Sci-Fi Podcast Ho!

THIS IS unfortunate, because I really should have plugged this before, and now it seems like I'm just trying to be self-aggrandiz...(Ed: Stop being So Canadian.)

Right. Sorry. Sorry. (Ed: Really, quit it.)

Ahem.

Space: The Imagination Station is Canada's Sci-Fi/Fantasy Channel. I helped get the station off the ground as a Producer almost ten long years ago now, before I started writing professionally. This week, they invited me back to talk about my personal experience on Blood Ties and this posting on this old blog.

John Llyr and Mark Askwith are both friends of mine. Between them, they know just about everything there is to know about Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Star Trek, Comics, and all things genre.

Awhile ago, they started doing the HypaSpace Podcast, as a web complement to HypaSpace Weekly, SPACE's weekly wrapup of Sci-fi news and wackiness.

What's great about this podcast is that it's not just two guys yakking about sci-fi. The podcast runs down the latest news and rumors, to be sure, but it also plays clips from Space interviews with celebrities, artists, performers, writers -- this is stuff that never appears on TV, so it's pretty much exclusive stuff. And it's free.

So you should check it out. And if you check out this week's edition, you get to hear me yak, and then at the end they've even dug up a really cool interview I did with Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials) when I was at the station. I think you can even subscribe to the Podcast via RSS and on Itunes.

Thanks to Mark and John for making coming back so easy, and for picking an interview question where I don't sound like a total tool.

Will and His Landlord

YEARS AGO I was in a series of bizarre Hallowe'en promos for Canada's music video channel, Muchmusic. In my favorite one, you saw me screaming at an assailant who was throwing, hurling pumpkin after pumpkin at me, against a huge wall festooned with the Muchmusic logo. As the pumpkins got closer and closer, exploding seeds and viscera on me, I screamed my head off, taunting my assailant, screaming, "is that all you got? is that all you got?"

CUT TO:

The creative director's toddler son, sitting amid the pumpkins....crying.

I was there. I got pumpkin all over me. But even knowing how it was made, seeing it cut together, I still watched and thought I was a heel. And that made it all the funnier.

I'm probably the last person in the blogosphere to post this, but I don't care. Will Ferrell mines the same joke, but way better. And for the comedy scholars out there, let's review an important comedy rule:

• Making jokes about kids being drunk = always funny
• Actual drunk kids = never funny
  

EDIT: I took the video off because it was doing that weird thing of loading and playing whenever anyone came to the page. I don't know why. You can still find it at 150, 387 other places on the net, I'm sure.

More Radio Fun

APPARENTLY Yours Truly will be on CBC Radio on Monday talking about the return of HEROES, and girl tv vs. boy tv.

I'll be part of a panel on Q, the new Jian Ghomeshi afternoon Arts show. Check local listings for the time in your area. (In Toronto, it airs at 2pm.)

Be sure to roast me here after the segment. I loves me the punishing and the mocking.

Our Readers Write

A COUPLE of interesting posts/comments/emails received here at Dead Things HQ recently that deserve a bit o'mention. In response to the post below, "Why Canadian Satire Sucks," someguy commented:

I work on Mercer Report and I remember the debate footage.

As I recall the debate was on, like, a Monday and our show was airing the Monday afterwards. So if we were going to use the tape it would have been a week old. So we didn't use it. Nobody cared that we "weren't allowed."

I think our shows has done its share of satire. We've put the Liberal leadership up for auction on ebay. In our first season we actually (probably) cost a Winnipeg MP his job when we aired him falling asleep in the House of Commons. And there's Rick's rants.

That said the show isn't intended to be 100% satirical. It's a travel around Canada show with some satirical elements. When we send Rick to visit polar bears or go window washing we're not intending to do political satire.

I'm glad you wrote in, someguy, because it gives me a chance to say the thing that I didn't say this time when I revisited this subject -- I happen to think that Mercer and 22 are both very funny shows, with lots of great material. But they're not satire. Yes, both shows have in the past traded in satirical humor --The Rant bit Mercer does is the most satirical part of the show, but that's not their full brief.

Mark Farrell on Inside the CBC said much the same thing about 22 as you do above. There, he wrote:

I think of 22 as a news parody show. One of the tools it uses is satire.

I won’t speak for the other shows but when Mark Critch shows up at liberal debates and conventions the candidates tried to avoid us because they know or think we’re not going to be soft on them. For the most part those interviews are not set up before hand. But don’t take my word for it watch them on the website if you want and decide for yourself. As an example, according to our field producer, at the Giller awards Bob Rae was trying to get away, he was trying to avoid us, he took a wrong turn and ended up talking to Critch and Crawford.

Also, as an aside, the Prime Minister has so far refused to appear on 22 minutes (which is his right, he’s a pretty busy guy,); We (22) have not been invited into 24 Sussex.

So yep, let me say that I don't want to pillory either Mercer or 22 for not doing hard satire when it's not their intent to do hard satire.

Where the gap comes, and where I might diverge from Doyle a bit (or maybe this is what he's saying, too, I don't know, it's hard to tell) is that in the popular imagination, these shows are held up as "Canadian Satire" and are often (as in the case of the "Inside the CBC" reaction to Doyle's article) trotted out as an example of a more virtuous Canadian brand of humor that says something about our character.

In reality, it's anything but that. The combination of the "big 3" shows on CBC and the reverse onus libel laws in Canada make it very unlikely that any kind of true satire program could ever flourish in this country.

CBC can point to the "safe" poltical comedy we do and say, "see? we do that!" And they'll have plenty of people (like the apologist spinners on the CBC thread) who'll tart it up as virtue -- when really it's evidence of constriction, not expression.

Even on CTV/Comedy's doomed Popcultured, the brief was to do celebrity news "but with a smile," Ie: don't be mean. No wonder the show tanked. I mean, are we really saying that what our celebrity obsessed age needs is more softballs?

As Joanna Schneller put it in the Globe today (talking about the cessation of Premiere Magazine):

Premiere gave writers space in which to expand ideas about our cultural moment in a general-interest format. Without venues like it, entertainment writing falls into two slots: either highly specified, or distressingly shallow, a scrap heap of sound bites, tabloids, "charticles" and gossip. There may not be many of us actively mourning the loss of Premiere's type of intelligence, but we'll all feel it

I think the same is true of the lack of true satire in Canada. I think it makes us poorer, and smugger, as a people. There's a study out just now that proves that viewers of The Daily Show are better informed about issues than the rest of the U.S. populace -- including people who watch the national nightly TV news. What the study seems to indicate is not that people get their news from the show, but that to find the show funny, you have to have a base level of understanding of the issues. To me, one of the great strengths of both Colbert and Stewart is that they are actually quite hard on Democrats, too. That's the nice thing about true satire -- it means challenging ALL the received wisdom.

