REVIEW: Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination During the 1934 Tour of Japan

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, April 16, 2012 at 10:22 AM - 0 Comments

In 1944, Americans heard Japanese soldiers shouting, “To hell with Babe Ruth!” Ten years earlier, Ruth had been the toast of Japan when he and other ballplayers made a tour of the country. Fitts, an expert on the history of Japanese baseball, tells the story of a goodwill tour that didn’t create long-term goodwill. All was well for the players: the Americans admired the Japanese dedication to the game (Lou Gehrig said, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if our chief rivals in baseball would be the Japanese”), and the Japanese studied American baseball techniques. But among non-players, anti-Americanism was brewing: the man who brought the Americans over, newspaper publisher Matsutaro Shoriki, was stabbed by a right-wing nationalist.

The sense of impending doom casts a gloomy shadow over the fun and games. One of the tragic characters is Eiji Sawamura, a pitcher who astonished the world by keeping the American all-stars scoreless for most of a game, and turned down a subsequent offer to play in America. The game turned Sawamura into “a symbol of Imperial Japan,” but in 1944 he would be killed in the war “by the creators of the game he loved.”

Fitts also tries to sort out history, particularly the question of why the intellectual, multilingual catcher Moe Berg was secretly filming Japanese sites. Fitts thinks Berg did it for fun, rather than for his government, but that it “sowed the seeds for his future career as a spy” during the Second World War, a job he was better at than baseball. But Ruth, according to Fitts, bought his own hype, and was “convinced that his visit to Japan had sealed the friendship between the two countries and forestalled any possible war.” It turned out baseball is just a game, and it’s dangerous to think it matters more than it does.

I am a woman, I am all women

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, April 16, 2012 at 10:19 AM - 0 Comments

Despite the Star Trek quote in the subject heading, this post is really one more thing about Girls (which, to repeat, I enjoyed a lot). This show sparked a surprising number of arguments about whether it accurately portrays modern women, and whether its very narrow focus (on rich white girls, who are played by rich white girls) is a mark against it. See this article, “Girls in White,” for a representative example of the articles that argue that Girls is not representative of today’s young people and today’s New York – and of course it isn’t representative, not by a long shot. If there does turn out to be a backlash against the show, HBO probably sort of brought it on itself with the promotion; they’ve been promoting the show as if it spoke for a whole generation, as if it would reveal the Way We Live Now in a post Sex and the City era. This would be like promoting a Woody Allen movie as a way of finding out exactly what New York City was like in the ’70s and ’80s.

You can argue, as some have, that the narrowness of Woody Allen’s world is an artistic limitation. (Though this was an easier argument to make when he had been making movies for a long time. If Lena Dunham is still revisiting this territory twenty years from now, that will be more problematic than her decision to use it for her first film and first TV show.) But we all do accept that Allen is not trying to give us New York life as it is experienced by the majority of people who live in it; he’s portraying the New York experience through his own eyes and his own social circle. A small, personal film can deal in broad and universal themes, and if we like it, we’re probably seeing things in it that we have felt or experiences. But as to what modern life is like, in an anthropological sense, we’re not going to find out from that particular work. The creator is showing us his or her world, not the world.

I think we all accept that from a film or a book. (Again, we can be annoyed by it, or get bored with an author for writing about the same small world over and over again. But we all accept that writing who they know is a big part of what artists do.) With TV, I sense that there’s a greater urge to see shows as broad statements about modern society as a whole. In some ways I think it’s a holdover from the era when TV was a true mass medium. When a show reached 30 million people in a U.S. whose Continue…

That anti-Kirk Cameron video…

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, April 13, 2012 at 1:19 PM - 0 Comments

…gets plus a million points, from an ’80s child point of view, for including the correct “Evie freezes time” sound effect from Out of This World. And I lose a lot of points for checking YouTube to confirm that they did, in fact, use the correct sound effect.

Doesn’t “reboot” just mean “retool?”

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, April 13, 2012 at 11:09 AM - 0 Comments

First the term “reboot” took over the way we talk about movies, and now it seems to be happening with TV: there are rumours that The Office will be retooled for its next season, but it’s being referred to as a “reboot,” thereby making it sound like a new concept. The plan doesn’t sound very new, though. Artistic considerations aside, The Office needs to stay around for at least one more year, maybe more, because it’s still the most popular comedy NBC has. It isn’t really working without Steve Carell (I think it can still be funny; it’s just sometimes hard to see what the show is supposed to be about now), and next year most of the remaining actors are going to need some time off for other projects. So the basic approach for the post-Carell years – try and shift the focus to the popular ensemble of supporting characters – may not even be sustainable for the next season. It may need an old-fashioned full-fledged re-tool, which means not only adding new characters but finding a new theme for the whole show.

Probably more interesting than what’s going to happen to The Office (which is not likely to get back to the level of seasons 2-5) is the question of what’s going to happen with that Dwight spin-off they’re planning: will it be the show’s Frasier, or the show’s Joey? Whatever happens, I sometimes think networks haven’t been aggressive enough in spinning off their popular comedies. Dramas are “franchised” all the time, but comedies try their damnedest to keep every character on the show for as long as possible. What we haven’t seen in a long time is what was known as the Fred Silverman approach: identify some popular supporting characters the show could get along without – Rhoda, Phyllis, The Jeffersons, Florida, Fish, Mrs. Garrett – and give them their own shows, which can be promoted via crossovers with the parent show.

