Jokes aren’t funny?

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 4, 2012 at 11:33 AM - 0 Comments

Here’s one idea I’ve been pondering when it comes to half-hour sitcoms: we (and I mean me) tend to fixate too much on jokes. A lot of the discussion is about the quality of individual jokes or how many jokes a show can cram in. But nobody really remembers jokes. What we remember is moments, or more broadly, scenes.

The most memorable moments in a comedy occur when a scene reaches a point where everything that happens in it is funny, because the scene is funny and the build-up has been properly done. That’s what we remember. The one-liners are almost irrelevant. They’re not totally irrelevant, but they’re really like punctuation; a comedy needs jokes because otherwise we won’t be in the mood to laugh. Jokes are like the warm-up.

I say this with respect to sitcoms because I think everyone understands this is true when it comes to, say, a film comedy or a play. A great comedy film does not need to have hilarious lines every five seconds, and it doesn’t provoke a lot of argument over the style of jokes (setup/punchline vs. conceptual or whatever). A great comedy film is hopefully going to be remembered for a few hilarious scenes. Even a stand-up comedy set really catches fire when it becomes something more than a series of observations or jokes and turns into a big, sweeping aria where we’re laughing at the whole thing, not the individual lines.

Instinctively, we understand that that’s true of a great half-hour comedy too, but discussion sometimes seems to get sidetracked by the focus on jokes or the frequency of Continue…

Long Lost Uncle Aesop

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 10:56 AM - 0 Comments

“Immoral” seems like a rather harsh word to use for Glee‘s use of a fairly old convention of television storytelling. The convention is the one that’s known as the “Very Special Episode,” and it goes like this: a show may want to deal with a very serious topic without being forced to compromise its basically light or comedic style. The solution is either to give the serious story to a character we don’t see very often (or in the case of that dead friend on Family Ties, someone we never saw or heard of before) or to give the story to the main characters, with the understanding that it won’t have a long-term impact on them.

The viewer accepts this convention, as they accept many conventions, because it’s really not that far removed from real life, where permanent change is quite hard to come by and where we only get occasional glimpses into the lives of many of the people we know. But we also accept it because it’s a convention, and we accept conventions that are necessary for the show to go on the way it is. In the case of the “Very Special Episode,” the thing we accept most of all is that the show is basically light one, it will remain basically light entertainment, and that means that a very serious issue is for that week only.

In a sense, that is exploitative and manipulative; that’s one of the reasons the “Very Special Episode” has been so mocked over the years: it expects us to invest emotionally in something that has had no buildup and will have no long-term effects. That’s why people get so annoyed about that Family Ties episode where Alex recovers from the death of a friend we’ve never seen before. It’s not implausible that he would have a friend we haven’t seen before (actually, given how much of a TV character’s life we don’t see, it’s implausible that they wouldn’t have other friends or relationships we don’t see all the time). But people were upset that the show was trying to draw our tears over a relationship that was created solely for that episode. And with Glee, people are annoyed that it introduces an issue for a few minutes of one episode with multiple storylines, tries to congratulate itself for dealing with it, and then moves on.

While I understand the annoyance, I’m uncomfortable with where this kind of logic leads: it could lead to the idea that a comedy show can never deal with serious issues unless it’s willing to turn itself into a drama, or that if an issue is brought up it must be pursued for a multi-episode arc. Glee has been a mess for the last while – but like most of Murphy’s shows, a fun mess, and rarely a dull mess – but I think it’s okay in the abstract that it can pick up an issue, say what it has to say, and then move on; it’s half The Facts of Life and half (to bring up that comparison again) South Park, another scattershot show that deals with whatever happens to be on the creator’s mind that week. That’s not immoral, that’s just episodic storytelling.

The Canadian Blues

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 2:31 PM - 0 Comments

Yesterday I was talking to a colleague who’d been overseas recently and mentioned how popular Flashpoint seemed to be over there: it seemed to be even more of a pop-culture phenomenon, she said, than it is here. Today CTV announced that the next season (currently in production) will be the last.

Update: Word is starting to trickle in that this decision was genuinely made by the creators, who wanted to move on and “end it the way we want.” If so, good; that’s a much happier story than I thought it was when the press release first came out.

The show has to be considered one of the most influential in Canadian TV history, both from a business standpoint – with its model of serving as a summer-replacement series on a U.S. network – and for the many similar Canadian-made cop shows that followed in its wake. It was one of the best shows of its kind. It was one of several Canadian shows from the last few years that demonstrated that a) Canadians will watch Canadian-made programs, and b) People outside Canada will watch a Canadian show even if it doesn’t try to hide the presence of the CN Tower or other distinguishing features of the Canadian city where it’s filmed. But while it did survive the loss of its partnership with a U.S. broadcast network, its alternative partnership (with the ION network in the U.S.) doesn’t seem to have been enough to keep it going beyond next year. (Update: But, see above; it might have been able to keep going if the creators had wanted to keep it going.) Though 75 episodes is certainly a very healthy run for a show that mostly did 13-episode seasons.