I like to think that Canadians are generally better informed than Americans about what's going on in the world. But I've also found in my personal experience that the best informed Americans are a lot more willing to challenge the orthodoxies at play in their mediascape, than the best informed Canadians are willing to examine similar Canadian myths.

I think that's because no one here ever says truly impertinent things. And I think a large part of the reason for that is because, well...they're afraid.

The example used in The Walrus article of a joke that almost got Mary Walsh in deep dutch was the quip about then-Reform Party Leader Preston Manning's speech being better "in the original German." Had the Reformers pressed a suit there, there probably would have been trouble -- despite the fact that the joke is funny.

I happen to think that's probably not good for either humor, satire, or political debate in this country. It's not that we're kinder, gentler. It's that we pull our punches. And in this day and age, I'm not sure we can afford to do that.

Thanks for writing, and letting me clarify my position on those shows, someguy.

***

Reader Jesse emailed me a link to this very fine story in the Chicago Reader, about how this summer, the Washington Post will close its one-man Canadian bureau, leaving absolutely zero American newspaper bureaus based in Canada.

Writer Michael Miner sounds like he had an opposite experience to me: he's an American who spent several years in Canada as a boy. Well, that's not exactly opposite. I'm an American who only lived in the U.S. a short while before I...no...wait...I'm a Canadian who was born in the...well, that's not exactly...

Oh bother -- read the article. One of my favorite points, which comes courtesy of the writer's Vancouver-based sister:

Canada is enough like the U.S. that Americans can't afford to pay attention to it. If we saw things Canadians did better, we'd have no good excuse not to copy them.

Neat observation. Miner also has a lovely turn of phrase when he observes:

Despite what Canadians think we all think, I don't consider Canada a part of the U.S. that technically isn't. For me, Canada is some sort of benign antimatter whose reason for being is to not be us. The existence of Canada is the gentlest reproach on earth.

"The gentlest reproach on Earth." I like that. I like that a lot. Thanks for passing that article along, Jesse.

***

Finally, an emailer, who I'll call, "Etobicoke," asks:

Are you going to write about the return of Billable Hours?

Well, Etobicoke, no. We don't talk about Billable Hours on this blog. We did once or twice -- tangentially -- when it first came out. Then, our delicate ears heard that someone connected with the show was going around saying that I slammed the show all the time on the blog. They were powerful upset bout it. They were upset enough to complain about me in Banff, and they were still complaining about me at industry events six months later. So, um...I punt.

However, if you'd like to read more about some of the changes made for Billable Hours' second season, Canadian Press has a great article on them, by Lee-Anne Goodman. Sounds like they really worked hard to retool to a more American-style writing room. You can see and judge the results for yourself when Showcase debuts the second season, this Sunday night, at 9:30 p.m.

They bad mouthed you, yet you plug the show? Why?

Because the Baby Jesus said, "turn the other cheek." And as I've said before, I'm a big fan of Baby Jesus, rather than scary punishy judgey Mel Gibson Jesus.

You're such a good boy.

Thanks, Mom. Er... I mean..."Etobicoke," thanks for writing.

Why Canadian Satire Sucks

A RECENT CONTRETEMPS in this blog had me take on (rather badly) the concept of satire at the CBC and in Canadian Comedy, as evidenced by three shows: Air Farce, 22, and Mercer. All this was sparked by a column John Doyle wrote about the subject in the Globe. If you click the link above, you can see the whole sorry exchange including me bloviating rather ... counterproductively ... on the Inside the CBC blog.

For the record, there is a problem in sharpness in Canadian comedy, and I knew this, and I knew it was at least partially structural, but I was exhausted at the prospect of trying to explain it.

Enter The Walrus.

One of the great things about playing poker with smart guys is that they read, and one of my friends left behind his copy of The Walrus on just this subject last weekend. I just got through the article in question, and it pretty clearly lays out (much to the consternation, I'm sure, of the ultra nationalists who wanted to make lameness a virtue) just why the situation is so.

And lo, The Walrus has that article (by Rebecca Addelman) online here.

Or at least the start of it, anyway. The article starts, cheekily, with a moment that was pretty dark for me -- during the last election, The Daily Show actually used clips of the Leaders debate to make fun of Canadian politics...which is something Canadian comedy shows were not allowed to do. (Oh my, isn't THAT something to be proud of...)

South of the border, the folks at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart thought otherwise. On January 19, broadcasting across ctv and Comedy Network airwaves into 465,000 Canadian homes, Stewart launched into six minutes on the debates. After airing some of the French-language contest, he deadpanned, “You may have noticed the quality of that footage was a bit grainier than the footage we usually steal. That’s because we had to get it from the Internet.” He then introduced more “forbidden fruit of debate footage that the cbc and the Parliament felt was too explosive for fake news”—two dreary Stephen Harper sound bites proving that Lunz was right, this stuff is boring, but that boring, in a blue-plaid tie, can be funny too. Canada is famous for birthing satirists who have gone on to take down the American establishment. How did we get to the point of needing Jon Stewart to make fun of our politicians for us?

The article goes on to explain the problems inherent in Canada's legal system -- the limits on criticism through free speech; the "reverse onus" that hamstrings comedians, and the more sinister, creeping effect where no one ever thinks of approaching the line lest they provoke a lawsuit that they're not insured for.

All in all, it's textbook libel chill. It's nothing to be proud, or smug about, and it's rampant in this otherwise great country.

Great article. Great magazine. (I would be very very happy to receive, say...you know, a free sub...hint hint)

Read it and weep.

Just don't make a joke about me that comes close to that imaginary line, because the burden's on you to prove it... and I'd love the money...

Fun With Actors' Names

LAURENCE LEBOEUF is a girl. SHIA LABEOUF is a boy.

Return to your homes, citizens.

Dipping My Toe into Durham

SO LAST NIGHT was a dip back into the thrall of the Toronto media thing scene. Which sounds about as fun as it is, but heyo, it's a living.

At a club in West End Toronto that used to be a lot more fun when it was The Mockingbird, the CFC held a launch party and panel discussion for a new original Canadian series called Durham County.