This isn’t done much now, and it certainly makes sense that it isn’t done much: nobody wants to risk wrecking a show by taking a popular supporting character away. (Back when hit shows had bigger audiences, the risk may not have been as great. Even if Rhoda’s departure lost Mary Tyler Moore a few ratings points – and it did lose a few, maybe not necessarily because Rhoda was gone – it was still huge. Today, for even popular shows, there aren’t that many points separating them from a failure; they need to keep all the ratings they can.) But it’s so hard to create a popular comedy that the advantages of spinning off a character might outweigh the disadvantages at this point.

The time to do it, though, is when the parent show is still big. So the appropriate time for an Office spinoff was probably a few years ago, when the network asked for one, but the producers were unable to find a spinoff idea, creating the original Parks & Recreation instead. We benefited from that decision, but it was sensible of the network to ask for a spinoff when the show was at its peak. And I think it might make sense for other shows.

So what are some current comedies that you think should (or at least could) spin off some supporting characters into their own shows without ruining the original show? My suggestion a few weeks ago was Big Bang Theory‘s Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch. They’re popular, they already have a lot of scenes together, and since they joined the show in mid-run, there’s no question that it could go on without them. The network has never been able to come up with a decent time slot companion for that show, so why not pull a Silverman? (Silverman himself once said something to the effect that if he were still running ABC, he’d have spun off Cam and Mitchell from Modern Family.)

The most infamous TV cartoon

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 at 4:06 PM - 0 Comments

Sometimes a bad show becomes legendary if it’s unavailable; because nobody can see it, they’re curious about how bad it is. And so it was with Daffy Duck and Porky Pig Meet the Groovie Goolies. After Warner Brothers stopped making theatrical cartoons, the company decided to loan out most of its cartoon characters (but not Bugs Bunny, who hadn’t been in any cartoons since 1964; I suppose he was seen as too valuable to use in limited-animation cartoons that might dilute his brand) to Filmation for a crossover special with Filmation’s “Groovie Goolies” characters. This might have been a test for whether Filmation would be called on to produce more cartoons with the WB characters, the way they handled other licensed characters. If it was a test, Filmation flunked; this was the only time until Roger Rabbit that WB loaned out its characters to another studio. You’ll soon find out why. Bad animation, bad writing, and they didn’t even get the speed of Daffy’s voice right.

But because the show is famous for being terrible, along with the fact that Warners will never allow the thing to be released commercially, people have always been interested in seeing it. And someone finally uploaded it last week. It’s in three parts, but I doubt many people will get beyond part 1.

One thing I always used to wonder as a kid was why Petunia Pig, a character I had never seen in the cartoons (she only appeared in a few black-and-white cartoons) was in so many of the licensed properties, like comic books and colouring books and so on. Of course I realized it was because these old cartoons had almost no female characters, and just having Petunia around as a sort of porcine Minnie Mouse was better than having no female characters at all. I suppose Petunia is a more canonical choice than Mary Jane from the old “Sniffles” comics.

Tiny Furniture 2: Tinier Furniture

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 at 3:33 PM - 0 Comments

Girls, premiering on HBO on April 15, is going to be part of a lot of conversations about women in TV and women in modern society. (Frank Bruni’s column on what it has to say about sex is a foretaste of what we’re going to be seeing.) Written, created and mostly directed by Lena Dunham, it fits into the “comedies created by women” theme that everyone has been talking about lately – a theme that gained more relevance when Lee Aronsohn made his infamous “labia saturation” joke. And it touches on a bunch of themes that are ripe for analysis: young people in the modern unfriendly economy; the problems of making a real emotional connection in a digital world; body images.

It’s also very funny, which is the surprising and refreshing thing about it. The first three episodes, all directed by Dunham, have all the trademarks of the indie-film Continue…

TV intros never stop coming

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, April 5, 2012 at 9:57 AM - 0 Comments

I love finding TV intros on YouTube that weren’t there before. You’d think they were all there already, but sometimes a new one turns up. Or a new channel, like this one, which collects obscure intros from the ’60s and ’70s.

Like this show, which I’ve mentioned before: Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers, the 1974 show where James L. Brooks, Allan Burns and MTM Enterprises tried to make Paul Sand a star. (This is the one that CBS seemed so unsure about that their promo was built around the idea that no one knew who Sand was.) It was also about an orchestra musician, so the theme sounded a bit “classical,” which might have been one of the mistakes. Despite the inherent comedy of a guy lugging his cello around, the opening makes it seem like the show is going to be highbrow.

This sitcom adaptation of Thorne Smith’s Turnabout - not exactly the most sustainable of weekly Continue…

What’s a classic, anyway?

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 at 5:42 PM - 0 Comments

There seems to be a surprising amount of talk lately about the past of TV, the split in American TV history that occurred in 1999, and whether we owe it to ourselves to get more into TV history. This post, despite its overly-provocative title, is a pretty calm and fair examination of this question from the point of view of a writer who, like many people, finds much older U.S. TV too limited and convention-ridden to qualify as “great.”