I hope to write more about this later, but with this and other recent cancellations, plus the Genies and Geminis merging into one award, plus this story on the problems of getting TV documentaries made, it just doesn’t seem like a very hopeful time for English-language Canadian TV programming. It’s not that it’s impossible to get people to watch it – arguably it’s easier now, with the improved production polish of Canadian shows and the somewhat improved promotional techniques available to networks; Flashpoint was better-promoted than most of the Canadian shows that preceded it. But it doesn’t seem like there’s an organized system in place to keep the shows coming. U.S. networks are still buying Canadian shows for summer runs, and that’s good, but a show can’t survive for a long time if it has to depend on the existence of an American network partner. What keeps shows going for a long time, and what supports a TV industry, is that networks put original programming – and finding an audience for it – at the heart of their business strategy. The issue with English Canadian TV is that it doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot to networks from a business standpoint, and it tends to vanish when networks go through hard business times.

On the other hand, and to end this on a hopeful note, I’ve seen people argue that the Genie/Gemini consolidation is actually a good thing, creating the possibility of a single awards show that will attract more attention. And the decision to shift international TV co-productions into their own separate category (“Best international drama”) suggests the possibility that the new show will focus more attention on home-grown English-language programming.

I have seen none of these shows

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, April 27, 2012 at 5:28 PM - 0 Comments

For YouTube Blog Filler™ there’s nothing better for the moment than that YouTube channel that is (until it gets taken down) collecting a lot of really obscure TV intros. Here are a few more recently-uploaded ones, all of them for shows so obscure that I’ve never seen them.

First, a flop show that actually got good reviews: Mama Malone, a 1984 sitcom created by playwright Terrence McNally as a vehicle for the British actress Lila Kaye. The surprising thing about the somewhat corny theme song is that it was written by a first-rank songwriting team, John Kander and Fred Ebb (Cabaret, Chicago, “New York, New York”). But first-rank songwriters have a somewhat mixed record when it comes to TV theme songs. A lot of the best ones are done by songwriters whose talents were uniquely suited to TV songwriting, rather than theatre or pop.

The only reason I have even heard of Custer is that it’s one of the shows mentioned in John Continue…

How networks perish

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 6:37 PM - 0 Comments

A friend told me she’d been marathoning a great TV series (never mind the name) recently and asked me if I’d been watching anything on DVD recently. I replied that I had watched nearly all of Laverne & Shirley, season 5. Well, if I’m going to make a confession like that, I might as well get a blog post out of it. The reason I bought this DVD is because I learned from the above review that CBS/Paramount has reversed its policy on chopping TV shows to pieces: while some generic music floats in on the jukeboxes, the snippets of copyrighted songs are left in, and the episodes are all at their original 25-minute lengths. Now if only CBS/Paramount had adopted this policy back when they were hacking The Odd Couple and Taxi and many other, better shows to death, but it is sort of nice that now that the DVD boom is over, the occasional season releases we do get are done with a bit more care.

The idea of Laverne & Shirley has always been more appealing to me than the execution. If you describe the show, it sounds wonderful: a slapstick comedy in the tradition of Lucy, the only post-Lucy show to allow women to be the knockabout, fearless physical comedians. Add in the two wackiest wacky neighbours in sitcom history, and what could be bad? Well, the scripts. Except maybe for the first season, they were never as good as they could have been, and everyone involved knew it. There are stories about how the writers would just throw story logic to the wind and figure out how to get the girls into a wacky physical situation, and this shows in the episodes. (There are also stories, of course, about how the actors would all drive the writers crazy. There was a huge amount of writer turnover, and Lander and McKean are said to have set at least one script on fire, though that’s a story that’s told about a lot of actors on a lot of shows, and could be apocryphal.) The physical comedy bits are sometimes actually funnier when they’re excerpted (or when we remember them, once we’ve forgotten what they were about), because the setups are so contrived. When the girls are wrapped up like mummies and trying to knock over a cabinet full of food, the physical schtick is funny but not as funny as it would be if the situation made any sense. It’s one of the things the original I Love Lucy had, and that Fawlty Towers had, and that Three’s Company had in its good moments: physical comedy that arises from a situation that is at least somewhat believable.

Anyway, the historically interesting point about this season is that it was the centrepiece of a disastrous season for ABC, where the network essentially gave back much of Continue…

In America (ha-ha)

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 4:35 PM - 0 Comments

You’ve probably already seen this if you watched the South Park episode about anti-bullying campaigns. But just in case, here’s the video it was parodying (and where Stan got his tic of chuckling after he says “in America”), from Cypress Ranch High School in the Houston suburbs. It’s pretty technically ambitious, getting as much of it as possible in one shot. The South Park version, with its cameos by any South Park elementary character the staff could fit in, sometimes seemed almost like an affectionate tribute to the original video, even though in context it’s supposed to be about Stan going overboard and making the whole issue about him.

