The Terrible Twos.

I GOT IT wrong last year. Turns out that today is actually the second anniversary of my first post.

And, as is traditional on this date, I reveal for those who occasionally ask, how this blog came to be called "Dead Things on Sticks."

I've had a run in the last year that even I can't believe. There's a sick sense when you hit a run of being in demand -- you know it's not forever, you feel like you can't possibly turn anything down, lest you never get another job again.

But there's just no getting around the fact that I've had a great run of luck, in an industry that's perpetually on the brink. I am extraordinarily grateful for that good fortune.

Since I started the blog, I've worked on six series. I've story-edited about seven or eight projects for other writers. I've had four shows in development -- one of which was greenlit. I've worked on two other projects for friends of mine -- one of them was a comedy series that so deserved to be on TV that I will always be shocked by the decision not to pick it up. But that's the game.

When I started the blog I was feeling dislocated and disconnected. It was hard to feel the "where" of this industry. In Canada, TV production is spread out in a way that it's not in the USA. And the mechanics of the industry here almost feels sometimes like it's designed to keep writers apart.

One of the aims I had starting this blog was to figure out where and if the heart of this industry lay; if there were other writers out there who thought like I did.

I don't know where that heart is any more than I did then. But I know that it's a tenacious bastard and that anybody trying to kill it better bring the big fucking hob-nailed boots. We will not be stomped under easily.

I have met, through this blog, more people than I can count. We are a community that has not rallied in the past, and I think that's changing, however slowly. That change can't help but be good for the industry.

I'd like to thank a few of the people who have taught me much about what I do, through their insights, comments, and general examples -- Alex Epstein, Will Dixon, Jim Henshaw, Mark Farrell, Shelley Eriksen, Peter Mitchell, John Rogers, Rob Sheridan, Bill Cunningham, Jill Golick, and all the various and sundry others who've stopped by and joined the conversation. (Also, apologies to anyone I'm forgetting and to anyone whose clever little handles I haven't managed to decode yet. Cheeky monkeys.)

I also want to publicly apologize to Diane Kristine, who I managed to infect with the desire to track Canadian TV. It's a measure of just how inadequate publicity in this country is that her "TV, Eh?" site has become the defacto starting point for anybody looking for info on Canadian TV. And it's entirely a labor of love...not even love, exactly, because Diane, like all of us, has a fraught and sometimes puzzled relationship to Canadian TV. When our heads start to disappear up our collective recti, it's the Dianes of this country we have to remember.

There's a new generation of people working in this country who love TV, and want to make TV not as a consolation prize because it's too hard to get into film -- but because that's the medium they love best.

It's worth it, guys. Despite everything. If you don't mind working your butt off, suffering the occasional WTF??? and putting your life on hold sometimes to meet your deadline, it's so worth it.

The WGC, by the way, I think, has figures showing that over 85 percent of their members earn their living in TV... that's food for thought, hmm?

And while we're on the subject of the WGC, I gotta tell you guys, if you haven't joined yet -- consider moving up that timetable. The WGC has come to my aid on several occasions already. Maureen Parker, the Executive Director, works harder for Canadian writers than anyone can possibly know. If we hang on, we hang on largely because of the efforts of Parker and her team.

I write TV because, I'm convinced, I'm not really qualified to do anything else. It's what I love to do. I managed to go to a gathering last night that was essentially a 20th High School reunion. Being able to say, honestly, that you love what you do and you're satisfied, even happy with your professional life? Like the ad says -- it is priceless.

I come from the school where you complain constructively, because you want things to be ever better. I believe "good enough" isn't good enough -- and that that attitude needs to be scourged from our industry because the audience deserves better. I have seen great talent, and great talent that's coming up. Speak up. If you don't, you deserve to be taken advantage of.

This blog picked up some readers through Blood Ties -- so thanks to Peter Mohan for bringing me on board that show. I can't wait for viewers to see my episodes, cause I think they turned out really well. If you came for hot vampire lovin' and stayed for the babble, then thanks for that, too.

And my agent, Glenn Cockburn, deserves a shout out, along with everybody at Meridian Artists, because they've always supported what I try to do here even if it has occasionally made them a bit nervous.

I keep hearing that there is a date for Across The River To Motor City -- and I will put it out here when it's confirmed. And The Border starts in January 2008 -- so it should be a busy couple of months.

When I started this, I thought maybe I'd get a hundred hits a day. I'm humbled by the number of people who tune in and drop by to read what is essentially a very, very narrowly focused conversation. I relish the discourse and the introductions this blog has brought me. It's been a positive force in my life, and I thank you all for being part of that, and for putting up with my perpetual first drafts. First drafts suck, you know. So you've been very gracious about them. But no, I'm still not going to write shorter entries. Too hard.

By the way, my couch is very very comfortable. So don't let anyone ever tell you that there's no such thing as progress.

The Crystal Moment, or Why You Can't Write This Shit.

SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY happened on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night.

I don't think it's much of a leap to predict that any author who came on, having just published a 400 page hagiography of Dick Cheney, was going to get a rough ride.

That being said, Stephen F. Hayes had to be feeling like one of those loose heat tiles on the Shuttle as he tried to bring his Daily Show experience in for a landing last night.

What Hayes couldn't have predicted when this appearance was booked weeks ago, was the appearance over the weekend of the video of Cheney in '94, declaiming in his angry Dad way, all the horrors that would have followed had the U.S. tried to take out Saddam in the Persian Gulf War.

That video, which Stewart also did a piece on last night, has some people scratching their heads. It's on the record that Cheney said these things before, about the first Gulf War...why is this unearthed clip causing such outrage?

It's worth watching from the beginning, just to chart the evolution of the interview. Hayes is obviously uncomfortable off the top -- he knows the question about the Cheney tape is coming. In many ways, Stewart is formidable in these book interviews precisely because he actually does read the books (or at least has a staff who does a really good job of highlighting the relevant points.) In any case, he won't let a happy talk answer stand. How sad that in this media age, that alone makes him stand out.

Hayes goes where you expect he'll go...he tries to have his cake a bit and eat it too, going to great pains to categorize Cheney's likely defense: "Things changed after 9/11" (yes, that again) as HIS response, not mine. But Stewart won't let him wriggle away.

In reaching for the core of why this thing upsets him so much, Stewart tries to do what he does: be funny. But when that doesn't work, when Hayes tries to use it to wriggle away, Stewart does the thing that is breathtaking whenever I see someone on TV smart and brave enough to do it: he asks the very thing the audience is thinking. He won't let it go. And when the answer is unsatisfactory -- how could it not be? -- Stewart goes for his main point: it's not just that he knew and lied. It's that he knew and lied, and along the way, pointed to anyone who didn't buy his disingenuous spin as gospel and questioned their patriotism.

The outraged gasps from the audience are palpable here. It feels to me like an accountability moment.