And there’s nothing wrong with that. The TV drama era that started with Twin Peaks and culminated in The Sopranos really did bring a lot of viewers to TV, Continue…

The CBC Cuts

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 at 5:11 PM - 0 Comments

Here are links to a couple of articles on the CBC cuts announced today, one in the Toronto Star, the other in the Hollywood Reporter. Perhaps the biggest news out of this round of announcements – not to minimize any of the others – is the announcement that the CBC will cancel a planned production expansion in Halifax. The announcements are not yet clear on whether this means the end of CBC TV production altogether in Halifax (that’s the impression I took from the phrase “Plans for CBC Halifax do not include TV studio production facilities,” but I’ll update when it becomes clearer), but if this does mean the end of Halifax as a CBC TV production centre – or even if it just means a reduced production capacity – it’s a shame. CBC’s Halifax production had its own distinctive style and tradition, and produced some memorable shows that would not have been the same if they had been moved to one of the two big English-language TV production hubs.

Are there too many female-centred sitcoms?

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 at 3:19 PM - 0 Comments

Producer Aronsohn on set of 'Big Bang Theory'/Warner Brothers Television

When Two and a Half Men co-creator Lee Aronsohn appeared at the Toronto Screenwriting Conference this week, he probably thought the big story would be whether Ashton Kutcher is up for another season as Charlie Sheen’s replacement. (Aronsohn says he is.) Instead, the sitcom veteran, who created the show with Chuck Lorre, found himself in trouble over his coining of the phrase “peak vagina.” Asked about the recent run of raunchy, female-centric comedies like Whitney and Are You There, Chelsea?, Aronsohn said that TV is approaching “the point of labia saturation” and joked “enough, ladies, I get it. You have periods.” The comments set off the kind of insta-firestorm that only Twitter can create, finally leading a chastened Aronsohn to tweet “it was a stupid joke. I’m sorry.”

Some conference attendees defended Aronsohn, saying his remarks were taken out of context. Kathleen Corrigan, a writer who was at the panel, pointed out that Aronsohn’s joke was aimed at “stereotypical shows about ‘being a woman,’ ” and not good shows like 30 Rock. Corrigan wrote that Aronsohn “worked on Grace Under Fire, Murphy Brown & Cybill—real feminist sitcoms. He’s criticizing anti-feminist trash that’s on TV now.” Aronsohn, however, may not have helped himself when he tried to defend the context of his remark: his first try (since deleted) began “women, please look up ‘irony.’ ”

Aronsohn’s original remarks might also have been especially ill-chosen after a TV season when everyone, outsiders and insiders alike, seemed obsessed with what it’s acceptable for women to talk about on TV. Critics like the New York Times’ Bill Carter breathlessly counted the number of times “vagina” was used in new sitcoms created by women, as if the very act of talking about a female body part—as opposed to the corniness or offensiveness of some of the jokes—was inherently shocking. Aronsohn himself noted the irony in the fact that his own show is non-stop penis jokes, yet people are “complaining about vaginas.”

That might be what this controversy has illuminated, if anything. The very act of talking about men’s body parts or bodily functions is no longer considered shocking, but the same doesn’t seem to apply to women. In 1998, Aronsohn’s former boss Cybill Shepherd (who, according to one of Lorre’s tongue-in-cheek vanity cards, had Aronsohn fired because she considered him “a misogynist”) complained that Cybill was not allowed to deal directly with women’s issues: “the network imposes too many taboos on our language. We can’t say ‘period.’ We’re supposed to say ‘women’s cycles’ instead.” 14 years later, TV language is less censored, but the word “vagina” or “period” is still a something that a lot of people – not just one writer/producer – still seem to get worked up about.

The two faces of Michelle Obama

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

John Paul Filo/CBS via Getty Images

There are two Michelle Obamas, depending on what media you consume. The first version of the U.S. first lady is in the inspiring books with titles like Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style, and the upcoming What Would Michelle Do?. The other Michelle Obama is the one Rush Limbaugh calls “Michelle, My Butt,” the one National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson proclaimed “had become increasingly angry since her undergraduate days.” Laura Bush was mostly ignored, even by her husband’s foes, but loving or hating Michelle Obama may be turning into a political litmus test.

The first Michelle is popular in fashion magazines, which celebrate her style choices and emphasis on healthy eating. “Michelle Obama understands that style is much more than an aesthetic choice or political tool,” wrote Kate Beatts, a former Harper’s Bazaar editor, in Everyday Icon. “It is the expression of one’s life, one’s way of being.” The entertainment industry has embraced her, too. The sitcom iCarly featured her in an episode earlier this year, the first time a first lady had been so immortalized since Nancy Reagan showed up on Diff’rent Strokes.

