How To Give Notes

"I HAVE a few notes..."

Ooooh. Ooohh. I think I actually heard groaning coming through the innertubes.

I've been talking (commiserating?) a lot lately with fellow TV scribes who are (it's the summer, remember) all presently drowning in notes. What are they saying? It might surprise you. Because sure, there's a little bit of carping of the "they just don't understand" variety. But most professional writers I know express their frustration a bit more plaintively. Vis:

When I am going to get some script notes that help me write a better next draft instead of leaving me on the floor in a pool of confusion and despair?

Contrary to popular belief, most of the pro writers I know understand that an outline is an outline, and a first draft sucks. Always. It's never where you need it to be. And what you need is an astute reader to help you out and get you to where it needs to be. If you're doing a poky spec script, that's one thing. But if you're in production, or prep, all of this has to happen in an incredibly compressed timeframe. But everyone needs that step. Even the Writer Gods who (barely) walk among us.

A good friend of the blog tipped me to Brian Lowry's article in Variety about notes.

Chuck Lorre was speaking with admiration when he told the New York Times regarding "The Sopranos" finale, "This is what you get when you let a writer do whatever he wants." But the "Two and a Half Men" co-creator's observation exposes a larger point.

Network notes have gotten a bad rap, but as several recent programs attest -- including David Milch's bizarre "John From Cincinnati," Aaron Sorkin's self-indulgent "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" and, yes, David Chase's much-debated blackout -- left to their own devices, even the finest writers can produce material that leave audiences cold and occasionally slack jawed.

Executives once joked that every A-list producer has a dud inside them just waiting for its owner to achieve success affording them the freedom to release the beast -- a dynamic that begs the age-old question of how to guide creativity without shackling it.

You can quibble over Lowry's choices (I loved Sopranos, still am not sure about John, and agree wholeheartedly about Studio 60,) but Lowry's whole column is well worth a read. But the best part, I think, is this:

Notes aren't inherently bad; bad notes are, and even pedigreed talent can benefit from a little direction.

Let's take that as a bedrock given. I mean, I believe I've written before about the effect good notes can have on a writer. So let's proceed to the next step:

How do you give good notes, rather than bad notes?

This is an entry that could, I hope, benefit Canadian network execs - because as I've said before, rigor, passion, and smarts at that level is what we creatives in Canada desperately need. But it also could benefit people acting as Story Editors, of which there are many in this country, mainly because Telefilm will sometimes pay for them.

Step One: Get the Relationship Right by Managing Ego

As Lowry says in his article, the person giving the notes is not exactly a collaborator. They are, if anything, meant to inspire. But how does that inspiration work? Well, if you remember anything from your philosophy classes, or science classes, the way the progression of intellectual thought generally works is this: thesis + antithesis = synthesis.

So an idea meets another idea, or a counter idea, and the fight between them results in a new (and hopefully better!) idea. Figuring out story goes the same way.

If you're in a position to give notes, there are two ways you can approach it -- you can try to get the writer to do what you want them to do, or you can try to challenge their assumptions, see what their intent was, and talk them through to a place where the result is better.

There are type-A's out there who will snort and snigger at this, and think that it's "touchy feely." There are producers who'll want to say, "hey, what I say goes," and there are network-editor types who'll say, "Hey, we're the ones paying the bill." And both those things are true. And both those things will result in you winding up with a crappy script and a writer who's just trying to get to the end of the project -- and away from you.

Down the line, what it also means is that you'll find fewer and fewer good writers want to work with you. There are producers out there -- even in Canada -- to whom this has already happened. They have trouble attracting talent to work with them because "the word is out." The community is small; people talk. There are also networks that have slid to the bottom rung on who to approach simply because their development process is known to be unpleasant and confrontational.

This sounds like "coddle the writer," a bit, doesn't it? It isn't. Because on the other side of it, the writers, if they're good and serious -- are undergoing the same process. They're trying to decode your notes and really understand what you meant. They're trying to let go of their immediate ego reactions and move on to getting and dealing with your points.

Understand that doesn't always mean taking and executing your note. Sometimes, the thing that's bothering you isn't really the thing that's bothering you. A good writer always takes note of the bump -- and if they don't agree with your diagnosis of how to fix it, they're still going to look for a way to deal with your concern. You don't see the way we're trying to manage our ego, in good faith, but trust us...we're doing it.

Then we drink a lot of beer. Unless we're one of those writers who have stopped drinking beer. Then we go to the gym and punch a bag. Same difference.

If you're a note giver, getting the relationship right, and managing ego means taking a couple of things on faith:

• Your writer understands the story better than you do, because they've lived with it longer.
• Your writer doesn't think it's perfect, and they don't understand the ins and outs perfectly either -- so there's plenty of room for your input and shaping.
  

