Me and My Rock and Roll Mouth

APPARENTLY, I'M quoted in the latest Playback. For their "The Burning Question" blurb, they asked:

"Was Banff worth the trip?"

"What's missing here is actual writers and actual craft, not the usual suspects talking to the usual suspects. You've got so many people asking 'What's the web strategy?' 'What's this? What's that?'... We all get together at these industry confabs and everyone's talking regional bonuses and educational elements. Fuck that. I want to watch Trailer Park Boys. It's all about the water cooler."

Denis McGrath, Writer, Blood Ties; blogger, Dead Things on Sticks

You know, it's only a matter of time before someone comes up with a Denis McGrath Random Quote Generator.

My money's on my friend Colin Viebrock.

Serial Killers

AT BANFF, I didn't get the opportunity to interview Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars, Cupid) because the only time they could offer me was during my panel. Diane Kristine did, though, and her surprising and interesting Blogcritics interview is here.

In my experience, I've found that TV writers tend to fall into two broad types. The introverts are the ones you imagine...they're quiet and nervous. They look like writers. They may be intense or funny or scabrous in the room, but at a party they tend to keep to the margins and observe. When they have to pitch, or schmooze, they force themselves to do it. But it's not easy and it's not fun.

Then there's the extroverts. The extroverted writers are people who like to talk to people. They enjoy performing, at least a bit. They generally have better relationships with the actors. They relish the opportunity to pitch and tell stories not just in the room, but in any social situation. I'm one of the extroverts.

The real unvarnished truth, of course, is that most TV writers probably fall on a continuum between those two poles. I've written before, I believe, about my impulse toward reticence with people I don't know and how I fight to overcome it. The truth is that if any writer was a complete extrovert, they probably wouldn't be able to abide the most important part of writing: the hours and hours you have to spend in your own head, or alone in a chair making something work.

That's a long explanation to get to a not-too-funny point: Rob Thomas is pretty much the grand high poohbah of writer extroverts.

In his master class session at Banff, moderated by Gillian Flynn of Entertainment Weekly, Thomas was relaxed and funny. He talked a lot about his post-Mars gig, running a new show for ABC starring Judy Greer. (Miss Guided) He repeated his highly improbable-but-true tale of how he got his start in the business (which you can read in the linked interview above,) and he even dished a little dirt. (Let's just say he's probably not on Kevin Williamson's Christmas Card list.)

Though it was highly entertaining, there was, of course, a bit of a funereal vibe over the session. I would say about 95% of the writer mafia at Banff was in the room, and a bunch of execs, and producers. It was also the least grey session I attended at Banff. The median age of the room was about 10-12 years younger than any other panel I went to. The room, in other words, was chock full of diehard, depressed Veronica Mars fans.

Thomas had obviously had time to work through his feelings about the cancellation. He was very gracious and understanding about it - while still pointing out that he thinks the Pussycat Dolls had something to do with putting the shiv in.

As I sat in the audience, seeing this tanned, good looking guy enjoy himself on stage, I thought, "remember to act that way when your baby is cancelled."

Truth is, Mars and Thomas has been a touchstone for me in more ways than just as a fan of quality TV (and quality genre TV, which is even harder to find.) For a couple of years now, when I've been pitching series, I've talked about the concept of "Veronica Mars serialization..."

What do I mean?

Well, if you take that first season of VM, there is definitely a season-long arc. But the interesting thing about the way the show was constructed was that the first couple of eps dealt very heavily with the mystery, and so did the last couple. But in the middle, there were all these strong and interesting standalone episodes, where a case walked in the door and was solved by the fade-to-black-vanity-card. In those episodes, there might be a serial element touched on -- but lightly. I really felt watching it that there was enough meat in the standalone ep to interest you, and if you weren't a regular viewer -- those little serial moments in the middle were so minor that you wouldn't be turned off.

It seemed, in fact, to be a much better execution of a formula that had originally been tried on X-Files, where there were "arc episdoes" (usually during sweeps) and standalones. The problem with X-Files was that the break between those arc episodes always felt forced...I mean, you discover something about bees or black oil and then don't follow it up for weeks because...why, exactly? The whole thing was so amped during the arc eps that they clashed with the pace of the other stories. With VM the threads were still out there, (heh heh, 'the threads are out there' No? ....nevermind) and you got the sense that you were just reflecting the world -- where clues don't often fall into your lap and sometimes it takes a while to solve things.

Now, I know, most of this is academic, because VM was never anything even close to a hit. But from a construction standpoint, I thought this idea of "Veronica Mars style serialization" could point a way toward the cessation of hostilities between the serialization/standalone camp in series TV.

In other words, between the creators, and the network types.

So when it came time for questions in Thomas' session, I asked him about it:

ME: You've seemed to come up with this formula where you have heavily serialized opening episodes and closing episodes, and in the midddle there you manage to tell interesting standalone stories where you would just hit the two or three serial points an ep where if you didn't watch before you wouldn't get thrown out. So I'm wondering now...in everything that happened. What are your thoughts now -- serialization vs. standalone, and what do you think the secret is to getting people to buy into serialization?

