Corey Haim Looks For Some Answers

You might have already heard that, as expected, it looks like Fox probably won’t pick up 24 for another season. The Fox studio (as opposed to the Fox network) is going to shop it around. NBC executives have already said that they won’t rule out the possibility of a pickup, but of course that would depend on how successful or unsuccessful they are in developing new dramas to re-populate the 10 o’clock slot. (24 is a 9 o’clock show on Fox because that network stops broadcasting after 9:59. On any other network, its level of violence and intensity would make it a 10 o’clocker.) Its future is certainly looking doubtful, and its cultural moment has passed.

Though I doubt if the political readings of 24, or its popularity with conservative Supreme Court justices who appear unaware that Jack Bauer is not real, have contributed much to its downfall. The brilliance of 24 was that although it was a political show, it was set up in such a way as to confirm the political beliefs of almost anyone who was watching. It’s sort of a mash-up of a “conservative” genre, the rugged-he-man-who-gets-results genre (think Dirty Harry) with the “liberal” conspiracy thriller genre, where the higher-ups are always lying about war and national security issues. It was identified a bit with its “conservative” side in recent years because of the the debates about torture, and about co-creator Joel Surnow’s politics. But I think its real problem is simply that it’s been on since 2001 and it’s done virtually every season-long story it can do.

(One thing I’d like to see them try, which they sort of made a stab at last year but abandoned, is to put Jack into a Mission: Impossible scenario where he spends the entire season causing mischief in some other country. But given that they will have to cut the budget, not increase it, if they want to stay on the air in some form, this probably isn’t feasible. If there’s another season, he’ll probably be in L.A. all year.)

24 also was a big advance in the well-known art of washed-up movie stars re-inventing themselves for TV. This is as old as TV itself; Lucille Ball went into radio and then TV because her movie career didn’t go as well as expected. But Sutherland is one of the best examples of how someone can hang around the movie business for years, making lots of movies (many of them in the lead) without ever becoming particularly famous or impressive, and then turn into a superstar by landing the right TV role.

Finally, don’t forget the unaired 1994 pilot.

While there are too many Star Wars-related videos on YouTube (and not enough Starcrash videos), this one almost requires embedding. The people who made it did so because they always sing “Jabba the Hutt” to the Parks and Recreation theme song. So:

Some instrumental themes just seem to ask for lyrics, and P&R’s is one of them: because it consists mostly of phrases of identical length, it’s very easy to sing along to.

This season of How I Met Your Mother has revealed a split in the way different fans view the show’s most popular character, Barney. Sometimes the show treats him as a pure cartoon character, whose serial womanizing and wacky schemes are played purely for laughs. And sometimes the show suggests that he might have real feelings and stuff.

That’s not unusual — except for Cosmo Kramer, the designated “wacky” guy on almost any sitcom will have moments where he turns out to be vulnerable and human. John Larroquette on Night Court is the guy Barney most resembles, right down to the suits, and he followed exactly the same pattern: most weeks, he’s pure comedy guy, and once in a while he’ll show his vulnerable side. Other examples are the “Bill’s Autobiography” episode of NewsRadio, any WKRP episode focusing on Herb, and some — not all — Mary Tyler Moore episodes focusing on Ted Baxter, the ancestor of all these characters. (The ancestor, I mean, in the sense of being a completely cartoonish, outsize character in the midst of people who are otherwise semi-realistic. Though that’s obscured on NewsRadio because other characters soon got more cartoonish than Bill, but looking at the pilot, Bill was the Ted Baxter guy and even Andy Dick’s Matthew was sort of subdued.)

