Don't...

YOU $@%^#* LOOK AT ME.

It's always sad when a Dennis goes out. I would now like to direct you to Jim at The Legion for one of my favorite Dennis Hopper stories.

"Mommy!"

Not So Glee-ful Anymore

AWASH IN SERIES finale nostalgia, what I think of as the most dramatic story of the 2009-2010 U.S. Television season has gotten a little lost: and that is the bizarre flameout of GLEE as an original, creative force.

I'm certainly not the first to lament about the decline of Glee since it returned for the second half of its first season. Not since first-season O.C. has a guilty pleasure series flamed out so fast. One of the best critiques I've seen (and I can't remember where I saw it now; if you know, please let me know the link in comments) is about the "two Glees." One is the show that's smart, with heart & surprising & interesting characters & situations and the other is the post-Success, Madonna-themed, shoehorn in as many numbers as possible Glee.

(EDIT: an enterprising reader emailed me the link. Of course the two Glees came from the excellent Maureen Ryan at the Chicago Tribune.)

Though the latter version is still capable of moments of beauty & pathos -- like the great sequence where Artie imagines rising from his chair to do "The Safety Dance" (like all things Gleek, it sounds ridiculous when you type it out loud) it seems like increasingly, the only thing keeping me watching is this:



And Brittany bon mots, as unexpected & wonderful & lovely as they are, aren't enough to keep me in the Glee camp.  Not by themselves.

Add to that this speech. I can't figure out if it's sublime, or just overwritten. I'm a little thrilled to see this on network TV, but at the same time, it feels a bit ABC Afterschool special. But man, does Mike O'Malley  sell it. Two snaps up for the Emmy bait.


Glee? Yay or Nay? Have at it below in the comments.

Zip.

EVERYTHING is satisfactual.

The Bridge finally goes Stateside

JULY 10 on CBS. Flashpoint returns to CBS June 4. And Rookie Blue goes to ABC June 24. So we'll finally have three Canadian produced series on U.S. Nets at the same time.

Depending on the reception, this might cement the whole "Canadians fill the summer strategy." Or maybe it'll start the backlash. Considering the kinda cavalier way FP was treated, there's so much more potential down than up that all the hoopla over this model two years ago seems kind of silly now.

Then again, anybody still remember crime time after primetime on CBS?

- sent from iPad, nerds.

Events Occur in Real Time? Not Any Real Time I Recognize.

NOT MUCH TO say about the 24 finale, save for the fact that I really was rooting for Jack to die. The tribute to Chloe was nice; it was great to see President Logan eat a bullet, finally.  (And whack a guy.  Seriously. WTF?)  And it was fun seeing Nazneen Contractor in there, too.

I smell spinoff! "Totally Chloe!" Wacky office comedy with Guns!

But you know how in horror movies & suspense movies now they have to do that thing to get rid of the cellphone?

I'm glad they saved that whole "Rewind the tape on the Predator, and then dispatch it immediately, and then have it make a direct microwave call" thing til the series finale, cause -- Dude! -- that is some SERIOUS FUCKING DEUS EX MACHINA.

Seriously? Is this the same CTU that had a mole every season and never once successfully set up a perimeter in EIGHT YEARS?

I'd like to see the writing room come up with Day 9 after you've pulled THAT Shit.

Anyway, Dink, Dink, Dink, Dink we hardly knew you.  There was lots of quiet/loud Jack Bauer yelling, which is always good times.

But beyond that? Ehhhh.

Maybe it's best to just go back to sunnier, more innocent times, and remember and ruminate one more time on How 24 Changed Everything for writers.

Was Blind, But Now I See.

THE SHORT VERSION?  I liked it. A lot.

In retrospect, maybe this promo shot shoulda been a clue.

I liked it because the final LOST gave me the moments I'd always loved about the show: memorable, emotional, wrenching scenes between characters I cared about.  And because those characters, to a one, demonstrated in the final episode how they changed completely in their time on the island: Jack found humility and completed his transformation to man of faith -- after being unlikable for a while, and mired in self-pity, he became worthy of the mantle of the hero. (And his eulogy/upbraiding of his enemy for disrespecting John Locke was incredibly moving.) Hurley found a strength to lead. Ben found validation & forgiveness. Kate proved herself as the person you wanted most in the clutch. Sawyer's strength & decency (tipped this whole season, imperilled by the flirtation with Locke) was confirmed.  Claire got her second chance. 

In the end, I liked that there were no do-overs, and that what happened, happened.  The 'sideways' world wasn't a cosmic do-over.  The bomb didn't split the universe. Actions had consequences.  LOST flirted with that trope for a very long time, and I'm glad in the end they came down firmly on the side of the immutable.  See, because it's the very idea that there's only once choice that makes faith so important. Anyway... that's what I believe.

I think that has a lot to do with how one reads the final LOST.