And that's why that video out there, being played, replayed, sent, resent, chopped up, animated, and referenced on talk shows is important. There are photos from My Lai that started the majority of the American people's turn against Vietnam. The "Smoking Gun" tape was the thing that finally finished Nixon.

With that tape, that small little interview, floating around -- what happens the next time the Republicans try the "criticize our efforts, you help the terrorists and disrespect the soldiers"? Because...the Republicans are still pulling this trick. But I wonder, after that Cheney video, if this video provides the "macaca" moment for that tactic. Probably not.

Because, you know, everything changed after 9/11.

Oh YouTube, you are going to make for one interesting election next year.

The true fun starts a little over halfway in.

How'd I Get To Meet Your Mother In the First Place?

REVISED OUTLINE, you are my nemesis.

But Carter and Craig seem like nice guys, and they get pretty detailed into the "big break" question, which I know everybody always wants to know about...so maybe I'll just keep banging my head against the wall and linkslut this "Watch With Kristin" interview with Carter Bays and Craig Thomas.

On any given day during the production of How I Met Your Mother, what are you actually doing? How do you go from a blank page to the product that's ready for air?
Well, in two years of doing the show, Craig and I have sort of discovered what's important and what isn't. And what is most important is story. So, we'll sit down with—not the whole writing staff—but me and Craig and usually two other writers in a room, with a dry-erase board, to figure out what the episode is going to be about.

You know, Phil Rosenthal wrote a book called You're Lucky You're Funny, which Craig and I are both reading right now. He talks about how Carl Reiner, on The Dick Van Dyke Show, would shut all the writers in a room and say, "What happened at your house this weekend?" And that's where the story comes from.

So, it sort of starts off as a few hours of therapy, talking about what we're feeling. You know, we'll be talking about what secrets do you tell your partner, and what do you keep from them, and that will eventually turn into [the] Robin Sparkles [episode]. Or we'll say, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if Robin was a Canadian pop star?" and we'll work our way backward, figuring out how you get to that. We sort of chart it all on the white board, and then we can assign that story to one of our writers.

When the story is broken and the scripts are locked, is the bulk of your job done, or are you heavily involved in what's happening on set and in the edit?
Well, it seems like so much of the great stuff comes out on the set and in the edit room, but if a script is solid, it is like a huge, weeklong sigh of relief. But with some scripts, you know, when the actors are rehearsing scenes for camera, to figure out angles, we're completely rewriting those scenes in the midst of it.

No Accounting For Taste

AND THANK God for that.

Finding a way to quantify art is a disastrous and persistent pursuit in some quarters. Every pilot done in the USA (and Canada, now that we've started doing pilots) is subjected to a battery of tests to predict and gauge how audiences will receive it.

And every year, you hear story about high-testing pilots that go nowhere, and low testing shows that run for years (like Seinfeld.)

All across America, thanks to Clear Channel and companies like it, you have robocalls calling random people three times a day and playing twenty second snippets of songs. Depending on how that sample reacts, that's the songs you get to hear on just about every radio station in America.

Quantifying art leads to bad art. And yet for some it's still the golden grail. I think it's retarded.

Anybody who's worked on a TV show or movie knows that it's as much work to make a bad work as a good one. And when you're working on something, you may get the vague idea of whether it's bad or good, but that's notoriously unreliable.

So, too, when product is put out there, and people finally get to judge it, reactions can be baffling and puzzling. Is Californication an interesting show? Or rather, is it

clear that it had been green-lit by some network BSD who's contemplating leaving his wife for an underage hottie and he thought YEAH, baby, YEAH, this series speaks the TRUTH!

When somebody you know and whose taste you admire says something like:

I couldn't sit through this one. I had it on DVD, and I tried to watch it twice, and both times it turned me right off.

I wonder what happens in the second episode? Because I didn't see a hook there.

What does that really mean?

My favorite kind of criticism is the kind where the people run down what they didn't like about something, and I can't really disagree with it. I remember feeling that way about Superman Returns. My agent ran down a particularly devestating critique of that movie, and I saw every one of his points. I couldn't really disagree with them.

Yet I loved the movie. I think it's in these moments that you see little things about yourself. Some good, some bad -- always interesting.

I'm having a similar reaction to Californication right now. Further down in comments there are several people left scratching their heads by Mad Men, another show I just love.

Yesterday, in the Globe and Mail, Arts Writer Kate Taylor (taking her crack at TV criticism) wrote about Seinfeld reruns, from the perspective of someone who never watched the show when it was on. (Yes, there are a few.)

Watching Seinfeld today, you can note with amusement plots that turn around answering machines but which wouldn't work with cellphones, but you can also observe that these are people who can afford to worry about pizza cooks who don't wash their hands because they aren't worrying about terrorist attacks.

Perhaps, after Sept. 11, we are simply living in a less funny era: The sitcom landscape is a desert these days and the only heir to Seinfeld is Curb Your Enthusiasm, the show in which David gets his kick at the can, building a series around the travails of a producer's life in L.A. On a smaller scale, it's a successful series - HBO recently renewed it for a sixth season - but it also has a much harder edge. David's bleak comic persona is one less able to shrug off his character's anxieties and embarrassments than Seinfeld's was. You can suffer the distinctly uncomfortable sense, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, that you are laughing at David, not with him. Perhaps it's no coincidence that none of the other spinoffs ever took hold: The Seinfeld moment is history.

Ooooh. Really? We're living in a less funny age, post-9/11? Knocked Up deals with terrorism head on, right? And the 40 Year Old Virgin had some amazing things to say about the war in Iraq. And, of course, that "No Blood For Oil" runner on Corner Gas was hi-la-ri-ous. Pffft.

The point is that this impulse -- to quantify, to explain, to debate -- we all do it. And the more we come at it from different perspectives, the more interesting our culture is. Thank God the banal assertion that "comedy is dead" that really was everywhere after 9/11 never took root and became canon, apologies to Kate Taylor.

Comedy on TV sits there in its periodic troughs, waiting for the next breakthrough hit. People praise John From Cincinnati while I scratch my head. (Even if Joss Whedon's little brother did write the finale.)

It's all good. It's all glorious.

The Nine -- remember that? -- It was the sure fire hit of last year. And now they won't even air the rest of the burned-off episodes, because it was too low rated.

Taken one way, this could induce an almost paralyzing fear in anybody who tries to pick something up and create. It can be used to support a lot of bad behavior (there's no accounting for the audience, so I'll do what I want, the audience is dumb so give them the lowest common denominator) and it can be used to glorify inaction (I can't figure out how to make this appeal to people.) It can send gatekeepers with no imagination to a batty and strange place.

I will never forget the weird meeting I had with the Canadian Network Suit who told me he'd passed on The Sopranos -- he wasn't telling the story as a "you know how I screwed up?" He was admitting that he'd seen the same show everybody else had and hadn't seen anything great in it...so he passed.
He told the story to show how much POWER he had -- he was able to Pass on the Sopranos.

