversation where the characters learn information that the audience already knows -- because that's dull for the audience and objectively you don't have the space.
Yet there's no getting around the fact that there's a whole lot of hand-waving in TV drama. People having conversations to convey exposition, people talking, talking, talking -- you try to make it as interesting as possible, but when you compare a standard TV show which shoots anywhere from 6 to 10 pages a day with a movie that shoots 1/2 to 1 1/2 pages, you can see that the scenes you pump out are just going to be different.
Right now one of the things we're working through is how you hide the solution, or hide the twist.
A lot of the hand waving that comes in tv writing is the writer's attempt to get you to pay attention to something here, while we try to slip something past you there.
There's an old theater saying, which I'll paraphrase, which basically amounts to, "If you put a gun in the drawer in the first act, it has to go off in the third."
That seems self-evident, but the truth behind it is this: you have to get that gun in the drawer in the first act, then get the audience to forget about it so that by the time someone goes for it in the third, it is a surprise on some level -- even though the audience supposedly knew it was there.
See? The game of chicken we play with viewers is this: we're going to show you stuff. And if you pay attention in the right places and make the right connections, you'll figure this out way before we show it to you. But we're betting you won't.
When, as writers, you win this game of chicken, people are entertained.
When you lose, people figure it out too early, and they say that your story was boring and predictable.
So why hide the shit at all? Why show the gun? Why not have it come as a total surprise?
Well, here's where it gets really nasty, chickens. If you just have the gun, or the murderer, or the secret rune or the letters of transit come out of nowhere, without setting them up, then it's a deus ex machina ending, and the audience will feel cheated and hate you -- way, way more than if you had crafted a predictable story.
Psychology is fun, isn't it?
Working back from your reveal, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to figure out how to leave clues that won't be obvious, but will add up to something meaningful. This is where throwing red herrings come in, too. You tease the audience, you lead them down a couple of paths, some false, some true. And hopefully, by the time you take the gun out, it's a surprise.
A lot of the time this is going to involve coincidence. All stories are based on coincidence in some way. Cinderella happens to drop the glass slipper on the stair as she leaves the ball, and it doesn't turn back into a rat or whatever so Prince Charming can find her. That's lucky, isn't it? Pretty coincidental.
In a romantic comedy, of COURSE the two characters run into each other after a year in the same cafe in New York. There are people I dated who live less than a kilometer from me and I never, ever run into them, but sure, why not. Cafe. New York. Sure.
The basic rule is that your story can weather some degree of coincidence, so long as that coincidence does not provide the solution to your story. (I think I wrote about this before once.)
What I'm finding now is, another way to think about it is: you have to get that coincidence as far away from your solution as possible.
If someone meets someone in passing who will become important in the end, that's coincidence, sure, but it's forgiveable. But the closer you get to the end, the less that coincidence will hold up to scrutiny, the more forced it will feel, and the more chance you have that the audience will reject it or figure you out too early.
You have to make peace with coincidence, and have a clear internal sense of how much is too much. (If you're like me, CRASH is too much. And yes, I know, that was the point.)
When you're giving notes on a friend's script, it's not enough to point out coincidence or a convenient story twist. You really have to drill down and ask yourself, "is this an acceptable coincidence, or are you asking the audience for so much here that it will threaten suspension of disbelief?"
I know writers who won't accept any coincidence in their stories, and almost universally, this results in flat storytelling that has way too much exposition, or much character histrionics that disguise the fact that there isn't a lot of forward plot momentum.
Unfortunately, coincidence and its proper use can often be the motor oil that keeps the gears of your story working. Remove it entirely, and you're left with an inert substance. To mix a metaphor, coincidence is like baking powder. A little goes a really long way.
The show has a complicated weave, and a lot of different things to track. One of the most challenging things about it is tracking what the audience knows when. In some cases, the audience is ahead of our characters, but there are some key facts that the audience doesn't know -- that they won't know (hopefully) until we reveal it to them.
That requires a deft touch, because the contstruction issues are daunting. There's a lot of choices you have to make just because of the demands of the form. For instance, you need to play time cuts, because you have anywhere from 41 to 47 minutes to tell your story. (We're writing for 47 and I think it's still tight.) You also have to play the story in such a way that you never see the conversation where the characters learn information that the audience already knows -- because that's dull for the audience and objectively you don't have the space.