But if you turn to Fox News or talk radio, Mrs. Obama’s emphasis on personal style comes off looking sinister. In particular, her anti-obesity campaign is seen as an excuse for a government power grab. Rebecca Hagelin, who writes the column “How to Save Your Family” for the Washington Times, wrote that Mrs. Obama “has assumed the air of ‘government knows best’ rather than empowering parents to make informed decisions about what’s best for their families.” Michelle Malkin, a columnist and Fox contributor, claimed the initiative is meant to enrich labour unions involved in serving healthy lunches: “The biggest beneficiaries of her efforts,” Malkin wrote, “have been her husband’s deep-pocketed pals at the Service Employees International Union.”

Continue…

950th Chevy Chase post

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, April 2, 2012 at 10:35 AM - 0 Comments

The feud between Chevy Chase and Community creator Dan Harmon has been publicized rather suddenly. It’s only coming into the public (or at least Deadline.com) eye now even though the feud erupted a month ago while the show was finishing up its final episodes of the season. When something gets into the news at a certain time, you have to wonder why it’s only coming up now, and I wonder if this is somehow related to the changing circumstances of that show. When Harmon gave his angry party speech and Chase left his angry phone message, a lot of people on the show thought it was likely to be canceled. Now it’s back, and doing not great, but well enough that a fourth season is almost guaranteed. (Not only are its ratings OK by NBC standards, its audience is very young and it attracts more male viewers than most comedies. A show that can attract young male viewers is always going to find advertisers. Combine that with the Hulu deal and the Comedy Central syndication deal, and a five-year run – or six-year run, to use one of their running gags – seems likely.) So that’s when stories from both camps start leaking to Reddit and the press, with everyone positioning themselves for the awkwardness of the season to come.

I find it funny to learn, from that Deadline.com article, that casting Chevy Chase on the show was Ben Silverman’s idea. Silverman was known for making decisions that sounded good in theory (let’s remake The Bionic Woman!) and didn’t work out so well in practice (Bionic Woman). Casting Chase, who was always notoriously tough to work with, may be just another Silverman decision that sounded better than it worked. The idea was probably that since the show was expected to have a more mainstream, broad-based appeal, putting Chase on the show would give it some appeal to baby boomers. In practice, baby boomers don’t watch the show, and the people who do watch the show are more interested in all the other cast members. So Silverman’s decision, if it was his, gave the writers extra headaches for no conceivable ratings reward.

The one thing I wonder after hearing these stories is whether the writing for Chase’s character would be better if the role were played by someone the writers liked. The writing for the Pierce character has never been strong, and except for a brief period when they seemed to be making him the token evil troublemaker of the group (which I thought was actually working) they didn’t have a clear idea of what to do with him. I usually chalk this up to the fact that it’s really hard to write an old person in a TV comedy: TV comedy is a young writer’s medium, so they’re best at writing people their own age or a little bit older or younger. But the writers have come up with some good old-man jokes for the Richard Erdman character. No writer ever sets out to write poorly for a character, even if it’s played by an actor they don’t like. But some communication between actor and writers – not friendliness, just communication – probably does make for a better or more consistent character.

Two tangentially related notes: One other reason why the old person is usually the Acceptable Target of modern comedy is that there’s been a shift in stereotypes, and particularly stereotypes about who is out of touch with technology. Once upon a time, old people were portrayed much more positively in popular culture – look at an old movie and the old person is likely to be a font of wisdom, or at least no crazier than the young people. But back then, many of the jokes about being out of touch, technologically illiterate, and so on were divided along regional lines. In pop culture, people who couldn’t figure out how to work new technology or were stuck in the past were rural people, of whatever age. As the city mouse/country mouse split became less relevant, the technological divide became more clearly an age divide. So elderly people took over as the acceptable targets for those jokes.

Second, the greatest crazy out-of-touch old man character on modern TV probably has to be this guy:

How to pitch a TV episode in 1967

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 4:12 PM - 0 Comments

I recently read the book The Studio by John Gregory Dunne, where he followed people around the 20th Century Fox lot for a year and reported on what life was like inside a major studio. The book is a bit thin on insight, but valuable for reasons that the author only vaguely knew about when it was written: it turned out to be about a studio on the brink of disaster (thanks to some of the movies whose production process was described in the book: Dr. Dolittle, Star! and Hello, Dolly! among them) and a whole old-school movie industry trying to carry on as if nothing had changed since the ’30s.

Anyway, though the book is classified as a movie book, Dunne spent a surprising amount of time with Fox’s TV producers – he was a TV fan, as I’ve mentioned before when I wrote about his high opinion of Gunsmoke, and he seemed charmed by the old-fashioned showbiz hucksterism of Fox’s star TV producer at the time, Irwin Allen. In another chapter, he visits with Paul Monash, a writer-producer who developed Peyton Place, U.S. network TV’s first successful prime-time serial. At the time the book was written, Monash was trying to launch another series, a legal procedural (though they didn’t call them that back then) originally called Judd, which wound up lasting two years on the air as Judd For the Defense. It turned out to be a well-reviewed series in the mold of The Defenders (though not as well-reviewed or respected as that very important series), a law show dealing with ripped-from-the-headlines issues.

In the book, Dunne reports on a pitch meeting between Monash and a freelance writer, a respected veteran named William Froug, himself the former producer of a legal drama called Sam Benedict. The meeting is an interesting if brief look at the process of selling a TV drama episode. Some things have changed since then: TV producers are less openly blasé, and less inclined to admit in front of a reporter that they’re engaging in cookie-cutter plotting or recycling of older scripts.

