Big Bang In Belarus

I can’t really deal with the fan outrage over last night’s Chuck. Seriously, I can’t do it, so I’ll let the links do it for me. I understand that many fans are invested in particular relationships (Chuck-Sarah, in this case) and feel upset when they see the writers resorting to the Frasier Technique, the introduction of a new love interest to separate the two people whose romance is the focal point of the show. (Frasier Crane, you will recall, was introduced into Cheers as a take on the stuffy fiance characters from old screwball comedies, a way of keeping Diane and Sam apart for a while.) They know the writers are doing it to try and stretch the show out. And they may feel even more upset when this technique is tried by a low-rated show that could be canceled at any second. Chuck is not a show that can take its time in giving the fans what they want, and fans are understandably worried that the show could end without ever giving them what they’ve been waiting for.

On the other hand, here’s what I find weird about ’shipping: it often seems so divorced from any specific goal for the characters. In a way, ’shipping is a holdover from “closed” storytelling forms, like novels and films and plays, where the ending of the evening’s entertainment is literally the end. In those forms, we root for two characters to get together, i.e. get married or at least go steady or something. If it’s a comedy, they get married; if it’s a tragedy, they die. Either way, it ends. But in a television series, unless it’s specifically intended to have a limited run, there is no pre-set ending. More importantly, the people who are producing the show want to keep it from ending. Everything they do is geared towards making sure that the show won’t have to end. That’s one reason shows introduce obstacles to the will-they/won’t-they relationship: by keeping the two leads apart, they hope they can sustain interest in the show and keep it from ending.

Because TV ’shipping is a closed-form idea applied to an open-form medium, it’s inevitably vague about what exactly the fans want for particular characters. Do they want them to be together in the end? Not exactly, because they don’t want the show to end. ‘Shipping is rarely expressed as a wish that characters will get married or even just start dating. It’s more of a general feeling that characters should be “together,” without a definite feeling about what “together” means. Basically it seems to just mean that the characters should be kissing each other instead of kissing other people.

‘Shipping a TV show may have made more sense back in the days when almost every show would push the reset button at the end of every episode (particularly drama shows). ‘Shipping Jim Rockford and Beth Davenport, or Kirk and Uhura, was a harmless pastime because you knew nothing was going to change anyway. It was part of the interactive way that the fans themselves created continuing story and character development for shows that didn’t actually have any. Once we entered the post-Cheers era where actually had ongoing romances (shows that weren’t soap operas) the fans’ rooting interest became a bigger problem, because we now have an expectation that our favourite romances will actually happen and be an ongoing part of the show. The writers know this, and devote a lot of attention to the romances, trying to keep the tension going without angering the fans. And there’s the biggest problem with ’shipping: not that people do it, but that it comes to dominate the conversation about a show and even the way it’s written. There’s something unfortunate about the way an action-adventure-spy show is going to be dominated for as long as it lasts (maybe not long) by romance.

Well, it’s official; MTV hasn’t had music videos for a long time (the line that “MTV doesn’t have music videos” went from trenchant observation to over-used cliche years ago), and now they have redesigned their logo to drop the “Music Television” tag. They are just another network whose acronym no longer stands for anything, the way The Nashville Network became TNN and finally changed its name to Spike TV or whatever they are now. Whether MTV will fee the need to give itself a new name depends on whether they continue to do well; if they ever need to rebrand again, the MTV name will go and be replaced by something else.

MTV’s rebranding has been, generally, a success, at least commercially. They don’t have music videos, and they don’t have the genuinely good scripted shows they used to have; but they do have a genuinely identifiable brand. Apart from being a network for young-skewing reality shows, some of which are addictively trashy (Jersey Shore, most obviously), they are still sort of a music network, in the sense that their shows tend to be saturated in music, played in the background or over montages. They’ve managed to survive into the YouTube era (which would have killed off their music-video format if it had still existed) by presenting shows that are like a mash-up of everything their viewers are interested in; they’ve made themselves over for the era of remixes and multi-media projects.