People think in some strange ways. They think all sorts of strange things. They may hate the thing you love. You may agree with them and still love it, or think their critiques may be out to lunch. They may hate a show because of a woman's nose. You may love it for an irrational reason -- how it reminds you of your first babysitter or that goldfish Sam you had when you were a tot.

Whatever. It's all a big, fat, unpredictable ride, and the only thing we can do as writers or artists is keep seeking out opinions, and keep honing our instincts.

If your instincts are right, you'll do well.

If your instincts are off, you won't.

That's as quantifiable as things get.

In just a few weeks, the carnage will begin anew. People will make their choices. There will be winners, and losers, and once again as always, whatever they decide, the audience will be right.

Yes, even about Two And a Half Men and According To Jim.

Meantime, all I can do is tell you that Mad Men continues on AMC Thursdays at 10, Californication runs on Monday nights on The Movie Network (eastern Canada) at 9 p.m. ET and Movie Central (western Canada) at 10 p.m. PT. Watch em and judge for yourself.

And keep that debate raging, and don't let anyone put that opinion in a box.

John From Dunzo

WELL. SO. I guess John gets to go back to Cincinnati.

David Milch's latest, canceled, and though there's much in me to like with the show. Zippy, who breathed and said not a fucking word and then was dead. And Cissy, a bitch these many years on no good account of that asshole husband, and Shaun, dear God, Shaun with his blankness, Jesus Christ Jesus Christ!

I don't know Butchie instead.

I have yet to watch the finale so I don't have much to say. But Tod VanderWerff at South Dakota Dark sums it up pretty well in the lede to his wrapup:

Frustrating, enervating and enthralling, John from Cincinnati might be the most awesome show that I couldn't ever determine the quality of.

Yup. That's about the size of it. I'll watch, but I won't be happy that this is that which cost us more Deadwood. Go read Todd here. Me, I'm sticking with the Mad Men.

Californication

I AM LEERY, always, of shows about writers or featuring writers. Yes, yes, I think we are endlessly fascinating. How could I not? I'm just not sure that the world needs to share our solipsism.

The last real Inside-Showbizzy series I loved was The Larry Sanders Show, and I think my unreasonable love for that show is an instructive one. It was the first of the big behind-the-sceners (unless you count Mary Tyler Moore or Dick Van Dyke, and I don't.) but the juice of that show didn't necessarily come from its setting. It came from a triumverate of truly amazing characters: Artie, the always on the edge of a beating hardass producer, venal, complex, damaged Larry, and the sublime Hank Kingsley. (How is it possible that the show never made a big impact, yet everyone seems to know, "Hey now!" Does Howard Stern really have that much power?)

Shows that are too inside baseball never age well. I liked Murphy Brown, but man, those shows are well nigh unwatchable now.

When Studio 60 came along, I was willing to give it a flyer because of Sorkin. And we all know how that turned out.

Entourage, interestingly enough, bores me the more it becomes about the business, and the less it focuses on those four guys. I think giving Ari his own plots free of the boys -- while inevitable -- was probably a big creative mistake.

And 30 Rock -- well, the TV characters on 30Rock are the lamest -- Jenna, Tracy Jordan...it's Alec Baldwin, Fey, and the Intern who sell that show.

See how I just rationalized all the inside baseball shows I watch as not being inside baseball? Nifty trick, self delusion.

Anyway, on to Californication. I have to admit, I was pretty held by it. And yup, this is not a likable character. I mean, that speech he gives in the restaurant to dress down his date is just...horrific.

He also suffers from Tommy Gavin syndrome. There is something off the charts ridiculous about that many women leaping over themselves to get a piece of the Duchovny magic. And flash their bits in the process. There are a lot of actresses in Hollywood, yes there are.

And yet...

The show charms. It does. It helps that Natasha McElhone and Duchovny have a lot of chemistry. (I think Natasha McElhone is one of the most beautiful women on TV. Finally, a woman that I could see someone being all moony over for years. Duchovny sure has good luck with redheads.)

The late-episode reveal of the nature of one of buddy's bed partners is probably what everybody's going to be talking about...and it was a pretty sickening reveal... it was a little uncomfortable that they played the same beat as Rescue Me (when the father is delighted by the possibilty that his daughter's a lesbian. That was funny the first time...)

But all that being said, and despite serious reservations about the character, (and serious envy about the Soundtrack...I mean, who digs up My Morning Jacket singing Rocket Man, AND licences Sympathy by the freaking Stones?) I think I'll be watching. The dialogue was cutting, and there were some genunie surprises.

Like, say, I never thought I'd find myself laughing so hard at a donkey punch.

I think it comes down to Duchovny. This is the David Duchovny that you saw on Larry Sanders, and in the extras on the new excellent Sanders set. He's loose, he's enjoyable and charismatic and low key. David Duchovny is yet another one of those actors (like Jimmy Smits) who's made for TV. He looks so damn comfortable out up there on that screen, and he's just so likable, that I want to spend time with him, even if he is a shit.

But hocheemama that was a lot of nudity. That's a lot of closed set days there, by gum.

For Golick's take on Californication, click here. What did y'all think?

Sometimes Fiction Just Isn't Up To The Task

As Rove goes, there's just the matter of believing the six impossible things before breakfast.

Woody and Marty Make Me Think

TWO INCREDIBLY WORTHWHILE remembrances today in the New York Times:

Martin Scorsese muses on the power of Michelangelo Antonioni, "The Man Who Set Film Free,"

Where almost every other movie I’d seen wound things up, “L’Avventura” wound them down. The characters lacked either the will or the capacity for real self-awareness. They only had what passed for self-awareness, cloaking a flightiness and lethargy that was both childish and very real. And in the final scene, so desolate, so eloquent, one of the most haunting passages in all of cinema, Antonioni realized something extraordinary: the pain of simply being alive. And the mystery.

“L’Avventura” gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies, greater even than “Breathless” or “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” (made by two other modern masters, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, both of them still alive and working). Or “La Dolce Vita.” At the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film and the ones who liked “L’Avventura.” I knew I was firmly on Antonioni’s side of the line, but if you’d asked me at the time, I’m not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini’s pictures and I admired “La Dolce Vita,” but I was challenged by “L’Avventura.” Fellini’s film moved me and entertained me, but Antonioni’s film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around me, and made both seem limitless.

and Woody Allen talks of Ingmar Bergman, "The Man Who Asked Hard Questions."

His work probed the deepest concerns of humanity, often rendering these celluloid poems profound. Mortality, love, art, the silence of God, the difficulty of human relationships, the agony of religious doubt, failed marriage, the inability for people to communicate with one another.

And yet the man was a warm, amusing, joking character, insecure about his immense gifts, beguiled by the ladies. To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: “Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?” or “You think it will be interesting to make a movie where the camera never moves an inch and the actors just enter and exit frame? Or would people just laugh at me?”

