And While You're At It, Don't Call Me Bruce, Either.

INTERESTING ARTICLE over at Wired News. Jason Silverman explores the persistent impulse away from labelling something "sci-fi."

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is set during a nuclear winter. Two survivors walk south, breathing toxic air, seeking out the continent's last canned food while ducking bands of flesh-eaters.
Describe it as "post-apocalyptic," as most critics did, or as a masterpiece of dystopian literature. Just don't call McCarthy's novel "science fiction."
Even when clearly appropriate, film studios and publishers avoid the phrase "science fiction." So do the novelists, film directors and editors in their employ. McCarthy's book, which is about to become a blockbuster -- Oprah Winfrey will tout it on an upcoming TV show as part of her book club -- is just another example of how the powers that be dodge the term, especially when it applies to "serious" fiction or cinema.
You won't find the words "science fiction" in Random House's bio of Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author China Miéville. Instead, he's called the "edgiest mythmaker of the day." Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep? It's classified as comedy, drama, romance and fantasy, but not sci-fi, at Amazon.com.

Out in the fan weeds, the reverberations of this impulse have caused a lot of consternation, and their own twisting reactions. Some won't call literary Sci-Fi by that name, preferring "SF."

Others refer to "genre" shows -- which always struck me in its own way as ridiculously broad. I mean, what genre? That's as silly as speculative fiction.

Sci-Fi isn't the only genre that gets to play this silly game with language. Horror on TV goes through a similar kneejerk, for a different reason. Most TV stations that have to think about advertisers and crazy Christian boycotts won't be seen to get behind Horror -- even though you could argue that it's a genre that is enjoying an enormous popular upswing right now. But if you're pitching, you better be pitching a supernatural thriller, kids.

I remember marvelling once when I called something "horror" and a network type corrected me instantly with, "dark fantasy." Boom. Not even a blink.

We have always been at war with Eurasia, you see.

But the sci-fi thing, to me, is particularly problematic. Because the labeling game is causing problems.

First you get a show like Battlestar Galactica. It doesn't matter how many top ten lists it's going to appear on, it doesn't matter that this is a show that you'd appreciate if you love The Wire or The Sopranos -- there's a big portion of the audience that won't tune it in because "that's sci fi. and that title."

There are reviewers that hate sci-fi. There are people who won't go past their prejudices. I've never once seen data that suggests that the kind of person who hates Sci-fi and that label would watch the show if it was called something else.

Moore's BSG is a gutsy show. It's fearless storytelling. It's challenging, it's relevant, and it's provocative. And despite what he says, it is also great sci-fi.

I mean, face it, if something's sci-fi, most people are going to figure that out. If you keep promoting the idea that the sci-fi moniker is something to be shied away from, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're dooming a genre that's always been about critiquing the world we live in now, and ceding it to the fanboys who like to see stuff blow up.

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.

Don't get me wrong -- there's a whole lot of problems catering to the built in audience, as well. For one thing, in my experience working for Canada's sci-fi channel, I've found that generally the hardest core fans tend to eschew complexity. They're conservative -- they don't like change. They don't like sex or complex human relationships between men and women. They like to think of themselves as more sophisticated, and smarter than the "average" tv viewer -- when in reality, they're not. But you know what? Maybe that's because all this dancing around what is and what isn't sci-fi has resulted in that being the only sector of the audience who's left willing to put up their hands and call themselves a sci-fi fan. Everyone else has moved on because they don't want dumb, and they don't like confused. There's other places to get your quality fix.

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 focacta.

Which is why I'm working on a script that is a Dark Thrillo-Comic Serial Standalone Scientific Fantastical Musical Romcom Procedural.

Okay. Time for lunch.

Huh.

SWEAR TO GOD, til I saw a promo for SNL last night, I thought Shia LeBoeuf was a girl.

Interweb Solitaire

I WAS AMUSED to see that photos I posted here, and the descriptions, got immediately lifted and reposted on a fan page out there. Ah the Internet. Remember the days of having to search out for any morsel of someone you liked? That fragment of a show or a song lyric? Does it mean anything to anyone under about 23 that once upon a time, if you didn't know a song, you had to sometimes wait weeks to hear it again -- on the radio?