The tough thing for me is I'm a writer who loves serialization in a market that doesn't. On this new show I'm on [Miss/Guided starring Judy Greer] I got the directive right from the network president: we want to be able to air these in any order we see fit. you know...we got this initial order of 6 episodes. And they've shuffled the deck. And it makes it really hard to even do the level of serialization The Office does, with the romance and Jim and Pam -- so it's hard...I feel like as long as we promised the network that there would be closed endings in Veronica Mars -- a case comes into the office in the cold open, and it's solved by the final act -- it bought us a lot of leeway in terms of allowing for an ongoing mystery. And yet at the same time, we were tinkering with that until the very end. Um, if Veronica Mars had come back for a fourth season, there would have been no arcing mystery. And the reason for that is we felt -- and I use that and I'm not sure who the 'we' is -- it was felt is a better way to say that -- was that people who were casually sampling the show weren't coming back because they feel like I'm missing elements, I can't figure out what's going on, I'm not going to come back -- in much the same way as, you know, the first season of 24 when I heard this is a good show a good show and I tried to sample it 8 episdoes in, it was...I have no idea...because we had run off our viewers in season one and season two. In retrospect, I don't even know what the best plan is, to answer your question. I love to watch serialiized things. I loved the Sopranos. I could watch that ongoing soap opera like thing forever. Um, and yet, you know, they will discuss in network meetings what their research shows--that the average viewer of any show will watch one out of four episodes. Therefore can you afford to sell a show that's that serial. It's a difficult question and one that I don't have an answer to. Creatively I love serialized shows...they buy and make fewer of those, though.

Sigh. Well. That was depressing, to be sure. I mean, I guess I knew all that. The new thing was the one-in-four. The last time I heard that bandied about they were saying that the average viewer watched half the episdoes.

But the more I thought about Thomas' answer and the whole question of serialization, the more something didn't seem to fit.

We've now fully entered this realm where you can't take a break. Heroes and Lost both took a bath in viewership after taking a long layoff in the middle of the season.

The challenge with serialization, of course, isn't just getting people to tune in in the first place -- it's avoiding the dropout. When I was in Vancouver in the winter, I broke up with Prison Break and 24 because I missed two episodes in a row. I didn't go back. In an on-demand world, or with plenty of viewing opportunities, like HBO or A&E offers with their shows, I'm not sure that breakup would have been as permanent.

Part of me also thinks that the malaise with the sitcom stems from the fact that they are so eminently missable. I'm a big fan of Scrubs, but when it comes to that show, I fit the average viewer pattern. I probably saw about 1/4 of the episodes this season.

The thing about the 1/4 rule is that it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If your show is designed so you only have to see 1/4 of the eps, does that mean you're holding yourself open to new viewers, or does it mean that no one is ever going to be passionate enough to see every ep?

Wasn't the success of Heroes this year tied to that idea of the "Heroes ending you didn't want to miss?"

Maybe it's the contrarian in me, maybe it's self serving, but I can't help but shake the feeling that as viewer loyalty in general shrinks, the solution is not more shows that advertise how much you can miss and still jump in any time; the secret is television you don't dare miss, where even if you PVR or TIVO it, you still want to watch it before anyone can spoil you or talk to you about it.

But if they're telling the grand poohbah no go on the serial, what chance do the rest of us have to prove them and their 1/4 theory wrong?

Any thoughts?

Greg Daniels, Part II: Long Skinny Notebooks, and The Five-To-One

NOT ONLY has Greg Daniels co-created one of the two best animated tv series of the last 20 years, King of the Hill, but he also wrote for the other one. (The Simpsons) He's written for Seinfeld and Saturday Night Live, and won Emmys galore. In fact, three of Daniels' Simpsons episodes are ranked as among the most popular Simpsons eps of all time. That's a feat.

This is the conclusion to my conversation with Greg Daniels, Creator and Executive Producer of the American version of The Office, which took place at the Banff Springs Hotel during the 2007 Banff World Television Festival.

For Part I, go here. To hear an NPR feature on writing The Office with Daniels and Mindy Kaling (writer, "Kelly") go here.


DTOS: I hate to go to the lame place -- this whole journalist driven, "death of comedy" thing -- but one of the great things about The Office that maybe points what's missing in a lot of other tv comedy today is the idea of truth. There is something true in the work you've done, both in King of the Hill and now in The Office. I recognize the America I see in The Office. And the America that I saw in your years of King of the Hlll. And I don't see that on Television a lot.


GREG DANIELS: Well, we have a couple of things that we do. And one of them is I get these reporters notebooks for the writers, and pass them out. And for King in the Hill we used to go to Texas and go around with our reporters' notebooks and here we're always going to offices, talking to people, and so there's a lot of observational comedy -- seeing what's going on and making humor out of that, rather than coming up with the comedy first. So that's one reason. But another thing is that the cameramen on The Office, specifically Randall Einhorn, although Matt Sohn his number two is also very good...but he's our DP and I used to sit him down when I told him what we were looking for and I'd say, "truth and beauty. we're going for truth and beauty." He really responded to that. "Cool," he'd say -- he lived in Australia, he'd go, "Truth and beauty, mate!" And then he'd go out...so he was always trying to find that moment of behavior, or that thing in the camerawork. So I think that's a lot of -- well, it's a combination of a lot of factors, but I'm glad you pointed it out -- because that's always our sort of secret thing we'd talk to him about.


DTOS: From a standpoint of...for the writer geeks reading this, now. Is there anything in your process that you've learned -- your secret "Office" weapon, the way that you do things that is a better way to do things than maybe a lot of other shows are doing?


GREG DANIELS: Well, I think surprise is extremely important. Which means originality. And I think people have to be really careful when they're doing creative writing that they're not remembering things. Because I think a lot of times you're going, "oh wow, that would be really cool if this happened, and then that happened" and you're not really thinking of it for the first time. You're actually remembering bits and pieces of things that you've seen on other TV shows. Or movies or something. And I would try and steer away from other shows and look toward real life to try and make the writing be fresher. And find stories that people tell you. Stuff like that -- not go, "remember that classic Lucy episode? Well a couple of tweaks and adjustments..." I think a lot of people do that, you know? "I know, how about a 'locked in a' something episode? That's always worked before." And I think that's just the wrong way to think about coming up with ideas. It's so much better to get these little skinny reporters notebooks that fit in your back pocket and try and go out and try and look at things and think of what would be funny in the things that you see out in the real world.

DTOS: Just because you've been so great with it, and have tried so many experiments with it -- what have you learned on the show about using the web, and the internet, and webisodes?


GREG DANIELS: Well, I would love to do way way more stuff on the web. Right now there's certain, um...Guild considerations, which I'm very respectful of, because I think the Guild is a great way to protect a good life for creative people and they've identified that these things are not appropriate for Guild members to do. And for some reason, the companies have not wanted to set a precedent by negotiating a Guild-covered agreement, which is silly because it's the same price, you know. But I guess these are issues that are coming up for negotiation in the next Minimum Basic Agreement, so no one wants to touch it now, which is too bad. If they did, I would be all over the web with all sorts of programming. As it is now, you know, once you pick around all the Guild issues -- we're still trying to do a lot of stuff. Just not as much as we would do. Why do it? To me it's because the whole thing with our show is that we've made it much more disposable because it's a fake documentary. So if there's a boom in the shot it's okay, and the lighting doesn't have to be perfect. And that kind of relaxes everybody in the sense of, they can try weird things. And if it works it works, and it goes in. And if it doesn't it doesn't and we haven't wasted an enormous amount of time and money. It's the ease of production -- and I think that's even more true with the web. Because nobody expects glossy, Hollywood values on the web now. So it's really all about the writing and the ideas, not the execution. And it makes it easier for people to just throw their ideas on. So to me if we have weird ideas, that we don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars of the studio's money on because I can't justify it, cause it's just too weird. I still could maybe justify a couple of thousand dollars. And that, creatively is maybe is the most exciting part...these weird, late night kind of ideas. The 1am sketch at Saturday Night Live.


DTOS: The five to one, yeah!


GREG DANIELS: Yeah, the five to one, they just throw it on! Yeah, I'd love to do more of those. That's what the web is to me.

New episodes of The Office return to NBC this fall.

In Conversation: Greg Daniels, Executive Producer/Showrunner of The Office (U.S.)

IN PERSON, Greg Daniels is in many ways, the comedy writer in my head. That is to say, he shows up for our interview late, distracted, in a long coat. He's a bit harried -- the interviews have started earlier than he thought they would, and I'm first up. I have a sneaking suspicion he got lost on the way to the room. The Banff Springs Hotel can be kind of cavernous and medieval that way. No paintings that follow you with their eyes, though...which is a shame.

If you didn't know The Office was an American remake, based on characters created by Gervais and Merchant, you'd swear that you were seeing a character who was a bit of Jim Halpert, and Ryan at his most harried. Playing the writer-as-performer game is always a slippery slope, but the heck with it -- I see a bit of Bobby Hill in there, too.

Daniels gets more animated as he gets talking -- and he's downright passionate when he speaks about he craft of writing. TV also runs in the family - his wife, Susanne, is the President of Lifetime Networks. All the best comic minds, I find, aren't shy about showing their serious side, and Daniels is no exception.

Diane Kristine also did an excellent, wider-focused interview with Daniels for Blogcritics, which you can accces here .

DTOS: I guess one of he first things I'd love to know about the show relates to the show I'm working on now. I'm struggling with the size of the ensemble and the cast, and how you service all those characters. And you have an enormous cast. And all those characters breathe, and live, and I'm wondering if that has anything to do with the fact that some of those actors are writers as well. Does that help you service all those characters?


GREG DANIELS: I think that probably is true. Some of the characters are working on the show in a different capacity. So they don't care as much if they don't have as much screen time. So that helps with three characters at least. But it's very difficult, mostly because it's very expensive. I came from doing animation for the last ten years [King of the Hill] and one of the fun things is that people do multiple voices, so you get an actor who does three voices, you get three characters out of them, and you can have a giant cast of characters to play with, where in ordinary tv terms you don't have that because if you want an ongoing character, you have to make them a series regular, which is very expensive. And you generally have to guarantee that they'll be in every episode, or seven out of 13, or ten out of 13. So we recently made series regulars out of a few fantastic actors that we've had, such as the character of Darryl, Craig Robinson, and Ed Helms and Creed Bratton...but you know, it's expensive. It's very hard to do starting off.


DTOS: I know you've probably answered this question a thousand times before but hopefully I'll try to get at it a slightly different way. One of the first things I noticed about the American version. that I thought, "that's interesting, that's a very smart American translation" is that the Jim character doesn't seem to hate his job like the British character did. So now that you've got three seasons under your belt and you know these characters arguably better than we did in the British version I'm wondering how you view-- now--those differences. And what makes your Office American, versus the jumping off point.


GREG DANIELS: Well. (long pause) I don't think a lot of these differences came into play until the second season. Some of them might have, but we were really respectful of the original, the first season. Maybe a little too respectful. But we didn't really start to do our own thing as much til the second season. We certainly had a lot of psychological discussions. I like to have a lot of psychological discussions before writing. And the idea behind Jim and why he was still there was, was at first he was there because of Pam. He would have left but he had this unrequited crush. But then I think we started to decide that he had a few character flaws that kept him there, like he was a little bit of a slacker, uh, I mean you can consider these flaws or not depending on your point of view. But you know...I sometimes think about the Jimmy Stewart character in "It's a Wonderful Life" kind of, how he spends his whole time, his whole time there and he realizes that he hasn't had all the adventures his brother has, but he's become very important to all the people in that town. So, it's kind of like, well, perhaps there's value in that too. So I think we started off thinking that a guy like that would be ambitious and do all these other things, and now we're kind of coming to the conclusion that just being ambitious and moving to New York is not the measure of a good person.


DTOS: I'm a huge fan of your version, and I have been since the beginning. But it's funny, as a viewer, but also as a writer, I can look at one early episode and think, "wow, this show is really finding its feet" and that's where the episode where you managed to do what nobody in America can do right now, which is deal head on with the subject of race.

GREG DANIELS: The Diversity Day episode?

DTOS: To start with, yeah...