Durham County is a six part, one hour mystery/police procedural series that will premiere May 7 on Canada's premium pay cable channels, Movie Central (Western Canada) and TMN (Eastern Canada.)

TMN/Movie Central are getting aggressive about raising the bar on their original programming, and after some highs (they were first in for Slings & Arrows) and lows (sorry, Terminal City, which recently proved the difference between a format sale and a program sale) they are really doing their level best to complement all that sweet sweet stuff they pick up from HBO and Showtime.


Durham County has a lot going for it. I first heard about this show last year. Then, I got to work with Holly Dale, (who directed Episodes One through Four) out on Blood Ties. The buzz has been good. So I settled in last night with fingers crossed. I've liked some of Back Alley's shows in the past (Talk 16, Drop The Beat) and been lukewarm toward others (Straight Up, Bliss) but from the moment I walked in, you could tell that straight from the graphic image treatment, they definitely know their mood.

They only showed clips, but the clips I saw seemed fine indeed. There's some first rate actors in this, including a lot of actors who are working in English, rather than their native Quebec French. Laurence Lebouef, who plays the daughter, and Patrick Labbe in particular are huge, huge stars in Quebec.

It's worth a chuckle to know that yup, in fine Let's All Hate Toronto fashion, this is the second series we've talked about this week that is set ostensibly here (Durham County is North East of Toronto) and filmed somewhere else. (Durham County was shot in Montreal.)

Gosh, we can't even play ourselves anymore...SEE! We ARE like New York!

On the panel was Adrienne Mitchell, one of the Executive Producers (with Janis Lundman, who wasn't there,) the writer of all six episodes, Laurie Finstad Knizhnik, and stars Hugh Dillon and Laurence Leboeuf.

Hugh Dillon is amusing and great on screen. Very charismatic and wounded....in the opening episode, at least -- which is the only one I've seen so far, he's got a quality to him that you see on the best of those British Crime dramas, like Cracker or Touching Evil or Prime Suspect. Like everyone these days, people on the panel gushed about The Sopranos, but DC doesn't strike me as being quite that operatic. It's smaller, quieter, and more sinister -- it really does have that British crime thriller feel.

Which is awesome. I love those shows.

Anyway, I'm always going to be endlessly grateful to Hugh Dillon, not just for his rock and roll past and Hard Core Logo and his great charisma on screen, but for the fact that I got to sit in the audience and hear him swear constantly at this launch event. I mean, like, Fleet Week swearing. I think I saw a couple of delicate flowers jump in the back row -- especially when he said a word that I don't think we've ever heard on a panel discussion in Canada, anywhere. He's the perfect antidote to Canadian fussiness, and he brought it bigtime last night. Good on him.

It's interesting to see these panel discussions, having seen so many of the damn things in the past and even having had to cover a few. It's like when it comes to Canadian shows, we're not fully media trained, and getting things across clearly and succinctly seems to be a stretch. The most impressive speaker was probably Leboeuf, who was very eloquent in talking about how the portrayal of violence is handled in the show.

It's clear that everyone had Virginia Tech on their minds, and as Leboeuf struggled to contextualize the drama, you could see that everyone was still continuing a conversation that they'd obviously had many times on set.

DC forces you to be a voyeur to violence...it implicates you straight off the bat -- the opening five minutes are difficult to watch. But that's kind of the point. As the setpieces slowly unspool, it becomes clear early on that what you're watching isn't really a whodunnit, so much as a whydoneit. That's really appealing to me. I pitched and tried to make Across The River To Motor City more of a whydoneit last year, and met resistance. We ultimately wound up changing it but I'm intrigued to see how DC handles the brief. It's kind of like the road not taken.

Being an event about Canadian tv, someone inevitably asked about the financing. In this case, it seems like DC benefited from TMN/Movie Central + Rogers Fund + CTF + Canwest Global + money upfront from Granada, the international distributor -- based on the scripts. THAT's interesting, in a "you know, huh..." kind of way.

As for the rest of the event, everyone seemed delighted (maybe a trifle too delighted) that the show's turned out as well as it did. Every time my American angel hears too much hype, my Canadian angel gets embarrased and says, "really, just let people see it for themselves...don't make a fuss." This is why I am never happy, maybe.

It was nice to ease back into the scene with a low key event. There were the usual party suspects. Some welcome familiar faces, and some new ones bold enough to introduce themselves (I got asked twice how I liked Grindhouse, and was puzzled at first til I realized I had, in fact, written about going to see the movie yesterday. I enjoyed it lots, thanks for asking. I wonder if this is how Paris Hilton feels about getting caught not wearing underwear?)

There were writers only too happy to plant themselves at the periphery with me and ogle the Dead Things -- not on sticks, for once, more like in little bowls. There was shrimp, though.

It's completely clear to me that I need to psych myself up to bring my A-game for the Canadian Screenwriting Awards Monday. I'm going to need to pre-load a few conversation sparklers. And I have to enjoy myself, since it looks like my little work furlough is going to be short-lived. Again, more on that later.

As for Durham County, I'll be posting a full review of all six episodes closer to the premiere date. This is one I want to savor a bit.

You know, like the shrimp. I don't mind if you say I'm being a little shellfish.

Okay, now I'm just ashamed.

Wherein Denis Posts The Cat

NOT REALLY, I mean, I don't even have a cat. I barely know any cats. But I don't really have much to say today but a bunch of little tiny things.

So this will be the bunch of little tiny things post.

I'll probably have more substantive stuff in a couple days -- including some news that affects the drift of this blog in the months to come.

• It occurs to me that since I arrived back in Toronto, I have not seen the sun. That strikes me as somewhat ironic.
  
  
• ROGERS should spend less time buying money losing terrestrial television stations from CTV Globemedia and more time fixing my stupid damn buggy HD PVR
  
  
• A cut on the tip of your finger can bleed for a very long time. Almost the entire length of a Sopranos episode.
  
  
• Macs rule, but Apple sucks. There. I said it.
  
  
• Do not even get me started about Crackbook.
  
  
• You know that thing about stop and appreciate the little things? Well, for all the nutsoness of being a writer sometimes, there are nights like the one I spent last night at The Paddock, surrounded by some of the funniest comedy writers in Canada, telling stories. Good conversation, good people, good humor -- it all goes a long way. It almost makes you forget to drink.
  
