I especially like the writers who blog their daily schedules. The faux process of the whole thing is at least as interesting and full of silliness as anything that comes out of the pre-packaged sessions themselves. Probably more so.
I'm disappointed that the Globe and Mail didn't send John Doyle this time. I always find his writing about the TV Hacks on Tour funnier than the other guy, Ryan.
But there is a Ryan I will go out of my way to read: Maureen Ryan, whose The Watcher blog at the Chicago Tribune is always good for a laugh and some great info. For instance, here she runs down David Milch's description of his new HBO show, John From Cincinatti:
“I guess that's what I was trying to say in this answer [in a previous interview] that to my mind reality is a shifting and elusive condition. It redefines itself constantly. …
“And which is to say that, when I was saying that this is a story that takes place on the margins of things, the attempt to identify the coordinates of reality is itself a kind of problematic and conditional effort. It's changing all the time.
"What constitutes -- where are we when we sleep? What is our sense of reality at that moment? It's, you know, science now suggests to us that what has been perceived as matter for a long time is, in fact, energy. That what looks solid, in fact, is constituted in waves, that Einstein's beautiful mathematical equations which depict the nature of reality don't apply at certain levels. And I think that's true as well about what constitutes the natural and the supernatural. You know, it depends on what foxhole you're in.”
Then there's Alan Sepinwall, who writes for The New Jersey Star-Ledger (which, if you're interested in such little things, has extra coolness because it's the paper that Tony Soprano walks down and gets at the end of his driveway in all those Sopranos episodes.)
Take Sepinwall's take on the David Milch session for John From Cincinatti:
Perhaps sensing he was losing his audience, Milch retreated to that familiar standby: jokes about his legendary history of drug use. (He's now in recovery from multiple addictions.) Quoth in its entirety:Awesome. Seriously, I think David Milch should now be considered the standard bearer for TV writer crazy. No...not good enough...he shoud be like the measurement of writer crazy. Like when describing people we work with, we should talk in units of Milch. "How's so and so?" "Oh, they're about .5 Milch on talent." "Really, that's pretty good." "Yeah, but they're 3 Milch's of crazy." "Oh, fuck it, then."
"I was talking about this research project in pharmacology into which I was dragooned. The freon aspect began when I was eight, and then I was transferred over to the alcohol project, and then subsequently to narcotics. And in all of that research, to the extent that there was a coherent intention, it was to ride a wave, which one could generate on one's own terms, that the self was suppressed and the sense of -- I used to -- nitrous oxide. I was involved in the subsidiary project involving nitrous oxide. And the great thing with nitrous oxide, I was getting teeth filled before I even had teeth."
Near the end of the session, stars Bruce Greenwood and Rebecca De Mornay, who had been silent the entire time, were asked how working with Milch was different from other showbiz bosses.
"Well, I think you probably witnessed the difference in the last 20 minutes," said Greenwood, whose tone hovered somewhere between amused and annoyed.
Finally, I don't think she's on the tour. And I don't always agree with her, but I love, love, love Virginia Heffernan's TV blog in the NYTimes. (And not just because apparently she's related to a fictional character on the King of Queens.)
Do you know any other dead tree writers blogging about the TV tour? Anyone you like to read? Let me know.
Now, I think it's time to go and crack one of those...book...things that I've heard so much about. I wonder if I can find a place to have coffee in Vancouver.
Hmmmm.