I like experiments. And this is a juicy one. I found this going through my Iphoto folder. It's a cute photo from the Blood Ties wrap party of Kyle Schmid (Henry Fitzroy) with the "Blood" books (and Henry) creator Tanya Huff.



Now...let's see how far this smacks across that interweb, how fast. On your mark, get set...swiiiipe!


It's like throwing red meat to a bunch of wild dogs. Heh heh.

Stan Daniels at The Turn

JAIME WEINMAN reminded me of something in the comments below about Stan Daniels. He, of course, is eponymously immortalized with his own type of joke: The Stan Daniels Turn.

It's kind of a self-aware, almost meta-humorous type of joke, because it's sort of a game between the writer and the audience -- see if they can set up something and find a creative way to contradict it in the very next moment -- and because it often depends on something happening oh-so-conveniently on cue, as in the above joke. When it works, it works really well, though.

Weinman wrote about it last year, and posted a great example from Mary Tyler Moore, and the incomparable Ted Knight. This is a great lesson for Comedy writers. I actually use appreciation for the Stan Daniels Turn as a litmus test for writers, directors, and network people.

Audiences love the Stan Daniels Turn. It's a really satisfying joke when executed right. And I've been in lots of meetings where directors, network people, and other writers pooh-pooh it. Because they're too good for the Stan Daniels Turn, you see.

I call these people, "people who do not understand comedy." When I am handed power, they will be shunned in accordance with the laws of the tribe.

Thanks, Weinman, for allowing me to skate through another day by glomming onto another's work.

Um...It's homage?

MIP, Mop, Map?

IT'S SO hard to know if this is just a case of positive thinking or if it's really a new trend in Canadian programming.

Currently, Canuck dramas and kids series are hot, some more so in foreign lands than at home.

Shaftesbury Films' ReGenesis has been sold to 110 countries and is near to bagging a U.S. sale. Its kids series Life with Derek airs worldwide in 137 countries and 10 languages. The show, airing on Disney, has also placed among the top 10 cable series for tween girls in the U.S.

Christina Jennings, chairman and co-CEO of Shaftesbury, says tentpole hits like that open doors in foreign markets. For example, Shaftesbury made The Murdoch Mysteries originally as TV movies for CHUM, then developed it as a TV series with Britain's UKTV.

"There's no question anymore that Shaftesbury could deliver commercial programming that worked in the international market," says Jennings.

The incredible thing is, here we are on the cusp of a time when having new streams of content is going to be essential, because national broadcast borders are being blown up, and Canadian networks are potentially putting themselves in the position where people go to them last.

Desperate Networks teaches that no show gets on the air without one champion inside a network.

This math...it just doesn't add up, does it?

Wow. It's a Bad Day for Writers

I'M SURE we'll see some better recollections from those who knew him -- but a sad loss to TV writers:

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Stan Daniels, the Emmy-winning co-creator and executive producer of "Taxi" and a writer on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," has died. He was 72.

The Toronto-born Daniels died of heart failure April 6, according to Mount Sinai Memorial Park, where a funeral was planned for Thursday. Daniels won eight Emmys during his long television career, including three for "Taxi" and three for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

Daniels apparently passed away April 6, but it was just announced today. If you read this blog and you knew Stan Daniels, I'd love to hear any anecdote. Especially anybody from the Toronto days.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

"And even if the wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death."


Damnit. After yesterday's post...well...


Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

If you really want to upset your parents, and you are not brave enough to be gay, go into the arts!

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please—a little less love, and a little more common decency.'"

And, of course...

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Rest in Peace. And thanks for the books.

Bring Out Your Dead, Bring Out Your Dead

Andy Barker.

God-Damn-it.
I hope you fuckers really, really, really love your According to Jim.

Out of the Bubble and Onto The Street

I AM kind of a news junkie. Always have been. When I don't know something that's going on in the world, I feel stupid. So it is that I pass by a group of Falun Gong protestors, and go home and learn about the group. (This is actually how I did learn about Falun Gong years ago -- the things you see walking through the city...)

I also consume newspapers and magazines voraciously. And online, too.

