For a Moment There, I Thought We Were In Trouble.

"I PICTURE MY EPITAPH: "Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown".”

Well, they never did. And the epitaph is liable to be far sweeter than that.

"I'd like to be remembered as a guy who tried — tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who isn't complacent, who doesn't cop out."

And he never did that, either.

Rest in Peace.

The Extraordinary Ordinary

IF YOU LOOK to the left, you can see in the sidebar a link that will give you all the details of the Writers' Guild of Canada Election Rally in support of Canadian Culture -- October 8, 2008. 11:30 A.M. in Toronto. Come down and meet an extraordinary group of writers, gaffers, composers, flautists, electrics, drivers, wig makers, fight coordinators, special effects makeup artists, producers, composers, riggers, stage technicians, singers, dancers, painters, sculptors, graphic designers, costume designers, box office managers, ushers, program researchers, camerapeople, floor directors, sound recordists, runners, actors, stage managers, artisans, draftspeople, educators, metalworkers, advertising copywriters, entertainment lawyers, comedians, artistic directors, opera singers, glassblowers, dramaturges, foley artists, carpenters, art therapists, folklorists, props masters, curators, architects, production designers, casting agents, publishers, offset printers, choir leaders, journalists, set decorators, focus pullers, appraisers, arrangers, transcribers, projectionists, PA Announcers, production assistants, illustrators, colorists, choreographers, poets, armourers, conductors, 3D renderers, photoengravers, window dressers, closed captioners, clearance researchers, level designers, motion capture artists, gallery assistants, proofreaders, documentarians, ballerinas, boom operators, songwriters, silkscreen artists, stonecutters, carvers, continuity persons, airbrush artists, script coordinators, web designers, jewellery makers, art teachers, dressers, online editors, literary agents, archivists, vocal coaches, tattoo artists, booking agents, weavers, location managers, distributors, roadies, salespeople, music producers, translators, DJs, record promoters, cartoonists, performance artists, acrobats, art directors, assistant directors, puppeteers, production accountants, librarians, organists, stock shot researchers, stuntmen, props masters, flash programmers, hair stylists, makeup artists, animators, acting coaches, character designers, publicists, dolly grips, key grips, coders, photographers, copysetters, fashion designers, camera operators, front of house managers, playwrights, radio hosts, story editors, picture editors....

Dirty Sexy Pay TV Programming

IT'S FUNNY, WHEN I wrote briefly about Dexter a little while ago I thought I would return to the subject before the premiere. But here we are, coming up on Sunday at 10pm (HBO in the USA/TMN or Movie Central in Canada) and I find that I can't really think of more to say about it. Well, not that I can't think of more to say, but just that it strains my brain to try and think of what to say about what I'd like to talk about, and explain why I liked the premiere so much, without getting horribly spoiler-y. So instead I will just say tune in on Sunday if you want to see a textbook lesson in how to set up a season of TV and deepen and introduce new themes.

This is a big weekend for people with Pay. Besides Dexter on Sunday, the premiere of Season 2 of Californication is Monday at 9pm. Now I was hot and cold on this show last year, but I've got to tell you, does it make me a bad person to say that I'm totally going to be there simply because I know that Duchovny's Hank Moody portrayal was going down while he was spiralling down into his sex addiction? I hate the tabloidization of our culture, I really do. I watched Letterman last night dutifully and guffawed over the 2nd straight night of McCain funny, but I flipped right off when Paris Hilton came out. Yet here I am, watching a show that I didn't even really like that much last year just because I know that just like the character he plays, David Duchovny can't control where he puts his junk. Clearly I'm going to hell.

Then after Californication next Monday night, there's a premiere that's probably the biggest don't-miss of the three.

I've always been fascinated by Little Britain. Not just because of the phenom it was in the UK, but because of that peculiarly English way of doing the same sketch over and over. Behind all the grotesque makeup, the strange thing about every sketch in Little Britain -- and behind the catchphrases -- every bit, every punchline is exactly the same.

I don't mean the sketches are all the same, I mean the shows are all the same. Every week the same characters appear and do the tiniest riff on the jokes and the sketches they're always in (hence the reliance on the catchphrases.)