Both articles are fully worth your while, of course, not just for their insight, but also their heart and humanity. Scorsese always talks about film and filmmakers this way, of course. Allen's melancholy says a lot, I think, not just about his striving, but his knowledge of his own mortality. And am I the only one who detects in Allen's writing an envy of Bergman's ability to not worry about what others think of his work? Or am I reading that in?

I don't have this kind of connection to film. I think I've admitted that many times. For better or worse (frequently the former, lately, it seems, the latter) film is as it is currently perceived: a director's medium. And it's about the visual sweep and motion. So I get it when Scorsese talks about how great it is to leave things unresolved.

And yet. And yet.

I'm starting to think of my love of the medium of television drama is something more. It's not just the love of someone working in a millieu where his gifts are better appreciated and respected. The conventional wisdom about TV is that it, even still, is film's poor cousin. Oh sure, sure, there are those who will make the bold point about the narrative of something like the Sopranos being better and more sophisticated than film, but generally I think there's a lot of unchallenged thinking going on out there in middlebrow and high falutin circles that TV is still largely what it was: film done more cheaply, on a tighter schedule, smaller budget, and more punishing schedule.

A lot of that (especially in Canada) comes from Directors -- who never quite seem to shake off the sense that by directing TV they're somehow lowering themselves. We have a high falutin cinema in this country, you see. (I should say that I've seen this less from the B.C. directors I've worked with, who seem to understand the medium a bit better.)

Directors want everything to be about the moment. It's very difficult to have a conversation in series with them, where you have to explain that what they may be doing here is setup for a character's reveal down the road. They tend to resent anything that does not pay off in their episode.

Television, by virtue of the fact that we live with characters and stories for so much longer, tend to revel in smaller reveals, telling details, and the slow build. This is all stuff that I've written about before.

But reading these two great men discuss the work of the giants in their field puts me in mind of those who I admire: Joss Whedon, who clearly is meant for TV rather than film; Sorkin, who for all the bombast of Studio 60 demands, I think, a hearth that's closer to the stage than the cinema. James L. Brooks, whose films have been hit and miss, but whose command of the TV medium is never less than masterful.

Increasingly, I'm starting to think of TV as not a cousin or brother to film, but as an evolutionarily distinct beast all its own. It's almost that moment few years ago when they discovered that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens weren't really related -- but evolutionarily distinct. We think of one proceeding from the other. But they don't. TV's DNA is encoded with the stuff of Radio Drama far more than the stuff of Film.

Maybe that's why (even though they are hugely popular) I find the big film sensibility to tv transfers -- yes, you, CSI -- so empty.

I can appreciate and marvel at the love of masters like Antonini and Bergman, but they don't make my heart quicken. They're not of my tribe.

Now, the only question is: who's the neanderthals in this little parable and who's the homo sapiens?

I know where my vote goes. And I'll say only this...three words:

Brett Ratner, Auteur.

And Then There's Tom DiCillo...

WHO'S DEFINITELY a film guy after my own heart...From the NYTimes:

“Look at the movies people are watching,” he said, sitting in his Upper West Side apartment and shaking his head. “They’re about nothing. You invest nothing.” Mr. DiCillo blames, in part, the events of September 2001. “People can’t invest real emotion because it’s too terrifying.”

“Have you ever noticed,” he asked, “that the entertainment business is the only one where there has never been somebody picking up a machine gun and going berserk? A guy in a post office in Cincinnati will bring an AK-47 into his place of business because somebody used his coffee cup. Nothing like that has ever happened in the film business and never will. Never will. You know why? The stakes are too high. It’s life and death. No one is ever going to jeopardize their place in the food chain.

“I’m not suggesting they do,” he said with a smile, “but it’s a brutal business.”

Full Disclosure: I wrote and produced a short film years ago about paparazzi. So I can't wait to see DeCillo's new film. Mmmm.

F*** The Average Reader

MMMM. Friend of the Blog Radio Eli passes along this juicy bit from this month's issue of The Believer, where Nick Hornby interviews David Simon (Homicide, The Wire)

In fact, I found this so delicious that I just went to The Believer/McSweeney's site and re-upped a sub to both The Believer and McSweeney's. So thanks, Eli. You just cost me money.

Simon Says:

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

Beginning with Homicide, the book, I decided to write for the people living the event, the people in that very world. I would reserve some of the exposition, assuming the reader/viewer knew more than he did, or could, with a sensible amount of effort, hang around long enough to figure it out. I also realized—and this was more important to me—that I would consider the book or film a failure if people in these worlds took in my story and felt that I did not get their existence, that I had not captured their world in any way that they would respect.

Make no mistake—with journalism, this doesn’t mean I want the subjects to agree with every page. Sometimes the adversarial nature of what I am saying requires that I write what the subjects will not like, in terms of content. But in terms of dialogue, vernacular, description, tone—I want a homicide detective, or a drug slinger, or a longshoreman, or a politician anywhere in America to sit up and say, Whoa, that’s how my day is. That’s my goal. It derives not from pride or ambition or any writerly vanity, but from fear. Absolute fear. Like many writers, I live every day with the vague nightmare that at some point, someone more knowledgeable than myself is going to sit up and pen a massive screed indicating exactly where my work is shallow and fraudulent and rooted in lame, half-assed assumptions. I see myself labeled a writer, and I get good reviews, and I have the same doubts buried, latent, even after my successes. I suspect many, many writers feel this way. I think it is rooted in the absolute arrogance that comes with standing up at the community campfire and declaring, essentially, that we have the best story that ought to be told next and that people should fucking listen. Storytelling and storytellers are rooted in pay-attention-to-me onanism. Listen to this! I’m from Baltimore and I’ve got some shit you fucking need to see, people! Put down that CSI shit and pay some heed, motherfuckers! I’m gonna tell it best, and most authentic, and coolest, and… I mean, presenting yourself as the village griot is done, for me, with no more writerly credential than a dozen years as a police reporter in Baltimore and a C-average bachelor’s degree in general studies from a large state university. On paper, why me? But I have a feeling every good writer, regardless of background, doubts his own voice just a little, and his own right to have that voice heard. It’s the simple effrontery of the thing. Who died and made me Storyteller?

Okay...now that's the weekend, folks. Hand me an olive. I'm done.

Mad Men Drops The Hammer

THE EPISODE was called "New Amsterdam." I thought that was a particularly clever title. In this show about advertising and generations, how great to see that old name -- Noo Yawk 1.0. --Much may be made of what this show had to say about the divide between generations, then. (And boy you're going back a few if you reference Dyckman in NYC.) But I'm more firmly convinced than ever that the genius of Weiner is that he's writing about today, not about the past...

This is the episode, to me, where Mad Men reached up and touched that Sopranos crown. It was that good.

Learning more about Peter Campbell's backstory was a fascinating turn that pivots the series on its ear. Nice writing, boys -- take the villain and make him all understandable. Very 21st century...And there's something so interesting in watching the steel magnate, for a company that you know went down in 2001.