Still, let’s face it; for many of us, MTV still means this:

Tonight’s episode of How I Met Your Mother, which brings back Jim Nantz from last week and adds NFL announcer Phil Simms to the mix, is an example of a show crassly (and probably network-ordered-ly) doing a cross-promotion with its network’s sports broadcasting. HIMYM did it well when they did the episode that tied in with the March Madness coverage (“The Bracket”), so this shouldn’t be a problem. The other thing that struck me was that the title, “Rabbit Or Duck,” suggests a possible Looney Tunes reference somewhere in there. I know that’s a lot to hope for, but it would automatically make it a good episode if it happened.

And while I’m on the subject of HIMYM, check out Myles McNutt’s paper “A Canuck in an American Sitcom,” which looks at the CanCon of the show (mostly Robin-related, of course) from an accessible academic perspective.

Anyway, the thing I like about HIMYM’s titles is that they are meaningful without being cute. Titling episodes is harder now than it used to be, because everyone knows the titles. Once upon a time, only the shows that actually chose to put the episode titles on the screen (I believe NCIS still does this, probably a Don Bellisario hold-over) actually had to care whether the titles were memorable. Shows that did not broadcast the titles, which included most half-hour comedies — not all, but most — would either use cutesy in-joke titles or punsthat the writers came up with to amuse themselves, or very brusque, simple titles. Barney Miller called almost every episode by some one-word title that referred to something that was dealt with in the episode: “Hash,” “Werewolf.” And on the in-joke front, the underrated 3rd Rock From the Sun put “Dick” in every title because the writers didn’t realize that anyone would know the titles other than themselves. Then the internet and cable boxes and the like began to tell everyone what the titles were, and today almost any fan of a show can tell you the title of any episode. So even shows that used to have simple titles began to over-react and do elaborate titles, often with very involved puns or movie references. The Simpsons went from having a bunch of normal, nice titles like “Bart the Daredevil” — plus the occasional pun if the writers thought of one — to having long pitch sessions just for the titles.

But the vogue for crazy titles seems to be subsiding (even Fox’s newest animated show, The Cleveland Show, doesn’t over-write its titles quite as much as their other cartoons). Now we’re more likely to see simple titles, or uniform titling gimmicks (Big Bang Theory, Chuck). And HIMYM’s solution to the titling problem has been a very good one: instead of big wacky titles, they have simple, unadorned titles usually taken from something that is said or done in the episode — but the line chosen is usually one that relates to the overall theme of the episode. So An episode about how a relationship can be ruined once someone’s flaws are pointed out: “Spoiler Alert.” An episode about the catchphrase of Danny Glover from Lethal Weapon and how the characters apply it to their own lives: “Murtaugh.” The titles don’t give away what the episode is about, but they make sense once you see the episode, and they sort of conjure up the mood and tone of the episode when you say them.

By contrast,the problem with elaborate pun titles is that they are often at odds with the episode they describe. The worst example of that actually comes from the era when nobody thought the titles would be known. A moving, downbeat episode of Family Ties where Mallory’s favourite aunt dies was titled… “Auntie Up.” Now the writers of that show have to live with this fact: anybody who owns the DVD has the mood of the episode spoiled even before it begins.

This is the most pointless imaginable opening to a post, but after watching an episode from Shout! Factory’s upcoming release of The Patty Duke Show, Season 2, I was asked how the show — and therefore the theme song — could be updated if the show were remade as an hour-long drama for CBS, Fox or USA. What I came up with was this:

Meet Cathy, who’s nice, with hippie hair,
She thinks we ought to love and care,
But Patty’s always having fights
And has the villains in her sights –
What a crazy pair!
But they’re cousins,
Identical cousins, fighting crime.
Cathy has done forensics,
Patty has done some time.

Where Cathy wears T-shirts that get wet
And has a cute, eccentric pet,
Our Patty likes to use her fists
On all the nasty terrorists –
What a wild duet!
But they’re cousins,
Identical cousins in their prime!
They jump alike, they run alike,
They even fire a gun alike,
Life is so sublime
When cousins unite against crime!

Unfortunately, selling this remake idea means convincing a network to allow a full minute for a theme song, and you know that’s not going to happen.

