Requiem for a Jane

SO GLOBAL has canceled The Jane Show after two seasons.

From the Playback Daily article:

Global Television will not renew the homegrown sitcom The Jane Show, which starred Second City alumnus Teresa Pavlinek, for a third season.

A spokesman for Global tells Playback Daily that a mid-season replacement for the Shaftesbury Films comedy has not yet been chosen.

The second season of The Jane Show, which featured Pavlinek as Jane Black, a struggling artist-turned-copy editor in an advertising firm, aired on Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. on Global.

Christina Jennings, executive producer at Shaftesbury, expressed disappointment that the comedy was not picked up for a third season for want of sufficient viewership. The second season averaged an overall national audience (2+) of 147,000 -- down 13% from season one, according to Global.

I have to admit that I drifted away from The Jane Show early for the usual Canadian TV reasons -- pre-emptions, they kept moving it around, wasn't sure when it was on due to lousy promotion, etc...

I wrote about it when it first premiered, but only saw about 4 or 5 episodes after that -- and only one from the second season of the show.

But I will say this: I had basically the same conversation with two Canadian TV writers I know, who both work for shows that get watched. And they both related how they tuned in an episode of the Jane Show and found it really funny. So I'll take that and file that away.

The real issue here, of course, is who are the people involved and what are they doing now? In Canada, very often we all start over from square one every time. The writers of the Jane Show now have experience under their belt, or more experience, and whether you think it was the best show in the world or not, those writers, I guarantee you, are better than when they started. In the USA, they'd be free to go to other shows and they'd be seriously being looked at. But in Canada, it's more likely that they'll be left twisting in the wind while more "new writers" are given a chance; so that in two years, those "new writers" who aren't so new can be the ones to twist, lather, rinse, repeat...

Is there a half-hour in development, or getting greenlit somewhere for them to go to? I don't know. But I hope so. I remember hearing from several places that when Traders shut down, the scattering to the winds of everyone who learned on that show set the Canadian TV industry back five years.

We have to stop starting over.

Bye Jane. Probably not enough people watched the show to say convincingly, "you'll be missed," But I sure hope everyone connected with you doesn't end up with a 323 area code...

I Am Curious, Yellow

IT NEEDS a few more options (like Glasses! And different hats! C'mon!) but at least it's a start. And it's well worth you wasting five minutes.

At the Simpsons Movie site, there is a create your own Simpsons Character game.

Awesome.


At left, Springfield me, "Hey! Does anyone want to quote me in something?"


UPDATE: Okay, what's sadder about this -- that I went back in and changed the character to give it a more realistic receding hairline, or that I actually opened it in Photoshop so I could draw in glasses?

Why Does David Chase Hate Me? And Why Even if the Call IS Coming From Inside The House, That Isn't Necessarily a Bad Thing...

I'M HOPING that sometime over the next several days I'll get into more "slice of writer's life" posts. I've been fighting bad headaches and trying to give the gig my full attention, so I need a bit of a breather.

I will say, however, that it's a good feeling when that draft finally gets kicked back from the network, and everyone goes around the horn at the production meeting, and even though you know it's all going to change anyway -- there's something very special about the first time on a new show when you get to type those magic words on a cover page:

"PRODUCTION WHITE."

Yessss.

In lieu of anything major from me as I give notes, wait for location scouts, screen actor auditions and all, I want to point you to a couple of very interesting articles I've read in the last couple of days:

The Long Con

Now that it's been a few weeks, Emily Nussbaum weighs in with an excellent, thought-provoking article in New York Magazine about the real legacy of Tony Soprano. And she kind of puts David Chase on the couch about it.

I found myself forming many of the same thoughts that Nussbaum expresses so well in the last couple of weeks when I tuned in some first and second season episodes of the Sopranos, in reruns. I was struck, as she was, by how much broader and lighter the show was in the beginning. I put that together with all those interviews with David Chase over the years, the ones where he talked about his real ambivalence toward the TV medium and how he always wanted to make movies, and I got to roughly the same place Nussbaum did: Chase's brilliance came not just from his self-loathing, but a little bit from his loathing of us.