In fact, that's the whole amazing, tense thing about Mad Men. You watch knowing that all these people are about to get swept up in something none of them understand, and can't stop. And you don't know how, or if, anyone will come out the other end.

But the beauty, the true beauty of the writing shines through in one scene right near the end. This is so close to subtext becoming text (and by the way, I just almost typed 'sex' rather than 'text' there -- say of that what you will, advertising types) that it's amazing they got away with it. But they did. This is a beautiful scene, in a show that's so good that it makes me feel like the squealiest fangirl ever.

(by the by, this is not script, this is my transcription of the scene.)

Now, this scene comes informed perfectly by the two scenes before it: the chilling meeting with Cooper where we see how Don and his boss both dance to another's tune, and the scene where they convince Pete that it's Don who stuck up for him - Don who saved his job. They are all on the edge, these Mad Men -- always selling the better version, never pausing to think about how precarious it is. Sterling's last line in that scene above....is it provocation? A challenge met? Slattery was neutral in his delivery. It's left for you to fill in.

Also, notice that Peggy is minimal in the ep, and Joan doesn't appear at all. I can't think of a Canadian network person anywhere who'd let you get away with that. Sigh.

I can't even think of really intelligent stuff to say about this ep. It just washed over me. I loved it. For a better analysis, check out this entry on The House Next Door.

If you're not watching Mad Men, then I gotta say, why not? What the hell's wrong with you?

Golick Brings the Babe Ruth-Aaron Pilot Heat

IN MY DESIRE to not be pissy and to try to shovel new content your way as often as I can, yo, yea, I sometimes have to rely on the kindness of, well, not strangers, but maybe those who have been doing this longer than I have and who manage to teach me things.

If you're a spec monkey, a baby writer, or even someone who's mid-career like me, you've got things so crazy good compared to when we scrabbled around in the dirt before the dawn of time, when networks were king and before scribes stalked the internet en masse. I can't even tell you. We've come a long way since the only thing you could count on was Syd Field and Robert McKee's eyebrows.

Never mind Jane Espenson's crazy good blogging on specs....I think you all should give a what-what to scripto-blogging's new Barry Bonds, but without the antisocial behavior and obvious doping: Jill Golick.


Never an * for the Golick's mad skillz, yo.

See, Golick crunches the numbers so you don't have to. I remember laying out for my Ryerson students the nitty-gritty of the whole TV ep breakdown and getting the blank stares of incredulity. Well, Golick breaks down Pilots regular like, and it's an awesome resource to behold.

In her latest post, she lays out what she's a-seein about trends in pilot writing. You could not click through and just read through the cadged material I'm going to quote below, but then you'd also be a very silly, stupid, pig-eating, farty english turdblossom.

(Sorry. I saw Spamalot last week. I'm having Post Traumatic Spam Disorder.)

These are the structural trends emerging from the pilots I've read and watched:

Open long.
A lot of teases are running very long. Or scripts are eschewing teases altogether and leading off with titles followed by a long act one. Once you get the viewer tuned in, why give them a commercial and let them escape. Hang onto them as long as possible without giving them a break.

Act lengths aren't even.
There's usually at least one very short (9 page, for example) act. Sometimes, I see symmetry between the first and second halves of the show with acts 1 and 3 almost exactly the same length and acts 2 and 4 the same lengths. I never see all four acts equal.

State your theme in the third act.
Very often the series theme is spelled out in dialogue just as the conflict is rising to its apex in the third act. Isaac Ho pointed this out in a post on Script Enabler. I've found it too. It usually falls at the thirty minute mark which would be around page 40 in a 60 page script.

Oh, there's more. More. More. Over at Golick's hood. She's got pictures and shit. She's even got a Part Two. I dare you not to click through, bitches. I dare you.

In completely unrelated news, Public Enemy has a new CD out. Deal with it. That single makes my heart palpitate.

Blood Ties Site Up At Citytv

Blood Ties finally makes its Canadian TV debut in the next two weeks. Citytv has responded with their own show site for the show. You can find it here.

So Very Wrong.

I can't help it. She's a powerful woman. And that's hot.

UK TeeVee from Piers & A Bit About HOUSE

PRODUCTION MAKES one a little remiss in checking the fine bloggings of others. But Man-Across-The-Pond Piers Beckley (mug at left) weighs in with this interesting news from Blighty:

ITV TO COMMISSION LONG RUNNING DRAMA SERIES

Michael Grade announced today that ITV are specifically looking for long running series.

To wit, "series that are on 14, 15, 16 weeks a year, on every year for three, four or five years".

Will the new UK standard force a shift to a writers' room model? At the moment, the showrun shows (Doctor Who, Torchwood, Robin Hood) use a model with a head writer commissioning, creating the overall story arc, and (sometimes) rewriting scripts. The main proponent I'm aware of for this writing style in the US is David Shore.

What we're not doing yet is breaking stories in the room. And that's where the heavy lifting goes on in most US shows.

But mainly, the question is this: Will we have a writer in charge of the new breed of shows at ITV?

If so, then this may be the beginning of the end for the old UK model.

Pretty heady stuff. The Brits are doing longer runs, the Canadians are shooting pilots...My God, all we need is the Americans to realize there's a world beyond the Southland and the Island of Manhattan, and it'll be like Dogs and Cats sleeping together.

Again -- woe betide the Canadian producers and channels that, due to economic reasons, rush headlong into six-episode orders. You may be out of step with what the market is saying to you...

By the by -- Piers also had some excellent reportage about a session with David Shore in London a month or so ago. I'm giddy at the thought that I might actually be posting something House-related that wasn't posted or referenced by Diane at Unified Theory of Nothing Much, first. But then again, she's been a bit of a slacker lately.

For those of you too lazy -- or cool -- to click a link, here's some of the juicy stuff Piers wrote about Shore and his process:

David only has about twelve days a year in which the staff are all gathered together to break story, and these are used to break the serial elements of the show.

A writer will come to him with a basic idea, which he'll give a Yea or Nay to. After that, it goes to a 2 page story outline: What's the disease, and who is the person. David will give notes on that, along the lines of "Here's what's good about it, and here's what's not."

When it goes to script, the writer will get two or three drafts. The final draft is then done pair-writing in David's office. This works by having a big computer with two screens. They'll then go through it line-by-line, with the script on-screen, amending as necessary.

Obviously this doesn't happen all the time due to production deadlines - but he does it this way so that the writer will learn more about his writing style, which should ease the writing next time.

David used to set a writing exercise for staffers on a previous series:

• Choose an issue

• Write a paragraph about what you believe on the issue

• Write another paragraph completely disagreeing with you

Regarding notes: If someone doesn't like something, there's probably a problem. It might not be the problem they've identified, and the solution they're offering may be awful... but it's likely that there really is a problem somewhere.

Sometimes you read stuff from great showrunners that makes you happy because you think, "hey! that's how I think too!" and for a brief shining second you get all puffy and, "hey whaddya know I'm on the right track!"