Speaking of theme songs, we just lost John Dankworth, the English jazz musician who composed a number of memorable theme songs, including the first theme for The Avengers. The BBC has a piece on this side of his career and what makes a memorable theme tune, a piece that’s worth reading because it discusses theme songs from a British perspective (most people, including me, focus on U.S. themes). And here’s his Avengers theme:

Of the Super Bowl commercials we didn’t get to see in Canada because simulcasters are out to get us, this Google ad — demonstrating how their system can create a romance between a French girl and a guy who uses the computer way too much — was the most acclaimed. Josh Schwartz, creator of Chuck and Gossip Girl, called it “maybe the best commercial I’ve ever seen. Incredible storytelling. Genius.” It is a pretty good illustration in how you can tell a genuinely visual, dynamic story without any people.

The most buzzed-about commercial of the Super Bowl cycle so far (it’s early yet) seems to be this promo for CBS’s Late Show With David Letterman. As you can see at the link, it’s based on an earlier Super Bowl spot featuring Dave and Oprah. And it’s been confirmed that all three participants in this promo were together for the taping.

Like everything Jay does, this can be interpreted in two ways depending on what you think  of him; comment online already falls into the “see, Jay’s a good sport” and “see, Jay will even sell out his own network” camps. It’s really just another reminder that celebrity “feuds” are mostly done for the sake of publicity, and they will gladly appear together and plug each other’s shows if it gets them some extra publicity.

Update: It seems that Letterman was hoping to have Conan on the couch as well, but O’Brien didn’t bite. That could be because was in the middle of finishing up his last round of Tonight shows and he didn’t have time to consider it. But many of us will prefer to think that it was because unlike Letterman, whose bitterness is probably largely an act at this point (look, he didn’t get the Tonight Show, but he basically got everything he wanted on another network), O’Brien is not ready to play Good Sport. And probably shouldn’t be.

Cougar Town is more enjoyable to me now than when it started, and I think I enjoy watching it more than Modern Family; it’s not nearly as well-done overall, but it has moments of crazy spontenaity that sometimes break through into something surprising, and the lowbrow goofiness of it is sometimes kind of refreshing. There is something about it that has consistently bothered me since it began, though, which is that most of the performances — and the way those performances are filmed — seem pitched all wrong for this one-camera, no-laugh-track format. Most of the acting, from Courteney Cox on down, is broad and a little loud, with bug-eyed looks and long pauses. It’s also statically staged (many scenes just have characters standing there, with no real physical component to the scene). It really feels like the acting and filming of this series was based on the 1967 handbook “How To Make a Columbia Screen Gems Sitcom: Look bug-eyed, pause a lot, and keep the cameras locked down.” And Cox, Christa Miller and other actors deliver their lines in an over-emphatic way that is familiar to anyone who’s ever watched an episode of I Dream of Jeannie or The Partridge Family; there’s nothing quite so jarring as overacting in an empty studio. (Though this doesn’t have a great deal to do with the lack of an audience; How I Met Your Mother doesn’t use an audience and has a much more lively rhythm, and many shows that do have audiences have had faster rhythms and snappier delivery. It’s just a choice some single-camera shows make for some reason.)

Which means that, while I would never say this for 30 Rock or Community or even a so-so example of the genre like The Middle, I think Cougar Town would work better with a canned laugh track. The rhythm of the show is so hobbled that the dialogue delivery practically cries out for a laugh track to improve the pacing and flow, and fill in the dead spots after each line. I figure they’ll eventually try to fill these gaps by slathering the scenes in background music, the way many shows do; but a laugh track would probably work better. That’s one of the reasons for the existence of the laugh track in the first place, that TV and radio comedy have their roots in the theatre, and it’s awkward and unnatural to have dead silence after constant pausing and emphatic delivery. The acting/directing on Cougar Town is so static and emphatic that it needs something to keep it from feeling hammy. I mean, a typical outdoor scene Cougar Town is not far from a scene like this in terms of its style, but the people in this scene have a laugh track to keep them from seeming like weird-talking space aliens.

Okay, that’s an overstatement, and you never know what’s going to work, but this sure sounds terrible for all kinds of different, interlocking reasons:

ABC has added another one to the mix, greenlighting the comedy pilot “Wright vs. Wrong.”