In one passage, she has a lovely description of TV auteurs:

But he [Chase] was willing to give us what we didn’t want. There are many breeds of TV auteurs: the great mythologizers, Buffy’s Joss Whedon and Lost’s J.J. Abrams and The X-Files’ Chris Carter; the quirky dialogists, like Gilmore Girls’ Amy Sherman-Palladino and the maddening David E. Kelley; deadpan craftsmen like Dick Wolf and sadomasochistic visionaries like Tom Fontana and California dreamers like Alan Ball. There are the utopian solipsists (okay, just Aaron Sorkin). But they all share an essential love for their characters—a natural side effect, one might imagine, of building one story for many years. Their protagonists suffer, but they rarely corrode.

In this sense, Chase was a true iconoclast, a prophet of disgust. He seemed determined to test TV’s most distinctive quality, the way it requires us to say yes each week. To be a fan, we needed to welcome Tony Soprano again and again into our homes, like a vampire or a therapy patient. Chase gave that choice a terrible weight.

I do think somewhere along the line, Chase started to really hate what he created. And he hated how much we loved it. Now, how much of that was based in this resentment toward him not being able to do what he really wanted to do (make movies) and how much of it was rooted in just a general cant of Chase's character, I can't say, having never met the man.

And in the end, it's not relevant anyway. Artists are notoriously poor at judging their best work, or at least coming to terms with the pieces that the audience loves. Woody Allen is forever perturbed that we preferred him funny; Alec Guinness went to the grave hating being beloved for having played Obi Wan. Ingrid Bergman was lukewarm on Casablanca. Miles Davis spent a good part of his career with his back to the audience, daring us to hate him...and didn't I read somewhere that Mozart hated The Magic Flute?

Still, there's something in Nussbaum's article that fills me with a kind of cognitive dissonance: "David Chase is a genius." "He hates the medium I love, and he's not crazy about we who love his work." I dunno. I dunno.

More from Nussbaum:

Over the course of the show, Tony’s sessions with Melfi have taken on many metaphors. They are like sessions with a hooker: She takes his money and plays a seductive role. (In one sequence, he dreams her office is a bordello.) They are like sessions with a priest: She hears confessions and guides him toward meaning. They are like sessions with the FBI: By talking to her, he’s betraying his family, putting his livelihood at risk, and violating omertà.

But most unsettlingly, they became a metaphor for our relationship, as viewers, with the show. Like Melfi, we began openhearted, proud of our empathy, and thrilled to have a character so rich to explore. Then came the counter-transference, the audience crushes, the endless articles on James Gandolfini, sex symbol. And slowly, as years passed, one could feel an insistent chill, even as Melfi herself receded into the background and message boards flooded with fans aping mobspeak. The violence was growing more intense: the assassination of Big Pussy, then Adriana, that brutal scene where Ralphie killed a pregnant stripper (a brilliantly sick sequence that caused a wave of viewer protest), the curbing of Coco. Dread, not excitement, began to feel like the show’s signature emotion.

The full article's really worth the read. Go here to read it.

Secondly, Will Dixon's got a fun and interesting post up about the problems of "The Telephone Cheat."

Most people carry a cell phone these days, so the "We can't reach them." or "We aren't able to call for help." complication always seems a little convenient. Most often it's solved with 'No Service' on the call display or whoever is trying to be reached is 'Out Of Range', but both are feeling more and more like a cheat or a cop out.

I tend to come down on the side of, "you gotta cheat sometime," but I hate it when those cheats grow lame. In The Ice Harvest, the whole thing doesn't work if John Cusack can be contacted by cell, so one of the first things he does in the movie is drop his cell phone and fry it. It works.

In the script I'm working on for The Border, we establish right off the bat that "cell phone service is being jammed." Because something getting out is a plot point, and you can't make it easy to get out or there's no tension. The fact that everyone's got a cell phone camera and access to YouTube is wreaking havoc with the news cycle and celebrity image-making, (not to mention "macaca") but boy, when you're trying to plot out a story where people can't know something is going on, it is murder.