But because How I Met Your Mother incorporates some serial elements, or at least some Cheers-style ongoing romantic entanglements, we see the characters’ circumstances changing in front of us a lot more than we would on those other shows. And this season, the show finally bit the bullet and gave Barney an actual romance that lasted for Continue…

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Andy Richter was on Regis and The One Who’s Not Kathie Lee Kelly this morning, and while he didn’t dish a lot of dirt or anything (“I have children, I still need work”), he did talk frankly about the mistakes made by the network, and the fact that “low ratings” talk is sometimes — at least when the ratings aren’t great but aren’t terrible — used to justify a prior decision to dump a show:

The thing about network television is, if they like a show,  if there are extenuating circumstances, they’ll say “well, you have to think about the extenuating circumstances”… but if they don’t like a show, they’ll say, “well, they couldn’t get the ratings.”  They weren’t saying that about the local news. They weren’t saying the local news somehow got bad.

He also talked about the practical realities of the situation, like why being out of work is a bigger problem than usual for crew members who (as in this case) have just changed cities:

This was immediately irritating to people that worked on the show. From stagehands to producers, they’re getting all these emails and Facebook things about “enjoy your golden parachute” and stuff. It’s not like that. In fact, Conan is putting a lot of his own money out there. He formed a little corporation just to pay people, because all these people moved from New York to California to work on the show. They’re robbed of their contacts, so even in a down time like this, they don’t have the contacts they would have on the East Coast to get work elsewhere.

Kelly Ripa once again proves that she’s a likable interviewer. Plus she called the whole thing “a hullaballoo,” making her the first person to use that term on national television since Joanna Pettet. Joanna can get away with it because she’s hotter, though.

I’ll have an actual — or at least more current — post later today, but for filler(tm), here is the catchphrase that was my favourite (more so than “Norm!” or anything else) when I was watching NBC Thursday nights back in the day. Though the question I can’t answer is whether this was really a catchphrase or just a joke that the writers repeated way too often.

All these examples are from one season. As with most catchphrases and/or overused jokes, I recall that they flogged it really hard for that one season (the third) and then mostly stopped. It’s like Barney said “suit up!” all the time in the first season but rarely said it afterward, and Happy Days mostly retired “Sit on it” after a couple of years. Most catchphrases don’t have a long shelf life.

The press release for Warner Brothers Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1980s DVD is at once hilarious, depressing and frightening. Some background: Warner Brothers has been releasing 2-DVD sets that are grab-bags of Saturday morning cartoon episodes from the ’60s and ’70s. The ’60s cartoons are generally better, but the ’70s sets outsold them. So WB figured that they’d raid their library for some cartoons from the ’80s, since ’80s childhood nostalgia is even bigger than the ’70s variety. Except that, when it came to unreleased cartoons, WB doesn’t have much from the ’80s: they’ve released a fair amount of the Hanna-Barbera stuff they have the rights to. So this set is mostly put together from worse-than-usual H-B cartoons and, above all, the library of Ruby-Spears, a studio put together by Hanna-Barbera writers who wanted to prove that they could make stuff just like their bosses, only worse. (They were soon taken over by the same company that bought H-B, and wound up making anything H-B passed on.)

The ’80s was a somewhat grimly fascinating time for TV animation because the quality, which had been getting steadily worse from the moment TV animation was invented (every year, H-B’s shows would get a little worse than they were the year before), went even further downhill, thanks to such innovations as the cartoon-length toy tie-in (these had been banned from TV before Reagan’s FCC loosened the regulations). But it was also the decade when animators and writers started to rebel and try to reverse the trend; there was the recently DVD’d The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse, made by H-B, R-S and Filmation people in search of some fun and freedom, but even at H-B, there were some signs of life from the people who would later go on to Ren and Stimpy or Tiny Toons or the various non-crappy cartoons that turned things around — for a while — in the early ’90s. So cartoons were showing signs of getting a little better, but the bad cartoons were worse than ever before. The new set is mostly an introduction to just how hilariously bad cartoons could get, to the point that you’ll never believe they’re not Robert Smigel parodies of bad cartoons.

I mean, look at this cartoon, one of eleven shows represented on this set. It is, in fact, a real cartoon — but if you didn’t know that, and you were told it was an SNL parody, wouldn’t you believe it? I would. It’s just, in the words of Too Much, “Too Much!” Also, there’s a certain name the announcer is fond of saying. See if you can guess what it is.