Canadian TV links

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 12:34 PM - 0 Comments

- Bill Brioux talks to producer Brian K. Roberts about the cancellation of the TV version of The Debaters, and the CBC’s issues facing television in general. Roberts (who, in addition to his other credits, was editor of The Simpsons in its early years and wrote the “Mt. Splashmore” episode) argues that the show was designed to work with a low budget, a nonexistent promotion budget, and the vertically-integrated model of taping a show that can be used both on TV and radio.

- A list of winners from last night’s Writer’s Guild of Canada screenwriting awards, Bruce Smith for John A.: Birth of a Country and Mark McKinney receiving the “WGC Showrunner Award,” celebrating his work on shows like Less Than Kind (Part of the point of this award is not just to recognize the work of a first-rate showrunner like McKinney, but encouraging more recognition of the idea of a showrunner – a writer who is the one in charge of the show rather than a non-writing producer – in Canada. It’s an idea that does seem to have gained more acceptance at English-Canadian TV networks than it had a decade ago.) On the not-so-bright side, the creator/showrunner of one of the winning shows, Todd and the Book of Pure Evil, announced the show’s cancellation at the awards ceremony.

Veep isn’t deep, but won’t put you to sleep

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, April 22, 2012 at 6:22 PM - 0 Comments

Having repeatedly defended Girls, I find myself on the other side when it comes to HBO’s other big half-hour comedy launch, Veep, though I expect Veep to be much more popular; it’s got Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and she is terrific as always. (The fact that she never looks any different over the years has been so much commented on that she might be the natural successor to Dick Clark for “never-aging” and “vampire” jokes.) With Dreyfus starring and Armando Ianucci handling the creative side, the show is well put-together and has its share of funny lines and moments, like a bit in the second episode where Dreyfus and her staffers try to figure out where they can go to get a photo op were normal people, or “normals.” It’s just that when an episode is over, I’m not sure what the point of it was.

Luiza Savage did a great set-visit piece on this show, where she talked to Ianucci and other people involved, and found that they’re all a bit cynical about the workings of modern U.S. politics. Which is Continue…

To the clip repository!

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, April 20, 2012 at 5:24 PM - 0 Comments

Sometimes a bunch of old clips turns up on YouTube all at once, and this YouTube account recently was updated with a lot of musical numbers from Tony Awards telecasts, starting in the late ’60s and going up to the ’00s. (The channel already had a bunch of other Tony clips, and some of the clips are already on Bluegobo.com.) Some are more interesting for what they don’t have – like choosing lesser numbers or performers because the stars weren’t available. Others are notable for who they include, like a clip of the replacement cast of Fiddler on the Roof, which had a young Bette Midler. And some are from shows no one would ever hear of again (Walking Happy). But there’s a lot of good stuff in there, from the all-black version of Hello, Dolly! onward. Here’s the opening of Zorbà, the 1968-9 Harold Prince production that was an exact mid-point between Fiddler on the Roof and his abrasive, uncompromising 1970s productions: it’s a meaner, darker opening number than his earlier musicals, but not as mean and dark as the opening of Prince’s Pacific Overtures, which would be performed on a later Tony show.

Unfortunately the biggest treasure for musical fans, the Ed Sullivan Show clips, have mostly been pulled from every site and aren’t coming back. Once in a while, a stray one manages to find its way back onto YouTube, like these two clips from Bye Bye Birdie: Paul Lynde’s bravura monologue as an angry suburban dad, and the “Put on a Happy Face” number. (I guess today you couldn’t do a number where the hero accosts a teenage girl and makes faces at her. Not without at least one joke about the possible implications.) Note that the drink Lynde refers to in his monologue had to be changed to “Ginger Ale” from 7-Up, because you couldn’t refer to brand-name products on a sponsored TV show without getting into trouble.

The place to be

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, April 19, 2012 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Have a look at Noel Murray’s “very special episode” column on Green Acres.

The interesting thing about that show’s reputation is that it sort of exists on two tracks. There has, right from the time it was on, been a sort of underground following that recognizes it as a surrealist work of art; Murray quotes one such article, by a young Armond White, but there have been many attempts to analyze the show as a subversive piece of television, and place it within the traditions of Theatre of the Absurd and and other comedy trends of the era. But Green Acres has never quite crossed over into being a fully-recognized, worshipped classic. It’s still routinely lumped in with the other comedies of the period – and more importantly, has always had many fans who enjoy it as a nostalgically goofy comedy. Eddie Albert may have been the first person to use the term “surrealistic” in connection with the show, in an interview while the show was running. He called Jay Sommers’ writing “wonderfully surrealistic,” using as an example a gag where an orange falls out of an apple tree. But then in the same interview he said that this was probably over-analyzing the show: “In a way I’m just answering the critics about whom I don’t give a damn,” he said, pointing out that many fans of the show were kids who just loved the cow and the pig.