Answering machines. Now this one's a biggie. I mean, my mom still has a 'push the Play button' model that creaks and whrrrs and needs a cassette tape, but EVERYONE else I know has Message Manager or Talkmail or some variation thereof. This makes the plot device of leaving the warning like "Pick up, Laura. Pick up! Well, I hope you get this message...the killers your husband!" (for the killer to hear and/or erase), or the exposition message where the audience gets to hear the crucial information (either as it's recorded or when its played back) a lot more difficult to execute with voicemail. Especially since not just anybody (a friend, the detective, the killer) can access and play back a voicemail.


I've been involved with two rewrites recently that included answering machines and faxes, plus no one in either script had a cell phone. Now I acknowledge these were rewrites of movies that have been in development for many many years, or are based on books written years ago, but regardless, they aren't period pieces. They're supposed to be set in the present. But if an entire plot turns on someone hearing a message or not able to be reached by phone...what to do, what to do?

Okay, Will, there I gotta disagree with your police work. I have a chip-based answering machine that's part of my cordless phone. Millions of these things are out there and all the big companies make them. I don't have the voicemail because why should I pay 8 bucks a month for something that I paid 60 bucks for, once? Plus, when I phone in to check my messages, if it rings more than twice I know I aint got any. And I get less spa...

Hey wait a minute. I think I was even on tv about this once.

Freaky. But this isn't about consumer electronics.

The larger thing Will's Calvinism on this issue raises is, "what is an acceptable cheat or shorthand, and what isn't?" Different writers will come down on different sides of this issue...Arguing about minutae is one of the things we really do well. (So long as you're arguing about minutae, you don't have to face the writing -- it's our version of going to long "strategic vision planning" meetings.)

For my money, the answering machine thing is an acceptable cheat. People on TV, by and large, have answering machines rather than voicemail. Just like they all have 555 numbers, and just like they can always find parking places, and live in $5000 a month Greenwich Village lofts on a waitress' salary, and have sex standing up with hair looking perfect and in place, and just like if they smoke, they're really evil inside.

Oh, and they have miscarriages, not abortions.

And if they really, really, really fuck up, they have to appear before the Female Black Judge.

And anyhow, help, she is on the way: the march of technology is slowly starting to help us poor, beleaguered screenwriters. These days, if your cell phone goes dead or something, it's actually harder to make a call than it used to be, because everywhere I look it seems that pay phones are disappearing. The days when there would be a phone in any greasy spoon are going away, at least in the major cities I've visited over the last while.

If we wait a few more months, "dead cell phone battery" may become something other than the "guy wakes up with a newspaper on his head and removes it to see an article on the front page that talks about exactly the thing he needs to find/see/realize/get"

Finally, Alex has got a good book recommendation.

Walter Murch is God.

And Somewhere, down in the Tropics, a Fat Roach is Macking on a Hottie Roach

IN THE FUTURE, after global warming, fundamentalism of all stripes, scorched earth politics, weird weather, unchecked capitalism and the metric system have finally murdered we rough beasts and rendered the planet a hot, gassy, barren rock -- only two things will remain:

1) The Cockroaches
2) According to Jim

Yeah, I know, I know. But people liked Jonathan Livingston Seagull, too. And c'mon. That book was bullshit.

William Hutt: An Appreciation

I MANAGED to catch William Hutt's performance as Lear at Stratford a few seasons ago, and it was a truly awesome thing. TV fans got a taste of that power in his featured role in the final season of Slings & Arrows.

Hutt died yesterday. He was 87.

From the CP obit:

Shakespeare remained a fascination for the actor throughout his career. When asked about the power of the Bard in a 2006 interview, Hutt said: "First of all, he froze the English language. Nobody has used the English language better than he has. Nobody. ... And also the world that Shakespeare creates with his language, his storylines, his characters, it's an incredible world."

With his rumbling voice and his lion-in-winter mane of white hair, Hutt commanded the stage well into his 80s, winning praise for his last turn onstage at Stratford as Prospero in 2005.

In honour of Richard Monette, the outgoing artistic director of the southwestern Ontario theatre company, Hutt agreed to return for a role in Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance" scheduled for this year.

He eventually had to withdraw from that performance, however, because of ill health.

Born in Toronto in 1920, Hutt served in the Second World War from 1941 to '46 with the 7th Canadian Light Field Ambulance and was awarded the Military Medal.

I can think of no better valedictory or legacy than that final season of Slings & Arrows. The gravity and tragedy of Lear, the few bits preserved forever on screen -- wonderful to behold.