But some things haven’t changed that much. The key thing here is how Monash and the writer instinctively – without network prodding, just based on what they know the Continue…

Laugh tracks in sitcoms are so retro

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 10:31 AM - 0 Comments

ABC; CBS; NBC; Everett Collection; iStock; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

“In L.A., you sometimes hear coyotes eating cats—to me, that’s the sound of a laugh track. I hit the wall. I just couldn’t take another minute of it.” That’s why Steven Levitan, co-creator of Modern Family, decided to do the show without a studio audience or laugh track. His vehemence shouldn’t come as a surprise. The sitcom format invented by I Love Lucy, with multiple cameras filming a performance in front of an audience, is in its own way one of the most controversial TV formats in Hollywood and the United Kingdom. Many producers are abandoning its laughter, its deliberately artificial sets, and its theatrical style. Andrew Ellard, a British comedy writer and script editor, says he “can’t imagine anyone wanting a live audience” for some types of sitcoms today.

Back in the ’80s and ’90s, the opposite was true: almost every half-hour comedy was shot in front of an audience. “I guess it didn’t occur to people that there was an alternative, which is quite comical when you think about it,” says Graham Linehan, creator of the hit U.K. sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd. If a show was shot without an audience, it added a fake laugh track, like M*A*S*H. But today, movie-style comedy without a laugh track is mainstream, and many writers prefer the offbeat humour it allows. Earl Pomerantz, a Canadian comedy writer who has worked on many U.S. shows and produced the first season of The Cosby Show, said when he worked on The Larry Sanders Show—an audience-free comedy that influenced The Office—he found it refreshing to write jokes that would be too subtle for an audience, jokes “about relationship things, and about the way showbiz people treat each other.”

Continue…

Smash’d

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 at 3:47 PM - 0 Comments

Well, Smash didn’t Save NBC, and it sure didn’t save the cause of serious drama on broadcast networks. But it is getting a second season, which means it succeeded after a fact; the ratings it pulls in are some of the best on NBC (it helps that it has NBC’s only good time slot, after The Voice). Even people who are appalled by it sometimes keep watching it, because when it’s bad, it’s bad in a fun or jaw-dropping way rather than a dreary way: the characters who drag the show down, like the teenage son, are such terrible characters that you can’t look away. If you can’t be good, it’s better to at least avoid being bland.

Smash obviously has revealed some problems that weren’t immediately apparent in the early, generally well-reviewed early episodes – even though some of the problems (like that teenager and that assistant guy) were there already. Some of these problems may or may not be addressed in the second season, which will proceed without creator Teresa Rebeck, who left the show to Pursue Other Projects™ or whatever other term you prefer.

There’s one recurring complaint about the show that I don’t entirely agree with. That’s the complaint that Ivy (Megan Hilty) is clearly more talented than Karen (Katherine McPhee) yet the show is biased in Karen’s favour. Yes, Karen’s a Mary Sue, someone who is meant to be a star-in-the-making even though she doesn’t have the talent or Continue…

French Scopitones are the best Scopitones

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, March 26, 2012 at 1:40 PM - 0 Comments

This song is the successor to Ann-Margret’s “Bye Bye Birdie” as a ’60s sex-kitten song that briefly makes a comeback due to Mad Men. The Daily Beast even called Gillian Hills for comment. Lionsgate has also announced plans to release Jessica Paré’s version as an iTunes single.

One of the effective things about the choice of song is that it’s actually not all that time-specific, being a minor 1962 hit that had already been written and recorded before that. It would have been easy but obvious to have Paré sing some new (for 1966) music to symbolize the coming of sexual freedom and society’s increased obsession with youth (and a new kind of coolness: not the early ’60s grey-flannel-suit cool, but the equation of coolness with youth and freedom, which will come to dominate advertising and media). But it makes more sense to take a song that would not bother anyone at the party very much, musically, and put the focus on the aspects of Paré’s character that would bother or disturb the other characters. Plus of course the foreign language of the song helps emphasize that the character is literally a foreigner and that she’s a foreign presence in the world of the show.

Besides, a song that isn’t already famous will have people combing the internet to find out what it is, thereby attracting more attention for the show; people trying to Google that “zooby zooby zoo” song helped drive a lot of onine traffic for Mad Men last night.

Sitcom stock plots that disappeared

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 23, 2012 at 4:24 PM - 0 Comments

Speaking of sitcoms: I was thinking about stock sitcom plots the other day. (Actually I was thinking about the stock plots that either originated on The Dick Van Dyke Show or were, as TVTropes would say, codified there. Western dream sequences, pool-hustler episodes, and accidental-hypnosis episodes didn’t start with that show, but the sitcoms that followed sometimes seemed to be aping TDVDs with their versions of those stories.) And one thing I started thinking about was that while most standby plots never really go away (wedding after wedding after wedding…) there are some stock plots that are very big for years, even decades, and then vanish.