One of the strengths of the show is that its jokes often work perfectly well whether you want to analyze them, or as silly jokes for their own sake. It’s not a show that works on two levels, like Batman, which has different jokes for different fans. It’s a show whose jokes are equally satisfying if you look at them in an “adult” way (asking what they mean or why they’re there) or a “kid” way (just accepting silliness without questioning it).

In terms of its topical relevance to the ’60s, I think one point Green Acres makes is that the idea of a simple rural paradise, unencumbered by modern problems, is a lie. The ’60s were a time when the rural/urban cultural divide had vanished in a lot of ways. People could remember a time when living in a small town meant that you were culturally isolated from the big city, but that was a long time ago. So rural TV comedies sprang up to demonstrate that that hazily-remembered world still existed. Petticoat Junction was based on the reminiscences of Paul Henning’s wife, whose grandparents used to run a little hotel in rural Missouri. So it was based on a memory of the way people’s grandparents lived in the ’30s – but set in the ’60s. The idea being that the world you remember from your childhood is still out there somewhere. The joke of Green Acres is that this is all wrong: small town people not only don’t have better values than big-city people, but they are products of the same culture. That’s why television, the great leveler of cultural differences, is a big presence on Green Acres (no one watched TV on other rural sitcoms, and the Petticoat Junction hotel didn’t even have a working phone) and why the petty rituals of Hooterville people are often ghastly parodies of the petty rituals of big-city people. The theme of the show is that Oliver was an idiot for thinking that there is some kind of escape from the values and culture of the modern world, and the only way to enjoy yourself and not go crazy is to be like Lisa, and accept that people are pretty much the same everywhere.

Fortunate ones

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, April 18, 2012 at 4:29 PM - 0 Comments

I think this article on Wheel of Fortune has a good point conflated with a not-so-good point. The not-so-good point, in my opinion, is that Wheel is somehow a throwback to an earlier time when money didn’t matter so much and the thought of losing a lot of money wasn’t painfully real (“here is a place where no one really needs the money, the most anachronistic thing of all”). I doubt there was ever such a time. The good point is that Wheel of Fortune offers a world where money and possessions are easy to get and just as easy to lose, and none of it really matters. But that’s true of most game shows, and particularly true of game shows that can sustain themselves every day for decades, like Wheel and Price is Right and Jeopardy!.

I remember that when I watched one of those shows as a kid, an older relative came in and heard me and another viewer discussing the cash and prizes as though they were basically insignificant: I said that winning $1000 was not really winning anything at all. The older relative pointed out that $1000 was a lot of money and that I shouldn’t be talking about it as if it didn’t matter. I replied that it mattered in real life, but it just didn’t matter so much on these shows. The fun of watching a game show is that it provides an escape into an alternate world where large sums of money become meaningless, and new cars are easily available: it’s like our world, except the scale is completely different. Amounts of money that would seem large to these contestants in regular life are so unsatisfying that they’re always trying for more; prizes that are practical and useful around the home are the most boring prizes you can win. And when a contestant loses, you don’t feel like they had a chance for a better life and had it taken away from them; you just feel like they had a chance to win, and they lost. (The losing is more unpleasant on Jeopardy!, but it’s not really about the money, it’s the humiliation. Not knowing the answer to a direct question is the ultimate humliation on a game show.) Game shows are like sports for non-athletic people: there are winners and losers, there’s a score, and none of it really matters. But that was as true when these shows began as it is now; I don’t think the Great Recession suddenly altered the way we watch game shows.

And speaking of game shows, here’s the late Dick Clark in a complete episode of Pyramid, promising someone that if she wins, her dream will be fulfilled and that she’ll be able to start her own business. And that kind of promise, which would seem cruel in another setting, seems strangely unreal in a game show setting. I’m sure it’s real to the players, who would like to get the money; but to the viewer, hope and humiliation alike are just part of the game.

Darn hippies

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, April 16, 2012 at 4:01 PM - 0 Comments

Television of the ’60s is notorious for either ignoring what was going in the outside world or caricaturing it in the most patronizing way. But for pure surrealism, nothing quite beats the legendary September 27, 1969 season opener of The Lawrence Welk Show on ABC. “Don’t you cats know this polka jazz is strictly from squaresville?” (It turns out some of Welk’s viewers didn’t realize it was a joke. “Some of the elderly people,” he remarked in an interview, “thought I had changed my style.”) You have to give him this, Continue…

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.

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…

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.