He'll be missed.

Me and My Rock and Roll Mouth

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

"Was Banff worth the trip?"

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

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

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

My money's on my friend Colin Viebrock.

Lookie Here!

IT'S SHAMELESS Self Promotion Tuesday here at DTOS. It's kind of like Pancake Tuesday, only the syrup is made of hype.

If you go to the handy dandy Itunes Store, Podcasts section, and look up the Podcast for CBC Radio's Q, and download the June 13 edition, you'll be able to hear the pop I did from the Banff TV Festival. Good Times. Good Times.

Also, one of the best events in the summer in Toronto is the Fringe of Toronto Theatre Festival. It's the place where Tony-winning The Drowsy Chaperone started. Toronto's best theatre artists, and sometimes the young-up-and-comers-you-haven't- heard-about-but-soon-will get a theatre and slots to do whatever they want. It's mad and chaotic, and usually a lot of fun. I've had a number of plays in the Fest in the past, including Top Gun! The Musical, which I wrote with Scott White and which blew up rather ridiculously in popularity.

Well, earlier this year a friend of mine approached me with an interesting project. He's a fight choreographer, and he was putting together a number of dramatizations of famous duels.

So a number of writers have contributed short scenes in this vein. All this fun and swordplay too.

The result, DUEL OF AGES, opens at the Fringe next week!

All perfs are at the Factory Theatre, Adelaide and Bathurst Street.

Thurs. July 5, 6:30 pm, Sat. July 7, 11:00 pm, Mon. July 9, 1:00 pm, Wed. July 11, 7:30 pm, Fri. July 13, 9:15 pm, Sat. July 14, 12:30 pm, Sun. July 15, 3:30 pm.

The poster is below. If you're in Toronto over the Fringe, check it out.

Serial Killers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do I mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any thoughts?

Oh. My. God.

OKAY OKAY. I know I said I was done til Monday. At least. But in catching up on some of my reading over coffee this morning, I read this little article in Salon, an excerpt from an interesting new book called "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean" by Douglas Wolk. If you work in TV in Canada, read this passage where Wolk talks about comic fans and tell me if it doesn't sound familiar:

There's an element of comics culture, sometimes called (a little derisively) "Team Comics," that gets excited whenever anything that looks like that acknowledgment or respect I mentioned above turns up in the outside world -- a college class on the graphic novel, a Hollywood movie based on a graphic novel, a newspaper or magazine article about a cartoonist, somebody reading a comic book on a TV show. Different segments of Team Comics take notice if a TV character is reading a new issue of "Aquaman" or Lynda Barry's "One!Hundred!Demons!," but the principle is the same.

Both the "Team Comics" culture vultures and the alternate-cover-hoarding mavens are driven by the desire to turn their hobby into some kind of success or validation, whether through affluence or cultural power, and that impulse is directly connected to the class aspirations that afflict the entire medium. A lot of comics readers are unhealthily attached to the idea that everyone else thinks what they do is kind of trashy and disreputable, and that they have to prove their favorite leisure activity worthy of respect -- to show the world that they were right all along.

It's probably time to let go of that strain of earnest defensiveness.

Uh...Der. Wow.

I get it now. We're all comic book geeks.

Mind officially blown. That's it. I'm getting the hell out into the sunshine. Stat.

Wherein Denis Asks for a "What What" and a "Mea Culpa"

I MEANT to work up a post all day today, but it's just turned into one of those days. First there were a couple of aborted notes sessions on other scripts. Then we spun out to see our set -- which is insanely cool, and a dream found location...this show's going to show my city off proper! Now I'm reading an outline and there's just not going to be anything else from me til Monday. Too burnt. Too Summer-headed.

But over at Will's place, he saved the best part of his interview with Al Magee for last. It's well worth reading , and I'm going to excerpt a big chunk of it below.

I get a lot of "good on you" stuff from people -- a lot of it, inevitably, in the "don't use my name" email or conversation department -- Welcome to Canada, you fraidy cats -- every time I post some gear to what the CRTC does or how Jim Shaw is mouthing off, or this, or that, or the other thing...