I love the exercise of writing the paragraphs. Sometimes I get the feelings on some of the shows I've worked on that the deck is stacked toward one of the positions a little too much. Making that exercise your starting point means you can't put your finger on the scale by hiding behind character and dialogue.

And his idea about notes and bumps -- hard as they are to deal with sometimes -- is also my philosophy. I tend to say, "you don't have to respect their reasons, but you do have to respect the bump."

But it was this observation that almost made me do the whole Diet Coke-through-the-nose thing:

Finally he passed on some advice he'd received years ago: If you want to teach a junior writer a lesson, shoot their first draft.

Oh man. Amen to that.

Burn Notice and The Takeaway: Not Just For Curry and Chinese Food

I AM really enjoying Burn Notice. It's not just that Jeffrey Donovan gets to play a character that's way better (but still just as dangerous) as the guy he played in Touching Evil; it's that old hybrid juice flowing freely. It's amazing that you can mix and match genres so much, slap on a fresh coat of paint, and come up with something that feels so fresh.

For those who haven't seen the show -- the premise is simple. Donovan plays a spy who finds out that there's a "Burn Notice" out on him; which means he's persona non grata. His accounts are frozen, he's got nothing, and he's dropped in Miami and told he can't go anywhere. In Miami is an old friend who's keeping tabs on him for the FBI (Bruce Campbell) and an ex-IRA ex-Girlfriend (Gabrielle Anwar). To top it all off, he gets to relive and reconnect with his mother (Sharon Gless.) Now he has to pass the time and eke out a living working cases and helping people til he can figure out why he was burned.

Pretty nifty combo of a number of items:

• Light serialization (ie: Veronica Mars style)
• Romantic comedy will-they-or-won't-they stuff
  
• Family Problems
• Spy stuff
• Investigations
• Witty Voiceover
  

Jill Golick's got a great breakdown of the pilot for Burn Notice here.

The mixmaster of story items make for a light and escapist viewing experience. You get a hit of House-like impossible relationship with mom, a bit o' sexy sexy with Fiona (Anwar's character); some buddy-buddy with Campbell, and the episodic investigation plot...

...and it's this plot that gave me a sudden brainwave.

Because what I really liked about it is that about twice during each show there's what I call a couple of "MacGyver Moments." That's where Donovan explains in witty voiceover, some aspect of spycraft using everyday materials...Ie: most 40 dollar garden lights have a pretty good motion sensor, you can shoot through drywall just around the door, etc, etc.

(Someone who's seen the show, if you can come up with more specific examples of what I'm talking about from Burn Notice; put 'em in the comments and I'll do an edit to give more examples here -- I just don't have time to go back and rewatch)

The MacGyver moments aren't just entertaining, they actually send you away with some cool fact or truth you didn't know before. And that's tremendously satisfying.

In fact, it puts me in mind of West Wing (as most good things in TV do.) Because one of my favorite things about watching the early, Sorkin-era episodes was that in every episode you learned a fun, strange little fact about American governance (which way the seal of the U.S. faces, the fact that the government doesn't execute people on the Sabbath, how we built 100 000 airplanes before WWII, etc, etc.)

On XM radio, they're about to launch an all-Presidential Election channel called POTUS. It's worth noting, I think that before West Wing, nobody really knew that acronym. The pilot for West Wing put that out there for everybody.

It was a little something to take away.

The "takeaway," in fact, is something that they were obsessed with in my former life as a (shudder) lifestyle TV writer. All those makeover and design shows, the Holmes on Homes and Debbie Travis'es and Queer Eyes are all about building in "takeaways" -- useful bits of knowledge the audience can take away with them and apply in their own lives. (Or not.)

Now in dramatic terms, not many of us have practical uses for knowing little bits of spycraft. But that doesn't mean it's not cool. And anyway, all those shows on the Travel Channel aren't really so you know the Top Ten Places to Go in Helsinki because they actually think you're going to go there. They know that 90% of us are going to stay with asses firmly planted in couch. But still -- it's nice to learn something new.

USA has actually done a brilliant job of extending this aspect of Burn Notice into its online offerings. They actually have a series of "Spy Tips" on their site. Oh sure, they're less funny than Ask a Ninja...but they're actually...useful. They're fun. Go watch.

And oh yeah, they've got a writers' blog, too.

This can get into dangerous territory with some projects, and some writers, because you can turn into a bit of a research wank. (Well, here's an interesting bit of Tudor-era crockery...) But if the subject is fun and interesting, the nice thing about building in a takeaway is that it a) makes your audience feel like they've learned something (smart) and b) makes your world more realistic and involving (smarter.)

So when you're working up those scripts, ask yourself, is there room to give the audience a little bit of a takeaway?

I'll have chips with mine, please. Yum.

Yessss!

SOMETIMES WHEN you're a writer on a TV show, you get to fulfill terrible parts of your personality that you didn't even know you had, that would otherwise have no outlet.

Like when the playback/art dept calls with a dull idea for a newspaper headline that's supposed to feature in an episode about government ministers and lapdancers, for instance.

Oh sure, you could go with "Strippergate." That's been done. You don't want to go there, do you?

No. No you don't. So suddenly, there it is, your opportunity to fulfill your secret dream of being a trashy, evil, exploitative tabloid headline writer.

With cheap puns and everything.

You know how it feels? It feels good. Not "mansquito" good, maybe. Not "Headless Woman Found In Topless Bar" good [Which is a famous actual New York Post headline] But mmmm, mmmm, good. Real good.

Thank you, Baby Jesus. Thank you for my little career.

Maureen Ryan Talks to Me Through My TeeVee

I LIKE Maureen Ryan because she thinks about TV. A lot. Anybody who thinks about TV is my friend. Anyone who turns up their nose at TV, who's casually dismissive without thinking about the medium, well, I won't say they're my enemy, but let's just say you're not getting a holiday card.

Ryan's been musing on her Chicago Tribune blog over TV storytelling and what kinds of stories work, and what kinds don't. She riffs off a piece that Jane Espenson wrote for the New Republic , dealing with SF narratives, which posits that audiences gravitate toward "The Chosen One," stories...comforting hero narratives. Most of the Sci-Fi that doesn't catch on doesn't catch on because it lacks this dimension. Interesting theory.

Where Ryan takes it further, though, is into the soup of what we who create TV do when we're doing what we do. (Doobie doobie do.)

I'm not sure I've ever heard it described so well:

Many TV shows similarly have an interesting, well-told "cover story" -- and a subtext that's just as intriguing, if not more intriguing.

This "TV disguise" is actually something I've thought about a lot -- many of the cleverest shows on TV use it to great effect.

For instance, I think "Battlestar Galactica" isn't just a satisfying tale of survivors on the run from extermination. It is that, on one level, but wrapped inside that overall structure is a meditation on governing, power, the tension between the military and civilians and an exploration of what human beings will do to each other -- and for each other -- when the "normal" restrictions of human society are taken away.