  
• I've made it through to the end of Ep.2 of The Sopranos, and any lingering dissatisfaction with the drift of the first half of the season is gone. What a valedictory. The way it's lensed, with all those autumnal browns and indirect lighting takes my breath away. Melfi's office has never looked so ominous. I take it back. The Sopranos does live up to the hype. All that and Sydney Pollack too.
  
  
• Mark Leiren-Young, a nice writer who also worked on Blood Ties, sent me a link yesterday to this article he wrote, an interview with Vonnegut. I'm still bummed out by his passing. It's funny the things you can't shake off. John Doyle in the Globe today also has a wonderful appreciation for June Callwood. Many years ago, Callwood gave the commencement address at my University graduation. I forget now what she said, but it was suitably inspiring and wonderful at the time -- and warm -- and I think I even remember taking comfort in her words for the first couple of years when I was working and it seemed like I was banging my head against the wall. People like that make you want to just make dead sure you put out into the world more good things than bad. Yup. I guess I'm thinking about karma now.
  
  
• This is just hilarious -- passed on to me by Diane. Yes. Hating Toronto. I hear it's set to be a demonstration sport at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

Tell a joke or pet your cat today. Call Mom. Encourage someone who looks like they need it.

Me, I'm going to see Grindhouse.

Oh snap. See what I did there?

Despair.

I HAVE NEVER seen a film or TV show where a troubled sociopath shot up anywhere and it was glorified.

But the United States' relationship with guns is sick. It always has been. The video below is moronic. It shows just how adolescent the gun cliche has become in our culture.

As the inevitable Columbine rehash happens over the next few days, please remember that we heard this all before. And nothing has changed.

Change requires will. And will requires generational rage. You are the ones being killed, in Iraq and on your own campuses. Your culture is producing these damaged people.

What will you do to stop them?

While you're at that, I'm going to say a quick prayer for the dead.

UPDATE: Just because it happens every time I post something like this, I should remind upfront that I am, in fact, American-born. I vote proudly, and have always been proud of the good that the United States of America has brought to the world. Like a lot of Americans living abroad, I've had a rough few years keeping the candle lit.

But there's another motion here, too. For any Canadians reading this, I get slagged each and every time I mention something like this, but go read Jim Henshaw's post today about the amnesia at root in Canadian society. We love it when Rick Mercer goes Talking To Americans, while we all cede anything in Canada that makes the culture here slightly different.

And then something like this horrific shooting happens. I know. We've had a few here in Canada. But the difference is that after women were murdered by Marc Lepine in Montreal, things changed. Gun laws changed. That, at least, is not part of the Canadian amnesia. This country doesn't produce psychopathic spree killers at quite the rate as the United States does.

The U.S. and Canada have been moving apart culturally for years. But the people selling the stories and the people buying the stories here aren't actually, you know, buying the stories. Our cultural future is American. Stop being smug about being Canadian...because if your kids don't know Vimy and everything else, then what's the difference? Run up the Stars & Stripes and be done with it.

Ooh. Yes. Someone's blood sugar is low today.

Do What You Say!

Well, apparently all that has to happen to have a funny SNL is for me not to watch. This is probably zipping all over the Interweb today, but the reason I like it is because it's kind of bullshit to write a death scene. Any death scene. Time was, you'd give somebody a great out line, like all those old film noirs. But just like the whole shift to the "auteur" theory in film, there's been an equal shift away from giving characters something meaningful to say before they check out.

Now the death is all about the cutting and the foofera. This particular short borrows heavily from "The O.C." -- who knew their melodrama well. (Well, except for Oliver.)

Go on, write a death scene after watching this. I dare you. (Dennis Heaton gets points for sending this to me first.)

Horror is Sccaarrry Work...

So the new issue of Canadian Screenwriter is out on the stands now, and the cover article by Vern Smith is up at the Writers Guild of Canada site. The article features extensive conversations with two of my Blood Ties compatriots, Peter Mohan and (Evil) Dennis Heaton:

Although a fan, Peter Mohan had never written about vampires when he browsed the horror section of a Toronto bookstore 10 or 12 years ago. There, he found a novel about a cop and vampire searching for demons downtown, and said, “Hold it, I like all those things.”

Flash forward, and Mohan is showrunning Blood Ties, adapting Tanya Huff’s “Blood” novels for the small screen. The series–which debuted on Lifetime in the U.S. in March, and will eventually air on CHUM in Canada–revolves around Vicki Nelson, a cop turned private detective suffering from a degenerative eye disease, and her love interest, a 450-year-old vampire. Upon said revelations, the focus of her agency becomes more about ghost-busting and less about fraud and adultery. But as appealing as the gist of it was the day Mohan read the back-cover copy inside Book City in Toronto’s Annex, the kicker was that this story was set nearby. And above all else, it meant the job of establishing normalcy would be a little more seamless in giving way to supernatural revelations.

“This is a quintessential Canadian show in a way that many others aren’t because we don’t push a Canadian agenda,” Mohan says. “It’s just a cool story that happens to occur here. We can make shows that travel with real streets and locations in establishing shots. It’s just centred in this place to ground this world.”

Previously, Mohan worked on such shows as Due South and Mutant X and wrote scripts for La Femme Nikita, PSI Factor, and Highlander. As for horror, he’d written episodes of Friday the 13th: the series, and produced FOX TV’s Eerie Indiana: The Next Dimension. He’s also been working on a “kickass” vampire feature film over the past few years. The important part was that Mohan was already up to speed on Huff’s Blood franchise, as well as the genre’s hallmarks, when Kaleidoscope Entertainment serendipitously came calling.

“I’ve liked a lot of horror writers–King at times, McCammon, Clive Barker’s books of blood,” Mohan says. “I still remember as a young kid reading ‘Dracula’–the texture of the paper, an onion-skin paper, it was so affecting.”

Personally, Mohan sees the genre through a psychological lens filled with fears about life, death, intimacy, and generally “opening oneself up.” In terms of the evolution of Blood Ties, he describes a larger story arc involving fate, Vicki, her new partner, the vampire, and her former boyfriend/partner on the Toronto police force.

(Above, Peter Mohan works hard at his desk. He may be reading a network notes email. But he's probably on YouTube, because inspiration is hard, bitches. Below at right, Peter Mohan and Dennis Heaton in my office at Blood Ties. You can tell we're talking about something important because Peter is holding a real live BT script in his hand.)