Now when Saturday Night Live does this, I approach it with nothing but pure contempt. So why is it so frequently funny on Little Britain?

Now let's turn to the subject of Little Britain USA. (9:30, Monday) Not quite as unwieldy a title as The E True Hollywood Story Canada -- it nevertheless raises a serious question about whether this most British of comedy series could ever transplant.

The answer is resoundingly yes. Shockingly so. There are many of the same characters, and a few new ones. The trope of exploring the heritage of Britain and America is thin gruel, sure, but it's still fun to see Vicky Pollard at a youth boot camp. Some of the America-only sketches are dead on the money and totally off the charts (the sheriff demonstrating his gun collection is a particular favorite, as is the Mum saying goodbye to her porn-influenced daughter as she goes to grade school (trust me, it's hilarious)) but I'm guessing that the sketch everyone is going to be talking about is the one where Rosie O'Donnell attends a Fat Fighters meeting as herself. Marjorie's obvious horror with O'Donnell's sapphic orientation is ... so offensive ... and really, really funny. O'Donnell's more than a good sport -- it's almost...majestic.

All in all, Little Britain USA is every bit the equal of its forebear. And yup, the punchlines to the jokes are still just as funny. I know that maybe this is what Ricky Gervais was lampooning in Extras, and I do feel the occasional pang of "why are you laughing when you've seen this a thousand times before?" but I guess that's why laughter is such a mystery. Good fun.

Of course, there's ... ahem ... another show I hope you'll watch Monday night. But that's a subject for another post.

Now Here's an Interesting Question...

DID I REALLY, really enjoy the 3rd episode of the new season of Entourage because it was really, really funny and great, or because I've spent every day since Saturday not sleeping, typing, typing, typing, looking at the screen, drinking coffee, sleeping, checking fivethirtyeight.com, typing, typing, showering, and going to a read through before typing typing typing END OF SHOW?

Who Are We Kidding?

CANADIANS CAN'T RELATE to artists.

That's a perfectly true statement.

No one can relate to artists. Artists do often operate on the margins. Even people like me -- writers for television, who are arguably toiling in the most relatable, populist form of the arts, tend to be irascible, ornery, opinionated. It's our job to reflect the world or truth through invented characters. Other artists work in weird media, perform or paint or draw or display works that critique or criticize or provoke.

But that's not what Harper waded into the other day when he talked about "ordinary Canadians" not caring about the arts. About it not resonating when they come home and see people prancing around at galas.

Well, I don't go to galas. But this isn't about me. And it's not about you either. And it certainly isn't about Gordon Pinsent and Wendy Crewson. Set that aside.

Harper threw down the gauntlet. It's about "ordinary Canadians."

The problem with the sneering Harper strategy is that it's based on ideas that a majority of Canadians do not support. So the only way he can shore up his support is to put people at war with each other. He's at war with his civil service. He's at war with scientists, and Doctors, and Elections Canada, and any number of other identifiable groups.

It's just our turn. Doesn't make us special.

But this time he poked a group that gets pissed off at consistently being told that they're elitist and don't matter to the country. So cultural workers, going forward, remember in all things the Harper characterization and sneer. It's time to speak of the real incomes, the real lives, the real jobs that Harper is sneering at here: a world that includes carpenters, drivers, costume makers, seamstresses, production assistants, recording engineers, front of house managers, camera operators, electricians, designers, graphic artists, animators, coders, administrators, clerks, lighting designers, caterers, chefs, photographers, violinists, and all the people who plan and execute all those small town cultural festivals, fairs, and concerts that Canadians are so rightly proud of.

Wendy, Colm, I love ya, God knows I do, but when you give your press conferences and go on Canada AM you're at least partially playing into his rhetoric. Why not step back -- just this once -- or better yet, use your voice to tell the story of the "Ordinary Canadians" Harper tars with his brush.