Also on the set is R-S’s Mr. T cartoon, which is almost as famous as the Norris one thanks to — yes — the Robert Smigel parodies. Which really are not very different from the real thing.

Other immortal classics represented on this set include, presumably for the sake of fake CanCon, Hanna-Barbera’s Ed Grimley cartoon with Martin Short. Also from H-B comes Galtar and the Golden Lance, a He-Man Continue…

TCM host Robert Osborne is 77 now, and while there are perpetual message-board buzzings about whether or not he’s looking well, this profile by Tom Shales indicates that he’s feeling good and not planning to slow down any time soon; next month he’ll be headlining a new TCM project, the TCM Classic Film Festival, where they’ll show old movies “introduced by the people who made them” (including public appearances by the most obscure — and probably most undeserving — two-time Oscar winner of all time, Luise Rainer).

How good a host Osborne is, I can’t definitively say; I’m so used to him that he just is a part of the TCM experience. His rhythm, his inflections, his physical appearance are all something we expect before and after the movie on a weekday night. If we know the movie already, he’s like a buddy welcoming us back to something we love. If we’ve never heard of the movie, he does the job of filling us in on what we need to know without providing spoilers.

And one thing he’s particularly good at is finding the proper tone for this type of programming. TCM is basically the last place where anyone can find old movies, so while it naturally skews older, it’s also trying to draw in younger viewers, partly for business reasons and partly because if they don’t introduce young people to these movies, nobody else will. So the host cannot act as a pure nostalgia guy, expressing a wish that everything could be like it was in the good old days. (Back when PBS stations used to show old movies on a regular basis, some affiliates had hosts like that: I remember one old guy quoting from Michael Medved and ranting at us that there’s too much swearing in Goodfellas, and why couldn’t movies be clean and wholesome like White Heat, where “Jimmy Cagney didn’t even say ‘darn.’”) But he will look pathetic and needy — and drive away core viewers — if he tries to turn his introductions into special pleading, begging young viewers to give these films a try. Osborne seems to know how to get the right mix: there’s a bit of nostalgia and a bit of fan enthusiasm in there, but mostly he just seems to be treating the movies as movies — not “old” movies, not nostalgic windows into a more innocent time, just films that we might enjoy.

I think, for Ontarians, the late Elwy Yost had some of the same qualities; his introductions were more personal than Osborne’s (he freely admitted to disliking certain genres, like musicals) and he was much more of a fanboy and a nostalgia buff, but his enthusiasm and lack of condescention made any movie seem like it was going to be an immediate, current experience, no matter how old it was. Are there any old-movie hosts — local, province/state-wide, or national — who you think were particularly good at selling old movies and not making them feel like antiques?

Also, may I make another plea: for God’s sake, would TVOntario open up its archives of Elwy Yost interviews with old Hollywood actors, directors, writers and more? They’ve got perhaps the best library of such interviews, and they hardly ever show them anywhere except in tiny 30-second snippets, plus copies that were donated to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Geez, they interviewed Henry King on film, and just let him talk, and all that’s available online is the first three minutes of the interview. Free the Elwy archives!

Update: A commenter who works at TVO confirms that they are working on making the interviews available eventually, though clearing them for re-use is a complicated process:

We receive many requests for Elwy’s old interviews, and we are aware of their value. Unfortunately, releasing them for public consumption is a complicated process. Old copyrights have to be cleared, and most release forms signed by interviewees in the 70s and 80s don’t account for Internet usage. But this is something we are working on, along with our other archived content.

Thanks for the clarification, and it’s good news that they are working on it.

Brian Johnson expertly handled the Oscar live-blogging, but once you’ve finished reading that, come back here (where I wrongly believed that Avatar was the front-runner) and answer this question: what do you think of the decision to bring back “And the winner is…” when announcing the recipient of the award?