Think of the boxing episode. Up until sometime in the ’90s, getting a character into the boxing ring was almost guaranteed if a sitcom ran long enough. Boxing fits into a sitcom for many reasons: it allows characters to fight without rousing the TV violence police; it looks good in the promos; it pulls in male viewers; and there are tons of boxing gags that go back to the silent days. But mostly, if a sitcom wants to do a sports-themed episode, boxing is just about the easiest sport to do on a soundstage. All you need is a ring; you don’t even need to show the fans if you make the “arena” dark enough. So everybody did a boxing episode. TVTropes lists a bunch of them. You’ll notice that when sitcoms do a boxing episode, it’s usually about the lead character having to get into the ring with a big tough guy for some contrived reason or another; when dramas do it, the boxer is usually a guest character, and often a murder victim.

So you’ll notice that on that list, most of the sitcom examples are from before 1997 or so. Then in recent years, most shows have stopped doing it. Not all; kids’ sitcoms (always willing to raid the old stock stories) have done their versions, and Mr. D is apparently about to do one. But boxing episodes certainly are not the towering force they once were, whereas bowling episodes are still going strong. What happened? A friend suggested it’s because boxing got less popular, but that hasn’t stopped mystery shows from presenting us with dead boxers. It might just be that with sitcoms more free to go out of the studio, there are other sports they can do for their obligatory sports episode. And also, back when more people had military experience, more people had personal experience with boxing – it’s not as easy to identify with as it once was.

What are some other stock sitcom plots that were huge for a long time, and then vanished? I’m sure there are others, but stock plots are hard to kill. Even changes in technology have not completely wiped out the “I sent someone a message and I have to get it back before they read it” plot.

The NBC sitcom counter-backlash

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 23, 2012 at 3:54 PM - 0 Comments

I see that Salon’s Willa Paskin has written an article about how Whitney has improved, thereby saving me from fearing I was going crazy. I had been telling people that it was one of the better new comedies of the season – a very backhanded compliment, admittedly, given what this season has been like – and getting genuinely horrified reactions.

Not that Whitney is a first-rate show; it is not. Paskin’s problem with it is that it’s not funny enough; my problem is a combination of that, its still-weak supporting characters, and its slow pacing. (The fact that NBC/Universal has not done this type of show in some years seems very evident. The same network’s Are You There, Chelsea?, produced by Warner Brothers, is a much worse show, but it has a surface slickness and speed. Whitney actually gets a certain odd charm from the fact that it doesn’t have that kind of slickness, but it also has a lot of oddly paced scenes.) But what it’s always had going for it is Chris D’Elia, who has turned in the best performance on a new comedy show. His delivery is refreshingly un-hammy; he gets the most out of everything he’s given and still resembles an actual person. (I also have to give some credit to the writers for that; actors can’t create a convincing character alone. Beth Behrs was very good casting on 2 Broke Girls, but the writing after the pilot has been so bad that whenever I see it, she’s hamming it up, unable to put together a convincing character out of the lines she’s been given.) Cummings is not the natural actor D’Elia is, and from what I’ve seen the show has had problems figuring her out: it seemed to start with the assumption that we would all love her because she was a tell-it-like-it-is person, and has had to adjust to the fact that neither she nor the character are terribly likable.

But it did adjust, and the relationship between Cummings and D’Elia’s characters feels, there’s that word again, real. They’re a convincing couple, two people who get on each other’s (and sometimes our) nerves but really do seem to be together because they enjoy each other’s company. In a season where most new comedies have been unable to create characters and relationships that seem remotely real – instead giving us Zooey Deschanel or the ham-it-up brigade on 2 Broke Girls – I have to consider it one of the more enjoyable shows, even though I cringe at some moments. (There were two new comedies this season that seem to me like they really know what they’re doing: Suburgatory, and Last Man Standing. Everything else seemed to range from strange combinations of good and bad, to outright amateurish shows.) I feel like it’s the sort of show that would benefit from a great big re-tool, since the premise they have set up is simply not strong enough to spin off a lot of stories. (Cummings’ character would work better if she were taken down a peg more often, but because the premise has her as the Alpha Dog among a group of pathetic friends, this can’t happen that often. It needs what one writer has called a “contrary character,” someone who we can root against instead of rooting against the lead.) It won’t happen, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it get a chance to try.

I don’t quite get why this show became the most-hated in a comedy season that wasn’t much good all the way around. It inspired quite passionate hatred in some circles; on the iMDB message board for it, there’s at least two people who seem to spend all their time writing post after post rooting for its cancellation and hating anyone who likes it. My theory about why this is (apart from the obvious answer – “because it really is terrible”) would be that it was a combination of the obnoxious over-saturated marketing campaign and its presence on the Thursday night lineup, where it was considered an evil interloper. Once it was moved to Wednesdays, it was no longer hated as much, and its ratings were only a little bit lower (because the post-Office slot, though still theoretically the best comedy slot NBC has, isn’t really that good a slot any more; it’s not helping Up All Night much either). Not that I think it’s wrong to dislike it; you have to be in an indulgent mood to forgive its weaknesses. But I do think it got more intense hate than it deserved, and that might be a sign that NBC’s marketing campaign backfired. If it’s renewed for a second season, a 50/50 shot at this point, the network had better promote it as a comedy about a couple rather than the one-woman show it seemed to be in the original marketing.