Sitcom, from scribe Stephnie Weir (“Mad TV”), centers on a sexy, female conservative pundit and her staff.

Weir is exec producing along with Tantamount’s Mitch Hurwitz, Eric Tannenbaum and Kim Tannenbaum. Sony Pictures TV is the studio.

This sounds terrible because:

1) Modern Hollywood stories about politics always devolve into a childish longing for “centrist,” “middle-ground” politics. Even The West Wing wound up creating characters who couldn’t exist in real life — like Alan Alda’s Republican candidate in the final season — to fit the Hollywood belief that the only reason anybody disagrees is because we just don’t sit down and talk things out enough. The number of wishy-washy, can’t-we-all-just-get-along stories offered by this particular premise are almost endless.

2) The wacky punning title, and the fact that the lead character was only named “Wright” so they could make that title. This is a jinx even when the show is good, like The Powers That Be.

3) Mitch Hurwitz is producig, and his name on a show now guarantees failure. Which is not something we would have expected back in the Arrested Development days, but it does seem like that was the best thing he had in him — either that or he’s better at writing a show than producing someone else’s show (or remaking a foreign show, which a lot of his other flops have been).

4) It sounds like a conservative Murphy Brown, and that show doesn’t hold up anyway.

Now just sit back and watch as this terrible, doomed premise becomes next year’s biggest hit. I don’t think it will, but it might. That doesn’t stop me from shuddering a bit at ABC’s taste.

I leave the comments on the Academy Award nominations to Brian Johnson, but the announcement for some reason inspired me to have a look at some old clips of awards-show musical numbers. The one that stood out as a perfect ’60s time capsule was Mitzi Gaynor’s performance of “Georgy Girl” at the 1967 show (for the 1966 awards).

The song, by the way, had lyrics by Jim Dale, who soon gave up songwriting for acting. And I think most of us now know the song because of Homer Simpson’s obsession with it in “Lisa the Beauty Queen” (“Hey, there, blimpy boy”). In the original film, it was there because a) Most movies had to have title songs at the time in the hopes of creating a tie-in pop hit, and b) To sum up the theme of the movie before the credits were over.

At the Oscars, the song was performed with all the staples of variety-show numbers in the late ’60s: 1) A powerful woman backed up by backup dancers who are totally subservient to her; 2) The woman starts off in one costume; the guys help her strip down to something skimpier; 3) Arms-flailing, butt-shaking dance moves; 4) A reinterpretation of the theme of the song in the context of a three-minute routine (here it becomes the “take off those glasses and you’re beautiful!” bit). Partly on the strength of this number, Gaynor got a series of successful CBS variety specials, where all her numbers were basically like this.

This kind of thing was all over TV in the late ’60s, because the culture was changing even as censorship restrictions weren’t loosening enough to keep up with the culture. So what we got in the interim was family-friendly dirtiness, with striptease routines presented as wholesome, athletic fun. More recently we’ve seen a lot of that in pop-music videos and performances, too; less of it on network TV and awards shows. Which may not be a good thing. If the Oscar numbers can’t be brilliant — and they can’t — they should at least be innocent expressions of dirty ideas.

Now, here’s the question that occurred to me after watching that video: if the broadcast networks wanted to bring back garish, innuendo-filled musical numbers, who would they get to do them? The networks have failed to revive the variety format, but they haven’t really tried the “sexy all-purpose female entertainer” type of show a la the specials of Gaynor or Ann-Margret. There are plenty of female (and male) entertainers who do this type of number routinely in their music videos; but who would you suggest should get the chance to do them in her/his own variety show?

The appearance of Jon Stewart on Bill O’Reilly’s show, which began last night and will continue tonight (then the unedited interview will be posted) is making for pretty interesting TV, as James Poniewozik explains. There are no real fireworks, because O’Reilly and Stewart genuinely like and respect each other and also because, weirdly, O’Reilly has become kind of the mellow guy at his network. I don’t know if this is because he just looks more mellow compared with Beck and especially the Colmes-free Hannity, or because he really doesn’t hate Obama all that much. (Ever since 2008 it’s seemed like his view of Obama is closer to his boss Rupert Murdoch’s than that of his other boss, Roger Ailes.) But as Stewart said, O’Reilly is now “the voice of sanity at Fox News, which is like being the thinnest kid at fat camp.”