GREG DANIELS: Wow, that was our second episode. I was at least thinking that you'd pick one at the beginning of the second season -- but that's pretty good!

DTOS: But that was the one to me that was the shot across the bow. I know a lot of people who watched the first episode and went, 'meh' but to me, this was what you would have to deal with in an American version, and you didn't shy away from it.

GREG DANIELS: Well if you know about the realities of TV production, you'll know that first episode was filmed a year before the other one. The first episode was the pilot, and the script had to be a situation where, you know, you're trying to get picked up. And since they had bought an adaptation, completely starting from scratch would be a very risky thing to do. So you know, that was the episode where we hired all the people, we didn't know who any of the actors were when we started shooting. The second episode is...The first episode really should be buried, really, of any new series. Because you don't know who the actors are. The second episode we knew it was Steve Carell in that part, we knew all the other actors, we knew Stanley was black, we knew all these things that we didn't before. I'm glad you liked it. I liked it too. But that was also one of the things where, Howard Klein and Ben Silverman and I went to England to talk to Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant and one of the things we talked about, this was before even the pilot rewrite, was that a big issue in American offices would be race. Huge. Bigger than class. That would be the equivalent to class in Britain. So that's why we hit it dead on.


DTOS: There's another key scene, I think that defines what's surprising about the show. And this one's from last season. Where you finally showed everybody out on the sales call. And the thing about that, the scene that almost had me getting out of the chair was the scene where you show that, despite everything, Jim and Dwight work really well together -- that they're a really good team. I thought that was brilliant.


GREG DANIELS: Thanks. There's a lot of deleted material in that. I'm trying to remember what actually aired and what didn't. But there's ... I think in the mythology of the show they used to go on sales calls a lot, but they got so irritated with each other that they didn't anymore.

Come back for Part II of my Greg Daniels interview tomorrow.

And That's a Wrap.

SITTING IN a Starbucks in Canmore, on my way back to Calgary, a short dinner with friends and then the Red Eye home.

The 2007 Banff TV Festival was pretty good for me. I met a lot of people I'd only heard of before. Lots of blog-love from people -- a nice conversation or two with people like Sean Davidson from Playback, and Bill Carter from the NYTimes (swoon), hangin' with the writer mafia, and best of all -- the chance to hang with people I usually only see as pixels -- Will Dixon, Alex, Diane Kristine, and Callaghan (though My God the man whines.)

When I get back, it's diving straight into notes for my CBC script. But I might also have a one-pager to write up. Ah the potential Development Deal. You are a sultry, siren calling little beeyotch.

So hope you enjoyed the posts from Banff. There will be more.

Mountains are Pretty.

Pictures of (some of) the writer mafia...in the Rundle Lounge, Post Wrap...

Number 1: Matt Schiller, Al Magee, Travis McDonald

Number 2: Dennis Heaton, Shelley Eriksen

Number 3: Diane Kristine, Me

Number 4: Alex "Have You Bought My Book Yet?" Epstein, Peter "The Cyborg" Mohan.

They're in the Money

HERE ARE the winners of the Pitching prizes at the 2007 Banff TV Fest:

CTV CANADIAN DOCUMART ($60,000 in development funding)
First prize and $30,000 was presented to Boy Genius & Bobby Fisher by John Chris Tou.

Second prize and $20,000 was presented to Taqwacore by Omar Majeed.

Third prize and $10,000 was presented to Murder for Love by Larry Day.

PITCH IT!: THE N NETWORK YOUTH DRAMA PITCH
Days and Nights at Camp Kanata by Chris Carter and Adam Jack won a development prize of US $10,000 from The N Network. The winner of the Youth Drama pitch also received a $5,000 motion picture film product grant as prizing for this year’s Audience Choice Award, provided by returning sponsor Kodak Canada Inc.

PITCH IT!: UK TV STYLE LIFESTYLE PITCH
Property Protégé by Lyndsay Duthie won a development prize of £5,000 from UK TV STYLE.

PITCH IT!: THE COMEDY NETWORK COMEDY PITCH
Frankie Fats by Scott Feschuk and Scott Reid won a development prize of $10,000 from the Comedy Network.

PITCH IT!: FOX 21 REALITY PITCH
Man Camp by Josh Levy and Robi Levy won a development deal with Fox 21.

iPITCH
Kwad9 by Jean-Francois Grenier won a development prize of $10,000 from the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund.

Congrats to the winners.

Paul Abbot Doesn't Believe in Typing

THE LAST session I attended at the 2007 Banff TV festival was a conversation with one of my favorite TV writers.

Paul Abbot might not be a household name over on these shores, but he's quite the big deal in the U.K. with several constituencies. There are those who love him for his longstanding work on Coronation Street. Then, others who admire his dark comedy Shameless. There's the work he did on several beloved Cracker episodes. And then there's Touching Evil.

Then there are people like me who admire all that work that came before, but who swoon like little girly men at the thought of State of Play, the six part miniseries set in the netherworld between journalism and British Politics.

I was disappointed to see that Paul was there only via satellite, but once you settled in (and got used to the video lag over the mojo wire from London) there was much to admire and report.

Firstly, he said that just this afternoon he's been outlining State of Play II. He says he's a bit stuck at the moment, as he started the 'wrong way round. Not exactly sure what he meant by that, but he assured the audience that BBC would probably have the sequel in hand by next autumn.

The American adaptation is also proceeding. He says he's very interested and encouraged seeing how they get it down to 120 pages. (His original script for the six hour series was 850 pages long.)

They're also working heavily on an American version of Shameless, possibly involving Woody Harrelson. Abbot said it was probably destined for cable since "They found out that fully 1/4 of the material couldn't be broadcast conventionally thanks to FCC rules." Ah America, America.

During the course of the interview, when he spoke about State of Play, I was pretty surprised to discover how he apparently did the thing you're never supposed to do. "I wrote the first ten scenes with no idea where it was going or how it was going to end. I just wanted to get the characters and inhabit the world."