Likewise, I've always thought "House" is really a weekly ethics seminar. What is moral behavior? What constitutes brutal disregard for others and what constitutes selfless adherence to well-defined ideals? What's the definition of violating a person's individual rights, and when is it OK to ignore those rights in order to save a life? Those kinds of discussions and arguments between House and his staff, or House and Wilson, could be taking place in a graduate philosophy seminar. Lucky for us they take place within a tightly constructed mystery story.

"The Sopranos"? A gangster's tale, to be sure, but also a deeply resonant examination of materialism and what the definition of manhood is in the 21st century.

Would you believe that I think "Deadwood" is, on one level, a treatise on government as well? After all, if you put aside the boozing and the swearing and so forth, the show's really about how people on the edge of a lawless frontier choose to rule themselves.

And way back in the day, I used to think "Grey's Anatomy" was an interesting take on how friendship and ambition collided. Now I'm not sure what it's about, except about how desperate TV writers often seem to be driven by a desire to make their characters as illogical, unlikable and inconsistent as possible.

I've often thought that the smartest TV writers find an idea or a set of challenging ideas that they want to explore, and then find a TV-friendly format that will allow them to do that.

After all, a TV executive who gets a pitch on "a weekly morality seminar" is pretty likely to pass. "A cranky but charismatic doctor saves lives in an unorthodox way" -- sold!

Though I'm in the middle of storybreak hell, I'm also dipping my toe back into development for the first time since Across The River To Motor City got made last year. (It's coming this fall -- I swear to Dog, just waiting for the date...) I took a long break from developing my own projects after that, because 2005-2006 had me juggling three. It was a hard slog, and after all that, the tank was low.

Now, in my copious free time (nights and sleep hours) and those times when I'm banging my head against the wall for my current project, I'm starting to think through two new concepts. I have pitch documents for both, and my agents are putting them out there. There's a lot that's fluid in a concept at that stage. But what's essentially true about what Ryan's written is this: I know, deep down, what I want the shows to be about. I try to put enough of that into the pitch document to intrigue, but not scare people. After that, you really do range a bit to find the best characters, form, storytelling style and format to dramatize those big ideas.

I can't help but think that one of the things that's holding us back in some quarters of Canadian drama is that we don't do enough to make that leap. I've seen a lot of recent shows that were about their underlying ideas -- but...not much else. The characters and storytelling weren't worked through enough to support that underlying framework. I call it "broccoli tv."

I've been seeing a lot of shows where they sell the morality lesson without coming up with Dr. House. That's partly a network thing, and partly a creator thing, and partly a flaw in the development thing. Given a chance, a network person will always want to talk about big things rather than plot or story, because they might not be good about plot and story, but everyone's got an opinion on women's suffrage or preemptive war or rehabilitation vs. incarceration...And it's pretty easy for writers to fall into that trap, too. Because finding the right form and absolutely the right characters -- well, that's the hard part. But it's also the part that the audience expects you to do. They want you to do that work.

Shows where you make the audience do all that work, like, oh, say, John From Cincinatti, well, they may be interesting, and curiosity-sparking. But they won't be loved. I really believe that.

Lost and Gilligan's Island are the same show -- except, of course, they're not. Cause they worked it, and worked it, and worked it. And then they threw in a polar bear, but who's gonna nitpick that?

I think Ryan's words are something that any TV scribe, experienced or non, should keep going back to.

The underlying stuff is great. It's what feeds you as a writer. But it's not the bulk of your work. Craft demands more.

A Little of What I'm Doing

IF YOU'D LIKE to know a bit more about the show I'm currently writing for, Playback, in its latest issue, has a feature story from the set.

The Border was commissioned as an MOW from documentary stalwart White Pine Pictures, but was later reworked. Raymont submitted the first episode of the 13 x 60 series as part of the pubcaster's pilot scheme last December, and received the green light in February.

Episodes will be "informed and inspired" by headline news stories.

The war on terror also makes the job of the agents more taxing. "A lot of it has to do with our relationship with the U.S.," says Raymont.

The Border is set across all major ports and points of entry in Canada, but the shoot is limited to Ontario locales such as Toronto, Ottawa and Oshawa, where recent filming attracted the attention of locals, who reported the mysterious landing of an executive jet on a rural road (a scene from one of the first episodes) to local news outlets.

Creative producers and writers David Barlow (Blue Murder), Janet MacLean (The Murdoch Mysteries), Denis McGrath (Blood Ties) and Sarah Dodd are on board. The ensemble cast includes James McGowan (Warriors of Terra), Graham Abbey (Heartland) and CSI: Miami's Sophia Milos, who stars as a member of U.S. Homeland Security. The Border will run 13 consecutive weeks on CBC in January. Brian Dennis (The Eleventh Hour) is supervising producer, and John Fawcett (DaVinci's Inquest) is among the directors.

The series was the pet project of documentarian Lindalee Tracey, Raymont's wife and business partner, who lost her long battle with cancer during the filming of the pilot episode last October. Her award-winning docs on immigration, The Undefended Border and Invisible Nation, inspired the storylines, though Raymont says this fictionalized version is somewhat more realistic.

"We can work with a team of people now who have insider knowledge on how the border works and who won't allow themselves to be filmed on camera," he says.

Funny thing, um...so Playback published this article in their daily email update. You'll notice, maybe, that there's..ahem..a name missing from the story department. We have a four person story department. They mention three.

Okay. No problem.

What's a little funnier... is that they went back and corrected the piece, added in a few people they'd left out of the original article, including the Producer and one of the Directors...but they still left out...one name.

Sigh. The glamor never stops.

But what do you know? I read it now and there's my name! My name's there!

I am sad and require constant validation.

Mea Culpa.

Can Rescue Me be Rescued, or Should We Call It?

SO SUMMER winds on, and though I'm spending days crunching grey to try and work out a story, everyone's vacations and scarcity makes for some time to catch up on summer TV.

The first thing that surprises me a little is that I might be joining the chorus of those jumping off the Rescue Me bus. I understand critics like Maureen Ryan who've called Rescue Me on its misogyny and for pointing out how ridiculous it is that every hot woman that comes along immediately falls for Tommy Gavin. But that's not why I'm disenchanted.

There's a big tightrope series have to walk -- and season four is generally that gauntlet. If you've conceived your drama well, you can probably get three seasons out of it without breaking a sweat. But Season Four is where the bloom comes off the rose, and unless you've got some real great new tricks in your bag, people are going to start to drift away.

West Wing is a perfect example of this. Season Four was Sorkin's last on the show, and though his swansong featured some really strong, interesting episodes, the grumbles about the show at that time really served to ease his flight out the door.

This fall, we'll see House try to avoid the stink of the fourth season curse. Will introducing new ducklings and shaking up the relationships work? Who knows -- House has kind of always had a problem with ongoing arcs (everything eventually resets to zero.)