This means that their discussion was quite substantive, with Stewart playing the role of the guy who wants to be a cenrist but can’t find where the center is in a world gone mad, and O’Reilly mostly concerned with defending the honour of his network as a news organization, and trying to argue that Stewart’s “cyclonic perpetual emotional machine” is only driven by a couple of guys on the network. It really does seem that this is the only criticism that stings at Fox News, which has gone out of its way to argue that its news shows are separate from its opinion shows. (I think this doesn’t really wash if you’ve watched most of their news anchors, apart from Shepard Smith. The m.o. of many Fox News anchors is to report the news in such a way as to provide talking points for the “opinion” shows. And in any case, opinion shows on cable news tend to present themselves as news sources.) The fact that Stewart is more respectful of O’Reilly than he was of Crossfire is interesting, though not surprising. He really does seem to like O’Reilly, whereas nobody likes Tucker Carlson.

Speaking of Fox, the recent emergence of Roger Ailes from his cocoon is a puzzling thing to me. Ailes has always been a behind-the-scenes kind of guy, yet recently he’s been going out for publicity; first he gave that interview to the New York Times he and his viewers loathe, and then he was part of the panel on ABC’s This Week, arguing with Paul Krugman and Arianna Huffington. (The fact that a panel would include Ailes, Huffington, George Will and George Stephanopolous Barbara Walters at one time is as good an explanation of why I can’t bear to watch Sunday morning news shows. That’s one horrifying group of people.) Why he suddenly wants to be a public figure, I’m not sure; either he wants to be taken seriously by the evil mainstream media, or he’s trying to shore up his position at Murdoch’s company in case of shake-ups.

I admire Lost because it always seems to achieve the effect it’s going for. That’s not to say every episode or every scene is good, just that there is always a feeling that the impact of a scene is more or less what the creators want it to be. This is another difference between Lost and its imitators. Lost doesn’t make a lot of sense a lot of the time, but it seems to be confusing because it wants to be confusing, because part of its appeal has to do with enabling us to argue over the meaning of what we’ve just seen.

By contrast, when Lost clones make no sense, it seems to be because of bad execution. I’m sure Heroes or Flashforward want to confuse us in the same entertaining way that Lost does, but for the most part they can’t. To get away with making no sense, you have to have perfect, confident execution; otherwise the show will be indistinguishable from shows that don’t make sense because they’re just bad. We know that when Lost confuses us, it’s on purpose. What Conrad L. Osborne once wrote about Stravinsky could apply to Lost: “Here is technical command that invariably nails down the effect it goes after; here are scenes that are recognizable as polished theatrical entities, not simply rough drafts with an exploitable core.” Without the technical command of Cuse and Lindelof, honed by working for years on fine but very different shows like Nash Bridges, there would be no Lost, just a collection of vague and perplexing gestures.

Anyway, Josef Adalian has a good “recap of recaps”, sort of a roundup of reactions to the Lost premiere by Lost-ophilic critics.

I’m also very fond of Maureen Ryan’s list of parallels between Lost and Supernatural.

And since I don’t want to post spoiler-y clips for people who haven’t seen last night’s episode yet, here’s the only clip I could find online of another TV show that makes no sense: “Mary’s Incredible Dream.” (An example of how a show can intend to make no sense but not have good enough execution to make that approach work, I guess.) It’s the only clip I could find online, and since it involves flooding, floating in the ocean, and Biblical references, it’s sort of appropriate. Anyway, who wouldn’t want to see The Manhattan Transfer turn up on the Island?

Aaron Ruben, who died Saturday at the age of 95, was one of those great U.S. TV writer-producers who wasn’t well-known except to his peers. He was also known to obsessive credit-watchers — the people who noticed that Andy Griffith or Sanford and Son were better when the name “Aaron Ruben” appeared in the credits. His greatest achievement was The Andy Griffith Show; he didn’t create it, but he was brought in as producer after the pilot (back when the title of “producer” meant much more than it does now; it was the closest thing to the modern “showrunner” job) and produced the show for its first five seasons.