Oh man. But he was just getting going.

Because it's a world, believe it or not, that he managed to reflect mightily without doing any research. "I'd never been inside a newsroom, and I'd never been inside parliament."

Right about this time I'm digging my nails into my knee. Because clearly this guy is a better writer than I could ever aspire to be. When you're that good, you make breaking the rules look easy. And they're not.

Abbot said that the closer he got to the end, the more scared he got, and the more that helped his writing. Been there, done that. Great. At least he's not an alien.

During the Q&A, I asked a question about the complexity at the heart of State of Play, and how he was able to maintain it; whether he had any difficulty getting the narrative past gatekeepers either at BBC or elsewhere. Abbot mostly shrugged off the question, but not before making a great point that though you have to view the network person you're dealing with as your customer, dealing with their note doesn't have to mean doing what they say. In fact, sometimes it's better to go deeper.

If you try sometimes, I guess, you just might find, you give'em what they need.

Abbot also said something intriguing about the experience of writing that I've been pondering myself lately. He said that in many ways, one of the biggest challenges of doing a six part series by yourself is that by the end of it, you're an entirely different writer than you were at the start. I certainly found that writing Across The River last summer. It's an amazing thing to try and reconcile the end with the start, just because you're in such a vastly different place when all the dust and tears and choices have settled.

Abbot was passionate about the need for story teams, and says that, against a lot of advice, he went and bought a building to establish a "writer's studio" in London, where teams of writers can be mentored and paired with a project. Abbot sees that as the way out of the British tendency to only do short runs of shows. In places like Canada that model is viewed a lot more favorably than it is by pros like Abbot. He came out and said that most top quality U.S. drama, working on that 22 episode a year model, is much better than anything that the British are producing.

See? The grass is always greener.

Finally, Abbot waxed angry and eloquently on the subject on the need for writers to be able to inject their personality into their work. He sees a fundamental flaw in a system where writers are forced to conform and respond to the whims of powerful script editors and producers.

"Your personality is what we want. The entire way you're training writers is wrong if you don't allow for that. We tend to train writers to be nothing more than fairly literate typists." Abbot thinks that Producers have their place in crafting the series for market, "but once the story is told, it ought to be up to the writer to find their way through. Otherwise you're just wasting your money."

And Then There Was One

WELL, IT'S the final day of the 2007 Banff Television Festival. It's been a great fest so far -- a chance to meet some of the new blood (even if I did feel, morally, that I had to tell them to strongly consider moving to the USA if they're just starting out and have nothing to lose.) Last night there was also an enjoyable dinner courtesy of Al Magee of Magee TV -- who is everywhere, all the time.

On that score, it bears repeating that Chris Szarka (Producer of Rent-A-Goalie) is the tallest man in Canadian showbusiness. And for once, for once, I managed to outdisturb "Evil" Dennis Heaton (Fido) with a simple three word phrase:

"Quack for Daddy."

Today I'll be taking in Mike Clattenburg's convo with John Doyle -- I'm hoping they really give'r to the whole Canadian TV thing - and maybe a bunch of pitches. I have a couple of meetings, and have to steal time to go over notes on my latest script from CBC. Call it Multi-multi-multitasking.

Today's the day that most of the big-wigs pull out. But the writer mafia, my friend, we stay til the end. The bitter, bitter end.

Take the script. Leave the cannoli.

Oh, I'll also be on Q on CBC Radio today (in the latter portion of the show) talking about Banffing and Pitching and Raindrops and Roses and Whiskers on Kittens.

It's the air, man. It's the air.

More later today.

Ben Silverman Changes The Gravity In The Room

IT WAS near the end of Ben Silverman's "via satellite" appearance at the Banff TV festival where he said the thing that made the room full of (mostly) Canadians perk up:

"I have to give a shout out to Little Mosque," he said. Silverman promised that he would come to Banff next year in person. And, he said, "I'm coming up there with a shopping bag. Soon."

Now that's notable. Because not only is Silverman the who ported The Office from the U.K. to these shores, but his company, Reveille, also had one of last season's only breakout hits, Ugly Betty, based on the popular telenovela "I Am Betty the Ugly."

Silverman has always been a bit of a wunderkind. At the age of 25, he helped sell Granada's Cracker to the U.S. The show didn't work, but it was only the first step up a ladder of a career that's relied on doing the thing that Americans don't normally do well: looking beyond their own shores for great ideas. Silverman was in the right place at the right time to watch Reality TV take off in the U.K -- and when the explosion of format sales took off, Silverman was there in the middle of it.

So he's seen first hand the value of pulling in new formats, new ideas from new places.

"There's some wonderful talent in L.A., but they're all eating from the same feed," said Silverman, in response to a question from Bill Carter, this afternoon. He was clear that he was going to be "forcing our executives into an international world view."

He's got a much bigger sandbox to play in now. The reason why Silverman was in Banff only via satellite was that, well, he's a little busy. Over the next thirty days, he'll be wrapping up his involvement with Reveille, and especially with Ugly Betty, cause it's now on a competing network.

The "executives" Silverman will be trying to force into that international worldview are his new coworkers at NBC, where he's just taken on the job of Co-Chairman of both NBC Entertainment, and the NBC Universal Television Studio. NBC, mired in fourth place, could certainly use some sort of big jolt. But when Carter asked if he could realistically be a change agent in a place like NBC, he paused and said, "It's a lot harder than I thought it would be. This is a big ship. I'm in the oil tanker."

Besides spending time abroad, maybe Silverman's internationalist views (and his veneration for the creative) comes from a childhood that saw him spending time in Stratford, Ontario, where his father was the musical director at the Stratford Festival, for a time. His mother, an opera singer, was also an exec with the BBC, based in New York.

The rest of the interview with Carter touched on some forward-looking and interesting views on TV. (Views that pretty much completely jibe with my own.) Silverman doesn't think the sky is falling when it comes to tv. He had an entertaining run when he talked about the person coming home at the end of the day, pummelled by distraction and worries about the war and meetings and coworkers and family and kids and laundry... and how they just want to turn on their TV and escape. He talked about going to dinner in Manhattan last night, and discussing the Sopranos finale, and two people whingeing that they hadn't seen it. "Tough," he said. That water cooler factor -- that's the thing that TV still has....you still want to talk about it.

The problem with that? You have to find the water cooler shows. Silverman's good at that. But the secret, such as it is, isn't rocket surgery: compelling characters, an emotional hook, and situations that entertain and that people respond to.

One of the most interesting points to come out of the exchange with Carter, that feeds into the "maybe the sky isn't falling" point of view? Now that Nielsen has started rating commercial viewing and not just program viewing (a change advertisers demanded) they have found something that could have incredible implications for the short term in TV. Apparently, "upscale" shows like The Office have the highest percentage of people actually watching the ads. Carter pointed out that that was incredibly counterintuitive, and it is. It doesn't seem it should be that way. But Silverman thinks it all has to do with audience engagement. They're more engaged, so they keep watching. And maybe...that means watching the ads, too.

Think about that for a minute. If people who watch good shows watch more commercials because they like the show, then what does THAT do to the advertising model?

In any case, Silverman is clear that he thinks content will go on, even if distribution changes. Eventually that digital world will enhance, not cannibalize, what we now know as TV. "The computer will come to the TV, not the other way around."

As for his own schedule, he's particularly high on Journeyman for the fall. He thinks they've got the right lead, and the right concept with heart. He also likes Bionic Woman and Chuck. We'll see.

My question is, when he comes to Canada with his shopping bag, will we have shows bold enough to interest him? Think about his high concept shout out. Little Mosque is new. It is untrod ground.

Bold.

I hope Silverman gets his chance to be as bold as he's promising. He's talking a good game right now.

"I didn't need this job. I wanted this job." he said today. And I believe him.

Wouldn't it be funny if he turned out to be better for Canadian TV than some of our homegrown movers and shakers?

Put that in your Banff and smoke it.

Lifetime talks about Blood Ties

JUST BEFORE my cold - so cold - CBC Newsworld interview this afternoon, I attended an "In Conversation With..." session with Susanne Daniels, the President of Lifetime Networks.

In a relaxed interview with Bill Carter from The New York Times, Daniels was refreshingly upfront, and pretty confident, about the challenge she's facing.

Daniels came to Lifetime from the WB, where, as an exec she managed to shepherd everything from Smallville to Buffy to Dawson's Creek. She worked with Kevin Williamson before Scream, J.J. Abrahms before he was a juggernaut, and Joss Whedon when his most reliable credit was one season on Roseanne.

So she knows talent.

She also knows talent close to home, since her husband, Greg Daniels, is the Exec Producer of The Office. Now that's one creative household.

She also said something that I've never heard a network exec say ever:

Don't always listen to the networks when they say what they want. You have to develop the thing you're passionate about. She admitted, in fact, that things change so quickly in the network game that you're better off going with your vision, and that networks often don't know what they want.

Wow. Would that there were 100 more network execs who thought just like her.

Daniels has no small task trying to bring Lifetime back. Her impression when she joined the network was that it seemed to be dated, and a little stuck in the past. She related stories about being on a plane and telling her seatmate what she did for a living and getting a funny look back as she said, "yeah, I used to watch your movies." "Give me a little while," Daniels said, "I'm going to try to get you back."

How that's going to translate into a new movie strategy? Daniels was a little unclear on that point. Seems like she's still working through it herself. But she was bullish on the upcoming slate of original dramas they're launching this summer, including Army Wives, which was (according to Daniels) Lifetime's most successful original program premiere in the channel's history. There are two more series going up this summer, which is a big slate for a cable channel. Daniels says, "that's the thing about cable. Look at USA with Monk. F/X and The Shield... You need one breakout series and you can build your whole channel around it."

So the three dramas this summer, as well as a couple of interesting sounding reality series (a Psychic Challenge?) is Daniels' way of rolling the dice to try and bring the viewers back.

But still, it's going to be a bear. Because as Carter pointed out, 55% of the TV viewing audience is female. That's not exactly a niche. How do you program for a niche that's that large and diverse? Especially when ABC is basically doing the same thing?

Now, Blood Ties fans, you've been very patient up til now, so here's what she said about Blood Ties. Late in the session she mentioned the acquisition of the show and used it as an example of how other considerations come into play. "The show did well for us - not spectacular, not a breakout...but it was one of the most downloaded shows consistently on Itunes."

In chitchat after the session, Daniels was even more enthusiastic about the show. Part of the reason for holding back those last ten episodes for October was that they are going to try a real push to build a whole night around Blood Ties. Daniels thinks that the show hasn't reached its full ratings potential, and they can get it there with better attention and positioning in the fall.

It's hard sometimes for fans to understand that the business realities do sometimes get in the way of the need for instant gratification...but to me, it sounds like a very smart and savvy programmer is thinking that she's got a great property that can do better with a little more help.

So loyal Blood Ties fans -- your efforts have paid off. The downloads are noticed, as is the enthusiasm out there. And yeah, waiting sucks, but sounds to me like you've got someone in the Executive Suite who's looking to try and do on her end, everything you're already doing on yours. This is a great thing.

But...

Before you ask....no -- she didn't say anything about that.

Might As Well Be On Mars

DIANE KRISTINE reports on Rob Thomas' visit to the Banff TV Fest. If you're somebody who's sending Mars bars, maybe you should stop now. The nuts were grand for Jericho. But really. Just stop.

The CW is still floating a June 15 deadline for the network to make a final decision on Veronica Mars' fate, but Thomas says the decision has already been made. He has been told president Les Moonves is not backing it, and the CW is not offering much of a deal or any guarantees despite that June 15 deadline.

"They were asking me to give up a whole lot on the outside shot of putting Veronica Mars back on the air," explains Thomas, who believes the false hope may be serving to distract from the fact that the CW cancelled the show.

He wavers only slightly when asked if it's official that he's taken the reins on ABC midseason replacement Miss/Guided, starring Judy Greer — the opportunity he was being asked to give up. "I think there's one little point they're still hammering out, but everyone involved believes it is going to work out, so it's official. Believe me, I've been doing Miss/Guided stuff every day this week, so I hope I have a job or I've been doing a lot of free work," he laughs.

He wavers not at all when declaring "Veronica Mars the TV series is gone."

Interestingly enough...by the time of Thomas' afternoon Masterclass, he wasn't even trying to deny the Judy Greer project anymore. He's moved on. Dude's got a new job. And I for one think, "Rob Thomas + Judy Greer = NICE."

I've got one or two things I'm going to post from Thomas' masterclass later. But for now, you should just go read Diane's piece.

At the St. James' Gate Pub in Banff...

THERE ARE those writers who stay till the bitter end, and those who punk out like little candyasses.

You know who you are.

Special points to: Will Dixon, Travis McDonald - Probie, Christin Simms and the WGC's Maureen Parker.

Also: Peter Mohan may be a cyborg. He should be watched.

EDIT 06/12: Callaghan, whingeing like a little bitch, points out he was there almost til the end last night.

Whateva. My Bad. See how you do tonight.

"I'm on three hours sleep," he says.

Seriously. No wonder the guy never posts.

My Radio Face Takes a TV Stroll

NOT THAT you should care, but just in case you do, I'll be live on CBC Newsworld today at approx 2:45 p.m. Mountain Time, 4:45 ET, chatting about the Banff TV Festival.

People, TV people, are the Peopleeist People...

THE WEATHER here in Banff is truly changeable from moment to moment. It was rainy and cold this morning, with a blanket of spooky fog on the mountains outside my window. Now the sun's out and it's merely cool. And the sun will still be up at 10:30 p.m.

Freaky.

The day started with an interview. Greg Daniels, Exec Producer of The Office. I'll be writing this one up as soon as I can. There was some good writer-geeky goodness in there. Later, in Daniels' masterclass, he expanded even further on the way the writing on The Office works. Lots of great insight.

Two of the most interesting points:

- Each rough cut of The Office comes in at 35 minutes for a 21 minute show. That's a lot of cutting.
- Daniels was originally going to just supervise the American remake, but couldn't get any writers to sign on because everybody said it was a suicide mission. Heh heh.

What made it even cooler was that Jon Plowman, the Executive Producer of the original version of The Office on BBC, was in the audience. There was a great exchange between the two that I hope someone else got down -- because I foolishy opted to trust my memory. Why do I do that?

I also managed to grab lunch with Plowman (as part of a group.) He said a bunch of things about how comedy goes through the BBC that has interesting implications for networks looking to produce comedy in Canada. He also said "I think writers should be paid more."

Hear hear, good sir. Hear hear.

The major tap dance for me was the panel I did this morning with Gillian Flynn from Entertainment Weekly, Eric Kohanik from TVTimes, Bill Carter from The New York Times, The Globe and Mail's John Doyle (who mentions Across The River To Motor City in his column today.) Moderator Bill Brioux kept the whole thing moving at a nice clip. Brioux started, of course, with a bit of shop talk about the Sopranos finale. (It's a funny thing to watch grown people scurry from a conference room so they won't be spoiled.) A lot of interesting issues were raised about the limits, strengths and weaknesses of modern newspaper criticism. I think there was general consensus in the room that at the very least, TV writers need to know more about the shows they're writing about than the people who are watching them, and that maybe there was a need to return now and then to reevaluate shows that take a while to find their footing.

Gillian Flynn was particularly strong on this point, when she rightly pointed out how 30 Rock progressed from a weak-ish start to become one of TV's best shows.

Intriguingly, by the end of the panel everyone pretty much agreed that maybe the thinking about TV criticism needed to shift from a print-based paradigm to thinking that you're writing primarily for the audience online.

And though I couldn't recall where I'd first seen it at the time, I was glad I was able to refer to this post by Will Dixon . Musing aloud on the discrepancy between sports coverage and tv coverage in a paper, the point was raised that as TV expands, and invents and recombines genres, having a "tv critic" is roughly like expecting a sportswriter to have an intimate knowledge of basketball, baseball, cricket, golf, lacrosse, jai alai...

Imagine how much better it would be if you could have TV writers who specialized. It's an intriguing thought.

All in all, an interesting morning. And no matter what anyone tells you, I did not say that all television is bullshit.

I may have said that everybody who works in television is bullshit.

But maybe I was trying to be funny.

In any case, my break's over now, and back into the fray for more hey how are you's. It's a tough job, this schmoozing. I will find someone who does it well. And I will bring them trinkets. And lo, they shall be my new god.

Apparently I'm an Optimist.

WHO KNEW?

From today's Calgary Herald:

'There is no secret to good TV'

Alexandra Burroughs
Calgary Herald

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Tony Soprano isn't the only one ready for a hit. As one of television's favourite anti-heroes faces his fate in the series finale of The Sopranos tonight, there's another kind of mafia stalking the 28th annual Banff World Television Festival, which kicks off today.

The don of this mob is Canadian TV writer Denis McGrath, and just like Tony Soprano, McGrath is trying to exploit a chaotic situation for his own benefit.

McGrath and his self-described "writer's mafia" -- a.k.a.: a half dozen of his writing pals -- are hitting the Banff festival at a time when the North American television industry is in turmoil.

Declining ratings, competition from the Internet, unpredictable viewing patterns and skyrocketing production costs have put the TV industry into a morass of confusion, speculation and pessimism. Rarely have industry insiders been so outspoken about the dire straits of their medium. Hit shows are no longer predictable. American networks are gambling on outlandish ideas and expensive risks. A singing talent show is the industry leader.

But in that chaos, McGrath sees opportunity.

"We're going to hang out in Banff and talk to people to help them understand that there is no secret to good TV," says McGrath, who writes a popular television industry blog called Hey Writer Boy, and recently worked on the upcoming CBC series The Border.

"Good TV is about focused creativity from writers who have power."

By the way, I'm not the Don of the Writer's Mafia. More like the Court Jester, and the Guy who takes the cannoli and leaves the gun. But let's not quibble when I'm saying bold and stupid things:

"Everything about TV is more complex than it has ever been before," he says.

"The characterizations, the shading, the humour, the fact that we're willing to watch an anti-hero like House on TV whereas 20 years ago every hero had to be a white hat wearing do-gooder -- this is all making for better TV.

A high dollar and pending strikes in the U.S. may strengthen the homegrown industry by keeping a lot of Canadian talent from seeking more lucrative opportunities in the United States.

"We've got this interesting bottleneck. We have the talent. We have a few good shows, a few hits," says McGrath.

"If some of this talent sticks around, we have an interesting opportunity here to actually move forward and do some good work."

McGrath says he's going to Banff to convince producers and broadcasters to take advantage of the opportunity before it's too late.

"The next Canadian broadcaster that actually has the courage to go out and green light something that's entertaining, but keeps that complexity -- they win."

Why I'm Going To Banff

WELL, IN a couple of hours I'll be on the road, leaving my friends in Bragg Creek for the chummy confines of the Banff Springs Hotel. And then it'll be All TV Festival, all the time.

The Eagle Eyed Among you might remember that when I came up with The Maple Leaf List, I said I'd also be announcing it today.

That's not going to happen, and the reason why is one of the main reasons I'm going to Banff.

There's no list to be had. I will say that I received a few suggestions, including, step up, TWO people who seemed to indicate that Peter Mitchell's CTV pilot is nifty stuff indeed. But for the most part, the responses I got were of the, "good idea, can't think of anything, please don't use my name" variety. Truthfully, when I started, that's kind of the response I thought I was going to get. I just took a flyer.

I'm going to keep the sideboard link open. I'm going to keep hoping that down the line we'll get people passionate enough about what they're reading to take that extra step of trying to promote someone else's work that they really loved.

But we're not there yet. And that's why I'm going to Banff.

We have an industry where people won't say what they know to be true. Where so-called Powerful Producers won't engage on issues of creativity; where the discussion of content does not seem to include the audience, what they want and need and why we haven't been giving it to them. We have an industry where we've been making bad television the same way for thirty years, and all anyone wants to do is talk about tweaking funding matters, not discuss the whole idea that the system doesn't work because creativity is thought of last, not first.

That's why I'm going to Banff.

Every year, Banff pulls in creative, interesting showrunners from the United States, and talks to them about their successes. This year that includes Carol Mendelsohn from CSI, Greg Daniels from The Office, Rob Thomas from Veronica Mars. (Okay that last one wasn't a success. But creatively??) They stand up and describe a system where the output of the writer is put front and centre. And all the attendees from Canada nod and go home and change nothing.

I saw somewhere that of the Canadian Banff attendees, about 40 percent were producers, 40 percent were network people of some stripe and the rest were others.

Well, I'm one of the others. And there's a few of us going this year. We're going to be the fun, occasionally loud ones laughing a lot at that booth at the St. James Gate pub. Come by and say 'hi.' We're really very nice people. But it's time we were more visible. It's time that we forced our way into the discussion, and raised the heretical notion that talking about the funding formula isn't the way to do stuff that doesn't suck.

I'm also going to Banff to cover it for this blog. And maybe do something for CBC Radio and Newsworld. Over the next few days you'll read reports from the perspective of an actual creative, of a conference where everyone talks creative -- but not to the people who really matter.

I will be doing this as my usual avuncular self. It doesn't always come through on this blog, but I'm actually quite a friendly guy, so long as you don't water me after midnight. (As a side note, if you're going to the Fest, too, come on up and say "howdy" to me. Seriously.)

I also want to start meeting the people who I know are out there -- the producers who think like me, who could make for a rewarding, not nightmarish work experience. And as I've said many times before -- the network people, too. There's not a hit show on TV that got there without a champion inside a network. It takes all of us to get it done. And we all have our roles to play.

It's just my position that the role "assigned" to writers in Canada has been faulty. And hasn't embraced the creative process. And we can do better. And to find like-minded people who'll stop arguing about the past and start creating the future?

Well, that's why I'm going to Banff.

I'll also be doing a panel Monday Morning with a bunch of TV Writers I kind of admire, like John Doyle, Gillian Flynn from EW, and Bill Carter from the NYTimes, to name just a few. I'm looking forward to that. I'll also be rah-rahing for a couple of friends pitches. I may even informally pitch one or two things myself...but that's getting ahead of things.

I'm also hoping that I'll get a chance to see Green Wing, and hear from some international types. And get a lungful of air that isn't smog-ridden.

So sit tight. And since I'm going, now's probably a good time to do a relink and refresher to some of the big posts I've made on Canadian TV. I am writer, hear me rant.

See you soon!

How Corner Gas Ruined Everything.

Awhile back I wrote about Ten Things That Would Make Canadian TV Better. And our readers wrote.

Should we all be thinking about demanding an end to cable substitution?

Why don't Canadian comedies blow most of us away?

What did Durham County do right?

When all the bullshit gets to you, you just can't help thinking things like this.

Why do it then? Because there's no better way to learn a living when it clicks.