Yet there's no getting around the fact that there's a whole lot of hand-waving in TV drama. People having conversations to convey exposition, people talking, talking, talking -- you try to make it as interesting as possible, but when you compare a standard TV show which shoots anywhere from 6 to 10 pages a day with a movie that shoots 1/2 to 1 1/2 pages, you can see that the scenes you pump out are just going to be different.
Right now one of the things we're working through is how you hide the solution, or hide the twist.
A lot of the hand waving that comes in tv writing is the writer's attempt to get you to pay attention to something here, while we try to slip something past you there.
There's an old theater saying, which I'll paraphrase, which basically amounts to, "If you put a gun in the drawer in the first act, it has to go off in the third."
That seems self-evident, but the truth behind it is this: you have to get that gun in the drawer in the first act, then get the audience to forget about it so that by the time someone goes for it in the third, it is a surprise on some level -- even though the audience supposedly knew it was there.
See? The game of chicken we play with viewers is this: we're going to show you stuff. And if you pay attention in the right places and make the right connections, you'll figure this out way before we show it to you. But we're betting you won't.
When, as writers, you win this game of chicken, people are entertained.
When you lose, people figure it out too early, and they say that your story was boring and predictable.
So why hide the shit at all? Why show the gun? Why not have it come as a total surprise?
Well, here's where it gets really nasty, chickens. If you just have the gun, or the murderer, or the secret rune or the letters of transit come out of nowhere, without setting them up, then it's a deus ex machina ending, and the audience will feel cheated and hate you -- way, way more than if you had crafted a predictable story.
Psychology is fun, isn't it?
Working back from your reveal, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to figure out how to leave clues that won't be obvious, but will add up to something meaningful. This is where throwing red herrings come in, too. You tease the audience, you lead them down a couple of paths, some false, some true. And hopefully, by the time you take the gun out, it's a surprise.
A lot of the time this is going to involve coincidence. All stories are based on coincidence in some way. Cinderella happens to drop the glass slipper on the stair as she leaves the ball, and it doesn't turn back into a rat or whatever so Prince Charming can find her. That's lucky, isn't it? Pretty coincidental.
In a romantic comedy, of COURSE the two characters run into each other after a year in the same cafe in New York. There are people I dated who live less than a kilometer from me and I never, ever run into them, but sure, why not. Cafe. New York. Sure.
The basic rule is that your story can weather some degree of coincidence, so long as that coincidence does not provide the solution to your story. (I think I wrote about this before once.)
What I'm finding now is, another way to think about it is: you have to get that coincidence as far away from your solution as possible.
If someone meets someone in passing who will become important in the end, that's coincidence, sure, but it's forgiveable. But the closer you get to the end, the less that coincidence will hold up to scrutiny, the more forced it will feel, and the more chance you have that the audience will reject it or figure you out too early.
You have to make peace with coincidence, and have a clear internal sense of how much is too much. (If you're like me, CRASH is too much. And yes, I know, that was the point.)
When you're giving notes on a friend's script, it's not enough to point out coincidence or a convenient story twist. You really have to drill down and ask yourself, "is this an acceptable coincidence, or are you asking the audience for so much here that it will threaten suspension of disbelief?"
I know writers who won't accept any coincidence in their stories, and almost universally, this results in flat storytelling that has way too much exposition, or much character histrionics that disguise the fact that there isn't a lot of forward plot momentum.
Unfortunately, coincidence and its proper use can often be the motor oil that keeps the gears of your story working. Remove it entirely, and you're left with an inert substance. To mix a metaphor, coincidence is like baking powder. A little goes a really long way.
On Demand North of the 49th
Checking over the blog lately, I notice that I've had a lot of Cancon. So this one maybe I'll try to keep shorter.
The Canadian Upfronts are happening this week, and it's hard to conceive just how in front CTV is. They dominate every night of the week. Seventeen of Canada's Top 20 shows are on CTV. Worse, a couple of CTV's homegrown shows are even in the Top 20! It's like they can't be stopped.
So now they're innovating again. CTV announced that effective immediately, they'll be making shows available on an on-demand basis, as ABC has done with Desperate Housewives and Lost.
Initially, they'll feature sports, news, and mainly Canadian shows such as Degrassi: The Next Generation, Instant Star, Corner Gas, Canadian Idol, and the new, big budget Whistler, but eventually they might be able to start licensing Canadian On-Demand rights for U.S. Shows.
The shows will run on demand with commercials, which you can't fast-forward through -- which I think to most people is a totally acceptable compromise. Hey, if you never have to miss a show again, and all you have to do is watch a couple ads, why not? If you don't want to watch the ads, tape the show and fast forward, same as usual.