I think Rescue Me might just have worn through its concept. I don't find any permutation of the Tommy/Janet relationship interesting anymore. Losing the Chief was a big blow...I agree with the many others who've said that he was one of two characters you actually could root for on the show (John Scurti's Lou being the other one.) Even the things that made Rescue Me audacious aren't working anymore. Those comedy scenes slapped up against the drama -- they were thrilling when they worked, and thrilling when they didn't. For some reason, they're just not working for me this year. Any of them. They just..lie there. I've seen up to episode 5, and I'm not burning to see the rest. I miss the Gavin brothers, too. In so much as that dysfunctional Irish hate/love/filial relationship struck me as something that really got at the core of who Tommy was. I spent a lot of time defending Season 3 to people. I'm a little bit mournful that the show hasn't continued the bold dance. This high wire act of series tv -- it is really, really cruel sometimes. But there you go.

I think the promo image for Season Four -- that ape like rictus from Leary -- says more about the state of the show than anyone intends. I think maybe the life is gone out, leaving an emaciated husk.

I've heard rumors that the episoodes I haven't seen yet get even worse -- and that Rescue Me's patented "shock value" slow burn storytelling might finally have erupted into full, desperate shock-for-shock's sake flame. It's a shame. Three seasons of a very interesting, very different show. Nothing to sneeze at, but man, I would have been happy to see them pull off two or three more.

Manohla Dargis: We're All Geeks Here

MANOHLA DARGIS weighs in in the New York Times today with a lively, lovely, and surprisingly touching essay from last weekend's San Diego Comicon. It's a strange time for those who create and those who consume -- with blurry boundaries and allegiances, and constantly shifting frames of reference. We may disagree on things from time to time, but there's no doubt that something important is happening in the video arts -- and maybe the relationship between comic artist and fan is the leading edge of that. I'm not sure. I just know that reading this article I felt like it was lapping at the shores of something very new in the artist/audience relationship:

The audiences are openly fawning, but you never lose the sense that they could turn against the presenters. The beast is happy as long as it’s fed, but woe to those who don’t feed it.

Such is the nature of fandom, which demands as much as it receives. That seems especially true of comic book fans, who appear to enjoy a more intimate relationship with producers than most pop-culture consumers. Part of this may be rooted in the very nature of the comic book, which is accessible even to young buyers. Comic books fit nicely in your hand, they’re relatively cheap and humbly constructed: just three staples and paper. Just as important — unlike movies, which until the introduction of digital technologies were almost entirely out of reach for most people — comic books are also something that anybody with a pencil and a slip of paper can create. Their seeming modesty is seductive.

At the same time, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, the elliptical form of the comic book — which forces you to make cognitive leaps from panel to panel, jumping across that stretch of white called the gutter — means you have to fill in more blanks than someone watching a mainstream movie...The wild-eyed, worn-out Comic-Con fans fiercely clutching a cardboard “300” shield in one hand and a plastic bag in the other may not have been thinking about aesthetics and intellectual pursuits. But they were actively engaged in the creation of culture.

So much is changing, so fast, that it's almost painful to try and take a quieter, longer-viewed step back look at the state of fandom and creation today. What I think I loved about Dargis' piece is that it's informed by the truth of our times. She relates earlier in the article her engagement with the underground comix of her youth, when her family ran a bookstore. But the transition that happened in the past -- the "growing up" and "setting aside" of that culture as you aged -- it's not happening anymore. And as much as dumb superhero movies with simple hero narratives does nothing to grow our collective imagination -- I still find myself, when confronted with the old geek or nerd stereotype, feeling like it's a relic of another area. The geeks are not disconnected, they are not marginalized, they have, in fact, won. And Dargis says as much. Again...in a lovely, thoughtful way:

The cliché about fans being losers with no social skills, no friends and no clue is essential to its myths, marketing and even its most loyal readers. In the last few decades the emergence of a geek elite has helped legitimize this outsider culture and helped bring legions of 97-pound weaklings into the sightlines of the industrial entertainment complex. In some respects America is now a country of freaks and geeks, self-professed outsiders who imagine themselves somehow different from the herd, perhaps because they are Americans — radical individuals who are united if only by their increasingly narrow interests and obsessions.

This kind of atomization of the culture has its problems, as we know deep in our bones. Yet for all my worries that we are turning into a nation of iPod people, that’s only part of the big, postmodern, late-capitalism picture. Despite all the plastic and dissembling, events like Comic-Con represent something genuine and true and, yes, powerful about how people live in the modern world. Every day we wake up to navigate through a faceless, inhuman, Made-in-China existence. Some of us escape through literature, some of us burrow deep into movies. And some of us find sweet relief in what, to the outside world, looks entirely disposable, useless and — here’s that word again — childish. They find happiness in Hot Wheels, wonderment in Wonder Woman. Superman teaches them how to fly, and they do.

Poor Boy Wonder

JIMMY THE BAT, intrepid Border story coordinator, is beside himself. There's a dialogue change to be done. Which means going to the next color. Which would be, now, say it with me....Buff.

But we don't have the Buff paper yet.

What to do? What to do?

Jimmy gets a crazy look in his eye, a desperate, hungry look as he stalks through the mostly-empty office, shouting, "I don't care! I'm going tan!"

In Canadian TV, this is how we roll.

Smart Friends Sum Up The CBC

IT'S GREAT to have smart friends. I highly recommend getting yourself a passel of them. Often we get caught up in our own B.S. or opinions. Like, oh, I don't know, me for instance. I could write a whole couple of pages about this or that issue regarding Canadian TV or TV in general.

Or I could just reprint, in its entirety, an email I got from my friend Jeff yesterday, entitled "Everything that's wrong with the CBC in one sentence."

Playback buried the lead in the CBC/Rabinovitch/Headhunting story. The final paragraph is this:

"A network spokesperson would provide no further details about the search process. "It's a federal appointment, so we're really not involved in the process at all," says CBC spokesperson Katherine Heath-
Eves."

Right. Well that explains a lot.

Well done.

Indeed.

Oh, By The Way...

THERE'S A hilarious coda to this post of mine from last week.

You ready for it?

They ran out of light and dropped the scene.

Yessss! WRITER! ON! THE! SET!

Canadian Teeny Tiny Tip: Mad Men

TODAY SEEMS to be the day for little tiny program updates, so let's just go with that. I say this as a public service because I am increasingly becoming obsessed with Matthew Weiner's Mad Men. (Weiner is pictured at left.)

If you are in Canada and your cabler is Rogers, you should know that the first two episodes of Mad Men are now available On Demand on the Rogers On Demand Channel, under the TV category. You might not otherwise know that since it's not an HBO or TMN/Movie Central show. It's not on the TMN on Demand -- it's on the channel you go to buy PPV download movies.

I'm assuming that other Canadian cablers are also offering this, but can't speak to that definitively. And if we've got it, maybe some of the Yankee services have it too.

Oh, yes. Mad Men also airs the old fashioned way, live, tonight (Thursday) at 10PM on AMC.

I'm just going to say four words: Christina Hendricks as Joan.

Yowza.