REVIEW: The wrecking crew

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 23, 2012 at 2:29 AM - 0 Comments

The history of American pop music in the ’60s is partly the history of a bunch of anonymous studio musicians in California. That’s what Hartman argues in The Wrecking Crew, the name that drummer Hal Blaine gave to the session musicians who actually played the instruments on many records credited to famous groups. Under wunderkind producers like Phil Spector, rock records became increasingly complex and divorced from live performance. That meant hiring Blaine, guitarist/bassist Carol Kaye, and other instrumentalists who could sight-read anything and give the sessions a special flair.

Though Hartman has based some of the book on interviews with the Wrecking Crew members, the new information can’t always disguise the familiarity of many of these stories. Even when retold from the point of view of the session players, there’s not much new about Frank Sinatra’s decision to sing “Scooby-dooby-doo” on Strangers in the Night or Brian Wilson’s freak-out after the failure of Pet Sounds. But the book does feature some entertaining anecdotes about the life of a journeyman musician, and one authentic success story: Glen Campbell, who went from being one of the best Wrecking Crew guitarists to becoming an actual star on his own—with help, of course, from Wrecking Crew players like Kaye and Jimmy Webb on Wichita Lineman.

Hartman pays some lip service to complaints about the inauthenticity of these records (we’re reminded that the Byrds complained about not being allowed to play on Mr. Tambourine Man). But mostly, this is a celebration of an alternative pop music world where playing skill, rather than authenticity, is what counts. The actual Beach Boys were inadequate to achieve what producer Brian Wilson wanted; for that, Hartman explains, he needed the Wrecking Crew, “players with the kind of skills that could help him realize on vinyl the full-blown, multi-layered arsenal of sounds he had floating around in his head.”

Recapping Our Top Story

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 23, 2012 at 12:04 AM - 0 Comments

In this post by Rich Juzwiak at Gawker, called “Tune In, Recap, Drop Out”, he explains why he’s gotten fed up with writing TV episode recaps: “I want to be a normal person who’s watching TV, not some frantic note-taking instant replayer.” He also provides a sort of potted history of TV recap culture on the internet, and explains how it evolved to its current state, where readers expect TV episodes to be reviewed almost as soon as they air.

There’s a lot of argument over what constitutes a “recap” versus a “review,” though in practice these terms are very flexible – most recaps include some element of reviewing the quality of the episode. (In fact, many of my favourite TV episode reviews are, formally, recaps. The writer recounts the events of the episode step by step, but from his or her own perspective, enabling us to see the virtues of the storytelling or laugh at its now-obvious flaws.) Pure recaps, just telling us what happened, only work for reality shows and soap operas, genres where you need to follow the ongoing storyline but don’t necessarily have to watch every episode.

I have nothing to say against same-day reviews, or the practice of reviewing every episode of a TV series. I don’t do that, and so I’m grateful to and impressed by people who do. Finding something fresh and interesting to say about an episode, without just being snarky or rehashing the plot, is a really impressive achievement. I do get the impression that the glut of episode-by-episode reviews has created – not a backlash exactly, just a new awareness of the form’s limitations: it can sometimes diminish both a serialized show (by trying to evaluate it before the direction of the season has become clear) and an episodic show (because there’s only so much to be said about any given episode; since the episodes are all somewhat similar, reviewing each one inevitably makes it seem like the show is repeating itself endlessly, even if it isn’t). This is the normal process of give and take, and it doesn’t really say anything bad about the future of the recap/review format; when a form proliferates, its limits become clearer, but eventually it finds its proper place in the scheme of things. The episode-by-episode review format has plenty of life left in it.

But what has occurred to me is that the purpose of the episodic review is going through a bit of a transitional phase, related to the transitional phase in TV viewing. When the idea of episodic reviewing Continue…

Kiefer Sutherland gets in touch with his sensitive side

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 at 12:59 PM - 0 Comments

Kelsey McNeal/FOX

You wouldn’t think a TV producer would need to redeem himself after creating two hit shows. But Tim Kring’s last creation was Heroes, which was only a hit for one season; by the end of its run, it was a critical and ratings punching bag, and media scholar Jason Mittell said it was “not remembered fondly.” Touch, Kring’s new supernatural drama premiering March 22, is best known as Kiefer Sutherland’s first show since 24. But for Kring, it’s also an attempt to hit the sweet spot his previous shows haven’t. Crossing Jordan, a mystery starring Jill Hennessy, was a long-running hit that got little critical attention. With Heroes he got the attention, but couldn’t sustain it. It was “a zeitgeist show that becomes really shiny and new and exciting,” Kring said, “and it’s hard to stay shiny and new.”

When Heroes’ success wore off, Kring didn’t make it easier on himself by his public statements, some of which were taken as evidence that he didn’t understand his own show. At one point he referred to live-TV viewers as “saps and dips–ts who can’t figure out how to watch it in a superior way.” Mittell recalls that Kring seemed ill-equipped to deal with “hard-core genre fans who were reading interviews and cared about his answers,” who “soured on his attitude of ‘don’t think too much about this.’ ” Kring himself feels that being a public figure is something he didn’t especially enjoy dealing with. “I didn’t want to be on the front end of things. I enjoyed being behind the scenes.”