Mayberry was not only the most popular small town in TV, it was one of the most distinctive achievements in creating a whole world in a television show. As a commenter pointed out in my post on The Simpsons, TAGS was an earlier example of a show where bit players grew into fully-developed characters who could have episodes built around them. And that’s as much the work of Aaron Ruben as anyone. Gomer Pyle got so popular that he got his own spinoff (created by Ruben) but he was only one of many characters who owe their fame, in part, to Ruben.

Ruben’s work on the first five years of Andy Griffith and the first three of Sanford and Son will be his main legacy, but of course, like most career comedy writers, he had tons of credits — not only in television, but in radio — and the obituary barely begins to summarize them. But fortunately he was interviewed for the Archive of American Television, and the interview is online.

From tonight’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a preview of the re-revamped Tonight Show.

By the way, ABC Family has picked up a new sitcom starring Melissa Joan Hart and Joey Lawrence, sort of a knockoff of Who’s the Boss? but with Boy Meets World writers. (ABC Family seems to be trying to bring back that type of show — that is, a “family” show but pitched older than the stuff Disney Channel does. The other pilot they ordered and didn’t pick up was from Michael Jacobs.) And no, there’s nothing inherently wrong with their return to TV; they’re both old pros at this point.

The reason I mention this here is that if Lawrence is getting a show again, this brings him one step closer to getting on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. This is something that would be fascinating for those who remember Bill Hicks’s almost 20 year-old dream of what would happen if Leno interviewed Joey Lawrence: “My God, what have I done with my life! I used to be funny!”

The way some people react when they hear of a new TV project from a brilliant drama creator is the way I reacted when I heard that Paul Simms, the creator of NewsRadio, is doing a new pilot for NBC. I was all, ZOMG, Paul Simms! Well, I didn’t write “ZOMG.” But I thought it.

Except for a stint as a consultant on Flight of the Conchords, plus his great work on the NewsRadio DVDs (he actually got Sony to delay their planned bare-bones release so he could record commentaries), he hasn’t been heard from much of late. But now he’s back, and while he’s done many unsold pilots — the development of one of them, which he was working on during the final season of NewsRadio, is chronicled in David Wild’s book The Showrunners – this one has a better chance of becoming a series. Why? Because it’s got a star attatched, and it’s got a producing credit for the man NBC fears most:

Matthew Broderick is coming to series television.

The actor, who had been courted by TV networks for years to headline a show, is attached to star in NBC’s multicamera comedy pilot “Beach Lane,” which was given the green light Monday…

“Beach Lane,” from UMS, Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video and writer Paul Simms (“NewsRadio”), stars Broderick as a celebrity author hired by an irresponsible millionaire heir to run his struggling small-town newspaper in the Hamptons.

Broderick was approached to do the project months ago but would only commit after reading the final script.

Todd VanDerWerff was, I think, the first to point out that the premise of this show is similar to Simms’s plan for the never-produced sixth season of NewsRadio. If the show had been picked up for another season, he was planning to retool the burned-out show by moving the whole thing to New Hampshire. This is sort of a New York version of that, but with a newspaper replacing a radio station. And of course “irresponsible millionaire heir” means “who can we get to play Jimmy James, again, who won’t look bad compared with the memory of Stephen Root?”

Anyway, you never can predict anything in advance, but Broderick is about as good a fit for the live-audience sitcom format as anyone (which is why people have been after him to do one for so long) and the world needs more of Paul Simms’s weird humour and good-natured mean-spiritedness.

While I’m on the subject of Simms, here’s a link to the famous interview he did toward the end of NewsRadio’s third season, when he thought (mistakenly as it turned out) that the show was about to be canceled and therefore he could say anything he wanted. This was the inspiration for an episode where Dave gives a magazine interview where he insults everyone in the office.

And though I’ve posted it before, here again is Simms (he’s the voice reading off the question at the beginning) talking about the traditional sitcom format: