Tumbleweeds

WELL, I didn't get my full outline revised and off to the CBC so there'll be cleanup over the weekend.

And the hardworking crew of The Border will be shooting well into the wee hours tonight. But after that, most of us will be on hiatus for a week. Not all - there's some second unit in Ottawa and Vancouver...but that's small by comparison.

Everyone's limping into the weekend, and I hope to read some books -- actual books - this week, see a play, some friends, acquire some life experience, you know -- all the stuff I don't do because I'm chained to a laptop.

Last night I was at The Spoke Club here in Toronto catching up with an old friend who's just shot a new pilot. Much shop talk, much fun, much bumping into old friends and colleagues with news and gossip and yore...

One of those delightful people, friend of the blog Jenncow, sent me an email this morning with a simple little tagline that I think sums up the quest in this business better than most...

Have fun, be nice, do good work.

So I guess I'll leave you with that. Blogging will be light til Labor Day. Have fun.

Don't Just Get MAD, Get Caught Up.

WELL, THAT'S PRETTY smart.

If you dropped off after the pilot or never got the chance to tune in, AMC is giving you all another chance to see MAD MEN.

Starting 9 a.m., Sunday, Sept 2, AMC will run the first 7 episodes in a marathon.

So there you go.
H/T to Maureen Ryan.

And what's all the fuss about? As she puts it:

Some shows are really good at one or two things (for instance, "Psych" is really good at inspired physical comedy and generally entertaining silliness). And that's just fine -- doing one or two things exceptionally well is no small accomplishment.

But then there are shows that wow you in a whole bunch of ways, and "Mad Men" is one of them. I love the detailed period sets and costumes; the cynical, witty dissection of the ad industry; the complicated gender politics; the dispassionate look at what it takes to achieve the American dream; and the startling glimpse of a time when racism, anti-Semitism and sexism were not only routinely ignored but hardly even seen as important issues.




And then there's the acting on the show, which is nothing short of spectacular. All the characters at the fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency are instantly intriguing, and Don Draper, the mysterious ad man played by Jon Hamm, is more fascinating every week. Who is Draper? What makes him tick? In a way, we know even less about him than we ever have, even after five episodes of the show have aired.

Mad Men airs Thursday nights at 10pm on AMC.

Panic in the Streets of L.A.

I'VE BEEN really enjoying Kay Reindl's blog of late. She rings truthful on so many things, and has a front-line reportage style and matter-of-factness that I appreciate.

Yesterday I asked about what people were looking forward to from the new fall schedule. It was partly a plant (and I knew this) because, of course, on the net everyone always favors the sci-fi or fantasy genre shows. But the other reason I was asking was because of the whispering. The whispering I hear-- even waaaaaaaay up here in Canada, is that nobody's too impressed. And there's a lot of dread going into this fall. But what the hell, I'm a million miles away. Let Kay tell you what it feels like in Studio City, CA:

Starting Monday, we've got a meeting a day all week. It feels like development season is cranking up. The studios seem to have just realized that holy CRAP, Labor Day's coming up! MUST BUY PROJECTS! I didn't think it was possible, but this year's even more fucked up than last year. Networks haven't bought a lot yet but the stories about pitching are pretty much the same across the board. Nobody wants to commit to anything. I think part of that is because of the mess that the fall season has become. More shows are in trouble at more networks than ever before. The networks and studios don't have any faith in the product they're putting on in the fall. They can't even pretend they do, because we've all heard the rumors. And you know what? Big effing surprise. The shows they bought are pilots, not TeeVee shows. They constantly order shows that don't have engines. There's a lot of firing of showrunners and actors going on. Too much. The main reason television works -- a vision -- is being excised from the process. So new showrunners are stumbling around in the dark, being forced to start from scratch with a show they didn't conceive.