If you forgive me for a moment, I'm going to veer off for a second in my post about a show that millions of people watched religiously (and a show where millions more lost their religion for the thing along the way) to talk a bit about a show that I worked on that almost nobody saw.

In 2004, I went to South Africa to work on a show called Charlie Jade. The show was this crazy Canada-South Africa co-production that had a famously troubled run.  (It was contracted for 22 episodes, delivered 20. 'Nuff said.)

The show was an overstuffed burrito of narrative hoo-ha.  Sci-fi magicks embracing parallel universes, environmentalism and a whole bunch of other isms, hero & villain tropes, tattoos, dystopian futurism, corporate responsibility, flashforwards, backs, dream sequences, X-Files style paranoia, film noir...I'm surprised there wasn't a unicorn in there.  I was part of a complete reboot of the writing staff, about halfway through the run of the show.  (This is where I met my good friend Alex Epstein.)

Of the many flaws of Charlie Jade, (and they were legion) one of the biggest challenges we faced was a whole bag of mythological ideas that had been thrown at the wall in a slightly ADHD way, and didn't really add up.  There was no plan. (Well, that's not true, there had been a plan in the deep longago, including a series bible conceived by the Executive Producer with some help from Sci Fi writer Robert J. Sawyer... but that had effectively slipped between the couch cushions.)  By the time we hit the ground  they were halfway through shooting, and the new writing staff had to figure out a way to try to tie the disparate threads of story continuity & myth together, and work toward a new end point.

At the same time, there were some truly perplexing characters who didn't act in ways that made sense, and we had to try to iron out a character arc, too.

(This kind of chaos still happens far too often on Canadian TV series. It's happening on a couple of shows right now.  It's not just a Canadian disease, but it is endemic of a system of TV production where you don't have writers riding point on story -- but that's a story for another time. Or, um, five years worth of blog.)

What put me in mind of Charlie Jade watching the LOST finale was the particulars of the big island solve.

The following is sort of a spoiler alert, but, uh, not really. And if you didn't watch LOST, it can probably be more accurately described as a "glad I didn't waste six seasons on this" alert:

So there's a giant butt plug in the island's heinie.  Desmond takes out the butt plug, and instead of cool flowing water, and golden light....there's nasty fire & rocks start falling all over the place, and steam shoots out and things get very very dire.  What can I say? The Island likes its butt plug.  Jack puts the butt plug back in though, and the island calms down.  But Jack is kind of covered in golden light water & nasty steam & island spit up & other...juices...and, uh, he's got a stab wound so he's all septic & stuff and he wanders off into the jungle and dies of a staph infection.

In retrospect, maybe going for a pacifier metaphor might have been better.  Oh well. Moving on.

Now for people wanting answers about Jacob & the Man In Black and the Smoke & what kind of energy and just what the $#@ is the island, anyway? I imagine this is just going to be a TOTALLY...ENRAGING... DEVELOPMENT!!!!

And yet, watching it all unfold, I couldn't care less.

Back in 2004, on Charlie Jade, we'd promised some sort of resolution that involved parallel universes. They had spent a jillion dollars on the first three episodes.  Now it was the end of the series, and instead of spectacular, spectacular, we had about three carrots, a Springbok & a package of biltong to throw at the screen.

So what the story department came up with was an impressionistic ending that pitted the two main characters against each other in a battle of wills, in a dreamscape that was a place between three parallel universes.

After bible fulls of plane theory and advanced scientific quantum explanations of how one universe would collapse upon another and all matter of hoofera, the final test of the two main characters came down to trying one another for their actions and intentions -- and the objective correlative of the struggle became three melting blocks of ice.  The two characters -- evil but complicated & good but complicated, finally worked together to unite the universes in a stable way that removed the threat of annihilation.

You know how they did it?

The ice from the symbolic blocks dripped into a glass. And they both drank from it.  And lo, they redeemed the universes.

Did I mention I'm Catholic?

Here's a clip from the finale. I'm telling you right now -- if you haven't seen the show (which includes the vast, vast majority of you -- you're gonna find it incomprehensible.) The drinking comes about 3/4 of the way through.



Charlie Jade was a rough ride, but I think we got out with an emotionally satisfying finale.  We scrambled toward that together -- the writers, the Creator/Executive Producer, the crew, the actors...But the only way we could do that was by letting go of the nitpicks and the how-this's and delivering emotionally resonant satisfying conclusions.  Which always come down to sacrifice.

But come on. They drank the kool aid? That's the big problem solve? Are you freaking kidding me?

Uh, no.  I wish we'd thought of the big old butt plug. But that's why the LOST guys are geniuses. Heh.

I firmly believe that they delivered a great finale because they focused on the right things.  We had to scramble to do that on our show.  They got to work toward it. And the resonance was much the greater for it.

TV Finales on Q

THE PODCAST for my appearance on Q last week is now up.  Check out me and author Nikki Stafford at about thirty-eight minutes in.