As the article explains, in 1989 producer Allan Carr, not content with producing one of the most-hated awards shows of all time, decided to change “and the winner is…” to the more neutral “and the Oscar goes to…” This was the golden age of kinder, gentler language, and the idea behind the change was that calling someone a “winner” implies that everyone else is a “loser.” This is, in fact, true, but that’s not the point.

The producers this year decided to bring back “and the winner is…” precisely because it is a little nastier and more blunt than “goes to.” They told Steve Pond that for those in the know, bringing it back feels “naughty” and “rude.”

Now, I remember hating the change at the time, and ever since then, I have felt it sounded wrong to use the bland “and the Oscar goes to.” The important thing is not that they got an Oscar, it’s that they won and four or more other people lost. So I’m happy to have “and the winner is” back. It’s one of the few really good decisions these producers seem to have made.

However, people who started watching the Oscars any time since 1989 are probably just as used to “and the Oscar goes to” as I was to “and the winner is.” When Kate Winslet slipped up and said “and the Oscar goes to Jeff Bridges,” some Twitter reactions lauded her for using the “traditional” phrase “and the Oscar goes to.” And I suppose that since it’s been around for 22 years, it is traditional now.

So what do you think? “Winner” or “goes to?”

And after you think about that one, here is something to play us out after that disappointing show: the wise and temperate observations (with dialogue by Harlan Ellison) of Frankie Fane and company.

Just to get in the mood for that awards show that’s coming up (or as George Sanders called them in All About Eve, “those awards presented annually by that… film society”) I decided to look at some Academy Awards show clips. My rigorous standard for including them here? They had to be a) On the internet and… well, that’s about it. My standards are high.

1. Here’s one of the most famous/infamous good-bad Oscar-show musical numbers: at the 1957 awards, an Oscar-winning song from several years earlier was performed by one of Hollywood’s biggest young stars, Rock Hudson, and one of its most famous semi-retirees, Mae West. The weirdness of the combination made the number an instant cult hit; it was a camp classic even before the term “camp” was mainstreamed.

2. My favourite kiss-off speech is Alfred Hitchcock winning the Irving Thalberg Memorial award at the 1967 Oscars. Hitchcock had never won an Oscar and was apparently not impressed with being given an award that is for producing, rather than directing (so it’s not even an honourary Oscar for his directing achievements). So he nonplussed everybody by keeping his speech to exactly five words.

3. For some reason I really love this promo for the 1987 Oscars. Why? Because the network managed to make it seem exactly like a promo for one of their drama shows. The tone of the announcer, the way the clips are chosen or edited — it’s like the Oscars are a gritty action drama. Which would make them more fun.

4. To represent controversial political moments and star self-congratulation, here’s the Vanessa Redgrave speech at the 1977 Oscars. This clip also includes the almost-as-famous reply by Paddy Chayefsky. For Continue…

The Hollywood Reporter has some Q&As with network representatives on their plans for the end of this season and the start of next season (pilot-wise).

- CBS’s Nina Tassler says they’re going to continue doing what they’ve been doing (crime procedurals and comedies). One thing I kind of like about her interviews is that, while she has some pardonable smugness about the network’s current success, she talks in mostly plain English, rather than using meaningless jargon like…

- ABC’s Steve MacPherson, whose interview has so much network double-speak that you’d expect him to start saying proactive and paradigm. Sample quote, after he’s asked about ABC’s firing of showrunners from V and Flashforward: “We look for someone who has a vision, is collaborative, able to maintain their artistic integrity while understanding our audience, and sees the value in the longevity and future of the series. Also having a strong team with complementary strengths is key.” He does lapse into something resembling English when talking about the possibility that ABC might pick up The New Adventures of Old Christine if CBS cancels it. I hope they do; it’s still funny and deserves an extra year or two.

- The CW’s Dawn Ostroff talks about the network’s shows and argues that just because they’re picking up more genre/action shows doesn’t mean they’re abandoning their core 18-34 female audience (though she also notes that “the CW is more boy-friendly than most people think”).