Think about the best shows you've seen. They can all be traced to a singular vision, can't they? All I see with the fall season is TeeVee by committee, which has never worked. The show I'm enjoying the most right now is Mad Men and boy, does that have a singular vision. It's also got a complex, not always likeable lead character. This isn't something you get with a committee. Every episode of this show is a dark little gem. In episode three, we got to see the three different generations and how they saw each other. A WWII vet, a Korean war vet, and somebody who didn't serve. They don't understand each other at all, which is relayed in a brilliant piece of dialogue delivered by the underrated John Slattery. And last week, we learned more about Don's past. The last scene with his brother was one of the most complex, dark scenes I've seen on American TeeVee in a long-ass time.

Ever since they started talking about the "showrunner school" I've been a little filled with trepidation by what I saw as the erosion of the U.S. writer-showrunner culture. Here in Canada it's my honest opinion (and Lord knows, I've said it before) that the main thing preventing us from creating truly superior product is the lack of this singular vision Kay talks about.

Shows in Canada seem to come largely in three stripes:

1. Inexperiened creator who is "helped" by more experienced producer/director (ie: nibbled to death by ducks or gothic power play between the different positions)
2. Tv by committee (where the network notes are dived on slavishly, everyone gets to weigh in, and the product is reduced to a fine paste)
3. Neverwas shows: shows by someone "with a track record" -- except that "track record" is usually as a U.S. line producer where the closest they ever go to creative was their lunch order.
   

Kay's dead right about Mad Men. Part of why this show is ricocheting like a bullet in my brain is because the layering, the detail, and the slow reveal is just so...measured. Professional. Well executed.

We have had these shows before in Canada: Durham County, Corner Gas, Trailer Park Boys, Our Hero, DaVinci's Inquest, Intelligence, Slings & Arrows.

We just need to make more.

But it's awfully hard to make that argument when you see the edifice crumbling to the south of you.

Aw, bag it. Who wants pie?

CSI Why?

KATE TAYLOR has been taking a kick at the TV beat in the Globe & Mail in the absence of John Doyle, who I hope returns quite bloody soon. It's been hit and miss. But she absolutely nails CSI today:

I have been desperately catching up on my CSI watching in recent days because the CRTC has me spooked. Usually we can trust the broadcast regulator to nothing much of anything that might stand between Canadians and their American television shows, but recently it actually made a ruling. Its ruling was that History Television has until January to dump CSI: NY from its schedule.

History is a specialty channel with the mandate of providing programming that is historically significant to Canadians. It tried to argue that the show's occasional references to the events of Sept. 11 meant that CSI: NY fell within that mandate. For once, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, an organization much given to swallowing whatever codswallop Canada's private broadcasters have on offer, was not buying.

Okay, seriously, I have been watching the CSI shows, ubiquitous in summer reruns, only because I wanted to prove my thesis that CSI is not only the most watched dramatic series on television, it is also the most unpleasant dramatic series on television. The crimes it depicts are brutal and gory, and the forensic specialists who solve them are know-it-all, cold and glib with little sympathy for the bereaved (who often turn out to be murderers themselves or at the very least adulterers, gamblers or alcoholics).

Meanwhile, anyone who has been stupid enough to wind up as a dead body is subject not merely to a messy autopsy but also to contemptuous quips from the forensics team. These jokes are never funny, which may explain why no one in a CSI show ever laughs: These self-important dramas are completely humourless.

So why do millions watch CSI? I have two words for you: The first one is death and the second one is sex.

The forensic scientists themselves, the first ones in the history of policing to conduct interviews with witnesses and to wear Armani suits under their lab coats, never lose their cool. They never scream, they never cry; the most they ever do is squint a bit or make earnest declarations about the cause of justice.

In that same episode of CSI: NY, Detective Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) began to explain to Det. Bonasera why they had to correct a past forensic oversight that was about to get some guy wrongfully convicted of murder. Taylor was earnest, perhaps a trifle more earnest than he usually is, but to describe him as passionate on the subject would be an insult to lovers everywhere. Bonasera, however, proceeded to tell him she had not seen him this happy and animated about anything in the years since his wife was killed on Sept. 11. To me, the guy looked only one notch above catatonic, but that's what she said. (I hope that, in passing, you took due note of that significant history lesson: People who lost relatives on Sept. 11 are still sad.)

She goes on to stick it to David Caruso in CSI: Miami -- and here's where it gets interesting for me:

In the particular reruns I was watching, he comforted his sister-in-law - if you find deadpan delivery and some crinkling of the crow's feet a comfort - an awful lot. His brother, her husband, is an agent who is supposed to be dead, but actually has gone underground. She is, of course, very beautiful. (She's played by Sofia Milos and is long gone from current episodes of the show.) She, not being a forensics expert, sometimes gets tearful. He narrows his eyes.

Like all possible relations between CSI principals, this one can never be consummated. Sleeping with your sister-in-law! Please, that's the kind of low behaviour one might expect from a secondary character.

Heh heh. Thank God. Anytime someone looks at a CSI show and goes, "huh?" I feel a little bit better about the fact that I CANNOT STAND THE FRANCHISE. The coldness, the humorlessness

How much do I hate CSI? Last Christmas, I found myself in a hospital emergency room with a sick relative. I was there waiting for 4 hours, at 2 in the morning. There were no magazines. The only thing to do was the one TV where Showcase was rerunning 3 episodes of various CSI's.

I opted to stare at the wall.

By the way, Sofia Milos is a very fine actor indeed. Which is why we're so very jazzed to have her in a multi-episodic guest part on The Border.

She's awesome. And in January, you'll get to see how awesome for yourselves.

Golick breaks down Blood Ties

JILL GOLICK'S GOT a breakdown of the Blood Ties pilot up at her digs. Go read.

On the mystery side, Mohan follows not only the investigation but also the villain. In many mystery series, we see the crimes only from the detective's p.o.v. Starting right in the second scene of the teaser, we meet Norman, the villain (he's one of the villains anyway and the guy who calls the evil demon into action). This is great for cranking up the stakes and this storyline provides the scenes for every act breaks except the final curtain on Act Four.

On the premise side of the story, Vicky is introduced to us in the first scene of the teaser. As a result we see her as the central figure in the series and since she's a former cop turned private detective, we quite naturally follow her into the mystery. And since her ex-partner-ex-beau is the cop investigating the same crime his involvement is also organic.

But the third player -- Henry the vampire -- is a little trickier to pull into the story. Mohan introduces him in the third scene of act one. Like Vicky, his first scene is purely for character purposes and only in his second scene does he learn of the crime that he too begins to investigate. He's investigating because the crime looks like it was committed by a vampire and he's afraid that he'll be blamed.

By mid-way through Act One, we have two story lines that are independent investigations of the third story which features the crime unfolding. That puts all three on a collision course.

Short Hits

RIGHT NOW, I'm limping toward a hiatus. There are DVD's piled up beside my TV's that I want to watch. There are six or seven candidates for "book I'm going to read" auditioning themselves on the table beside the couch. And I'm trying to get feedback on one outline and give it on another.

I've got idears for posts, but I'm vamping for a bit while I find the time to do them. Let me break it down for a minute, baby:

• There is now a completely linked and inverse relationship between my love for Entourage and my love for Flight of the Conchords, which HBO recently gave a second season. The latter is as fresh and winning and smile-making as the former is dreary. I thought it was interesting that Entourage this week was a whole lot better simply because Ari was involved with the boys' plot. I don't care about his kids' school. I never did. As for Flight of the Conchords, there simply is nothing bad anyone could ever say about Bowie's In Space:

• Thanks to a friend at NBC/Universal, I've seen the Bionic Woman pilot, and I have thoughts. I'm hoping to write those up in the next couple days. I'm bummed they canned the deaf sister subplot though. I thought that was pretty cool. Oh, and I hope the series stops looking like it was shot on Planet Vancouver.
• I went back and forth about getting a pass for the Toronto International Film Festival this year. But the combination of the fact that I'll be in prep for an episode then, and the fact that they bumped the Industry Pass by 100 bucks on August 7 kind of made my decision for me. But that doesn't mean I'm opposed to seeing films. If you've got your suggestions, or better yet, stray passes to this or that, feel free to set daddy up.
• I'm interested in a reader poll, and here it is: One show from the new fall lineup, and only one -- that you're looking forward to. Not two. One. If you could only watch one, what would it be? I'd like to see if there's any difference between the Americans and the rest of the world on this one.
  