But every once in a while when I post about how the creative people in this country really need to stand up and pull up boots and work harder and be more professional, I'm greeted on those posts with a whole lot of silence. And that's telling.

Now, I like the Teamakers site. She/He is an anonymous manager somewhere inside CBC Toronto, Fort Dork, and since the days of the lockout of 2005, she/he has posted a lot of interesting commentary and criticism of the dysfunction of CBC, all under the nom du keyboard "Ouimet." Well, today, Ouimet went off on a hack about the Globe's TV critic, John Doyle. I gather the issue is that Ouimet feels Doyle takes info that appears anonymously on the site and uses it in his column without proper attribution. Or something.

I punt on this issue, completely. It just doesn't really interest me.

What does interest me mightily is how a lot of commenters take the time to courageously, from the cheap seats of anonymity, trash Doyle, including someone apparently connected with Dragon's Den who seems to have it out for Doyle because The Globe gave Dragon's Den a bad review.

This is the shit that makes my blood run cold.

Because, see, the other part of having an industry that we take seriously is having, and displaying, a level of professionalism that I don't see everywhere I look. And we should see it everywhere.

Commandment fucking one of that professionalism is that you get a bad review, you take the freight. You don't whinge like a baby about it. Certainly not from a position of anonymity.

Television, when it gets covered at all in Canada, is covered mostly as a business story. That's not good. We don't have very many people writing intelligently and critically about the business and about the culture and what it means to Canada. With Antonia Zerbisias at the Star moving on (after being fed up, finally) with the insularity and reticence of anyone in the business to speak truth about the problems facing us, Doyle is probably the only guy left in Canada who regularly calls it like he sees it, and treats television -- Canadian television -- as something worth considering and writing about. Vinay Menon and some of the other writers at The Toronto Star are trying to get that moving, too. But you know, it's still one page for TV, nine pages for Sports, right?

When I was in Banff, it was a great thrill to finally meet Bill Carter from the New York Times. Much of what I know about TV, much of what I think about this industry, is based on Bill's excellent reportage. We don't have a Bill Carter in Canada. Would that we did. Doyle to me is the only guy who comes close. Antonia's gone, guys. While I was there, I also finally had a conversation with another writer who used to write about TV in this country, and they confirmed something I had always suspected: they stopped because they got tired of all the whining by all the people who pounced every time they thought they were being treated oh so unfairly in the press.

We all need to grow the hell up.

If you're a creative in this country, I think we need a drunkard's prayer or oath or something. Here's my first draft to start:

I resolve to do my best to craft stories and characters that will entertain and enrich the cultural experiencce of the Canadian Television viewer.
I resolve to conduct myself professionally at all times.
I resolve to work as hard as I can, to never settle for good enough.
I resolve to remember to work telling stories, and to be paid for that, is a privilege, and that there are many, many people out there who would gladly trade places with me.
I resolve to put my work out into the world when it is ready to be judged, and to react to that judgement profesionally, with dignity and with perspective.
I resolve to learn, and do better, and to keep ego in check, and to help those who come after me.
I resolve to keep bitterness at bay as long as I can.

I don't know. Too flowery? Anyway, back to Will and Al Magee. Here's what Magee says, kind of on the same line:

The only hit one hour show I worked on was Slings and Arrows and I was a spear carrier to Bob Martin and Susan Coyne’s genius. (Ask producers Niv and Danny, they’ve got the touch.) I think Regenesis is a success because it is unique, it is rigorously produced by a strong production company and team and it has committed support from its broadcaster. That combination has allowed the show to mature and gain momentum and build an audience. It takes time, (more than one season) to discover a series, to learn from the audience and to process all of that learning into stronger characters, stronger stories and a stronger series design, which payoff with audience.

On the speculative opinion side – popular television is made by people who live and love television, not by people taking a break from feature film careers. Which is not to say you can’t do both. Slings was loaded with feature people, and certainly the actors, the producers and the director have great success in features, but they also have great experience and respect for the craft of television story telling and dedicated themselves to that. So too do the team at Regenisis. The industrial series that we make never hit too big in Canada because they smell so inauthentic. It’s not so much fun to watch a guy from a salad dressing commercial dressed up like an Alien spewing gibberish on a set full of flashing lights. But those series give us all great experience and keep us alive and make it possible to develop an industry. And sometimes they make it harder to develop an audience. (And by the way that is not a reference to Stargate, which is a favorite of mine, great television made by an incredibly talented group of people.)

Can we get a one hour series that takes off the way our half hours like Corner Gas and Little Mosque can? Maybe, and maybe if the one-hours follow a similar route as the half hour hits – authentically Canadian, not pretending or aspiring to a US primetime aesthetic, and giving the audience something accessible that is not available on a network simulcast. It takes a perfect triangle to get any series right but it’s more important on a one hour because of the pressure on the writing to be sustainable. So the triangle of a skilled writer with a strong point of view, a producer who knows how to work with writers and broadcasters and banks, and a broadcaster who is unflinchingly committed to the series is essential. I’ve had first hand experience on each side of the triangle and at various points in my life as a writer, as a producer and as a broadcaster, I’ve been the one to screw things up. It’s not one of those triangles that works with two sides out of three. It takes all three. So can I revise my pretentious label and call it not the Perfect Triangle, but the Perfect Storm.

The world doesn’t need another TV series the way it needs cures for what ail us, so the making of TV series is an illogical enterprise from the get go. In my twenty some years, all of the successes I’ve been a part of have had perfect symmetry on what I’ll now call my triangle theory. If you’ll permit me the temporary pretensions of naming my own theories:

Slings and Arrows had a head writer in Bob Martin with a unique imagination and singular point of view. It had producers in Danny and Niv and Sari who are very creative, know how to lead projects, how to marshal resources, how to bridge production and broadcast, and it had a team at Showcase that was maniacally committed to the enterprise. Speaking purely from my experience on that show from the broadcast side at Showcase, we were rigorous and respectful with the development, the creative team completely engaged with us for full debate, and as a result the project maintained one singular point of view and a commitment from everyone to stay on the same page regardless of the pain. Hence there was no pain. That takes great commitment and leadership from all sides which we don’t often experience.

On the creative side, the cliché that it’s all about good writing is only partially true. It’s all about good design. Good design requires the committed input of the writer(s), the producers, and the broadcaster. The broadcaster has to come to the project with an actual tested set of information about their audience not just wacky guesses and misinformation and insecurity that will undermine everyone’s confidence. From the writers it takes a commitment to the project, to the ongoing development of the project, to the responsible integration of all the input, good, bad and otherwise, and to managing their own sense of attachment to their best ideas that just won’t fly without getting pissy and passive aggressive and throwing their hands up. It’s toughest on the writers and we have a lot of extremely talented writers who can write brilliant material, and we need to support and develop those writers to gain the skill to manage their own temperament and attachments so they can apply their talent to what may at the time appear like the most undermining of notes and conditions that get placed on their work.

We need leadership and we need to commit to each other.

Amen, Al. The full post is here. As for the rest of it, maybe this weekend take a look in the mirror and don't think about the CRTC or the CTF or the Networks, or the Tory Government or Bev Oda or Konrad Von Manheimsteamroller or all the other things that are wrong with the system. Look to yourself.

Can you do better?

Let's try. Let's all start Monday.

Have a good weekend.

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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


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


DTOS: The five to one, yeah!


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

New episodes of The Office return to NBC this fall.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

GREG DANIELS: The Diversity Day episode?

DTOS: To start with, yeah...

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

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

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


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


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

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

Will Dixon and Al Magee

I SWEAR this is not just because he hosted a wonderfully enjoyable, raucous dinner in Banff, where Evil Dennis and I managed to traumatize a very nice Magee TV staffer -- but Will Dixon is quietly on fire again with a great profile of one of Canada's nicest super-producers -- Al Magee.

There's a lot to ponder in Will's two part (so far!) profile, but here's the bit that caught my eye the most:

Al: The big lesson from Europe was that all audiences really crave homegrown hits. I worked on a show in Finland called Tutto Jutto, a crazy cross between Lawrence Welk and the Newlywed Game. On Thursday nights 3 million of the 5.5 million population watched Tutto Jutto. It’s no wonder that our own hits have such an idiosyncratic homegrown feel.

And the professional sensibility in Europe is the reverse of here; the producers and broadcasters don’t take themselves too seriously, but they take the work and their responsibility to the production community and the audience very seriously.