- NBC’s Angela Bromstad is understandably vague about a number of things, with a lot of “I cannot confirm or deny” lines about the future of their modestly-rated cult shows. But she has some fairly interesting things to say about what she’s doing to rebuild the network’s prime-time lineup, and a good quote about why it usually doesn’t work to imitate the last big hit (e.g. the various Lost clones): “you have to fight the trend to imitate because that’s usually not going to work; you have to find the next new thing. It’s tough to be ‘what isn’t on’ because there is so much on.”

- Fox’s Kevin Reilly may have the toughest job of all, even tougher than NBC’s. American Idol is still a huge asset for the network that offsets other problems, but without Cowell, it might not do the trick. A lot of the network’s shows are in decline — like 24, which is on the bubble now — and as Reilly admits, they’ve done a poor job of non-animated comedy development. He doesn’t put it this way, of course, but with a few good breaks for NBC’s new shows, I could see NBC rising while Fox falls next season.

Seriously, if Jimmy Fallon just turns his whole show over to reuniting the casts of NBC Saturday morning sitcoms, it’ll be must-viewing every night. Tonight he’s following up his Saved By the Bell crusade by reuniting the cast of California Dreams, a show from the same producer (Peter Engel) that was essentially the same show except they lived near the beach and were in a band and played original songs in every episode. Well, they had a band on Saved By the Bell, too, but not in every episode. (“Ba Boom” was the show’s only memorable catchprase. And it’s not that memorable.)

Here’s the theme song, proclaiming that they are “surf dudes with attitude” (both parts of that statement are false). What other Peter Engel shows should Jimmy Fallon reunite? I’m thinking City Guys.

Scott Macaulay tries to explain the new Oscar voting system and how it works, with quotes from economist Justin Wolfers. Wolfers also provides some follow-explanation here. The use of ranked voting, familiar to those who follow sports MVP voting, means that a movie has the potential to win even if it doesn’t get the most first-place votes.

But that doesn’t really answer the big question: should Avatar or The Hurt Locker be considered the favourite to win? No one really seems to know. Unlike the other big categories, where the winner is almost pre-ordained, Avatar and Locker have sort of been co-favourites for a while; sometimes Avatar seems to have the momentum, and sometimes it’s Locker. (If Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were alive, they would right now be playing Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron in romantic comedy about a divorced couple whose films are competing for the Oscar.) They’re different types of filmmaking, and both of them are types of movies that would, at certain times in Oscar history, be considered the likely winner. The question is not whether history will repeat itself this year, but which moment in history will repeat itself.

I reflexively think of Avatar as the favourite, because it’s a type of production that usually wins Best Picture: the long, huge-budget mega-blockbuster that “saves” the movie industry and gets the award because it’s doo too big to ignore. Winners that fall into this category include Gone With The Wind, The Sound of Music, The Godfather, and Cameron’s own Titanic. These were movies of epic length and scale that became tremendous hits (often after people thought the studio was going to lose its collective shirt on them). They combined massive popular appeal with technical finesse and a tendency to impress movie insiders: Continue…

Will Dixon has a good post about the stigmatization of Canadian-made English-language programming, and the fact that it starts early.

Now, I don’t know if I agree that the stigma is mostly due to the proliferation of U.S. programming on our airwaves. I mean, that’s part of it, but it doesn’t explain it all. Thinking back to my own childhood, as I started to become more aesthetically aware, I started to notice that Canadian shows often (not always, but often) were a step behind their U.S. and British counterparts in terms of production values, lighting, camerawork, and other little things that added up to an overall effect. There are also certain writing/storytelling tics that are identified with Canadian shows, particularly Canadian dramas. Once you notice these problems, and notice that the shows that have these problems frequently turn out to be Canadian, it’s hard not to feel like Canadian shows have a problem. This may harden into a prejudice against Canadian shows, so that we’re looking for those problems and expecting them whether or not they’re there (and excusing the same problems in U.S.-made programs). But I don’t think it starts as a prejudice; it starts as observation.