Just Between Us Girls

I SAW A rough, rough cut of my first episode of THE BORDER today.

Episode 103 -- Directed by John Fawcett.

Edited by Brett Sullivan.

And...

Um....how to put this?


Yessssssssssssssss.

When you can see the show and get excited about it at the rough cut, well nelly, you may just have something there.

Across The River To Motor City Canadian Dates Set

FRESHLY CONFIRMED. Read the Playback story here.

Across the River to Motor City will face Global's Shark and CTV's Big Shots when it goes to air this fall, stepping into the Thursday 10 p.m. slot on most Citytv stations in late November.

The six-parter by Devine Entertainment and Jonsworth Productions will bow on the Citys in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver on Nov. 22. That date is also the 44th anniversary of the JFK assassination, which seemingly has something to do with -- although producers have been coy on this point -- the murder mystery at the heart of the series, which is set half in the present day, half in 1963.

Winnipeg will be the first to see the series. The City station there will debut Motor City on Nov. 19, at 10 p.m. CT.

The series was co-created by Robert Wertheimer (Charlie Jade, Bollywood/Hollywood) of Jonsworth and the very busy Denis McGrath (Blood Ties, The Border). Wertheimer was also showrunner, cowriter and exec producer, working with execs David Devine and Richard Mozer. Michael DeCarlo directed with David Greene as DOP.

Nov 22 preem date = way cool.

More later -- the "very busy Denis McGrath" has to run off to a read through.

Bless Me Shelley For I Have Sinned.

EPISODE TWO of Californication, and...

...still interested.

And for the life of me I don't know why. I'm not like Alex at Complications Ensue, who generally has a problem with unlikable main characters. But this guy has so little to recommend him. The middle aged writer who women of all stripes throw themselves at is a ridiculous construct. But there's something about the other people that I just find compelling. And Duchovny too, I guess. Although he better do something quick or I'm gonna get bored. And Evan Handler hasn't been this wasted for a long time. And every time I see Pamela Adlon, I mourn Lucky Louie.

At least they got the new husband character right. However much you don't like Duchovny, that guy's way worse.

It can't be just that, like the main character, I hate L.A., can it? I mean, that's crazy talk.

Meanwhile, Mad Men is turning into some heap big interesting Walter Mitty gothic fantasy -- with the revelation that Don Draper's greatest sales job is his own identity. I know I'm not the only one who thought when he went into the box in the last ep that maybe, just maybe, he was going to take care of his newfound brother Sopranos-style. It's testimony to the fact that you don't know this character at all. You don't know what he's going to do -- which was always the sick fascination with Tony. Me likey.

Will has been speculating lately that the stake has finally been driven through the "tv season" and I tend to agree. I fully expected that once the Sopranos, uh...stopped in mid frame, I wouldn't turn on my TV the rest of the summer.That's pretty much been my practice for the last several years. But this year it seems that there was always something to fill a (lighter) viewing schedule. There was enough to watch that I even was able to opt out of some stuff: I didn't go back to Big Love, I dropped out of Rescue Me -- I should have dropped out of John from Cincy after the big parking lot speech...'m on the edge of doing the same for Entourage -- though I kind of want to see the big Cannes episode.

Anyway, if anyone can tell me why I like Californication, I'll offer you a guided tour of my soul. Bring a poncho. The first three rows are going to get wet.

I don't even know what that means.

Blood Ties Tonight!

THE WAIT is over for long-suffering Canadian fans. If you receive via your cable box thingy either the Toronto or Winnipeg feeds for Citytv, you get your chance to see the two hour premiere of Blood Ties tonight at 8 pm.

Calgary and Vancouver, you're up later this week.

Vinay Menon in the Toronto Star has an ouch-y but quite hilarious review -- just click the "Toronto Star" link back there a few words, like.

Enjoy.

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.