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Billionaire Koch brothers want the Cato Institute to bolster the GOP

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, March 19, 2012 at 2:45 AM - 0 Comments

Bo Rader/Wichita Eagle/Getty Images

When Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute, it seemed like a perfect match: the billionaire philanthropist and his brother David were leading supporters of small government in the U.S., and Cato quickly became the country’s most prominent libertarian think tank. But lately, the Kochs have decided that this particular free market organization needs a bit less freedom. The Kansas-based energy tycoons have filed a lawsuit against Cato and its president Ed Crane, seeking to gain a majority ownership stake in the institute. “We seek no ‘takeover,’ and this is not a hostile action,” said Charles in a press release. Not everyone is convinced.

Though the Kochs fell out with Crane years ago—“Crane had been insufficiently respectful of Charles’s management philosophy,” Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker—the current conflict isn’t personal, it’s ideological. In recent years, the Kochs have become more directly involved in electoral politics: their group Americans for Prosperity played a major role in the 2010 Republican sweep of the House of Representatives. But under Crane, Cato has sometimes been willing to take positions at odds with both political parties; it’s the only think tank reliably “informed by more than partisan convenience,” liberal journalist Ezra Klein once wrote.

That’s what the Koch brothers are seeking to change. Senior fellow Jerry Taylor told libertarian blogger Jonathan Adler they have already rid the board of some of its “strong, principled libertarians,” replacing them with friendlies with a more reliably conservative bent. One of the nominated board members is John Hinderaker, a lawyer who once called George W. Bush “a man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius.”

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Unlucky “Luck”

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 at 7:30 PM - 0 Comments

HBO’s Luck had so many problems that it almost seemed like the title was supposed to be ironic (or at least provide set-ups for subject headings like this one). The rumoured conflicts between creator David Milch and creator Michael Mann; the low ratings. What finally did it in, though, was the controversy over its treatment of animals: two horses were hurt and had to be euthanized during the first season, and another one died during production on the second season. That third death was apparently the last straw; the show has been canceled.

Since the cancellation announcement was only made a few minutes ago, it’s too soon to know the whole story behind the end of the show – let alone why it was unable to fix its safety problems after two deaths had already occurred. (Some have argued that this is inherent to horse-racing, rather than inherent to the production style of the show; that may be so, but a show needs to maintain more stringent safety standards than real life or even real sports.) But it’s hard not to speculate that the negative coverage was a nightmare for HBO. Luck is one of those shows, like Treme and Enlightened, that HBO picks up despite the ratings: demonstrating that they support an ambitious show, and that the ratings are not the only things that matter, is what the network calls a “brand enhancer.” (And it helps that on a pay channel, ratings are not, in fact, the only things that matter; overall prestige helps get you subscribers.) But that only works if the show is actually enhancing the network’s brand, not dragging it down. The show itself was divisive but had some compelling supporting characters, and Matt Seitz for one felt it had developed into “a great series” midway through its first and only season (which will finish airing on March 25).

But HBO can live with a show that inspires divisive reactions among viewers; a show that makes them look bad in real life, for the treatment of real-life animals, is another thing. If the show really couldn’t go on without safer treatment of horses, as HBO implies in the press release, then it obviously had to go. What we don’t know yet is whether that is the reason or just an excuse. In other words, maybe they could have continued the show with fewer racing scenes, or racing scenes shot differently; maybe not (only the network and producers really know that). But it’s possible that even if they could have continued it without killing horses, the very fact that it happened – and continued to happen after they’d been warned – may have brought Luck to an end as a brand enhancer for HBO, and therefore as a show.

Theatres embrace tweet seats

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 at 1:12 AM - 0 Comments

Jeff Swinger/The Cincinnati Enquirer

From the reaction, you’d have thought a theatre was going to destroy the world. It was something even more controversial: the Tateuchi Center, a new theatre being built near Seattle, announced it was going to encourage cellphone use. Executive director John Haynes spoke proudly about his plan to allow texting and Twitter. What he got in response was a barrage of posts and emails that startled him—he hadn’t been expecting negative reaction. “Most of them were flame mail: ‘I hate texters, I hate cellphones, I hate people who talk on them.’ ”

For people who are ambivalent about smartphones, the theatre has been the last refuge, a place where their use is universally discouraged. Theatre stars like Patti LuPone have chided phone users. Earlier this year, New York Philharmonic conductor Alan Gilbert brought a symphony to a halt when a cellphone rang. But theatres, ballet companies and opera houses have been quietly opening their doors to tweeters and texters. It even arrived on Broadway Feb. 19, when a production of Godspell held a special performance with “tweet seats.” “The 18 of us chosen for this event were chosen because of our love for Godspell and for Twitter,” says Caryn Savitz, who live-tweeted the Biblical action.

This kind of talk alarms those who think there’s something special about an unconnected performance. “It goes against what going to the theatre is all about, which is to have a communal experience,” says John Karastamatis, director of communications for Mirvish Productions. But even as he speaks, theatres have to grapple with the question of how to deal with a world where instant communication is part of most people’s lives.

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