From there, like in writing, note giving comes all in the execution. Rather than approach your notes as, "In scene 5 we don't think this should happen," or "I don't like this," how about trying more open-ended questions that require the writer to clarify -- really clarify -- what they're trying to do. "Why do you have Jenny discover the boyfriend's infidelity here? Why not later?" Or "What does killing the Mexican get us in this scene, and is that really worth the risk of making our protagonist unlikable?"

Coming in imperiously: cut this, move that, make this funnier -- hate this line, but don't have an alternative...well... that's not helpful. It's just not. I mean, really, ordering writers around can't be that fun. It's not like we're actors or something...we're not....bendy.

If you ask open-ended questions, and get a dialogue going -- you might have a longer notes call, but I guarantee you you're going to have a more interesting discussion. By forcing your writer to clarify and to articulate their intent, you can focus like a laser on those parts that really aren't integral to the story. And what comes out of the subsequent discussion will make the end product better.

By the way - this is also how writers work with each other.

I recently finished a story editing gig for a young writer who's trying to get his series off the ground. I was clear always, when I made a suggestion, to frame it with, "I feel..." statements, and "What was the intent of..." and "How are you going to..." statements. I didn't impose my ideas on this writer, because I didn't have to. By asking the right questions, and reacting positively to his ideas, we got to a much better place organically. And of course, some of my ideas got in there, too. But they got in in such a way that the writer bought into it. They didn't feel imposed -- it wasn't me vs. him. It was us. Us is always better.

When something wasn't working for me, the other thing I did was frame in terms of "what is the audience experiencing right now?" Which brings us to step two:

Step Two: Who are the Audience, and What Should they Be Feeling Right Now?

The fight over the audience is where you could have some legitimate sparks between network and writer.

In theory, knowing the audience is the network's job. In the United States, they will have very sophisticated testing to show you just what the audience is thinking and feeling, and exactly how they react in razor thin increments. They'll show you the testing data, and what it means, and what they want, and how it all results in success.

Which is why, of course, every fall all of the networks' shows become massive giant hits.

Do the Dr. Evil pinky with me now...

Rigggght.

Leonard Stern, the producer of Get Smart, wrote a book a long time ago called "A Martian Wouldn't Say That!" which collected some of the most inane notes given by network executives. In the Lowry Variety article, he quotes Stern as talking about the downside of testing by executives.

Stern agreed that writers have cause for skepticism in dealings with executives, especially when the suits cite research and testing -- betraying their willingness to "surrender instincts, or a refusal to acquire them."

In most cases, the writer's objection is having someone try to quantify or "prove" something unprovable, when the steady application of common sense would probably work better.

Part of that common sense is arriving at a baseline agreement about who the audience is, and what they're likely to know.

The most famous story I can think of on this point is something I heard from the mouth of Peter Casey, one of the Executive Producers of Frasier. He came to visit us when I was a resident at the Canadian Film Centre several years ago. He told the story of the early days of Frasier, when they prepared scripts, they had Frasier and Niles make jokes about opera and art and wine. They got a lot of pressure from the networks to take those jokes out because it was felt that they would alienate the audience. Casey and his partners argued that Frasier and Niles were who they were, men of erudition -- and that they would make jokes like that. To not have them make those jokes would be to betray something about the character. And they felt that if even 10% of the audience got those jokes, they were worth it. There would be plenty of other stuff to keep the people who didn't get the "ten-percenters."

Well, lo and behold, a few weeks into Frasier airing, when it was already a big hit, they got the data back and they found out that fully 40% of the audience was getting the "ten percenters."

At this point in the story, Casey paused and looked at all of us. "Makes you wonder. Those shows that won't go for the 10% percenters. What level are they aimed at?"

That story has particular resonance for the Canadian TV industry. Because traditionally, we never go for the ten percenters. Ever.

There's a few ways you can get lost on the way to your audience.

• Assuming that the audience is dumber than you.

Audiences have (a la Stephen Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You) gotten used to watching Lost, and Heroes -- shows with rich narratives and lots of stuff going on. They watch CSI and they watch Ugly Betty and they have no trouble keeping all the characters straight. They watch E.R. and since the very first episode, they do not worry about jargon and medical stuff -- so long as the drama (or the comedy) is there, they are carried through all right.

But if you get 'noted' to over-explain everything; if you can never use jargon or shorthand, and if you always have to make sure that everything. is. explained. always. Well...then two things are going to inevitably follow: your pace will be deadly slow, and your audience will be bored. Remember the lesson of the ten-percenters.

• Assuming that the audience is you.

Some writers do this, especially new, starting out writers writing autobiographically, but it's far more common with network execs and producers: they extrapolate their single experience and make it universal. "Women don't think this way," "A man would never let himself be..." etc, etc. It's a deadly trap and it can derail a character or a story faster than just about any other pitfall. Insisting on a behavior, or an action without taking it through the questioning process in Step One above serves neither audience nor script.

• Making the audience surrogate character the blandest person in the piece.

You'd be surprised how often this happens. If so and so is supposed to be me, and they're as boring as a dog's ass because they're so chaste/perfect/virtuous/saintly/straight/buff/teetotalling/flawless ... well, then what are you saying about me?