“I’ve done 450 hours of TV, often having to pretend Toronto is Chicago, New York, wherever, so it’s great to write a show where they’re chasing monsters in the Annex,” Mohan says. “That’s the crazy thing about horror. The more you ground the story in something mundane, commonplace, the more you open your eyes to another level. By setting this in a very realistic Toronto with realistic cops who never thought there was anything like this, there’s a whole new world. Even cold cases that seemed insoluble–suddenly they’re looking at things differently.”

For Dennis Heaton, who also worked on Blood Ties, helping audiences establish normalcy was also job one with Fido, a zombie feature that debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. In Fido, it was a 1950s fictional small town, Willard, whereas Blood Ties is contemporary. In either case, Heaton describes a mandatory process of making that world as ordinary as possible.“You want to ground your audience so that when your character moves into the supernatural and then the unreal, they start to have reactions to that world, and your audience is having the same reaction,” Heaton says.

“You set it up and here’s your real world and now you’re faced with a vampire and your characters going through disbelief until it’s proven. You draw your audience in through your protagonist. If you’re set in a fantastic world, then your audience is going to have a certain disconnection from reality.”

Adapting all that horror
Blood Ties is also an adaptation for the small screen, so slicing the pie among a group of writers that included the author was another trick entirely.

With author Huff writing one episode, Mohan says the Blood Ties crew stayed true to the central literary dynamic by having the author in on story meetings and pitch sessions.

“Given the time constraints of television production and how quickly you have to get a script turned around, it’s better to have so many hands on deck,” adds Heaton. “You put your script forward and you’re getting feedback from maybe five or six people. You still have to filter that information, but it helps you focus the script faster.

“When you’ve got six people and they’re all saying this doesn’t work, you know it doesn’t work. Then you also have that assistance in finding out how to improve it and get it done, so your writing time is reduced from two or three weeks to three or four days because there are so many people cooking the script with you.”

Still, putting literature on TV can be brutal on the original artifact, so what about having the author in on the deed?

“Tanya’s been really good with us in the sense that these are her characters and she has certain feelings about how they’re produced,” says Heaton. “She gave Peter a lot of freedom to transform it from her literary world into television. It was a positive experience to work with her and get notes from her about whether we’re deviating from her course, because she also understands the things that have to change.”

As for the rest of the process, Mohan describes it as controlled chaos, saying, “You had to be writer and audience at the same time, and you had to be a hard audience. To win people over we had to bring them along by creating something emotionally real. Vicki is a hard sell to the supernatural. Bit by bit, she becomes more exposed to proof. If she’s accepted it, I think our audience will accept it. By that point, I think they will be invested in her character and her entanglements.”

(Above, Dennis Heaton and Travis McDonald in a notes session in Peter's office. You can see that we've failed to keep Travis awake.)

And While You're At It, Don't Call Me Bruce, Either.

INTERESTING ARTICLE over at Wired News. Jason Silverman explores the persistent impulse away from labelling something "sci-fi."

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is set during a nuclear winter. Two survivors walk south, breathing toxic air, seeking out the continent's last canned food while ducking bands of flesh-eaters.
Describe it as "post-apocalyptic," as most critics did, or as a masterpiece of dystopian literature. Just don't call McCarthy's novel "science fiction."
Even when clearly appropriate, film studios and publishers avoid the phrase "science fiction." So do the novelists, film directors and editors in their employ. McCarthy's book, which is about to become a blockbuster -- Oprah Winfrey will tout it on an upcoming TV show as part of her book club -- is just another example of how the powers that be dodge the term, especially when it applies to "serious" fiction or cinema.
You won't find the words "science fiction" in Random House's bio of Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author China Miéville. Instead, he's called the "edgiest mythmaker of the day." Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep? It's classified as comedy, drama, romance and fantasy, but not sci-fi, at Amazon.com.

Out in the fan weeds, the reverberations of this impulse have caused a lot of consternation, and their own twisting reactions. Some won't call literary Sci-Fi by that name, preferring "SF."

Others refer to "genre" shows -- which always struck me in its own way as ridiculously broad. I mean, what genre? That's as silly as speculative fiction.

Sci-Fi isn't the only genre that gets to play this silly game with language. Horror on TV goes through a similar kneejerk, for a different reason. Most TV stations that have to think about advertisers and crazy Christian boycotts won't be seen to get behind Horror -- even though you could argue that it's a genre that is enjoying an enormous popular upswing right now. But if you're pitching, you better be pitching a supernatural thriller, kids.

I remember marvelling once when I called something "horror" and a network type corrected me instantly with, "dark fantasy." Boom. Not even a blink.

We have always been at war with Eurasia, you see.

But the sci-fi thing, to me, is particularly problematic. Because the labeling game is causing problems.

First you get a show like Battlestar Galactica. It doesn't matter how many top ten lists it's going to appear on, it doesn't matter that this is a show that you'd appreciate if you love The Wire or The Sopranos -- there's a big portion of the audience that won't tune it in because "that's sci fi. and that title."

There are reviewers that hate sci-fi. There are people who won't go past their prejudices. I've never once seen data that suggests that the kind of person who hates Sci-fi and that label would watch the show if it was called something else.

Moore's BSG is a gutsy show. It's fearless storytelling. It's challenging, it's relevant, and it's provocative. And despite what he says, it is also great sci-fi.

I mean, face it, if something's sci-fi, most people are going to figure that out. If you keep promoting the idea that the sci-fi moniker is something to be shied away from, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're dooming a genre that's always been about critiquing the world we live in now, and ceding it to the fanboys who like to see stuff blow up.

When you lose the clarifying ability of genre -- when you try to hide it, you lose sight, I think, of the mechanics of what you're doing -- and everything becomes softer and more slippery. If you're trying to run away from what kind of show it is, then how can you honestly talk about what needs to be in the show to reach -- never mind the audience that you want to trick into watching -- but the audience who would be predisposed to watch anyway?

In the network hallways, that leads to some frustrating conversations where they buy a sci-fi concept, and then fall over backwards trying to hide the sci-fi in it. You know how hard that is to write? Very.

Because there are certain expectations people have in watching sci-fi product, whether it's called that or not. Can you imagine a soap opera without any sex, either actual or implied? What about a murder mystery where they said, "maybe we should think twice about having a body." But these straitjackets are applied to sci-fi shows all the time. You get notes that just aren't consistent with the genre -- there's no sense making a Six Feet Under observation in a show that's just not built that way. You find yourself getting notes that you can't take -- because you have the wrong premise, the wrong characters, the wrong sets. And all this comes out of the idea that it's okay to buy one kind of show and then say you're going to make another.