J. Kelly actually came up with some figures from Statscan in a comment below. Why not say something more like this:

"Earnings... are generally lower for cultural workers than the rest of the labour force. While average employment income in Canada was $31,757 in 2000, actors earned $21,597, painters and sculptors earned $18,666 and musicians and singers earned $16,090. In comparison, senior government managers earn $65,020. As Statistics Canada indicates: “for every successful creative and performing artist there are many with earnings below those of the average Canadian worker."

And remind people, that if cultural workers are "Ordinary Canadians" too, then why is Harper so hell bent at attacking such a wide swath of the economic engine of this country? Aside from the "cultural" arguments [which members of the government have said, outright and privately to representatives of the creative unions DO NOT MATTER TO THEM IN THE LEAST] when you argue the economic reality you point out how foolish his wedge-making rhetoric is, and how much his contempt is out of touch, and exactly the mean-spirited nature that's dogged him his whole career. This is NOT an admirable man. I don't care how many sweaters they put him in.

Connect yourself to the other 30 million people in this country. We are ordinary, Mr. Harper. You are not. But Shame on You for making ordinary-ness, and not excellence, the yardstick by which things are supposedly judged.

It seems like you're uncomfortable with anyone who seems to express a vision for the future. Could it be because you have none, other than the ruinous free markets to the rescue cant that has brought our neighbour to the south to the brink of economic collapse?

I'm an ordinary Canadian -- with some pretty ordinary contempt for you, sir. Thanks for spending 240 million of our dollars on an election we didn't need. Asshole.

What It's All About

POLITICS SHMOLITICS. Crashing markets, sturm and drang, crushing disappointments, it's hard to remember why you do this.

This is why.

What attracted him to “The Office,” Mr. Novak said, besides the possibility of steady employment, was the idea that he would be part of a show that was “aspiring to do something truly great.”

“Most things on television weren’t, at that time,” he said. “Most things were aspiring to be mediocre. They were imitating shows too, but they weren’t even imitating good shows. At least we were aspiring to be like the best of the best.”

Mr. Novak has written some of the most memorable episodes of “The Office,” including “Chair Model,” last season’s gem in which Michael, the regional manager of the Scranton, Pa., branch of Dunder-Mifflin, falls in love with a woman in an office-supply catalog; “Safety Training,” the third-season episode that featured an inflatable castle in the office parking lot and watermelons being tossed off the office roof; and “Diversity Day,” the program’s first broadcast episode that was not an almost direct copy of a British “Office” script.

“That was B. J.’s first script, and it was a classic right away,” said Oscar Nuñez, who plays Oscar Martinez on “The Office.” The episode featured an exercise in which the office workers taped index cards to their foreheads, each with the name of an ethnic group written on it, and then had to experience how others reacted to them upon seeing their race.

Mr. Novak said that initial script was fun because, for the first time, he was encouraged to write “whatever I thought was funny.” It was the opposite of an earlier writing experience, for a sitcom called “Raising Dad,” he said, when he would sometimes get a real laugh from writers for a line, “and they wouldn’t even consider putting it on the screen.”

That WB show, he added, “had a different mandate. They weren’t writing for their peers, they weren’t writing for themselves. They were writing for the network, or what they thought the network wanted.”

Mr. Novak contrasts that with his current experience. “If there is a best joke of the day, it will be in the show, unless there is not time for it,” he said. “It will never be because people thought they couldn’t pull it off or they had other priorities.”

Hands up if you've got that job right now.

Right. I thought so. Back to plugging away, then. Carrot officially dangled.

Don't Be The Wedge He Wants You To Be

CANADIAN RIGHT WINGERS got their Christmas wish when Stephen Harper ascended the Tory throne to power. For years they'd been sitting on the sidelines watching the craziness of the culture wars in the USA, forlorn that in Canada, that kind of weeping and gnashing of teeth didn't go on as much.

Well, it's here. And as I started to say yesterday, I think every time we try to make the intelligent, reasoned arguments about the value of the arts, we make it it worse.

Jill Golick has some further thoughts today, including a list of the battleground ridings where the majority/minority and who's in control will play out.

I think we need to give some thought to who our audience is — the undecided and the voters in the 45 battleground ridings in BC, Ontario and Quebec. Then we need to craft a message that will help them decide to vote our way.