Even I, as a kid, probably wouldn’t have liked Wayne and Shuster as much as I did if I hadn’t been introduced to them via a U.S.-made LP of their four best routines: even in an audio-only version, it had an obvious production polish — mostly in the music, which was scored by a U.S. studio band, and some of the supporting actors — that I didn’t get when they did the same routines on the CBC.

Many of these problems can be collected under the general heading of “money.” Since we know that Canada has no shortage of excellent technical facilities (Americans come here to make their shows and do just fine), writers and actors, the troubles of Canadian shows are often attributable to the budgets. That includes the writing, since it takes time and money to hire a writing staff and polish the scripts the way the best shows do. There’s also the point that Canadian TV has never really embraced the writers-first system that the U.S. and UK have embraced in their different ways, but even that can be seen as having a bean-counting element to it.

And I’m not just talking about the budget for any individual show, but the industry-wide idea of what the production values should be for a typical show. You can pour extra money, often with U.S. investment, into a show like Flashpoint, and it’ll look good — but it doesn’t change the perception of what Canadian shows are like. Other problems are related less to budget than to prestige — whether television is seen as a place for notable actors to be — though that may also come back to budgets, because we’re competing with the U.S. in a way that even England is not. We’re in the path of the biggest TV industry in the world, and we don’t have the kind of state investment in television that England makes, even after the latest round of BBC budget cuts.

That doesn’t mean things are hopeless, because there’s a lot that can be done on a tight budget, and the production values and writing sophistication of Canadian TV has improved a lot. As Will points out, there are Canadian shows that are as well-made as anybody’s and therefore don’t “look Canadian” to kids. But there is that general problem that hangs over everything: English Canadian kids grow up with the perception that tacky-looking shows turn out to be Canadian (or some U.S. first-run syndicated drama, but they don’t make those any more). That perception won’t be changed by the emergence of good comedies like Dan For Mayor, or shows that do well in the States like Being Erica. It may be that it’s the quality of the bad stuff that needs to go up; when everything, good and bad, has an air of competence about it, then the stigma is lifted.

Last night’s premiere of Parenthood did pretty well, though no one knows how much the numbers were inflated by NBC’s almost-endless promotion of it during the Olympics. The next few episodes will be the key; either the show will drop off to a reasonable level that will please the network (whose expectations can’t be particularly high, given that they’re desperate to fill the 10 o’clock slot) or if its drop-off will be similar to other NBC 10 o’clock shows from the pre-Leno era, like My Own Worst Enemy (which started with similar numbers).

The show itself is a good, well-cast mash-up of comedy and drama, likely to be described as Modern Family meets Brothers and Sisters. When the pilot was re-shot with Lauren Graham, aka the non-monstrous version of Jenna Elfman, replacing Maura Tierney, the show took on a lighter tone than showrunner Jason Katims originally planned. This has something to do with the presence of Graham but may also have something to do with the success of Modern Family on a rival network: a competing multi-family show obviously wants to help itself to some of the elements that have made that other show a hit.

Finally, since Ron Howard expressed himself dissatisfied with the 1990 TV version of Parenthood, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at it, since the episodes are available on YouTube. 1990 was one of the last big years for movie-to-TV adaptations, as the Star article notes (partly because the success of The Wonder Years had everybody looking for single-camera, laugh-track-free comedies, and movies are the obvious inspiration for that type of storytelling) and Parenthood was, at the very least, a better try than Ferris Bueller or Uncle Buck. It was done as a half-hour single-camera show, created by David Tyron “Ty” King, a former Newhart staff writer coming off a long stint writing about bittersweet family problems on Empty Nest.

The most famous things about the 1990 Parenthood are a) The presence of Leonardo DiCaprio in the role that Joaquin Phoenix played in the movie, and b) The presence of Joss Whedon as one of the staff writers. So here’s an episode written by Whedon, with a prominent DiCaprio role.

Trivia: Whedon invited his ex-boss Ty King to write a couple of Buffy The Vampire Slayer episodes for him in season 2 (“Some Assembly Required” and “Passions”).

Click “Continue” for the other two parts of the episode

Continue…