The Scheduler as Ozymandius

UK writer Stephen Gallagher has credits that shame me in three mediums, including a stint writing Doctor Who, and an upcoming series he created starring Patrick Stewart called Eleventh Hour. Regarding my post on the "The End of The British Six Pack?" He writes:

"The six-pack was a great model. Once. When the UK only had two TV channels and there were no video recorders and the pace of life was such that six weeks went by like an ocean liner.

These days... a zillion channels, life far more hectic, most of our viewing timeshifted... six weeks is what it takes to become aware of a show, by which time it's over.

Right now the main obstacles to change here in the UK are the network schedulers, who are terrified at the size of the commitment involved in a 26-week run of standalone stories, and the producers, who baulk at the idea of stepping back while writers talk to each other.

The schedulers want someone to guarantee them that a show won't fail. Which can never happen. The US can meet this by making the shows just ahead of time so that cancellation only leaves you with a couple in the can.

The producers are used to micromanaging writers on a one-on-one basis and pretty much laying down what is and isn't going to play. In a roomful of writers, the non-writing producer is weakened. The US answer - structure the producing power within the room.

What the industry in the UK is hankering for right now is to make drama like HBO does it.

Memo to self: I have got to work on my brevity. Stephen just nicely encapsulated the major stumbling blocks that people like Jane Featherstone face trying to change the face of British Drama. And he did it in a few short paragraphs. Watch now, as I fail to do the same in my response.

Here in Canada, writers face a lot of the same obstacles, with a few peculiar quirks that are all our sweet own. But you do hear the HBO bogyeman trotted out with alarming regularity.

The problem with this idea -- both for UK creators and North Americans -- is that HBO works on an entirely different economic model than most of the commercial channels -- or even the publicly funded channels like Big Auntie Beeb and her sad, preemie little sis, the CBC.

At HBO they recruit top talent and they leave them alone, and get thirteen episode runs that rock. But. (There's always a but.) HBO is entirely a subscription service. They charge you 15 dollars a month, and they know that for a significant number of subscribers, intelligent, original series are the draw. But once they have your fifteen dollars, they don't even care if you watch. See, the series is the carrot. HBO uses ratings not to determine a program's success, but to determine if it's connecting with its subscriber base. It's more of a buzz-meter. All they care about is: will it get Emmy nominations (and thereby extend the prestige of the brand) and is it intriguing enough that it will help us retain subscriptions, and sign up new ones?

The HBO viewer is by no means an average viewer. They have more money, they're probably better educated -- and they're a way smaller pool. The Sopranos is brilliant, Six Feet intermittently so, and Sex & The City started a cultural quake: but though the ripples these series made is huge, the audiences that watched them were not. (It's not quite as cut and dried in Canada as the U.S. as Sex In the City, The Sopranos, and Six Feet have all played second run on either terrestrial or extended basic cable.) It's always struck me that chasing the HBO model show is a bit of a chimera. Instead, don't you need to develop from the bottom up? Ask who is your audience, and who would you like your audience to be, and how do you develop shows that would attract them?

To me, this is the real brilliance of the US networks. A FOX show is not a show that would appear on any other network. The WB took some early chances when everybody was ready to write off the idea of a fourth US net as a pipe dream, and it paid off. For years, NBC had a touch for developing comedy that no other network could match. This, I think, comes from knowing who your audience is and coming up with shows that can reach them. So, in everything but quality, when I start hearing the bleating about developing "HBO-like" series, my question is not, "aren't you aiming too high?" but "why are you aiming so low?"

When it comes to The Scheduler, the Canadian problem is a little more comical, or sad, depending on your point of view. The fact of it is, there really isn't a lot of indigenous production to schedule here. What schedulers from the networks do here is go down to the L.A. screenings, and cherrypick the best of what the U.S. nets have developed. So they get to bask in the reflected glory of creative risks taken by people other than them. Then they come back and schedule those shows, usually at the same time as their American network counterparts. That way, they get to piggyback on U.S. network publicity and magazine covers and promos and such. Then -- and here's the truly magic bit -- the CRTC (the Canadian telecommunications regulatory body) allows them to substitute their signal over the U.S. network signal for the duration of the simulcasted program. So their ads get double exposure! Yayyy! So, in other words, even their role as "scheduler" is a misnomer. Their job is to follow the US lead.

Yet...these people walk around Toronto like superstars. Because they're good shoppers. Seriously. I've been at the same parties, seen them up close in their natural habitats. It's like me expecting applause and praise for picking up a few choice items at HMV.

And it's kind of hard to argue against them, because broadcasting in Canada is a very profitable business. It's way cheaper to schedule US shows than it is to produce Canadian ones. And Canadians want to see these shows. And if it's doing absolutely nothing to slow the steady stream of talent to the United States, and doing nothing to actually develop a distinct culture of your own, well...so what? "Did you see the numbers CSI: Miami did last week? Aren't I brilliant?"

Um..well...maybe Les Moonves is brilliant. You just had a gold card.

There are signs of change here...there are LOTS of network people I have talked to here who are really committed to having homegrown hit shows. Corner Gas has made an impression. For years there was a shrug and a "Canadians don't want to watch Canadian shows." Now, once a week, one out of every thirty Canadians watch Corner Gas and prove that's a load of hooey. But the people who are toiling to try and find great scripts and develop a good show do not have the power in the organization that the shoppers do. Nowhere near. And in this system, with its anemic production culture, Canadian producers don't have a lot of power, either. Very little, actually. Strangely (and I know this is counter-productive to my goals) that almost makes me like them more.

The most positive change to come about -- and this is only in the last couple weeks -- is that the funding agencies here are switching to something called an "envelope system" for drama. Time was, you would get a go-ahead from a network, then apply to the Canadian Television Fund for financing (or part of your financing) and you could get turned down. So the network wants you...but you don't get your money because a bureaucrat decided your show wasn't "Canadian enough." (Don't get me started on that one.)

But now the system has changed. Henceforth, the networks will be apportioned a certain amount of money, and they can spend it as they wish -- so long as it's on drama or comedy. Which means that creators no longer have to do two sets of documents and proposals...you just have to sell the network.

Will this help? I don't know. Remains to be seen. It can't be worse than the current system. And it will do nothing to shame or clip the reign of the white wine sipping schedulers who stride high because they have the ability to buy American creativity at wholesale prices.

CBC, god love her, has her own problems. But the Schedulers there, too, walk around like mighty Ozymandius.

And they've made some colossally bad scheduling decisions lately. Like taking a comedy show that they launched last year to great fanfare called "Rick Mercer's Monday Report," and moving it to Tuesday.

I wish I was kidding.

Jai guru deva om

Twenty-five years.

It's a little hard to believe. Still. Unlike the bloviating baby boomers who you'll mostly hear from today, I knew him as a child first -- and, funnily enough -- as a fellow New Yorker. Through words and interviews and snippets and those beautiful melodies I learned sarcasm and wit; passion and compassion; frailty and fault.

It's always pleased me that most of the fiction that's tried to capture what he's about: plays, Broadway Musicals, Films, and television -- have all fallen so incredibly, comically short.

Sometimes the artist just needs to speak for himself.

A lucky man, who made the grade, indeed.

The End of the British 6-Pack?

Heh heh. I don't know why, but the idea of the "British 6-Pack" amuses me. Face it, we have to get a new joke -- the-making-fun-of-their-teeth thing went past the sell-by date years ago.

In this article at The Guardian website (yes, registration is required. but it's free, stop whining.) British TV Production Exec Jane Featherstone opines that the UK may finally have to move away from the six-pack... "We are going to have to start producing longer-running series," she says. "We are going to have to start the shift to US-style 26-part series..."

Here in Canada, of course, CBC is in love with the six-pack (cause, you know, that's what they do in the UK.) Featherstone's other point is that you have to make shows with broader appeal, that could sell overseas, even -- to make up the difference in budgets. That seems to be going in the opposite direction of CBC too, but who knows, now that a British person has suggested something different, things could change awfully quick here, too...

I think longer seasons are definitely better for building and maintaining writing careers, because as it stands, the UK is a lot like Canada in the sense that short runs of episodes tend to mean they only employ the writers who've created the shows. That's not good for training, and it's not good for building a larger community of professional writers. (I believe the situation, believe it or not, is actually a little better in the UK, since there is some support there for professional theatre. In Canada...not so much.)

How can building a series of sets, crewing up, and starting a whole production for six episodes really be economical, anyway? Your advertising costs for promotion are still pretty fixed -- what, other than raising the budget, is the downside of producing 13? Or 18? Or 22? Or hell, even 8?

I hope it happens. If the UK recognizes that short run series aren't the most viable model, then maybe the anglophiles here will finally be forced to wake up and smell the international market -- and not in the bad-old-days way of crappy industrial action-adventure stuff designed to ape a U.S. syndie market that went south years ago.

Everyone in Canada talks about a U.S. sale, and then goes out and makes product that would never in a million years sell there because of how completely it reeks of provinciality. Note to creators: Corner Gas is universal. Slings & Arrows is universal. Within its niche, so is Trailer Park Boys. But Eleventh Hour (the Canadian show, not the UK version) and Hatching, Matching & Dispatching aint. You can be specific to a place, and still be universal. But it means you have to think about the audience, and stop being quite so self-indulgent.

That being said, there are plenty of people, professional people, who get it here in the former British North America...So, UK Producers -- if you're going to make a go of this 22 episode thing, and if you need a co-production partner to make up some of those budgets, may I humbly suggest Canada? We're like the U.S.'s slutty little sister who likes to smoke pot and drink strong beer and hang out with married gay boys and dykes while we take our aspirin with codeine. We don't have to watch hockey. We just like to. But we can get past that. And look -- that's Queen Liz on our money, too! Yayyy!

Featherstone's production company, Kudos, is probably best known on this side of the pond for A&E's MI-5 (which shows in Canada on BBC Canada under its original British Title, Spooks.) If you've only seen the show on A&E, I'd highly advise picking up the DVD's of Season One and Two (and soon, Three) as A&E cut out up to fifteen minutes per episode for commercials.



I always liked Spooks/MI-5. I thought it was a bracing and refreshing look inside the world of Intelligence -- again, with a non-Amero-centric spin to it. Plus, the sexy American CIA Babe they had on the show, was, well...hot.

The Guardian article has a lot to say about the show that's quite illuminating. And one bit that flew right over my cultural head, but is remarkably cool -- and shows just how pressure cooker the TV game can be.

One of the favorite moments that made me sit up and take notice in MI-5 early on was a gruesome scene where someone was tortured using a deep fryer. It was raw and surprising as hell. What I didn't realize is that, if you were watching in the UK, it played as even more of a surprise, since the actress they killed was the biggest star in the cast...

The effect was spectacular: 334 viewers complained. Messageboards all over the BBC website continued to buzz even two weeks after the event. Some people thought Faulkner would return from the dead. Others suspected she had a twin sister. What seemed to have shocked them was not the brutality of the death - not especially graphic in the normal run of TV drama - but that Spooks did what television almost never does. It killed off one of its leads in the second episode of a long-running series. And in mainstream TV you just do not do that.

Jane Featherstone, joint managing director of Spooks production company Kudos,laughs and looks a tiny bit guilty. "The Lisa thing actually came about because David Wolstencroft was writing the outline for episode two and we just couldn't get it right," she admits. "We really needed the series to get the green light and the strongest story we had was in episode 13, where a woman got her head set on fire. We'd seen Lisa but we weren't sure we were going to cast her, the best story we had was the climax, we needed the commission, so what were we going to do? I said, let's move the most dramatic thing you've got to episode two and kill off the only actress the audience recognise and then you've got them hooked. We hoped ..."

There's two things that are really interesting there. First, the idea (that just didn't play here) that they killed off a big name (in the UK) in the episode made the show even more shocking for the home audience. I think that's brilliant. The American equivalent was probably the first episode of The Shield, where Vic Mackey's bonafides were forever established by the way he took out Reed Diamond -- a face who fans of the genre recognized from Homicide.

The other interesting bit there, at least to me, is the way that the pressures of the medium constantly force you to move things up. The creator of 24 is on record as saying that in that initial season, they had every intention of having the assasination attempt on David Palmer happen in the finale. Instead, it wound up coming halfway through Season One.

I've said it before. Lord knows I'll say it again. TV is a beast. And the beast must be fed.

Great article. Great series. Thanks to Lee Thomson's blog for the tip.

Keepin Downloads on the Down-Low & Other Tales From the Magical Land of Commerce

So I see Itunes has added NBC wares to their download store. Interesting, but, of course, ultimately useless to someone not living in the continental 48. (Okay, maybe Alaska and Hawaii can play too.)

But this reminds us all that, for all the hype surrounding the idea of downloading TV legally or not, the route to change is rapid. It's just not necessarily well-distributed yet.

In the UK, it seems, they're way further ahead with the idea of downloading TV. BBC has made announcements about having far more of its program archives online. Now they're squabbling over details - and here's an interesting twist - about how long it will be free (yes, free) or available after the broadcast...

That's right, USA, someone's further ahead. (The link is to an article at the Guardian Unlimited website, and I think registration is required...but it's free and that shouldn't be a hardship since it's a pretty great paper anyway. Especially you Americans. Get out. Live a little.)

For my take on the subject, look here.

In other revenue-stream news, the Christmas party episode of NBC's The Office aired last night, and in the midst of it there was a plot that revolved around the giving of an Ipod Video.

Now -- this was obviously a product placement plant by Apple. I mean, come on, the same week of the Itunes launch of ... wait for it ... downloadable Office episodes they feature an Ipod in a Secret Santa plot for the office party? Who'd a thunk it?

The thing is, in this case, it actually fit really well. The Ipod is a desirable gift. And in the context of the episode, the product featured really well both as an object of desire (so the sponsor's happy) and an object of conflict (so the show is served.)

I know that some pros and organizations are antsy. What does this mean? How can you ask writers to "work in" products? Should there be extra compensation for doing so? These are indeed important and thorny creative questions. And after long and careful consideration, the official position here in Sticksville is this:

Gimme.

I'll write it in. Whatever you want. Give me one. You got it. That should be the official WGA/WGC standard. You want a plot with an Ipod? Great. Send 'em over. There's four of us in the writers room.

Ford F-150, I'm talking to you, too.

Tampax?

Whatever. A man's got friends. Send over a case and we'll work it out. It's all good.

Now, where's my new Ipod?

Welcome to my Monkey Overlords!

Hidee-ho to any of you surfing in from the deliciously funny and informed world of the Kung Fu Monkey.

Here in Sticksville, we endeavor to deal with your TV writing and watching needs with a somewhat internationalist perspective. But not too international. After all, at the end of the day, Canada is roughly as exotic as New Jersey.

Poke around the hood a while, feel free to fling a little, drop a comment or a line and while you're at it, if you want, you could check out some of my favorite past posts.

What happens when you go up against bitter, bitter LOST fanboys? Well, it looks a lot like this or this.

Curious about the differences in the British, U.S., and Canadian systems of making TeeVee?

What about what it takes to be a writer?

It's kind of a lot like coming out.

Recently I've been working on a few new pilots. Which brings on the occasional bouts of sturm and drang.

We like to talk about books sometimes. And also about shows we're digging.

And sometimes we just get silly.

Anyway, welcome. Nice to have you. The sun is shining here in Toronto today, and when you can say that any day between November and April, that's a good day.

The Second Episode Problem

So. Pilots. They're easy.

Either it's a premise pilot -- the story of how your world comes to be (Rachel moves in with Monica after leaving her fiancee at the altar, and meets the Friends; Mackenzie Allen, after being advised not to take the oath, becomes President after the death of her strange-bedfellows running mate; Agent Mulder, a believer in all sorts of phenomena, is assigned a new skeptical FBI partner named Scully) or it's a story where you're dropped smack in the middle of your world (the first episodes of The West Wing, The Office, Trailer Park Boys, Corner Gas, Law & Order, etc.)

Both have their advantages -- It's simpler to hide exposition or convey information about the characters in a premise pilot, because the audience is learning things along with the characters. However, there's something to be said for being dropped right into the action. An interesting example of this is Firefly, where FOX ordered up a new, action-oriented pilot ("The Train Job") after they judged the original pilot too character-driven. Having seen the whole set, I can't necessarily say they were wrong. Remember -- the two other times Joss Whedon created a show, they came with built-in equity: Buffy's premise had been explored in a movie, and Angel brought two well-defined characters from Buffy.

And I lied in the first line, okay? It's not easy to write a pilot. It's actually really, really hard.

But in many ways, when you sit down and face the Second Episode Problem head on, deep and abject depression is the only intelligent, motivated and sane reaction.

It's like you managed to scale a mountain using only salad spoons and string cheese, and you have one moment at the peak, and then, what do you know -- there's another mountain lurking right behind it.

Where your pilot episode is about establishing the tone and the breadth of the world, your Second Episode has a different, and in many ways more daunting purpose:

It has to show both the sturdiness of your template, and the sustainability of the world.

First, sturdiness -- those characters you met briefly in the pilot? Let's see more of them, and let's note now how their conflicts are deeper, or funnier, or even more dramatic than we thought. Let's return to the main locations that we visited in the pilot and show how these locations are the right locations to promote dramatic conflict and situations.

Now, sustainability -- Let's show how a case, or a story, or a problem, or a funny situation, can just walk right in the door and demand to be dramatized. See how easy this is? See how lovingly the parameters were crafted in the pilot? Can't you just imagine seventy or one-hundred and sixty five stories in this exact vein -- all different, of course -- but not too different. The conflicts between your main characters? Those aren't going to get solved any time soon. They may even seem insurmountable. The endearing quirky bits you got hints of: well, just drop a few more nuggets that show how you haven't seen any of the true quirkiness, and by Dog when you do see it, it's going to be adorable and you're going to want to watch forever.

In short, the Second Episode is really where your story becomes a TV series.

Sturdiness + Sustainability = Template

The template is what happens every week; it's what your show delivers every episode: the type of story, tone, execution, humor, atmosphere, the whole magilla. In Veronica Mars, you know the template is that every week she's going to learn some small piece of the season-long mystery (big or small) while still solving the case-of-the-week. And the case-of-the-week will usually have something to say about the class or social differences lurking just under the brackish waters of Neptune High.

Sometimes you establish your template nice and tidy-like and then a few episodes in realize you're screwed. Smallville had a fun thing going with the Kryptonite-monster-of-the-week thing for a few weeks, but then realized, egad, that's going to get boring -- so they defaulted more to the rich cabinet of their mythos. (Which you don't have, by the way, because you're not splashing in the pool of one of the most beloved characters in the 20th century pop cultural pantheon.) Others have pointed out the limitations of House -- how many times can they screw up medically and almost kill the patient before they discover how the patient lied and make the correct diagnosis? (Actually, as it turns out, quite a few: say one thing about House -- their research is impeccable.)
House did a number of things in the first season to try and break out of their straitjacket: they brought in Chi McBride as an antagonist. That was never going to work, but it bought them a few weeks of arc momentum until they could twist and turn the character interactions enough to give them a more solid grounding. (They also refocused around House, thanks to the introduction of the ex.) House also manages to show how having a really good template does NOT mean tellling the same story the same way every week. The two episodes (so far) where they've messed around with story timeframes and flashback elements have been among the strongest in the series. Yet they did contain the elements of the template: there was a medical mystery, there was a personal involvement by one of the doctors, and there were plenty of interesting red herrings and half steps along the way.

Like House, Frasier figured out its template early on, and at least until the good writers left, found that it was pretty elastic. My favorite episodes of early-series Frasier were always the "farce" episodes. They were constructed differently than the others, which was why they only did one of those a season: but the elements of character conflict, interaction, humor -- all were the same. They just got to hang a different frame around it.

So establishing your template -- figuring out what happens every week -- does not have to be restrictive. The people who say it is, or does, simply don't have a sophisticated understanding of the television narrative form, or how films and TV series differ.

The problem is that when you sit down to start that process -- it's an almost mathematical experience. And I don't do well with Math.

Once, I was in a group with the Executive Producer of Frasier, Peter Casey, and he said that the secret he found when it came to write Frasier's second episode was this: don't count on anyone having seen the first episode. In other words, find a way to re-introduce all the major conflicts, plot points, and relationships all over again. If you watch Episode 2 of Frasier, you'll be amazed how similar it is to the pilot. The problem Frasier faces with his father is the same - it's still about Frasier not wanting to lose his freedom. The conflict with Niles is the same. You could easily start with Episode 2 and dive right in. And these days, you have to count on that if you want to survive. Even with a "Previously on..." you still have to make your second episode as accessible as the first. Assume the whole room watching is new.

I just sank a little lower in my chair.

Two of my projects now are at Episode 2 stage. (I was contracted for two scripts and a bible on each of these series.) Another project I'm writing is at Episode 1 -- and though it's in many ways the most challenging of the three, it's also easier to write for a few hours each day...even though I know that for that project, too, the daunting, dreaded Episode 2 lurks just over the horizon.)

For my half-hour comedy, the Episode 2 problem was this: I'm past the premise pilot. I have a core cast, and like Friends, in the pilot episode, I really was only able to concentrate on three of the ensemble. One of the seven characters didn't even appear until the last scene. (She was the comic relief, talked about but not seen for the first episode.)

When it came to craft Episode 2, I knew I had to focus more on the characters who were given short shrift in the pilot. Okay, so that dictates a certain kind of story. In the same way, I have to service the main couple, and the two comic relief guys whose plot was the thing that everyone responded to in the pilot. Whew.

This is a series about university students living in Rez. Episode One was the move in and the first days. I know that the show -- the template -- is about the ongoing problems and challenges of living together, so that immediately sparked one realization: I needed time to have past. It would be natural to pick up the story with the first interactions of all the characters -- but I already did that in the pilot, at least with some of the characters -- and that's not the show.

To be true to my template, then, the answer was simple: there is now a one-month gap between Ep 1 and 2. In Ep 1, they all move in, and in Ep 2 they've been living together a month.

So now I needed to find a plot that serviced the unserviced characters, and spoke to the premise of the characters having trouble getting along...

...and you know what? The demands of the template actually led me to a great, natural plot. I think that Ep 2 of this series is stronger than Ep 1. It's certainly more representative of what the concept and premise can be.

Episode 2 thinking is all about strategizing up front. If you've done it right, hopefully once you're writing script you're confident in what you need to accomplish.

With my hour drama -- I'm still at the pitch. And the pitch has been a bitch. I made a silly mistake with the first iteration: I focused the story around the guest charater, instead of the principals. My understanding of the principals was evolving at the time, but once that was pointed out to me, and I engaged in the requisite ritual self-flagellation, I realized that the fix wasn't really all that difficult.

My story -- my template -- needs to be about my characters being devilishly clever and manipulating everyone around them to get what they want. Sounds simple, except, of course, for the fact that I'm writing people who are definitely, without a doubt, more clever than I am.

I want a writing staff so much right now I could just cry.

Anyway, one of the other weird things about the Second Episode Problem is the fact that you live with the first episode so much longer. In both the cases I've cited above, there's been more than two years to get to draft on the Pilot. Then you need to come up with Episode Two within a month or two. That's still more time than you're going to have once the bastard goes into production (sound of Denis knocking wood) but it's still a strange, whiplash experience nonetheless.

I remember years ago I used to go to tapings of the great Canadian TV comedy series Kids in the Hall (you can still hear me laugh on about half the episodes. I'm a loudlaugher.) Here's the story that terrified me beyond belief: The Kids gigged in clubs here in Toronto for seven years. Seven years, building material and a catalogue of proven, killer sketches. Then they did season one. And at the end of season one, the cupboard was bare. Season One writing time: seven years. Season Two: Three Months.

That's why you need to do the math, and think through the template. The beast must be fed, and the cupboard, sadly, well...it's always, always bare.

UPPITY DATE: Serendipity alert: as I finished this post and hit "publish," who should walk into my neighborhood coffee shop but Mark McKinney from the Kids in the Hall

So I promptly crushed his head

One Pilot I'll Be Keeping My Eye On...

One of my favorite recent shows was Worldwide Pants' ED.

During its three-year run on NBC, I thought the show was a very entertaining, good natured show that successfully mixed comic and dramatic elements. It had a great cast, led by a Canadian actor who I think is the closest thing I've seen to a genuine Jimmy Stewart type, Tom Cavanagh, and the lovely, never-better-than-in-this-role Julie Bowen. Together, those two executed a pretty-well executed running "will they or won't they" romantic subplot. The show also had an intriguing combo of offbeat lawyering and small-town weirdness about it.

Plus, they filmed it close to where I lived when I was a kid.

ED was one of my specs a couple years ago. I actually quite liked that one. Too bad it's fishwrap now. Oh well.

The big news is that the creative team behind ED, former Late Show writers Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman, have just gotten a Pilot with ABC. The pilot will star Donal Logue, who's never yet managed to transfer the excellence of his Tao of Steve performance to Television.

This is one that I'll be rooting for.

Link to the story in the Hollywood Reporter.

Mentors and Mentor Characters

I'm on a couple deadlines and I have a friend staying with me for the weekend, so I'm going to punt.

Over at Artful Writer, Craig's been having an interesting back and forth about Benefactors and Mentors. His thesis is basically that mentors are overrated. Screw them, and get yourself a benefactor.

That's actually pretty good advice, so far as it goes. I guess the problem with mentors is that it is very much buyer beware. Craig sounds like he didn't have a great experience. I did. I've had at least a couple of people I'd call Mentors in my life. I've had Benefactors, too, in the sense that I have people who took a chance on me and gave me a gig when I didn't have much experience because they recognized that I had talent, and moxie. Don't discount the moxie. It isn't just for 40's femme fatales and cute orphans with dirty faces.

The difference, maybe, is that I never expected my mentors to be the ones to actually get me work. Nor did I expect them to weigh in on whether I had talent or not. I knew I had talent.

I've informally mentored a few people over the years. I teach too, so that line gets blurry. But from time to time, I've had former students who I've tried to follow over the years. Some have asked me for advice, and we've met up for coffee, or I've given a read and notes to their scripts -- some I've just kind of kept track of along the way. Sometimes people call me for advice of how to make an approach, a strategy for how to get an entry level job, when to ditch that job -- life stuff that's easy-peasy to talk about freely when it's a few years in your past.

But here's the thing: I won't answer the question: do I have it? Because the reality is that so many don't. And having to tell someone that? Well...that's...you know...uncomfortable. If you're not buying me some free fish, what's in it for me to crush your little dreams? And if you are buying me fish, then why would I crush your dreams. I mean, the spicy tuna roll is delicious.

The talent question is perilous, and at some point, you have to stop seeking that answer from mentors, and start proving it to yourself by hooking into some benefactors.

At least that's what I think Craig was talking about.

I'm a big believer in karma and paying it forward -- but that doesn't extend to putting myself into uncomfortable situations where I have to crush someone's dreams. That'd just be icky. I can't believe that I'm the only one who feels that way. So if that's what you're looking for from a mentor...maybe you've misread the true utility of the position.

Read Craig's post about mentors here.

Read Craig's even-more-suffused with awesomeness post about mentor characters here.

Seriously, Dude, Seriously.

I know, I know, I know -- there's no big plan for "the numbers."

I don't care.

LOST still rocks. Hard.

Les Grands Follies Canadiens!

Ooh La La.

It took an American comedy show, Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, to offer the funniest and truest spin on the reality of Canadian (and by extention, American) politics right now.

For those of you from elsewhere with no real reason to care (or those of you in Moosejaw or Burnaby or Corner Brook who just haven't tuned in yet) Canadians are going to the polls for an unprecendented winter election on January 23rd. Winter election. In Canada. Insert your own joke here, I have to go find mittens.

Stewart, in talking about the fall of the government in a parliamentary non-confidence vote, had this to say:

The vote followed revelations that Martin's ruling Liberal party had engaged in a money laundering scheme that channelled millions of federal dollars into party coffers. Shocking, that somewhere a Liberal party is ruling.

Then, later, in a happytalk with "Senior Canadian Bureau Chief" (and real-life Canadian) Sam Bee Stewart asked: "The incident with the government falling, what is that about?"

Bee's answer:

"Basically it's this, Jon. The country's administration misled the people, abused its power and it's now being held accountable, and forced to play a political price for its deceit."

Stewart feigned shock. (Then made Bee say, "eh.") Funny stuff.

But in Canada itself, it's not so funny. Today comes word that the CBC has managed to bonehead their way into another colossally stupid decision. For those who keep track of such things, the braintrust that runs Canada's national broadcaster locked out their workers earlier this year, causing two months of crickets on their Canadian radio and TV dials.

Well, as John Doyle writes in today's Globe and Mail (sub required) CBC has waded into the election fray by delaying a major movie from January 15 to March.

The movie is about the life of Tommy Douglas -- 24 star Kiefer Sutherland's Grandfather, a beloved Canadian politician who led the province of Saskatchewan, and introduced the forerunner of Canada's public health care system. In 2004, in a special series of programs on CBC, Douglas was voted "The Greatest Canadian."

He's a politician who's as important to what Canada is today as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal was to the shaping of the modern American state. (And like FDR, much of his legacy is now being threatened.)

CBC's position is that running the series before the election campaign would be wading into politics. This, despite the fact that the story does not address a single event newer than twenty years ago.

What the CBC sluggos don't seem to understand, and what John Doyle points out in his column, is that moving the miniseries to late March is an inherently political act. Either CBC is saying that they think that they're afraid the show will make Canadians vote NDP -- which is ridiculous, or that airing it might offend one of the two parties that will form the next Government -- Conservative or Liberal. Either interpretation is odious, and shows the contempt that the CBC braintrust has for their audience.

It gets worse. January in Canada is pretty much prime viewing time -- for obvious reasons -- people don't go out. The Canadian TV season really usually gets cooking in January. Ratings are way up, and that's when Canadian series launch -- away from the klieg lights of US Network promotions. Advance word on the Douglas biopic is that it's excellent -- directed by John N. Smith, who directed Dangerous Minds, among other films.

By bumping it to March, CBC is taking one of its potentially highest rated shows, a show that dramatizes Canadian stories and issues that resonate to this day, and banishing that discussion to a time when the series will be buried. (In March, many Canadians go on vacation for March break. It's NOT a prime viewing time.)

They tanked their fall schedule, and now they're pulling punches with their own product. For people who care about telling stories or a broadcaster that truly reflects a national mandate, the actions taken by CBC leave only one path: to reserve as much contempt for them as they seem to have for their audience.

Pathetic.

If you're Canadian, you can tell CBC what you think here, or write them at:

Audience Relations, CBC, P.O. Box 500 Station A, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5W 1E6

Objective Correlative, Meet the Supremes

The Objective Correlative is one of my favorite writing terms. I first encountered it reading T.S. Eliot's writings on Hamlet, and then got re-acquainted with the concept thanks to one of my mentors when I went to the Canadian Film Centre.

Writers need to know about the Objective Correlative.

And there is no finer example or definition than this example, courtesy of Slate.

Music for Screenwriters, Redux

Meanwhile, down here in the comments section, the discussion of "music for screenwriters" continues. Some thoughts on some of the picks so far...

Lee Thomson suggests:

Richmond Fontaine, by God. They just completely blew my socks off - the champions of losers and fuck-ups everywhere.

Richard Thompson, most definitely...

It seems that the growth of my entire musical library, for the past five years, has been shaped by Uncut magazine, and BBC Radio 3's Late Junction (amazing programming - except for the twenty minute sitar solos. That's when I go and clean my teeth.)

When I was in South Africa writing on Charlie Jade, one of the things that shocked me the most was my horror at magazine withdrawl. I remember devouring six week old New Yorkers like they were manna. No Rolling Stone, no Entertainment Weekly, no Harpers...I never realized what an utter magazine whore I was. So when I would go down to CD Wherehouse and slap down the equivalent of about 25 bucks to buy UNCUT, it was like a lifeline. A lifeline for a sad, sad junkie. Uncut's reviews never steer me wrong -- and it was in South Africa, reading Uncut, where I discovered the joy that is Richmond Fontaine.

I finally got to see Richard Thompson play a concert in Toronto a few summers back, with a lovely woman who I was crazy about at the time. The fact that it didn't ultimately work out with her (I am stupid) makes my memory of that evening's acoustic performance of 1952 Vincent Black Lightning all the sweeter. (And to digress further, Shoot Out the Lights is right up there with Blood On The Tracks for all time great breakup albums.)

I will definitely check out Radio 3 -- and I will once again plug my fave choice for music, Nic Harcourt's Morning Becomes Eclectic on the mighty KCRW.

Writergurl writes:

If you're interested in a new C&W band, I'd recommend "Sugarland" (new country act, from Atlanta... I knew them when...)

Haven't heard of them, but will definitely seek them out. Writergurl, no doubt following in the mighty footsteps of Ryan Atwood from the O.C., gives a shout out to Journey -- a guiltier pleasure you will not find. My friend Tara would definitely approve.

Danny Stack makes the case for "Weddings, Parties, Anything" which is indeed a fine band with wonderful story songs.

Lisa holds out for the Delta Blues, which I can heartily support. So let's keep going -- who else?

You need storytelling music to recharge the batteries? Who gets you going?

Show a little faith, there's magic in the night
You ain't a beauty but, hey, you're alright
Oh, and that's alright with me

Dying Is Easy.

You know the rest of that quote, right?

Last night I went to a launch event here in Toronto for CBC's new round of comedy pilots. One of the problems with the Canadian industry is that there's not enough money to develop and pilot a lot of concepts, as they do in the USA. If a project makes it through development, it works itself out in (or more often, doesn't...) in its first few episodes.

A couple of years back, CBC started piloting selected shows. They air them in January after New Year's, before deciding whether to make an order for...usually, six, that air the next year.

Now those of you doing the math will realize that even if you do grab the brass ring, you're not going to make a lot of money. Actually, at WGC rates, if you write all six yourself, you can probably live -- frugally -- for almost -- almost one whole year.

Yup. Showbidness the Canadian way is lucrative to the max!

I was pretty unimpressed by the three pilots CBC put on the air last year -- including the two that were subsequently given further episodes: Hatching, Matching & Dispatching and Getting Along Famously.

This year, the three pilots are called This Space for Rent; Rabbittown, and Cheap Draft, Bad Language, Fast Cars, Women, and a Video Camera (an absolutely terrible title made all the more terrible by the fact that it's a little too close to the British show Two Pints of Lager & a Packet of Crisps.)

I'll post a review of the full shows just after the New Year (they air in Canada starting Jan 3 on CBC) but I will say one thing now: the one to watch is Rabbittown -- the story of two competative frenemies drinking and carousing the streets of St. John's, Newfoundland. It's a witty and wicked take on Abfab -- with younger women. It was laugh out loud funny in several places, and well made. The best thing about it was the way that it refuses to judge the characters. In Canadian series television, that's a real rarity.

I think CBC is doing the best it can in trying to pilot these comedies, but there's a couple of things that came out of the event last night that indicate some of the huge structural problems series comedy faces in this country: first, the presentation went to great pains to point out that the pilots were from Vancouver, Halifax, and Newfoundland. That's right, kids...regional politics rule the CBC and sometimes the most important thing is to show your regional bonafides. Imagine a corresponding U.S. presentation where the most important thing was to go to great pains to point out how none of the series originated in Los Angeles. Yaaaay!

The other thing -- and I will not out the person who said it -- but at one point someone got up and described their show as "TV for people who don't watch TV."

Poor CBC. You would think that they'd be focused on their current problem: making TV for people who do watch TV but don't have anything to watch on CBC.

Sadly, this mentality rules the roost in Canada. It seems they're constantly giving TV shows to people who really want to make "Canadian feature films" and who don't much like, or care for TV. So we get judgemental drama, heavy handed melodrama, and comedy about characters who are so busy trying to make a point, that they skimp on the whole broth of trying to be, you know, entertaining.

You know, like a comedy's supposed to be.

Comedy is hard. One of the shows I'm developing right now is a comedy, and it's a huge struggle. I have no idea if it's going to work, and I have no idea if its going to go. It's hard to get comedy through the process here because no one understands what a unified voice is, and by the time something makes it to air, it usually has so many fingerprints on it that the product isn't distinct, and the tone is no longer fresh. I think this is why Canadians are much better at doing topical, sketch driven comedies than comedy series.

Anyway, you'll hear more about these three pilots closer to the airdates. In the meantime, I'll go back to trying to write TV for people who actually watch TV.

Music for Screenwriters, or How I Walk The Line

On impulse yesterday I bought a New Order CD. They have a new Singles collection out here in Canada. Roughly the nineteenth one they've put out. I thought I'd grok onto hearing the old faves I remember, but the thing really left me cold.

The seventeen year old self, the one with way more arrogance and way, way, way more hair -- would doubtless sneer at this, but I realized that somewhere along the line to becoming a screenwriter, I also became a country music fan.

Now, let's not go crazy. I don't like Garth Brooks or anything. Kenny Chesney -- in fact, hell, most of what passes for popular country today, I despise. You can take your redneck women and your dime store patriotic pablum and ride it straight to hell. But around the edges, I notice that most of what I listen to has got that "Americana" or "alt.country" twang to it.

Steve Earle. Lucinda Williams. Dwight Yoakam. Ryan Adams. Whiskeytown. Kathleen Edwards. Pernice Brothers. Wilco. Lyle Lovett. Rodney Crowell. Shelby Lynne. Iron & Wine. Calexico.

Last week I went to a show at Massey Hall that was just Lyle Lovett, Guy Clark, John Hiatt, and Joe Ely sitting around singing songs on the guitar. It was magic. I was transported.

And Thursday, cause KCRW pre-empted the schedule, I got to listen to a few hours of Johnny Cash -- this is after seeing the excellent film Walk the Line last weekend.

What's struck me is this: country and country-influenced stuff is storytelling music. And that's what I crave now. Sure, I'm still susceptible to hooks and buzz bands like Arcade Fire -- but these days the music I'm most attracted to are the story songs. And country is all over that shit.

It's not just country, of course -- Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan -- all rely on story songs as a big part of their repetoire.

It's just funny that my musical taste has shifted so far without me really thinking too much about it. Weird.

So there it is. Throw it open for the big thread: let's call it Music for Screenwriters. I want to know your picks. All of 'em, till my comment box runneth over.

If you're a storyteller, who should you be listening to?

Happy Yanksgiving

To all my American readers. Please remember the following:

Wait 15 minutes before seconds. Seriously. Digest a bit first.

It's never a good idea to drink and carve.

Grandma was young once, too.

Just because Billy says he's gay, doesn't mean you love him any less. The Pilgrims were pretty fruity, too. Mayflower? Hello?

In The Future, All TV's will be triangular...

Deep in the depths of the early 1990's, before I turned to writing full time, I was a producer on a show called media television.

media television was fairly revolutionary for its time. How revolutionary? In the second program, the show profiled the first issue of a brand-new magazine called WIRED. We were (arguably) one of the first programs to regularly display our email address at the end of the show. mediatv was slugged "the modern art & science of persuasion." We covered the intersection of advertising, modern television and emerging new media. This is back in the day when everyone called it "the information superhighway."

For whatever reason, Toronto's always been a hotbed for the whole "prognostication on the future of media" industry. We had Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. We also had Citytv, which, along with shows like media television was the brainchild of a Canadian media shaman and raconteur named Moses Znaimer. Once upon a time, Citytv was a mind-blower of a local station. In shows like The New Music, it did MTV before MTV was even a wisp. It went to an all videotape newscast while other stations were intoning, "film at 11..." It also got those newscasters out from behind the desk. Today, if you watch Citytv, it's a pale shadow of its former self -- like everything else in media, it's chasing the same trends and dollars, and is now in the pleasing shareholders business -- but once upon a time, it was a weird, wonderful, and mind expanding place to be.

What working on media television gave me was a front seat for the rise of the first internet hype bubble. Over a period of four years, I interviewed all manner of futurists, visionaries, prognosticators and analysts -- along with a passel of twenty-one year old geniuses who were burning through millions in venture capital, but who giggled any time you said, "how are you eventually going to make money at this?"

Well, we know pretty much how that ended now, don't we?

I look back on my experience at media television as kind of the geek equivalent of the journey Cameron Crowe's eponymous narrator goes through in Almost Famous. I can tell you what I saw at the revolution. But in the end, what it mostly added up to was bullshit.

I've been mostly inoculated against the "where things are going" virus since. Especially on the internet, it seems, any discussion of changes in distribution models seem to be driven by people with a very shaky understanding of consumer behavior, economics, psychology, business, and techology...take your pick, really... William Goldman famously opined that "Nobody Knows Anything." And when it comes to the changing nature of how TV will be distributed, he couldn't be more right.

Not that it stops people from trying.

In New York, a writer I quite like, Adam Sternbergh, tackles the implications of subscription TV, and how TV on the Ipod might spin out and change the distribution model of TV. Read it here.

Sternbergh makes some interesting points, but he also falls pretty far down that prognostication well. Over at Brollywood, John Sullivan points out the major flaw in Sternbergh's argument: what he calls, "The Josh Paradox."

Basically, it's all well and good to say that advertising is irrelevant, and that the Joss Whedons of the world can cut out networks and sell directly to consumers -- but that belies the fact that no one is going to pre-buy from someone they don't know. So you need the reputation first. And how do you build that reputation without big media companies and their promotional push behind you?

This is exactly the same argument as "artists don't need labels anymore." No. Madonna doesn't need them. Elton John doesn't need them. If you're a young band just starting out, sure, you can post your album on your website. Like 2 million other bands. Now. What do you do next?

I know that this is not hard and fast. I recognize comics like Dane Cook have been able to leverage the 'net to bypass some of the traditional routes to success. And yes, the Nobody Knows Everything dictum applies to the gatekeepers and big companies, too: FOX did cancel Family Guy, then reverse themselves. DVD sales are changing how success is measured, and definitely have affected how serialized you can make your stories -- but the problem with predicting how things will play out down the road is that you can never, ever take into account all the variables in all the right proportions -- never mind account for the "X Factor" -- that nebulous accident that could change everything.

What do I find interesting in media trends? Well, I think that the product placement thing will probably continue and increase. Hopefully, it'll be subtle, like Ford's alliance with 24. But maybe not. I also think the recent trend of single sponsors for shows may continue, and increase. And how interesting is that? That part of the solution to TV's future may come from its past -- the single sponsor show. In a world where everybody has PVR's, maybe breaking into the program for ads six times doesn't make sense.

I think DVD sales will continue to change what gets greenlit, and how long things run.

I think networks and production companies probably will sell reruns at low price points. You will never have to miss LOST again (as I did last night...I'm in Canada, so I can't download it legally from Itunes, but if I could, I'd be there, boom, no problem.)

But if the history of media teaches us anything, it's that things don't get destroyed by technological change. TV did not destroy radio. TV did not destroy movies. Neither did the VCR. To say that we're moving toward a "viewer buys from program maker" model ignores the example of that recent Internet boom: eventually, everyone decided that what they wanted most was entertainment and info from the same sources they got them from before. Big companies had the pockets, and they still had the edge. Maybe it wasn't quite the 100 percent stranglehold it used to be. Maybe it was just...90 percent.

If you were a 500 pound gorilla in the old order, you had a great chance of being one in the new order. Not to say that there wasn't a chance for a new monkey to come along and grab some love, but people still prefer the New York Times to Bennie's Spokane News Hut.

After I moved on from media television, I started working at Canada's version of the Sci-Fi channel. What I noticed there is this: people talk about how they want things first. And some do. Some people probably will pay top dollar. But the other side of that argument is this: no matter how long they've been available on DVD, no matter how many times they've been rerun'ed -- every time we took a show off the air, somewhere, somehow, viewers complained. There is always an audience. There is always someone new to reach. There's always a different way to get to them.

The audience is not monolithic. It's a big tent, and the lesson is that there's no one way that audiences want to consume their entertainment anymore.

So if you're a creative person, what should you make of all these emerging trends?

Well, honestly? I think the only thing you can do is hone what it is you have to offer, and not worry about it. Work on the creative side. I am nowhere near as interested in the idea of how someone will watch TV on an Ipod as I am, for instance, in the fact that in the upcoming King Kong game, we now take for granted that you can "play as Kong, or play as a human." That has way greater implications for people who are trying to create compelling stories than 99 cent downloads from Itunes.

Back in the mediatv days, the big thing was going to be interactive tv. The idea that the videogame would take over the narrative arts. Then you had people like Penn Jillette, who dared to call "bullshit." I'm paraphrasing here, but he said something to the effect that, even 2000 years ago, sitting round the campfire, a storyteller could weave a tale and then stop and ask you, "okay, what happens next?" And you wouldn't care. Because that sucks. What you want is a good story.

And let's face it: everybody thinks they can write. Fans on TV Without Pity will always say that if only those stupid program makers had listened to the fans, the show would have been better. I have one cab driver a week who thinks he could come up with way better stories than what's on tv right now.

Okay. Great.

But they don't do it, do they? And that, my chickens, is the key. Worrying about how the distribution model is changing and 'what that means' is just one more excuse for anyone trying to be creative, not to buckle down and do the really hard thing, which is to get your ass in the seat and get to work.

So by all means, if you're creative and you want to write or create, keep abreast of how things are changing. But don't believe for a second that there's some great egalitarian future out there where you can directly reach out and pluck your audience.

You will always have to deal with the Man.

The trick is to do it in such a way that you don't become the Man.

Because the Man can talk all he likes about how this model or that is going to go...
But yesterday I sat in a room with three writers for six hours, and at the end of it we had two broken out half hour episodes. Funny episodes, where in the morning we had nothing.

And that's the thing that has real value. The rest is just prognostication. Leave that for the pointy heads and MBA's. Work on the stuff that actually matters. And when people tell you how the future is going to be, nod politely and remember that anyone can predict what comes next. Especially if you don't mind being wrong.

But if you can face down the blank page, well, then that's the wine, my friends. The rest is just arguing over the shape of the bottle, and the color of the label.

I'd rather talk about the wine.

You're making it too hard.

So there I am, trying to come up with fiction. And silliness. And comedy. Yet in the last 48 hours, we have the leader of the world getting flummoxed by a door, the right screaming that some TD's lineup gaffe is evidence of the antichrist, reports that the U.S. planned to BOMB A TELEVISION STATION and what passes for normal -- the further fallout of a 37 year old military vet being called a coward.

Oh, and some more US soldiers died. And the bird flu's still coming.

And FEMA won't talk to New Orleans.

Would you %#$@ers please, please, please give me a break? There is NO WAY I can try to manufacture absurdity in a climate like this. Seriously.

Remember when everyone talked about the death of irony after 9/11?

Can we go back to that? Seriously?

You're salting Daddy's game, here.

Back to the Room

Gonna be a little light here over the next couple of days. I'm back in a room breaking story for a friend's project.

I'll just leave you with this:

3-D is not ready for prime time. And Medium is still a ridiculous show. How ridiculous? It makes me miss what's-his-name- the-husband's role on The Mind of the Married Man. Serious.

I try to watch every show at least once, but seriously dude, you couldn't get me to watch Medium again with a mallet. Ghost Whisperer, I'm talking to you, too. Feh.

No Way in Hell

...are you going to get me to say a word about the Gemini Awards. (Canada's Emmyhahahhheee heh hhhee heee hhee ho ha...damnit. Really thought I'd get through that without laughing.)

Nope. Not a word.

For that you have to buy me beer.

The Office & Earl

I have no idea if it'll stick around much longer, but after an extended PVR clean off, I've got to say that the American iteration of The Office has completely won me over.

There were glimpses of possibility last season. I thought the episode that dealt with the racism training was incredibly, almost absurdly subversive, and packed a much deeper punch than the equivalent episode of the original BBC series. (Which is entirely appropriate, considering that issues of race are a third rail in the United States -- far more in-your-face than they are even in vaguely xenophobic Great Britain.)

But with the season 2 run of episodes, some interesting things have started to happen. First, the American show has, I think, now produced more episodes than the show that spawned it. Second, the growth in the American characters has finally reached a tipping point for me where I'm no longer missing the UK versions. Pam is at least as engaging and funny as Dawn. (Interestingly, I think they've also made the character smarter.) The Tim/Jim character in the US version is not as self-loathing and ambivalent about his job as his UK counterpart, which is an interesting, and I think very American change. I always thought that Rainn Wilson was gifted enough to make his charcter work, even though you'd never forget or stop missing the glorious Gareth, but in the last couple of episodes, Wilson's deadpan delivery has just slayed me.

Then there's Steve Carell. No, he's no David Brent. He's a particularly American slice of self-absorbed. It's amazing how if you tweak a few traits, a character can be so completely different in the ensembe. The one thing that worried me most about the American Office was that Michael Scott just didn't have anything like the bubbling under, "he's so sad" cluelessness that made you feel a strange, sick sympathy for Ricky Gervais' David Brent.

But in the last few episodes, with the aborted romance with his superior, Michael Scott finally got some sympathy points. Grudging, horribly fought, and compromised as they were. It's a testimony to Carell that he can take this American boss -- who's so much less likable than the British model, and still make him riveting.

I'm not sure how the show played in the U.S. press when it premiered there, but here in Canada it was a pretty predictable backhand-slamming. It's undeserved. For my money, The Office is the most successful British import since probably Sanford and Son. It puts Queer as Folk and Cracker to shame.

What Greg Daniels did in adapting the show for the American market was recognize some very basic differences at the core of the psyche of the two countries. Michael Scott is such a product of the sunny, individual-first school of American mythmaking that he fits. Tim was likable because of his doubt and his self-lacerations. Jim is likable because, well, his decency. The interactions with the warehouse staff play on issues of hip hop and cultural difference, not class difference. It's obvious that Daniels really studied the British show, and then let it go.

Contrast that with the absolutely horrible American version of Coupling from a couple years back and the achievement becomes even more striking. I never knew how they were going to adapt Coupling. Each of the six main characters on that show seemed to me to embody a different, yet distinct slice of New British archtypes.

When the American version premiered, within five minutes it was painfully clear that nothing had been done to find the corresponding American types. Patrick, Tory that he was; Jeff, a very British eccentric, even the particular brittleness of Sally -- none of the Americans looked in any way like actual in-your-30's types you'd find hanging out in an American city. They were too good looking, and too bland by half.

Greg Daniels learned the lessons of Coupling well. I, for one, hope that Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant enjoy their creator royalties for some time to come. The Office is sophisticated, heartfelt, true -- and American to the core.

I also have caught two or three more episodes of My Name is Earl. Initially, I thought that the whole show pretty much rested on Jason Lee's shoulders. But in the recent episodes, they've really done quite a bit to spread the comedy around, with deft turns from both Ethan Supplee as the brother, and Jaime Pressly as Joy. I think Earl is great, good natured fun. I would probably spec it if I needed a half hour sample.

Both these shows, I think, prove that just like the box-office slump story of 2005, the "comedy on American TV is dead" story is seriously overblown.

Now if we could just get a few more comedies on the air in Canada...

UPDATE: With the November 22, 2005 show (Michael at Improv class, Dwight's Office Romance, and Jim's Karaoke Party) The American Office has achieved a wicked pinnacle. The secondary characters are as interesting as the British ones were; the world is more fleshed out, Jim's fundamental decency is stronger and clearer than ever -- the introduction of the Camera as character is a stylistic step forward from the original...In other words, the child has definitely grown up. The show stands on its own comic feet. As well cast, as well observed, and as funny as the original ever was. As David Brent would say: Fact.

*okay, they still haven't done anything as funny as the David Brent "If You Don't Know Me By Now" video -- but give them time.

Book Review: A Great Feast of Light

It could be that I'm just becoming an old fogey. I recognize that. But lately, when I look out at a television landscape of TIVO's and extended cable, of satellites and timeshifting and VOD, 343 channels of Gilligan's Island starting on the hour -- I can't help but think that something's been lost.

It's not just that Bruce Springsteen's once-scorching "57 Channels and Nothing On" seems crazy-quaint. (Dude, it's your own fault! Why didn't you TIVO?) It's that the explosion of choice and program-management techniques (what we used to call "taping,") has fundamentally altered what made television so revolutionary in the first place.

John Doyle's "A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age" is a memoir and a love letter. It's a book that rights the wrongs of a thousand McLuhan descendents who like to natter about how TV ruined everything. It's the story of a young boy growing up in a cloistered, maddening, provincial country, and how a magic window into a wider world changed everything, forever. Doyle manages to be both wistful and clear-eyed, speaking of his childhood in the small Irish town of Nenagh. Television came late to Ireland...RTE went on the air in 1961. In describing the people of his little town, Doyle paints a scene ripe for a shocking, cathode-ray corrective:

"...their stories were always the same, going around and around until everybody knew the punch line. They were always about farmers and shopkeepers and how the world was fixed with everybody in their allotted place. On television, events changed things. The truth came out and justice was done. I knew that teachers and adults weren't as instantly entranced by television as small children were. And I knew why, without anyone explaining it to me. Grown up people were stuck in their ways and their old stories. They knew everybody they were ever going to meet.

But that would change too. Television would break through all the layers of habit and conformity. The smallness of their old world would become clear as day."

The book contains amusing reminiscences of programs as varied as Bat Masterston and Get Smart, The Avengers and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. But the focus is squarely on how these new worlds, new ideas and ways of looking at the world seeped into a society that was still in thrall to the Catholic church; filled with "thick" brothers and cruel nuns, and a generally backward way of thinking.

For the Irish Americans tugging at their collars now, this is no Angela's Ashes, a parade of miseries and petty cruelties moving from horror to horror. The Doyles sound a lot more like my people -- a little more middle class, perhaps. But with a father working for Irish Life and a mother who didn't seem to cotton onto those who promoted small mindedness, Doyle paints a quiet childhood where television did exactly what all its haters feared: gradually seeped in and molded the thinking of a young boy.

The Doyles moved around Ireland quite a bit. I was pleased to read the chapters about tracing a childhood through County Roscommon and Leitrim, since that's where my Mom's people are from. This section also gives rise to the book's most moving passages: contrasting the peace of a country childhood with the horrors that lurked just beyond the mist. As young John Doyle walks the fields of Carrick, we're reminded that this area was once ground zero of the famine that decimated Ireland.

It's a strange turn for a memoir about television, but it does set the stage -- because if you know your Irish history, you know what's coming.

I've often talked to my parents about what it was really like to see Vietnam on the TV every night. I've spent hours in a little cubicle at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York, watching back news programs of the time. I've seen the moment where Walter Cronkite turned against the war. As an adult, I, like everyone, sat back and watched in quiet awe as satellites relayed live pictures of bombs raining on Baghdad. Twice.

But I don't think that compares to being a young Irish boy trying to sort through an old war that suddenly re-ignites on your doorstep, brought to you in glorious color on the TV. As Ireland descends into the bitter thrall of sectarian violence, Doyle clings to the images that make sense to him: the anti-authoritarian, anarchic revolution that was Monty Python's Flying Circus, the pull of soccer -- even the much milder social critiques of shows like The Liver Birds and Upstairs, Downstairs.

All in all, the memoir paints a coming-of-age that was reflected, pushed, and prodded by television at every step of the way. It's an engaging portrait of an Ireland that's simply not there anymore, an Ireland consigned to the dustbin, in part, by the tide of change ushered in by the tolling of the Angelus Bells on RTE, that night in 1961.

I'm not sure that people much younger than me (I'm 37) think of television that way anymore, or if they ever did. Television was that thing that was always there. There were always more than four channels. You never had to 'get home in time to watch something.' There are so many different types of entertainment vying for your attention now that the social effect of television is muted; and discussions of the power of the medium are far more likely to be driven by reactionary forces, for whom nothing is scarier than a hint of breast or a bad word.

I don't remember the start of television, of course. But I do remember the time of four or five channels and no VCR. And I remember the winter of 1977.

In January, 1977, we were living in Orlando, Florida. Our TV was a beat up old SONY, black and white, maybe 20 inches.

Six months later, when we moved to Canada, my Dad bought a big cabinet model color TV, and I was shocked and enthralled. Enthralled to watch shows like The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island in color for the first time -- they seemed like new shows! Shocked when I caught a rerun of Gilligan's Island in black & white. I thought the TV was broken. My Dad had to explain to me that the show used to be filmed in black & white, before they switched to color.

I loved living in Orlando. The two years I spent there still seem a little magical to me. We lived in a development called Bay Hill. (now the site of the Bay Hill Classic. If you care about golf, I'm sure that means something. Not to me, alas.) Ours was still a new development, and our street dead-ended in an orange grove. We were also across the lake from Walt Disney World. Every night of the summer, we'd walk down the road to where the orange trees started, pick one off the tree, and watch the fireworks over the Magic Kingdom.

Then there was this one time when, like wildfire, a rumor went through the neighborhood. We rode our bikes up to the Golf Club, and sure enough, dining there, surrounded by kids and other admirers, was Evil Knievel. He signed our autographs and indulged us with stories, and when it was time to leave, he simply got up and walked out, and we all hushed to see if it was true-- did he clank when he walked, from all the metal pins in his many broken bones?

I set that scene to give the proper context to this story:

We had a big backyard. Lots of flowerbeds, lots of plants and trees. My father was the General Manager of the Pepsi bottling plant in Orlando, and through that job, he met Mr. B. Mr. B was a large, kind black man with enormous hands and a booming laugh. Mr. B was the go-to man in the plant. He knew when people needed things. I first met him when he came to pick up the baby stuff -- the cribs that my sisters didn't need anymore. He loaded them into the truck and carted them off to whoever needed them. I was fascinated by this: how did he know? My father was pretty straightforward on the matter. "The people in the plant don't have a lot of money," he'd say. "He takes care of them." "Is that his job?" I wondered. "Nope," my Dad said. "That's just what he does."

I figured Mr. B was a pretty important guy, knowing what everyone needed like that. Mr. B worked the bottling line as a supervisor, and when my dad took me to work, and I saw him, I'd always run up and say hello. He'd smile, and sneak me some Dr. Pepper off the line. It tasted horrible cold -- I never did get the taste for it -- but hot off the line it was delicious.

There was a woman who used to help out my Mom with my little sisters. Mrs. L. She'd babysit sometimes, sew, and mind my sisters so my Mom could run out to the supermarket. Mrs. L was a kind southern woman who loved singing along to the country music on the radio.

One day, when Mrs. L was there, Mr. B and some of his guys were doing some yardwork for us. Mr.B came to the front door looking for water for the crew. Mrs. L said she'd get it, but Mr. B had to come to the back door.

I had NO IDEA what the hell was going on. Why did he have to go to the back door, when he was standing right there at the front door, in the 95 degree heat? It seemed stupid, so I asked my Dad about it later.

I think my Mom had a conversation with Mrs. L the next day. I didn't hear any of it. I was sent to my room to play.

A few months later was January 1977. We didn't know yet that we were going to be moving to Canada. Maybe my parents did, but I didn't. But the really exciting thing is that my parents let me stay up late with them, to watch something on TV. My parents had let me stay up to watch TV late before. One time, a neighbor of ours was on To Tell The Truth. And if there was a baseball game or a space launch from Cape Kennedy, sometimes I'd get to watch that. But this was different. There was a program, airing every night for seven nights... I'd never heard of that happening before.

It was called Roots.

After I watched it, I started to put together a lot of what I'd seen -- with Mr. B, Mrs. L -- even the strange looks I'd get sometimes from some of the white workers in the plant when Dad would take me to work, and I'd run up to say "Hi" to Mr. B.

Everyone watched Roots, it seems. We talked about it in school. And the next time Mr. B and Mrs. L were both working at our house, I noticed that she had trouble looking Mr. B in the eye. Later that month, Mr. B came by with his pickup truck, and picked up a whole bunch of baby clothes and toys Mrs. L had collected. He thanked her for them, and said he knew just who they would go to. And she nodded and turned around very fast and walked back into the house. She didn't know what to do with her hands...that's what I noticed. Her hands kept fluttering by her sides. I knew what was making her feel that way. And I wondered if she ever thought of the day that she asked Mr. B to go to the back door -- that simple, incomprehensible action that I now understood completely, thanks to Roots.

I was glad she didn't know what to do with her hands.

Anyhow. How's that for a digression?

Point is that Doyle's book re-energizes me and reminds me why I loved television in the first place -- why this is the medium where I want to tell stories. Maybe the landscape is different, and maybe television will never affect people quite that way again.

But then again, every time I'm in a new place, I remember to flip on the TV at least once. You learn things that way. Things you'd never learn anywhere else.

Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.

Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.

I'm ten.

False alarm.

Just flurries.

Still. In the words of Barney:

"Uh oh...it begins."

Well, that's it.

It's snowing in Toronto.

Goodbye, cruel world. :)

Getting Past the Gatekeeper

This is one of those stories that is different depending on where you live.
If you're an American writer living in L.A., your paths and ways "in" could fill several books, and all sorts of handy advice can be gleaned out in the scribosphere from all those guys way more successful than me.

So this post isn't so much about the politics or tricks of getting your stuff read in Mammon. Sorry. You can stop reading now if you want to.

Outside of the American system, driven by the purity of eyeballs and the quest for audience, things get a little weird. In Canada, in Great Britain, I imagine in Australia and probably everywhere else that's NOT the USA, you have to go through some combination of commissioning editors, network people, or quasi-governmental funding agencies.

(I know you have to eventually go through network people in the USA too, but what they're ruled by, I submit, is simpler to understand. Fear and money is always easier to understand.)

The problem of "How do you get past the gatekeeper" has been in the back of my mind for a while. It came to the forefront this morning with an example that I think illustrates the problem -- at least here in Canada.

On the front cover of today's National Post -- one of Canada's two national newspapers, the above-the-fold story is about a lawsuit. At a froofy do celebrating Maclean's Magazine's 100th anniversary (it's like the Canadian TIME Magazine. Stress ...LIKE) Disgraced Media Baron Conrad Black (kind of like the Canadian Rupert Murdoch. Stress ...LIKE) served a libel suit on a writer named Peter Newman. (Um...he's just a writer.) I didn't see the kind of play the story got in the Globe and Mail, but Toronto's other Broadsheet, The Star, played it quite prominently, too -- I believe on the front page.

What does this have to do with getting Television ideas and scripts past the gatekeeper? Hang on. I'm getting there.

This is a story about society people suing each other. Is it news? Debatable. It's certainly media gossip, and should definitely be played as such. But the fact that it gets played so prominently on front pages (and though I haven't listened today, I'm pretty sure it's a big topic on CBC Radio, too) indicates what's out of whack in the mediasphere in Canada. Though they'd be loathe to admit it, there's a rampant provincialism at work, that vastly overestimates the importance of issues like this to the population at large.

Outside of Toronto, Canadians constantly complain of a "Toronto bias" which I've been senstive to, since I'm not originally from here either. But over the years I've come to conclude that it's not a Toronto bias so much as a favouring of these kinds of stories.

The other recent example I can think is a literary prize called the Giller Awards, which gets massive coverage every year, completely out of whack with the degree to which regular people care about it.

Understand that I'm not saying you don't cover literary awards. I'm not a savage. I'm saying that the news judgement in the media here tends to favour rarefied things of limited interest to people outside that society group. Society balls are not news. But sometimes, here, they're treated as such. On your average Sunday, the New York Times does a far better job covering a wider spectrum of arts, high, low, and middle, than does the weekend Globe & Mail.

What does this disconnect have to do with commissioning editors or funding agencies? (Okay, you've been patient.)

The people reading scripts, deciding on stories to put forward are usually people who strive to be like the people up in the rarefied air. They identify with that strata, and like good little strivers, tend to put forward ideas and talent that appeal and conform to that mindset. When they do deign to do something "populist," it smacks of condescension, and it sinks below the waves without a ripple.

This is especially true at CBC -- but it's also something you'll see in various points at a lot of the funding agencies. A lot of the smaller channels and specialties do have a better handle on who's actually watching and what they actually like. But they have far less money to spend, and far less influence, too.

The problem of the out-of-touch-Gatekeeper is not a small one. Because the arts media in this country all strive, for the most part, to be part of the rarefied group, you don't get a lot of critical coverage of, say, Candadian films that don't appeal to most Canadians, or TV shows that portray a world that's very different from the world that most Canadians experience. TV producers and writers shouldn't want to go to events with the president of the TD Bank Hedge Fund. I don't even know what that is. But it doesn't sound like fun.

Here's the worst part: there's no real incentive to change, because people who fail to deliver an audience don't ever lose their jobs. Most of the money in Canadian TV is made from re-broadcasting US TV, anyway.

The fact that no one has examined Corner Gas, and to a lesser extent, Trailer Park Boys, and tried to understand why they resonate, completely flummoxes me.

They succeed because somehow they got on the air -- they go over the head of the rare air types and right into the homes of Canadians. And like Hockey Commentator Don Cherry (who the CBC tried to fire, then found themselves in the middle of a shitstorm revolt and backed off) people watch them because they're relevant to the 29 million people who don't care about 90% of what's in the Arts section in weekend Globe & Mail.

By the way, Quebec doesn't have this problem. Tons of popular films. Tons of popular homegrown shows. They'll tell you it's because of the language barrier. Don't you believe it.

So say you're a writer trying to reach an audience. Your problems are twofold: do you play the game and show the Gatekeepers the kinds of things they want to see, that conform to the people they'd like to be, and the country they'd like to show? (In which case you may indeed have a very nice career and may even get invited to parties where important people sue each other.) Or do you write for a show that you think will connect with the people?

Decide. Good luck with that. And let me know how it goes, ok? I'd really like to know.

Now... international scribes -- how does it work in your neck of the woods? How do you get past the mighty Gatekeepers? I'm interested to know.

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.

Okay. Cereal's eaten, coffee's poured, blogs blogged, paper read, ass in seat -- today is about the focused work. So as not to leave you hanging, dear reader, here's a wickedly entertaining piece from Slate speculating about "How you'll know when the boomers have lost control of the media."

Read it here. You'll be glad you did.

Dead Things Index

As of 6:31 PM, 11/15/2005:

Total Ass in Seat Hours: 9
Number of Glasses of Water consumed: 10
Number of Glasses of Coke Zero consumed: 3
Cups of Coffee consumed: 6

*note to self: may be dying.
*further note to self: what is the deal with Coke Zero, and why is it so much better than Diet Coke?

Pages revised: 14
Longest sustained block of work: 1.8 hours
Trips to the Bathroom: 5
Time, in minutes, spent watching birds swoop and turn outside my 9th floor window: 76.3

*how do they all know to turn at exactly the same time?
And what are they planning, flying in formation like that?

Amount of time spent updating sidebar links, in minutes: 28
Scribosphere-related procrastination, in minutes: 111
Time spent reading paper, in minutes: 11
Time spent reading John Doyle's book, in minutes: 13
Time spent talking to agent, in minutes: 6.3
Time spent talking to fellow writer friends, in minutes: 37
Time spent worrying about career, in hours (foreground): 1.3
Time spent worrying about career, in hours (background): 9.8
Time spent listening to Wilco's new live album, in hours: 1.3
Time it took for some reason to download album off Itunes, in hours: 1.4
Time spent wondering what seminal 80's song The O.C. will commission a cover of next, after "If You Leave" and "Forever Young," in minutes: 17
Best Guess, after 17 minutes: "Don't Stand So Close To Me" or "The Safety Dance"
Quality of today's work, expressed as a percentage: 58
Quality of today's procrastination, expressed as a percentage: 42
Quality of today's lunch, as expressed as a percentage: 28
Minutes until I have a celebratory, "you did what you could today" tumbler of Red Breast Irish Whiskey: 2

Think I'm Kidding about CBC?

I'm not.

Matt Watts is a very funny guy. Comic, writer, and one of the stars of recent episodes of The Newsroom, the show that, about ten years ago, made people go, "CBC did something hip?"

Well, plus ca change, plus ca meme chose...

Dear Richard Stursberg & Robert Rabinovich,

This is how you guys are treating your talent. Not some guy off the street. Not some unknown writer. A writer who's worked for you before. Who's on one of your big shows.

Seven months.

Good Grief.

Don't feel so bad.

Yes, my fellow Yanquis, he does look like a monkey.
But we in Canada don't have it so hot, either.
This is our current Prime Minister, The Right Honourable Paul "Mr. Dithers" Martin:



Isn't that awesome?

Now wait. It gets better. Because we're in a minority government situation here (if you don't understand the parliamentary system, Wikipedia, kids. But first, drop and tell me the line of succession in the USA to five places...) the Government is likely to fall sometime in the next two weeks. And there will be an election campaign.

An election campaign...over Christmas.

For a vote...in January.

They're going to make Canadians go to the polls in January.

Hahhahahahahahahahahaahahahahahah!

Don't laugh too hard, though, Chickens.

We still have a surplus.

Google Fun

Someone just came upon my blog by Googling the term:

"advantages of vaginaplasty"

To the best of my knowledge, I've never written on this subject.
I'm cold. And afraid. And the wolves are after me.

What are you guys thinking in Tokyo, anyway?

But I also have a 2nd draft to crank out, so...

Brr.