But in Vancouver, I was more out of touch than I usually am, and my online media habits started to reveal cracks in information flow. By reading my usual online sources like the New York Times and Salon and the Washington Post and others, I felt pretty up to date with what was going on in the United States, and more or less the world. For some reason, I didn't read the Guardian as much as I do when I'm in Toronto. Maybe it scared me, as, you know, since I was on Pacific time and they were in England that was like reading news of the future.

Anyway, obviously, thanks to bookmarking, and the newly revitalized Playback brand, I even felt like I had a sense of what was going on in the TV and Film industry.

Where things fell down was on the Canada front. I'm sorry, but Canada simply does not have a top level, quality online news site. Not Google news, certainly not the Canada.com branded portals (Vancouver Sun, National Post, etc.) The Globe has annoying firewalls for their best content; The Star is too-Toronto focused (and strangely, which may surprise some people, I'm not really eager to keep up with the Toronto news when I'm not in Toronto. Though I'm sorry I missed the Lower Bay reroute of the TTC.)

So it was that though I was up to the millisecond on news of Anna Nicole, her baby, Britney, her head, and the American Idol castoffs, and their dirty online pics -- I had only a vague, foggy sense of what's been going on in the country I live in for the last three months. Good thing it was winter in Canada, so the answer was largely, "not much."

Also, Macleans is a great site. Without Macleans, I would have sounded like a total idiot.

Anyway, this little bubble extended especially into my last weekend on the left coast. I did a lot of cool things -- saw the Fred Herzog show at the VAG, (which a reliable source insists is not pronounced in such a way that it rhymes with, "cadge." Yeah, whatever.) I also watched the world go by on a grey Howe Street afternoon, had a great meal at Feenies, saw The Lookout (Joseph Gordon-Levitt is dreamy.) visited with friends, met some B.C. writer and production types at The Irish Heather, and haunted my fave coffee spots -- but I didn't pick up a newspaper. I was more concerned with the geography of getting all my stuff into my two bags. Even having shipped two boxes off beforehand -- it was close. Too close.

So it was a bit of a surreal experience to see the solemn juxtaposition of the Vimy 90th Anniversary and the death of six Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan play out as point-counterpoint silently over the baggage carousel at Pearson Airport, as I waited for those two bags. It's then, for the first time, I learned the names of the dead, and saw the cutways to PM Harper and the Queen in France. A set of golf clubs sailed ludicrously past as the CBC switched to footage of a nursing home, and a poor, shaking, broken man who's presumably one of the last survivors of that battle. His grandson spoke for him, and though I'm sure he was saying all the correct things, I couldn't hear that, and I felt a little angry and unexpectedly melancholy at the thought that this old man was already silenced; his descendant already speaking for him, reshaping the narrative of that terrible day and what it all meant.

Jim Henshaw has a lovely little piece about Vimy and his grandfather's memory of it up at his place. For a different view about the juxtaposition of Vimy and the deaths in Afghanistan, today Doyle writes a piece that's thoughtful and interesting and will undoubtedly get all the people who get riled up by Doyle riled up again.

The talk, in the reportage, was of how the sacrifice at Vimy defined Canada as a nation. This was largely unquestioned as an idea and the image of the majestically large memorial only underlined that idea. Nobody seemed to be appearing on TV questioning the validity of the proposal that blood sacrifice is necessary to define nationhood.

This is a multicultural society, not one in which everybody can be assumed to share the same opinion on Canada, Canadian history and the meaning of being Canadian. To some, whose roots are in other societies and who have found refuge here, the acceptance of the idea of blood sacrifice is difficult. The public promulgation of the idea makes them uneasy, and with good reason.

The debate about the meaning of Vimy and the questioning of its accepted meaning happened in newspapers, this one is particular. TV is hopeless on such issues.

This is definitely received wisdom in Canada. The narrative is shaped in one very specific direction: At Vimy, the soldiers from the small nation, Canada, prevailed where the British and the French had failed. Canadians paid a terrible price, and came out the other end as a nation.

That's what I learned in my high school history class. One of the coolest things about history in high school for me was taking the U.S. History class. Because all the dates and events were familiar to me (I was a history geek way back) but having them taught from a dispassionate Canadian perspective was sobering and interesting. None of the tropes or myths were allowed to remain intact. It was intellectually bracing. (I also had a wonderful teacher, who sadly died a year later.) But when I took my Canadian History class, I remember feeling intense dissonance in how they could teach that Canada was born out of revulsion at the U.S. Civil War, and wanting to avoid that all costs (which is one of the reasons Confederation came together the way it did) and this idea that Vimy defined the nation. But I never put up my hand. I had the sense that this was one piece of national mythology that didn't bear examination...at least not in Canadian History class.