Don't get me wrong -- there's a whole lot of problems catering to the built in audience, as well. For one thing, in my experience working for Canada's sci-fi channel, I've found that generally the hardest core fans tend to eschew complexity. They're conservative -- they don't like change. They don't like sex or complex human relationships between men and women. They like to think of themselves as more sophisticated, and smarter than the "average" tv viewer -- when in reality, they're not. But you know what? Maybe that's because all this dancing around what is and what isn't sci-fi has resulted in that being the only sector of the audience who's left willing to put up their hands and call themselves a sci-fi fan. Everyone else has moved on because they don't want dumb, and they don't like confused. There's other places to get your quality fix.

In the end, the reason why a lot of sci-fi product winds up being anemic, dull, or retreaded and bled of creativity is because in that development process, you have the people paying the piper begging writers to run away from the thing that is the very essence of the show.

It's focacta.

Which is why I'm working on a script that is a Dark Thrillo-Comic Serial Standalone Scientific Fantastical Musical Romcom Procedural.

Okay. Time for lunch.

Huh.

SWEAR TO GOD, til I saw a promo for SNL last night, I thought Shia LeBoeuf was a girl.

Interweb Solitaire

I WAS AMUSED to see that photos I posted here, and the descriptions, got immediately lifted and reposted on a fan page out there. Ah the Internet. Remember the days of having to search out for any morsel of someone you liked? That fragment of a show or a song lyric? Does it mean anything to anyone under about 23 that once upon a time, if you didn't know a song, you had to sometimes wait weeks to hear it again -- on the radio?

I like experiments. And this is a juicy one. I found this going through my Iphoto folder. It's a cute photo from the Blood Ties wrap party of Kyle Schmid (Henry Fitzroy) with the "Blood" books (and Henry) creator Tanya Huff.



Now...let's see how far this smacks across that interweb, how fast. On your mark, get set...swiiiipe!


It's like throwing red meat to a bunch of wild dogs. Heh heh.

Stan Daniels at The Turn

JAIME WEINMAN reminded me of something in the comments below about Stan Daniels. He, of course, is eponymously immortalized with his own type of joke: The Stan Daniels Turn.

It's kind of a self-aware, almost meta-humorous type of joke, because it's sort of a game between the writer and the audience -- see if they can set up something and find a creative way to contradict it in the very next moment -- and because it often depends on something happening oh-so-conveniently on cue, as in the above joke. When it works, it works really well, though.

Weinman wrote about it last year, and posted a great example from Mary Tyler Moore, and the incomparable Ted Knight. This is a great lesson for Comedy writers. I actually use appreciation for the Stan Daniels Turn as a litmus test for writers, directors, and network people.

Audiences love the Stan Daniels Turn. It's a really satisfying joke when executed right. And I've been in lots of meetings where directors, network people, and other writers pooh-pooh it. Because they're too good for the Stan Daniels Turn, you see.

I call these people, "people who do not understand comedy." When I am handed power, they will be shunned in accordance with the laws of the tribe.

Thanks, Weinman, for allowing me to skate through another day by glomming onto another's work.

Um...It's homage?

MIP, Mop, Map?

IT'S SO hard to know if this is just a case of positive thinking or if it's really a new trend in Canadian programming.

Currently, Canuck dramas and kids series are hot, some more so in foreign lands than at home.

Shaftesbury Films' ReGenesis has been sold to 110 countries and is near to bagging a U.S. sale. Its kids series Life with Derek airs worldwide in 137 countries and 10 languages. The show, airing on Disney, has also placed among the top 10 cable series for tween girls in the U.S.

Christina Jennings, chairman and co-CEO of Shaftesbury, says tentpole hits like that open doors in foreign markets. For example, Shaftesbury made The Murdoch Mysteries originally as TV movies for CHUM, then developed it as a TV series with Britain's UKTV.

"There's no question anymore that Shaftesbury could deliver commercial programming that worked in the international market," says Jennings.

The incredible thing is, here we are on the cusp of a time when having new streams of content is going to be essential, because national broadcast borders are being blown up, and Canadian networks are potentially putting themselves in the position where people go to them last.

Desperate Networks teaches that no show gets on the air without one champion inside a network.

This math...it just doesn't add up, does it?

Wow. It's a Bad Day for Writers

I'M SURE we'll see some better recollections from those who knew him -- but a sad loss to TV writers:

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Stan Daniels, the Emmy-winning co-creator and executive producer of "Taxi" and a writer on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," has died. He was 72.

The Toronto-born Daniels died of heart failure April 6, according to Mount Sinai Memorial Park, where a funeral was planned for Thursday. Daniels won eight Emmys during his long television career, including three for "Taxi" and three for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

Daniels apparently passed away April 6, but it was just announced today. If you read this blog and you knew Stan Daniels, I'd love to hear any anecdote. Especially anybody from the Toronto days.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

"And even if the wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death."


Damnit. After yesterday's post...well...


Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

If you really want to upset your parents, and you are not brave enough to be gay, go into the arts!

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please—a little less love, and a little more common decency.'"

And, of course...

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Rest in Peace. And thanks for the books.

Bring Out Your Dead, Bring Out Your Dead

Andy Barker.

God-Damn-it.
I hope you fuckers really, really, really love your According to Jim.

Out of the Bubble and Onto The Street

I AM kind of a news junkie. Always have been. When I don't know something that's going on in the world, I feel stupid. So it is that I pass by a group of Falun Gong protestors, and go home and learn about the group. (This is actually how I did learn about Falun Gong years ago -- the things you see walking through the city...)

I also consume newspapers and magazines voraciously. And online, too.

But in Vancouver, I was more out of touch than I usually am, and my online media habits started to reveal cracks in information flow. By reading my usual online sources like the New York Times and Salon and the Washington Post and others, I felt pretty up to date with what was going on in the United States, and more or less the world. For some reason, I didn't read the Guardian as much as I do when I'm in Toronto. Maybe it scared me, as, you know, since I was on Pacific time and they were in England that was like reading news of the future.

Anyway, obviously, thanks to bookmarking, and the newly revitalized Playback brand, I even felt like I had a sense of what was going on in the TV and Film industry.