This is going to be GREAT news for Canadian Shows, which often suffer from being punted around the schedule. Canadian networks, because they depend so much on U.S. shows, are at the Americans' scheduling mercy, and Cancon gets caught in the crossfire. Maybe now, CTV at least can start to grow the appetite for homegrown product. It's hard to hate the top dog when they seem to be doing so much right.
Which brings us to Global. Global used to be on top, with the powerhouse U.S. shows, but that's slid in recent years in the withering competition from CTV. Global announced an aggressive schedule with a lot of new buys, which you can find out about here.
By the way, I didn't just link to that Sun article for the announcements, but to show you the attitude. One of the features in the reporting of all the upfront presentations is that the articles written about them dump any mention of anything homegrown right to the end. Bill Brioux, who takes a faux populist stance in most of his TV writing, goes one better:
Global did announce more Falcon Beach. But it also announced more Jane Show, and two other new one hour dramas which I know nothing else about:
Class is a university-set show, and Quill follows the adventures of a counter-terrorism operative.
There are lots of problems in the Canadian industry that have to do with US - writers, creators, producers, that we need to solve. But idiots like Brioux, who bring a standard issue Canadian-complex-defeatism to their writing, well...Houston, we got a problem there, too.
(If anyone involved with Class or Quill reads this blog, get in touch by email. I'd love to hear a bit about your shows -- and I know considering the dearth of non-press release driven entertainment reportage in this country, I won't read any articles about the shows in the papers. Not whilst the Bill Briouxs are doing such a bang-up job on the beat.)
The Canadian Upfronts are happening this week, and it's hard to conceive just how in front CTV is. They dominate every night of the week. Seventeen of Canada's Top 20 shows are on CTV. Worse, a couple of CTV's homegrown shows are even in the Top 20! It's like they can't be stopped.
So now they're innovating again. CTV announced that effective immediately, they'll be making shows available on an on-demand basis, as ABC has done with Desperate Housewives and Lost.
Initially, they'll feature sports, news, and mainly Canadian shows such as Degrassi: The Next Generation, Instant Star, Corner Gas, Canadian Idol, and the new, big budget Whistler, but eventually they might be able to start licensing Canadian On-Demand rights for U.S. Shows.
The shows will run on demand with commercials, which you can't fast-forward through -- which I think to most people is a totally acceptable compromise. Hey, if you never have to miss a show again, and all you have to do is watch a couple ads, why not? If you don't want to watch the ads, tape the show and fast forward, same as usual.
This is going to be GREAT news for Canadian Shows, which often suffer from being punted around the schedule. Canadian networks, because they depend so much on U.S. shows, are at the Americans' scheduling mercy, and Cancon gets caught in the crossfire. Maybe now, CTV at least can start to grow the appetite for homegrown product. It's hard to hate the top dog when they seem to be doing so much right.
Which brings us to Global. Global used to be on top, with the powerhouse U.S. shows, but that's slid in recent years in the withering competition from CTV. Global announced an aggressive schedule with a lot of new buys, which you can find out about here.
By the way, I didn't just link to that Sun article for the announcements, but to show you the attitude. One of the features in the reporting of all the upfront presentations is that the articles written about them dump any mention of anything homegrown right to the end. Bill Brioux, who takes a faux populist stance in most of his TV writing, goes one better:
Oh, yeah, Canadian shows? Just as at the CTV upfront, nothing we haven't seen or heard about before. More Falcon Beach, more ReGenesis, more Debbie Travis.What a maroon. And here's a shocker, kids. He's lazy and wrong.
Global did announce more Falcon Beach. But it also announced more Jane Show, and two other new one hour dramas which I know nothing else about:
Class is a university-set show, and Quill follows the adventures of a counter-terrorism operative.
There are lots of problems in the Canadian industry that have to do with US - writers, creators, producers, that we need to solve. But idiots like Brioux, who bring a standard issue Canadian-complex-defeatism to their writing, well...Houston, we got a problem there, too.
(If anyone involved with Class or Quill reads this blog, get in touch by email. I'd love to hear a bit about your shows -- and I know considering the dearth of non-press release driven entertainment reportage in this country, I won't read any articles about the shows in the papers. Not whilst the Bill Briouxs are doing such a bang-up job on the beat.)
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
Co-Writing and Gang-Breaking
In my trolling-for-inspiration question-solicitation mode, W.C. Dixon writes:
Working alone -- to geek out for a moment -- is like having a single processor trying to crunch story. The room, you get all those brains crunching at once -- bam -- instant parallel processing.
I find when I break alone, I also tend to get off track easier, and get bogged down in fridge logic issues.
(digression) For those of you who don't read John Rogers, or haven't seen his excellent posts on Jargon Preservation, Fridge Logic is a piece of inconsistency in a story that doesn't really impact the audience's enjoyment: ie: it's something they won't bump on, so you don't really need to worry about solving it. The most famous piece of Fridge Logic ever is probably the letters of Transit in Casablanca. When you think about it, the idea that there are these letters that can get anyone out of Casablanca --because they can't be questioned -- by Nazis -- well, it's ridiculous. But if you think of that at all, it's a half hour after you've enjoyed the film, and you're standing at the Fridge looking for the Snapple and you go, "you know..."
Geek fanboys, when they talk about the inconsistencies in Star Trek episodes, 99% of the time they're complaining over fridge logic. (Sci fi fans are fueled by fridge logic...they'll find inconsistencies where there are none.)
The story logic you have to worry about is where you do something that really is going to make the person bump, or is too convenient, or violates something you've done before (ie: on Star Trek, they establish that you can't beam through shields. If they do that in an episode, that's not fridge logic. That's a mistake . Bump. (/digression)
Aside from those things, there's also some psychological comfort to breaking as a group. You don't own the success 100 percent -- but TV is collaborative, so you never do. But you don't wear the failures yourself, either. The story is our problem to solve, not your problem to solve. And you get to be with people, and though it's hard work, it can also be fun.
Breaking a story by yourself isn't fun. Is never fun. It's just a pain in the ass.
There's another common way to co-write tv, which is one person writes Act 1 and 2 and the other writes Act 3 and 4, and then they put them together and try to harmonize voices. I know that sounds horrifying at first blush, but it can really save a lot of time. If you are in sync with your writing partner, and you're working off a good outline, there's no reason in the world why you shouldn't be able to do this. I've done it in production a couple times, though more commonly as a rewrite of a freelancer script.
I remember years ago interviewing William Gibson (or maybe it was Bruce Sterling) about the book they wrote together, The Difference Engine. Apparently their rule was to rewrite over each other and the rule was -- you only saved the current version, you could not change anything back to the way you had it. Sounds like an interesting way to work -- this is in the age of trading disks back and forth. Now I guess you'd just shoot emails back and forth.
I know there are people who actually sit down, looking over each other's shoulders, and write together. I also think this is what most people think of when then think "co-writing." I can't imagine doing this for the life of me. Although I suppose if you're really in sync that could work.
I've only written like this once -- years ago, when I was in University, I co-wrote a sketch with a friend of mine. It was exciting to come up with stuff and get it down right away, right there. It was great to have the instant validation. It turned out to be a great sketch. That sketch probably marks the time when I stopped writing to have something to perform, and realized I took more pleasure in the writing of it.
That writer's on Corner Gas now, by the way. I know the good'uns.
The other thing that I notice about writing partnerships is that a lot of them seem to end acrimoniously. Hardly surprising, I guess. But if my heart's going to get broke, I suppose I'd rather have it be because my heart's broke, not cause an intimate work relationship got wrecked. But again, that might just be me. Your mileage might vary.
Do you find it easier to break a story on your own or with a group in a writer's room?That's a no-brainer. I think the room is the way to go. You get a bit of Stockholm Syndrome with yourself when you're breaking: you will convince yourself that you've got a solution all worked out when it really is still crunchy. And then when you go to outline, that will bite you in the ass. If you're in a well-put together room, there will always be someone there to say, "wait, wait. I don't buy it, what about this?" And then you fix it.
Working alone -- to geek out for a moment -- is like having a single processor trying to crunch story. The room, you get all those brains crunching at once -- bam -- instant parallel processing.
I find when I break alone, I also tend to get off track easier, and get bogged down in fridge logic issues.
(digression) For those of you who don't read John Rogers, or haven't seen his excellent posts on Jargon Preservation, Fridge Logic is a piece of inconsistency in a story that doesn't really impact the audience's enjoyment: ie: it's something they won't bump on, so you don't really need to worry about solving it. The most famous piece of Fridge Logic ever is probably the letters of Transit in Casablanca. When you think about it, the idea that there are these letters that can get anyone out of Casablanca --because they can't be questioned -- by Nazis -- well, it's ridiculous. But if you think of that at all, it's a half hour after you've enjoyed the film, and you're standing at the Fridge looking for the Snapple and you go, "you know..."
Geek fanboys, when they talk about the inconsistencies in Star Trek episodes, 99% of the time they're complaining over fridge logic. (Sci fi fans are fueled by fridge logic...they'll find inconsistencies where there are none.)
The story logic you have to worry about is where you do something that really is going to make the person bump, or is too convenient, or violates something you've done before (ie: on Star Trek, they establish that you can't beam through shields. If they do that in an episode, that's not fridge logic. That's a mistake . Bump. (/digression)
Aside from those things, there's also some psychological comfort to breaking as a group. You don't own the success 100 percent -- but TV is collaborative, so you never do. But you don't wear the failures yourself, either. The story is our problem to solve, not your problem to solve. And you get to be with people, and though it's hard work, it can also be fun.
Breaking a story by yourself isn't fun. Is never fun. It's just a pain in the ass.
Which brings me to co-writing...have you had success co-writing with anyone or prefer to write solo?I'm co-writing something right now. It has a lot of advantages and a lot of drawbacks. I firmly believe that once you do have a story, someone has to be the conductor, and move it forward. Most people I know who cowrite regularly have a system where one person takes first pass, one person takes second pass, and they go on like that. I co-wrote a play like that last summer. It can be an interesting process. Generally, when I co-write, it's a project where I was not "the primary" ie: it's not mainly my idea -- a lot of the initial ideas come from someone else. I tend to have very proprietary and solid ideas about how to execute ideas that I come up with myself. In order to have the necessary malleability to make the co-write work, I just find it's better if I'm not the originator. But that's probably a quirk that says more about me than about the process.
There's another common way to co-write tv, which is one person writes Act 1 and 2 and the other writes Act 3 and 4, and then they put them together and try to harmonize voices. I know that sounds horrifying at first blush, but it can really save a lot of time. If you are in sync with your writing partner, and you're working off a good outline, there's no reason in the world why you shouldn't be able to do this. I've done it in production a couple times, though more commonly as a rewrite of a freelancer script.
I remember years ago interviewing William Gibson (or maybe it was Bruce Sterling) about the book they wrote together, The Difference Engine. Apparently their rule was to rewrite over each other and the rule was -- you only saved the current version, you could not change anything back to the way you had it. Sounds like an interesting way to work -- this is in the age of trading disks back and forth. Now I guess you'd just shoot emails back and forth.
I know there are people who actually sit down, looking over each other's shoulders, and write together. I also think this is what most people think of when then think "co-writing." I can't imagine doing this for the life of me. Although I suppose if you're really in sync that could work.
I've only written like this once -- years ago, when I was in University, I co-wrote a sketch with a friend of mine. It was exciting to come up with stuff and get it down right away, right there. It was great to have the instant validation. It turned out to be a great sketch. That sketch probably marks the time when I stopped writing to have something to perform, and realized I took more pleasure in the writing of it.
That writer's on Corner Gas now, by the way. I know the good'uns.
The other thing that I notice about writing partnerships is that a lot of them seem to end acrimoniously. Hardly surprising, I guess. But if my heart's going to get broke, I suppose I'd rather have it be because my heart's broke, not cause an intimate work relationship got wrecked. But again, that might just be me. Your mileage might vary.
Tuesday, June 6, 2006
Mentally Exhausted and Morally Questionable.
C'est moi.
I'm at sixes and sevens this week with a ton of work and not a whole lot of inspiration. So if anyone's got any questions or things they want to ask me, fire away. Maybe it'll give me something to write about.
Otherwise, I'm just going to make some soup and get back to the outline.
I'm at sixes and sevens this week with a ton of work and not a whole lot of inspiration. So if anyone's got any questions or things they want to ask me, fire away. Maybe it'll give me something to write about.
Otherwise, I'm just going to make some soup and get back to the outline.
Sunday, June 4, 2006
And Jane, She is a Clerk...
Ah, Sweet Jane.
Anyway, this isn't about the Velvets or the Junkies either. This Sweet Jane is all about a new Canadian comedy, The Jane Show. It airs on Global, at least in Ontario, Thursday at 9:30 p.m. Global's notorious for moving around shows depending on your timezone, so check your local listings.
The development game in Canada can be fraught. Because you don't always do a pilot, a lot of the development is focused on scripts and bibles. That's a problem, of course, because so much has to do with casting and direction and how everything comes together that if you pick over the written details too much, there's no guarantee that you're going to get any closer to quality. And if you spend too much time picking over scripts, there's the ever-present danger (especially with a comedy) that you're going to get comitteed to death. I have several friends in comedy development deals right now who've had so many sets of notes that the joy has been completely leeched out of the script process. Everybody's at the stage where nothing's funny because they've read it too much -- and that's when, unless there's a strong hand at the till, the wheels really come off.
The Jane Show could have easily gone that way, for a lot of reasons. First of all, this show came out of Global's in-house script development program at a time when Global was tagged in the industry for a pretty cynical non-committment to Cancon -- ie: just about the only thing they did was the ultra low budget serial Train 48. I know the Train had its (few) fans -- but I saw the ratings, guys. The public wasn't on board. Doesn't mean everyone involved -- actors and writers -- didn't work hard, or weren't talented. It just means it was conceived and executed with a cynical eye toward maximizing Cancon at minimal cost. It was a loss leader for Global's U.S. shows.
When The Jane Show pilot aired, it seemed a bit dire, and hardly the thing to bring Global back into the "we're actually trying" fold (see Traders.) It was a halfhearted Sex & The City wannabe. It seemed strangely dated, it was trying too hard, characters had likability issues -- it was just a mess.
Then, just about the entire top tier of executives at Global TV changed. You know what happens to old projects when a new team comes in, right? So the chances for the series of The Jane Show to emerge as anything decent seemed long.
Well, the first episode aired last Thursday. And they beat the odds. All of 'em.
It's hard to quantify just how much better this show was than the original pilot. Is it perfect? Nope. But it's solid. The point of view is clear. The performances are enjoyable. And it's funny.
So everybody involved -- Global execs, the creators, the writers brought in to work the material for series -- should all pat themselves on the back. The weakest thing about The Jane Show now is that title.
Teresa Pavlinek (one of the co-creators, along with Ralph Chapman) is Jane. Jane is 33, and has spent the last eight years writing her novel. She's had a poor-paying arts job for so long that she needs a root canal she can't pay for, and she's reduced to debasing herself as a personal assistant to a horribly egocentric famous writer, just so he might one day read her book and give her an entree to the world of publishing.
Of course, he dies. He dies before ever revealing what he thinks of Jane's book. Armed with no money and being back at square one, Jane has a chance meeting with a friend who gets her a job interview with a liquor wholesaler. "We sell hope," they explain.
What's great about the POV of the show -- office work not as drudgery or debasement, as on The Office, but as a saving grace -- is a neat Canadian spin. See, here, personal assistants don't become powerful, and agent's assistants don't move up. Too often, in Canada, in the arts, there is no 'up.' The joke I've been telling for years is the pitch a producer gives to a writer, "hey, listen, buddy -- we're really low budget on this, not much to go around, but if you do me this favor right here right now and make this work, in a year I'll have another project going and I'll come back to you and then I'll ask you to do exactly the same thing."
So it might not read that way to Telefilm, but the dramatization of that attitude is probably the most Canadian thing about TJS; that and the very boss use of CanCon fave, "Sweet City Woman" in the end montage.
Pavlinek has been a fixture of the Canadian comedy scene for years. She's very tall, has expressive eyes, great timing, and is very funny. A bit of a Canadian Alison Janney thing going on, too. She does hilarious character work, which is the one thing that fills me with trepidation about TJS -- is Jane enough of a kook to let Pavlinek really stretch? I hope so, because the ensemble around her is good. The act outs were sharp and clear and filled with choice and the story had nice momentum.
Global could promote it better, of course, and let's not comment on the fact that it's been launched in ... sigh ... June. But you know, that's a structural Canadian TV problem, hardly a Global-centric problem, and it certainly doesn't have anything to do with the individual merits of the show.
After my anemic feelings for Billable Hours and Jeff Ltd. (both of which I've watched since, and I have to admit Jeff Ltd. has gotten a bit better, though the criticisms I had of it I think still hold true) The Jane Show promises greater things from Global.
(Full disclosure: I do actually have something in development at Global, but then again, I've had stuff at CTV, and that didn't make me warmer toward Jeff Ltd. Showcase is probably consistently my favorite channel. I'm a fan of Trailer Park Boys and Naked Josh, and I've worked on two shows for Showcase -- but I gotta say, Billable Hours? Not so much.)
Typing stuff like that gives me hives. Y'know, there really is a strong possibility I'm screwing myself royal by actually saying what I think in this blog. But then again, if people don't start doing that on some level in the Canadian industry, things are never, ever going to get better.
This is the time when I hear my mother's voice. "But why you?"
Simple.
I am dumb.
But I also believe in TV.
Alright. Back to work. On a Sunday. Sigh.
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