That message isn’t about our needs or what we think Harper will do to us. Maybe it’s about the needs of other Canadians and how a Harper government will effect them. Or maybe we should be painting a vision of Canada as it could be; a Canada that those voters want to share.

Reading her post, though, one little thing does nag at me. We are supposed to be storytellers. And we're the ones who are getting framed here. And our response is to talk about our problems?

That's not just solipsistic, it actually IS a little elitist.

The message artists -- not the Paul Grosses who are speaking for you right now, but YOU -- should take forward in this election is not OUR issues. It's small stories observed of ordinary Canadians, as it were. If Stephen Harper wants to get into a discussion about Ordinary Canadians, well, let's use our nouns and verbs and adjectives and powers of observation and letter writing, and storytelling, and flood radio shows and internet boards, and give them to him. Because the truth of those arguments don't look good for his party, or for this out-of-touch, mean spirited leader. Don't let them frame the argument.

Harper's policies are shit for the very Canadians he's courting. Arm yourself with the facts. Get out and tell THOSE stories.

Which is, you know, kind of our job, right?

EDIT: Now that I think about it, there's a perfectly valid counter to this latest harper "niche" thing accusing artists of elitism. It means arming yourself with a few facts about the average yearly salary of an "arts worker" in this country. I don't know where you get that stuff..maybe StatsCan. Anyway, the thing that occurs to me is that right now in the middle of this campaign, Harper better HOPE he can keep the discussion on things like demonizing artists.

You know why?

Because essentially his vision of the Conservative party is cut from the same ideological cloth as the neo-cons in the states -- the ones who've pushed "market force, shrink the government, deregulate, deregulate" for a generation.

This week we see the wreckage and hypocrisy that has wrought in the USA. Even now as they discuss bailout, it's a bailout that protects the people who burned down the system in the first place, and does nothing to help the actual working people.

If that was my legacy, I'd want to talk about artists too.

Arts as an Election Issue

REMEMBER C10? BACK in those old days, I started out arguing that the best argument to make was NOT the censorship one, since that played right into the base -- but to attack the very real and legitimate argument about the crushing reality that uncertain funding or financing would bring to the sector. Even I fell down on constantly hammering that argument home. That's the thing about wedge issues. They're designed to overload your reason circuits.

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but the Conservative Party of Canada is going to win the Canadian Federal Election. Barring some game-changing, incredible clearing of the decks. And the Liberal Party platform, announced yesterday (Yesterday? Really?) probably isn't it.

So again, as I sit in my WGC Council Meeting, and talk to other people (in and among the grinding out of script pages, which is another story. My condo for an uninterrupted 23 hour writing day, and, uh, 12 cc's of adrenaline, I guess) there seems to be a concerted effort toward the practical matter of: how do you talk to these people? Because they do not understand your issues.

As a friend put it recently, "they look at all of you as bought and paid for ten times over by the Liberals anyway."

I tend to think, again, the economic arguments about industry and job creation are going to fly better with this crowd than any notion of culture as society-builder. They simply don't think that way. They don't care.

In Today's Globe & Mail (which, for all I tend to criticize the press these days, really has been all over this culture issue -- they deserve praise for that) Jean-Daniel Lafond, the husband of Canada's Governor General, is profiled by Michael Posner. And besides a bon mot about culture to make us all feel good: "Culture is oxygen," he says some of the smartest things I've seen about culture in the current campaign:

Fundamentally, he said in a recent interview, "it's a problem of education," and the fact that the Conservative government could slash funding for a variety of arts programs and organizations and do it without a large-scale reaction indicates just how much education is needed.

"We need to sensitize people to the importance of the arts. Don't forget, culture is oxygen. We have to protect it and [spending on it] is not wasting money. But it's a dead end to make a confrontation between artists and politicians. The only possible end is demagoguery."