It's too long for a T-shirt, but I wonder if we could get that last statement on a coffee mug? Or maybe, I don't know, how about a tattoo that we can pass out at the CFTPA convention and the broadcaster launches? Who's with me? Anybody?

You're leaving me out here alone again, aren't you? Bastards!

Part I of the Magee profile is here. For part II, click thusly.

(and just to clarify, in the post below I mention that the only thing keeping us from doing interesting work is will. I mean will. I don't mean you, Will. Glad we cleared that up.)

I'm Not Sure.

THAT I get John From Cincinatti.


I'm also not sure that I care. The performance of the actor playing John, which I thought would get old fast, is really growing on me. Greenwood is dependable as always. And to see Ellsworth and Charlie from Deadwood show up in very different roles is both disconcerting and joyous.

And I haven't even thought about Luis Guzman yet.

And Rebecca DeMornay as a hot granny? Come ON!

John Doyle wrote yesterday about HBO series and how far and away better they were, and you have to admit it's true. Even the ones that I don't care for, like Big Love, are consistently more interesting than anything available from the major networks.

The thing is, because of how crappily CanCon does here anyway, you would think that would take the pressure off to make things more accessible. I'm almost sure that I could live with an industry where we weren't getting the boffo numbers thanks to poor promotion and various other structrual limitations, so long as the quality suggested that we were making a contribution to the art.

One problem, of course, is that fine line between art and self-indulgence. I think there's a bit of Emperor's New Clothes Syndrome out there in CanConLand. Many that have been called "brilliant" and "visionary" have struck me as "boring" or "twee."

I've worked on cheeseburgers and I've worked on vanity projects, and I've worked on shows that were on a continuum between those two things. But if any network, any broadcaster would have the balls to let someone talented here make a John From Cincinatti, well...that'd really be something, now, wouldn't it? That's probably why I flipped for Durham County. Save us Obi-Wan-TMN...you're our only hope!

Except they're not...or they shouldn't be. CTV 's run The Sopranos, terrestrial. CBC gets a whack of cash from taxpayers. How is it possible that they don't have room in their development slate for brilliant? Where is their process failing them?

Think: the only thing keeping us from doing these shows is will. Will, and the wisdom to trust a creative voice and get the hell out of the way.

If You're Surfing in here from Blog T.O.

WELCOME, first of all. This is a blog about TV writing and sometimes Canadian TV. If you scroll down through the last two weeks of posts, hopefully you'll be able to find some lively reportage from my trip last week to the 2007 Banff TV Festival. I have more of that stuff to come, including an interview with the Executive Producer of The Office, Greg Daniels.

If you look at the entry from June 8, I think there are links to some of my big all time posts. Can't say more now. Busy rewriting. Ciao.

Dude, when do you have time to Write?

Debbie over at BlogTo -- a nifty little blog about all things Toronto, did a little email interview with me recently. Go read it here and find out why I'll never forgive Avril for that thing she said to me on the carpet at the MMVA's...or something:

How did you get into screenwriting?

Sideways. I always wanted to write. When I first graduated Ryerson I sent a script I wrote down to L.A. It was a "Wonder Years" spec script and I got really great feedback on it from the Executive Producer of the show. But I didn't follow up. I drifted into TV producing, doing stories on media and technology, first at TVOntario, then at Citytv. I had a wonderful time at Citytv, got to interview a lot of people, but was still restless.

In 1996 I did a play at Summerworks called "Press'd" -- and my boss at the time, Moses Znaimer, brought a Director friend named Jeremy Kagan to the show. And Kagan flipped for my play. He loved the writing. But I never followed up. About a year later, I'm watching the Emmys and there's Jeremy Kagan, accepting an award for Directing "The West Wing," which was my favorite show at the time. And I decided, if I ever got another break like that, I wasn't going to let it pass by.

By this time I'd moved on to help start up Space: The Imagination Station. I met up on-set with a couple of guys producing a show called STARHUNTER. They liked me, I wrote a few eps for their second season, and then I took the big leap. I quit my job and went to the Canadian Film Centre. When I got out, I never looked back. I've been working ever since, first in documentary (I did a lot of lifestyle wedding shows) and now drama.