If you've read Doyle's book about growing up watching TV in Ireland, I think you have a clearer idea and context of where he's coming from. He was a boy who watched his countrymen explode into violence in a most peculiar way -- on the TV. The War on Terrorism by definition means something different to someone who grew up in that context.

I'm just not sure. I think what the Canadians did at Vimy was undoubtedly brave. But as a young nation, to lose so many young men who could have been building the country for a pointless, stupid fight a continent away -- well... we're ninety years on now. Can't we say that World War I was a bewildering, pointless, awful mess with impunity now? Or is that not - in the parlance of our time - supporting the troops?

I don't know.

Yesterday afternoon, I was in a cab and talk radio was playing and I learned the NHL had favored NBC, who pay nothing for NHL rights, over CBC, who pay a hunk o change -- giving the all-important Sidney Crosby game to the NBC afternoon sched, forcing Hockey Night in Canada to go with a game of lesser interest to Canadians Saturday night. If Hockey is religion in Canada, then the Saturday night game is its greatest sacrament.

I didn't get what was going on at first, in the cab. So I asked the cabbie.

"They move hockey to afternoon. Very bad. Very bad for Canada."

I asked his name. Asif. I may not have the spelling right. Asif comes from Jordan. He's been here five years. Asif knows his Canada, that's for sure. I thought about Vimy and the sacrifice and received wisdom and what defines a nation and how much better I felt when I wasn't living in a news bubble.

I went home, and restarted my newspaper delivery. They start coming tomorrow.

Fun With Runways

YOU'RE COUNTING down, ten nine eight... waiting to touch down, the only part of the flight when you're a little scared...and you're maybe 100 feet from the ground and suddenly the engines scream bloody murder and the plane banks left and up, up up and you're all like, WTF?

And then a couple minutes later, the Air Canada First Officer comes on and says, with characteristic understatement, "Folks, they were gonna put us on a runway with a flight that hadn't exactly cleared. So we're gonna come around again and give him some extra time to take off."

And then you know you're someone who watches The Office too much. Because you do a take to the IMAGINARY CAMERA.

Whoa.

Still, all in all, it's nice to be on the ground in one piece.

I've gotta unpack. More tomorrow.

Don't You Fuhgeddabout Me

So The Sopranos turns up for the final 9 tonight at 9 (in Canada, on Movie Central - TMN)

After Tony-in-a-coma, Christopher-crushes a dog, and all the other joys brought to you by seven minute sopranos, I ask you: what could they do for a final act?

I mean, besides Quebecois gangsters -- which believe me, I'm looking forward to.

The Toronto Star asked yours truly and a few other Canadian screenwriters to weigh in on that very thing: how we'd end whole shebang. I went kind of meta with my version, mainly because David Chase is a depressive sort and Italian and Id hate to get beaten to death accidentally for crossing the line.

Sopranos creator David Chase desperately wants to go make movies. If I were him I'd do what Six Feet Under did and go for a ending that can't be undone. That way, HBO won't call about reunion specials.

I'd have a rumpled private detective stumble into Newark. This detective – let's call him Rockford – stumbles across something he shouldn't one night at the Bada Bing. Paulie Walnuts and Christufuh work him over out in the Pine Barrens, but he won't die, because he comes from the era when you just didn't kill the hero on TV. Carm wises up, falls for Rockford. Tony freaks out and disappears. Silvio tells everyone Bruce Springsteen is the new Boss, picks up a guitar, and goes out on tour.

Tony finally turns up in the small village of Cicely, Alaska, where Meadow's taken over as town doctor. He spends the rest of his days telling everyone he's a retired astronaut. In the last shot of the series, he looks up, and sees the ducks. They've returned. All is well.

To see John Rogers' and Alex Epstein's rather more serious takes, and my friend Rob Sheridan's showstopping zombie crossover, click here.

Mombies. That's gold, Jerry.

Happy Bada Bing Easter Everybody.