Until the population understands the vital importance of the arts, not just its economic power but its cultural force, "it's very safe for a politician to destroy culture. We have to go further with education. Culture is not elitist. For me, it's an essential part of life. Otherwise, it's dead. But as it is, for more than half the population, culture is not a necessity. We have to go further ... The debate is not just for election campaigns. It's bigger than that. So maybe this is a good crisis. I think it's dangerous to tie the culture only to nationalism. ... Culture is coast to coast. Diversity is easy to talk about, but our country is made with that and if we want solidarity, we have to recognize real diversity, not just to save Quebec or Alberta."

Part of the problem is the very notion of "culture" as "special." Because to the swath of people who are likely to decide this election, it's not. They simply don't care. Yes, if you're an activated, pro-culture voter, you may know why that is ultimately short-sighted, self-defeating, even -- dare I say it -- un-Canadian -- but that case has not been effectively made, which is kind of why we're in this fix. And the problem is that the less culture matter the more provincial Canada becomes and the more the close-minded appeal of the Tory message will resonate. The only possible end is demagoguery.

Right now, the Conservatives' chance is based upon the fact that the left is split and the right is united. But that doesn't have to remain so forever. A few more cycles with these guys in charge and the oxygen sucked out of anything cultural (perhaps to be put to Sports -- and let's not kid ourselves, a dynamic that pits amateur sport funding versus the Arts would be like Christmas and Baal rolled into one for these guys) and that socially progressive Canada that most of us treasure will look as quaint as crackly old Newsreel footage.

There is nothing, after all, Progressive about these Conservatives.

But if they're driving, you have to talk to them.

So the attacks that are shrill and hysterical have to go. Yes, check things like the WGC's Election Page, and try to figure out if you're in a riding where your vote really could make a difference. And ask questions of your candidates and go to all candidates' meetings. But after that, spend some time thinking about the future, and how you're going to build a bridge to two audiences -- 1) Canadians. And 2) Conservatives.

Jill Golick discovered an interesting new front when a canvasser came to her door. She wrote about it on Weinman's Macleans site:

The NDP canvasser at my door the other night was a biologist and breast cancer researcher. He says the Harper government treats his industry in exactly the same way; decimating it with a thousand small cuts.

The sciences and arts aren’t the only ones being slowly strangled by Harper’s cuts. Perhaps the arts community would be more effective telling those stories than our own.

Harper is at war with the civil service, and cutting lots of industries that don't immediately resonate in his orbit. Finding those people, building bridges to those issues might offer another way.

Because trust me when I say this: they love it when we talk about how special we are and how important we are. They want more of that. It makes us deliciously easy to ignore.

The Alberta-bound Conservative mindset is a pure distillation of quid pro quo politics. "What does supporting your issue get me?"

In the end, we're going to need to figure out the answer to that question. We ignore it at our peril.

That Sharp Intake of Breath You Hear...

FROM HEAVEN TO THE SOUTHLAND, is people waiting for the overnights on HEROES. I didn't watch myself-- I still have about half of Season Two to get through on DVD -- but the strength or relative weakeness of the return of this once-mighty freshman phenom might offer tea leaves for the season to come.

NBC is pretty much in freefall, and an audience that's fickle enough to love something as intensely as Heroes one minute, grow disenchanted during a strike-shortened season and NOT come back at all...

...well, if that's the case we might just be looking at a Baseball Effect. You know, like fans after the 1994 strike. My friend Jeff still hasn't forgiven them.

Anyway, I'll be in a Council Meeting when that news comes down, so feel free to post'em in the comments here.

But like I said, there's a whole lot of folk mouthing "Save the Cheerleader, Save the Nework" this morning...

I Am Reliably Informed

THAT THEY TORE down the Irish Heather in Vancouver.

Seriously, what is wrong with you people?

If you mess with the Railway, I'm gonna have to come out there and kick some ass.

Truth and Bling

WELL, TOMMY SMOTHERS is officially my hero. Again. And Tina Fey. What do you say? I mean, really? Man.

Shame about The Wire diss, but you know, you knew that was gonna happen.

I have a script that's behind and a WGC Council Meeting tomorrow, so there's not much more I can say. But let's throw open the thread below. What did you think of the Emmy Awards?