I say all this because now I look back and I think the missed opportunities had purpose. I had to get past my fear. People tend to think that you only get one 'break,' but it's not true. You just have to want it badly enough that you are willing to risk everything. Some get there more quickly because they've got youthful bravado or a natural fearlessness on their side. Some come later to it, once they realize that they won't be happy if they don't really try. But the risk -- taking the risk, is all.

The full profile is here.

It's a Bouncing Baby Blog! Pro-Writer Style!

IT'S HARD at this point to come up with a new entry point into the scribosphere. Lots of niches are being scratched daily. But more and more agents, both southerly and cold Canadians, are reporting that they're hearing that people want to read original pilots as spec samples. Sometimes it's as the second or third script -- but still, that makes for a daunting challenge.

Because nothing is harder than writing a pilot. It's a dark bit of business, part necromancy and part bone-crushing bravado.

Luckily, an incredibly wonderful, hardworking, and way experienced Canadian writer named Jill Golick has a new blog where she obsesses over pilots. Not so you don't have to...just because she's writing pilots herself and therefore, she's obsessing over them anyway. She's just letting you listen in. Awesome, hey?

Here's a bit from a recent post on a British show I've never seen, but boy do I want to now:

One of my favourite series of 2007 thus far is the British series Skins. The opening scenes of the pilot, entitled "Tony" and written by Bryan Elsley, are absolutely fabulous.

The show opens with a 30 second title sequence that is all shots of characters and ends with the series title "Skins".

The first shot of the first episode is close on eyes which pop open, awake, as the camera slowly pulls out to reveal a teenage boy in bed as church bells ring in the distance. His alarm goes off and he flicks on some music as he springs into action, doing his dips, chin ups and bicep curls in only his tight white underpants, his face expressionless. His first smile appears as he surveys his image in the mirror.

That sequence takes 37 seconds and it's all about character.

A teenage girl looking bedraggled in her smudged makeup and short skirt walks up the street.

In his bedroom, our teenage boy's watch alarm sounds. He stations himself at the bedroom window and looks out. In the window across the street, a woman allows her white robe to drop to the floor, revealing her naked back. She glances out the window; she knows our boy is watching.

On the street, the girl glances up at the woman's window and then at his. She stops, arms crossed, staring up at his window. Is she a pissed off girlfriend?

No, actually. She waves, trying to distract him as the naked woman turns in his direction providing a good front view. Below the young girl finally attracts his attention.

The boy turns to his stereo, cranking the volume higher, higher, higher still, smiling with satisfaction in the direction of his bedroom door, behind which we can barely make out a male voice: "Tony! Tony!"

Tony, the teenage boy, signals to the girl below and she lunges for the front door. An irate looking 40-something male wearing nothing but red boxers storms into Tony's room, yelling to be heard over the music.

"Sorry," says Tony, pretending to fiddle with the remote, "the volume's busted."

"Every fucking morning!" spurts his furious father. Meanwhile the young hottie is sneaking up the stairs, into her bedroom, peeling off her clubbing clothes and slipping into her demure English school girl uniform.We're not done yet.

Tony is now sitting on the toilet reading Sartre's Nausea as his father knocks on the bathroom door begging to be let in. Tony smiles mildly as he flushes, brushes and goes out the window, leaving the bathroom door locked and his father pounding and cursing on the other side.

Tony climbs down to street level, pauses to smile at the now-dressed woman from across the street and lets himself into the house.

In the kitchen, Mom is making eggs. His sister, now every inch the innocent school girl, nibbles toast. Dad, still ranting about getting into the bathroom, steps into the kitchen and stops dead when he sees Tony.

The lock is broken again, Tony claims mildly, as his father stares at him with mounting hatred.

By this time, you couldn't pay me to turn off this show. And the interesting thing about this opening is that none of it has anything to do with what follows. Tony's parents and sister don't have any significance in the series until a much later episode.

Instead of establishing story, the writer has opted to devote the first three and three quarter minutes of the pilot to setting up character. And he has done so beautifully.

Jill breaks down other pilots and talks about what makes them work. If you're taking that leap toward trying to come up with a pilot yourself, it's an invaluable addition to the scribosphere: Running With My Eyes Closed.