Where things fell down was on the Canada front. I'm sorry, but Canada simply does not have a top level, quality online news site. Not Google news, certainly not the Canada.com branded portals (Vancouver Sun, National Post, etc.) The Globe has annoying firewalls for their best content; The Star is too-Toronto focused (and strangely, which may surprise some people, I'm not really eager to keep up with the Toronto news when I'm not in Toronto. Though I'm sorry I missed the Lower Bay reroute of the TTC.)

So it was that though I was up to the millisecond on news of Anna Nicole, her baby, Britney, her head, and the American Idol castoffs, and their dirty online pics -- I had only a vague, foggy sense of what's been going on in the country I live in for the last three months. Good thing it was winter in Canada, so the answer was largely, "not much."

Also, Macleans is a great site. Without Macleans, I would have sounded like a total idiot.

Anyway, this little bubble extended especially into my last weekend on the left coast. I did a lot of cool things -- saw the Fred Herzog show at the VAG, (which a reliable source insists is not pronounced in such a way that it rhymes with, "cadge." Yeah, whatever.) I also watched the world go by on a grey Howe Street afternoon, had a great meal at Feenies, saw The Lookout (Joseph Gordon-Levitt is dreamy.) visited with friends, met some B.C. writer and production types at The Irish Heather, and haunted my fave coffee spots -- but I didn't pick up a newspaper. I was more concerned with the geography of getting all my stuff into my two bags. Even having shipped two boxes off beforehand -- it was close. Too close.

So it was a bit of a surreal experience to see the solemn juxtaposition of the Vimy 90th Anniversary and the death of six Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan play out as point-counterpoint silently over the baggage carousel at Pearson Airport, as I waited for those two bags. It's then, for the first time, I learned the names of the dead, and saw the cutways to PM Harper and the Queen in France. A set of golf clubs sailed ludicrously past as the CBC switched to footage of a nursing home, and a poor, shaking, broken man who's presumably one of the last survivors of that battle. His grandson spoke for him, and though I'm sure he was saying all the correct things, I couldn't hear that, and I felt a little angry and unexpectedly melancholy at the thought that this old man was already silenced; his descendant already speaking for him, reshaping the narrative of that terrible day and what it all meant.

Jim Henshaw has a lovely little piece about Vimy and his grandfather's memory of it up at his place. For a different view about the juxtaposition of Vimy and the deaths in Afghanistan, today Doyle writes a piece that's thoughtful and interesting and will undoubtedly get all the people who get riled up by Doyle riled up again.

The talk, in the reportage, was of how the sacrifice at Vimy defined Canada as a nation. This was largely unquestioned as an idea and the image of the majestically large memorial only underlined that idea. Nobody seemed to be appearing on TV questioning the validity of the proposal that blood sacrifice is necessary to define nationhood.

This is a multicultural society, not one in which everybody can be assumed to share the same opinion on Canada, Canadian history and the meaning of being Canadian. To some, whose roots are in other societies and who have found refuge here, the acceptance of the idea of blood sacrifice is difficult. The public promulgation of the idea makes them uneasy, and with good reason.

The debate about the meaning of Vimy and the questioning of its accepted meaning happened in newspapers, this one is particular. TV is hopeless on such issues.

This is definitely received wisdom in Canada. The narrative is shaped in one very specific direction: At Vimy, the soldiers from the small nation, Canada, prevailed where the British and the French had failed. Canadians paid a terrible price, and came out the other end as a nation.

That's what I learned in my high school history class. One of the coolest things about history in high school for me was taking the U.S. History class. Because all the dates and events were familiar to me (I was a history geek way back) but having them taught from a dispassionate Canadian perspective was sobering and interesting. None of the tropes or myths were allowed to remain intact. It was intellectually bracing. (I also had a wonderful teacher, who sadly died a year later.) But when I took my Canadian History class, I remember feeling intense dissonance in how they could teach that Canada was born out of revulsion at the U.S. Civil War, and wanting to avoid that all costs (which is one of the reasons Confederation came together the way it did) and this idea that Vimy defined the nation. But I never put up my hand. I had the sense that this was one piece of national mythology that didn't bear examination...at least not in Canadian History class.

If you've read Doyle's book about growing up watching TV in Ireland, I think you have a clearer idea and context of where he's coming from. He was a boy who watched his countrymen explode into violence in a most peculiar way -- on the TV. The War on Terrorism by definition means something different to someone who grew up in that context.

I'm just not sure. I think what the Canadians did at Vimy was undoubtedly brave. But as a young nation, to lose so many young men who could have been building the country for a pointless, stupid fight a continent away -- well... we're ninety years on now. Can't we say that World War I was a bewildering, pointless, awful mess with impunity now? Or is that not - in the parlance of our time - supporting the troops?

I don't know.

Yesterday afternoon, I was in a cab and talk radio was playing and I learned the NHL had favored NBC, who pay nothing for NHL rights, over CBC, who pay a hunk o change -- giving the all-important Sidney Crosby game to the NBC afternoon sched, forcing Hockey Night in Canada to go with a game of lesser interest to Canadians Saturday night. If Hockey is religion in Canada, then the Saturday night game is its greatest sacrament.

I didn't get what was going on at first, in the cab. So I asked the cabbie.

"They move hockey to afternoon. Very bad. Very bad for Canada."

I asked his name. Asif. I may not have the spelling right. Asif comes from Jordan. He's been here five years. Asif knows his Canada, that's for sure. I thought about Vimy and the sacrifice and received wisdom and what defines a nation and how much better I felt when I wasn't living in a news bubble.

I went home, and restarted my newspaper delivery. They start coming tomorrow.

Fun With Runways

YOU'RE COUNTING down, ten nine eight... waiting to touch down, the only part of the flight when you're a little scared...and you're maybe 100 feet from the ground and suddenly the engines scream bloody murder and the plane banks left and up, up up and you're all like, WTF?

And then a couple minutes later, the Air Canada First Officer comes on and says, with characteristic understatement, "Folks, they were gonna put us on a runway with a flight that hadn't exactly cleared. So we're gonna come around again and give him some extra time to take off."

And then you know you're someone who watches The Office too much. Because you do a take to the IMAGINARY CAMERA.

Whoa.

Still, all in all, it's nice to be on the ground in one piece.

I've gotta unpack. More tomorrow.

Don't You Fuhgeddabout Me

So The Sopranos turns up for the final 9 tonight at 9 (in Canada, on Movie Central - TMN)

After Tony-in-a-coma, Christopher-crushes a dog, and all the other joys brought to you by seven minute sopranos, I ask you: what could they do for a final act?