• Surrendering to your agenda.

See: Canadian Drama. Your theme is not your story. It is one arrow in your quiver. If you desperately want to "say something," then may I suggest drafting a manifesto? This one can come from either side, but it's always deadly. We know racism is bad, people. You don't have to tell us. And tell us. And tell us.

...you could show us, maybe. How bout that?

• Adding a scene in to show us "more about the person's character."

Not if it doesn't move the story along, buddy. You're on the deadly pace express.

It's amazing how much you can deflect a trip down a bad road -- whether you're the network or the writer, by asking the simple question: "what is the audience feeling right now? why are they rapt? what are you showing them that makes them not care about reaching for that remote?"

This is where the proper definition of "fridge logic" comes into play. Some writers use "fridge logic" to be a bit of a band-aid to coverup bad plot holes. (But, if you're discussing the story like in Step One, likely those holes won't stand up to challenge, right?)

What fridge logic is, is those little bits of coincidence or plotting that won't interrupt the flow of the story for the audience. They're so named because they're the kinds of things you will only care about a half hour later when you're looking for something to eat in the fridge. Yup, there's probably some goof over on TWOP that will stand up and say, "they forgot about X and it ruined it for me!" but those people are not a large part of your audience.

In the end, one of the best definitions of fridge logic, and they way you can learn to tell the difference between fridge logic and a legitimate story concern is in the application of a fix. If the fix for the "problem" seems convoluted, long, or drags more than the problem itself...that's fridge logic. Solving plot problems -- real ones -- makes the story seem cleaner, not more convoluted.

This is a skill that any good note-giver can learn. But again -- it comes from centering yourself thinking, "what is the audience experiencing right now?" And it requires developing those critical skills. Research aint gonna help you.

Step Three: Stop Reading the Script and Start Seeing the Movie

This one, writers can be guilty of. Or story editors. Or network suits. Or anyone. And it comes from the willful forgetting of one very important fact:

The audience will never read the script.

Repeat that to yourself. What you are poring over, what you are slaving over -- is a transitional document. It is a physical representation of something that your audience is going to experience in an entirely different medium.

When you're reading to give notes, there will inevitably be some things that seem confusing on the page, that won't be confusing when they're filmed. Unfortunately, one of the only ways you can start to tell which is which is to go through it a few times. But in my experience, I've found that we often spend far too much time obsessing over details of presentation that just aren't going to read for an audience.

Reading a script is hard. There's a lot of detail to keep straight and you don't have all the visual and auditory cues: voice, look, manner, inflection -- that communicate character. We've all seen deleted scenes on DVD where a whole speech was cut to a line and a reaction shot, and yet nothing was lost. That is the magic of the medium.

There is nothing in the world more dehabilitating for a writer than to have to cut something because the person reading it wasn't reading it closely enough. Nothing will take the fight out of a writer faster than going through that experience a few times. You start to feel, "what's the point?" You make your peace. And the next thing you know, greatness has escaped out the door once again.

Seeing the movie takes time. It takes more than a cursory read. And it might have to involve you going back to step one a couple times too: maybe you do need the scene explained to you. That's no matter. That doesn't mean you're not good at your job. And it doesn't necessarily mean the scene isn't working. You'll know if it does by what happens when the writer tries to defend it. If they're unclear, then you're right: the scene isn't working. Maybe you can come up with something better, together.

Step Four: Review Your Notes and Don't Allow Contradiction

There are some people who read all the way through and then give overview and specific notes, and there are some people who give notes as they go along. Ie: if they don't get something, they note it right away. I tend to like to do the latter -- even if that means that I do a "take back" note. ie: Page 8 - OK, that explains my confusion, page 5...never mind...but is it too long a gap?"

By reading and giving notes that way, I feel I'm doing my best to approximate the audience experience -- feeling my way through the story in real time, imagining I'm watching it.

Your notes should be written, as succinctly as possible. Don't lecture or hector. Know your writer: some need more praise than others. Sometimes, a checkmark or a good goes a long way.

What's desperately needed at the end of this, though, is a final clean and wash. If you've expressed thougths or questions about the character acting in a certain way in Act One, you can't give the opposing note in Act Three. Your writer is working very hard to try and have internal consistency in the story as it progresses. Doing the same thing with your notes is the very least you can do.

In Canada, we do a lot of international co-productions. And inevitably, different sets of notes come from different countries and the notes all contradict each other. I'm not sure if you can always make those notes agree...but if you've got different people in the same organization reviewing the material, you should take the step to harmonize those notes and present a unified front.

Otherwise, writers heads tend to explode. And it's the middle of the summer. No one likes to be covered in viscera.

There are good notes out there, and there are people who give good notes. And though it may not always be a Kumbaya festival, it is always rewarding, and it always makes the script better. And there's not a writer I know who wouldn't want to work with someone who approaches notes like I've outlined here, again and again and again.

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.