I mean, besides Quebecois gangsters -- which believe me, I'm looking forward to.

The Toronto Star asked yours truly and a few other Canadian screenwriters to weigh in on that very thing: how we'd end whole shebang. I went kind of meta with my version, mainly because David Chase is a depressive sort and Italian and Id hate to get beaten to death accidentally for crossing the line.

Sopranos creator David Chase desperately wants to go make movies. If I were him I'd do what Six Feet Under did and go for a ending that can't be undone. That way, HBO won't call about reunion specials.

I'd have a rumpled private detective stumble into Newark. This detective – let's call him Rockford – stumbles across something he shouldn't one night at the Bada Bing. Paulie Walnuts and Christufuh work him over out in the Pine Barrens, but he won't die, because he comes from the era when you just didn't kill the hero on TV. Carm wises up, falls for Rockford. Tony freaks out and disappears. Silvio tells everyone Bruce Springsteen is the new Boss, picks up a guitar, and goes out on tour.

Tony finally turns up in the small village of Cicely, Alaska, where Meadow's taken over as town doctor. He spends the rest of his days telling everyone he's a retired astronaut. In the last shot of the series, he looks up, and sees the ducks. They've returned. All is well.

To see John Rogers' and Alex Epstein's rather more serious takes, and my friend Rob Sheridan's showstopping zombie crossover, click here.

Mombies. That's gold, Jerry.

Happy Bada Bing Easter Everybody.

That's A Wrap.

11:03 p.m. Last Shot, Episode 1-22 "Deep Dark", Thursday April 5, 2007. Dylan Neal (Mike) and Kyle Schmid (Henry) in the process of discovering something gruesome at a bus station. (Christina Cox watches foreground)


L of Frame: Episode Director James Dunnison watches the last shot with Executive Producer/Creator & Showrunner Peter Mohan. Peter also wrote Episode 22, "Deep Dark."



11:06 p.m. A moment as Christina Cox (Vicki) watches the last take of Season 1.











Post-wrap. Dylan, Christina, and Kyle say 'thanks' to the hardworking crew for a great year.

That's all for me from The Left Coast. See you back in Toronto.

Don't Jump, Michael. You Are Loved.

NBC may not be having the best year in the ratings, but they just got a quality-juice up.
The Office, Friday Night Lights, and Scrubs were all honored today in the announcement of the 2006 Winners of the George Foster Peabody Awards.

The Office was honored because it "firmly established its own voice and studied brilliance."

Scrubs was honored for its parody of The Wizard of Oz, and Friday Night Lights won for its "clear eyed reality."
Ugly Betty also picked up a Peabody for ABC.

HBO received awards for Spike Lee's devestating "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," "Elizabeth I," and movies about Billie Jean King, Baghdad ER and a young musicians' special.

The late Ed Bradley won for his 60 Minutes report on the Duke rape case.

Man, I'd take a Peabody over an Emmy any day of the week. Awards will be handed out by Bob Costas (Bob Costas!) on June 4.

"Maybe You And Me Were Never Meant to Be..."

Sigh.

So Jaime Weinman got ahold of the DVD release for WKRP: Season 1, and it's a hack and slay job with nearly all of the music replaced.

Since this is a show set in a radio station, this is a lot more significant than you would normally think. Like The Wonder Years (which also is MIA on DVD) 'KRP used music not as wallpaper (a la the dewy "montage" shots of shows like Dawson's Creek, and the O.C.,) but as a character -- underscoring and informing many of the scenes. Since there are no original elements, and the tracks are mixed, this sometimes means the elimination of entire scenes. It's a terrible stitch up job. Click the link above and you'll see how.

Over on his Maclean's blog, Weinman gets into more of the why; why FOX did what they did, and why maybe shows like this really belong on smaller labels with larger price points -- like SHOUT! factory.

What we're really facing here is the fact that big companies are essentially hopeless when it comes to non-current TV shows on DVD. It's not because the people who work there are big meanies; they're not, and many of them are doing their best. But a DVD set from Fox or Paramount or Warner Brothers has to be mass-produced and mass-marketed. For the most part, they don't do limited releases or special collectors' editions; everything has to be priced and sold at Wal-Mart level prices. The only way to do WKRP or The Wonder Years or a similar music-heavy show is to pay for the music and then make up the costs by jacking up the price of the set, but that's against company policy.

Also, big companies have a heavy amount of overhead, meaning that it's tough enough for a set to make back its cost even without paying for music. Which is why shows with even fairly decent levels of sales get abandoned after one or two seasons.

This is why most of the best TV on DVD releases come from independent or semi-independent companies, like Shout! Factory (which did Freaks and Geeks, SCTV, and the Electric Company best-of sets among many others) or Image (The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Twilight Zone). They can charge more to make back the costs, market the products to collectors and fans rather than trying to break into Wal-Mart, and put people who are actually familiar with the series to work on it.

In the post on Macleans, Weinman shows a clip that fully illustrates what's been lost. And it's heartbreaking.

I'm so torn about this DVD. I know it's not what I want. I don't want to support this kind of butchering, but at the same time, there's the reality that the set doesn't sell, and there won't be any more released. No matter what happens, it's a bad deal for the consumer.

WKRP is one of the shows that made me want to go work in the media. The other was the movie Broadcast News. The thought that it is now IMPOSSIBLE for me to experience the show that was so important to me growing up the way I saw it then, seems unseemly, somehow. Even out-of-print books can be found in a library. Commerce really gets to dictate the repository of cultural memory? Is that really the way we want things to go from now on?

This may seem trivial -- and it is. It is trivial. But remember, too, that music rights kept the greatest documentary made about the Civil Rights movement -- Eyes on the Prize -- out of print for several years. That's a disservice to education as well as to cultural history, and history itself.

Part of what's happening with the internet and the brave new world of content is a discussion that changes what we think of as content, and what we think of as the audience's rights when it comes to that content. So far, corporations have kicked arts' ass on this score. Mickey Mouse is killing the public domain, just as remixing and mashing and a pastiche culture demand flexibiilty.

In Canada, there's much whining about a new copyright act. And when it's tabled, it will inevitably be retro and biased toward the corporations and against the consumers.

When's that pendulum gonna swing?

And do I really have to pay 30 bucks for this piece of KR(a)P?