Americans Like Our Shows… Eventually

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 1:56 PM - 0 Comments

Marsha Lederman has an article on Chris Haddock, who created Da Vinci’s Inquest and Intelligence for the CBC, and how the belated U.S. following of those shows wound up getting him his current job on Boardwalk Empire. It turns out that Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan was an admirer of Da Vinci’s Inquest, and mentioned this after he sat on a panel being moderated by Haddock; Haddock sent copies of Intelligence to Gilligan and Treme‘s Eric Overmeyer, and the two of them started talking the show up in Los Angeles.

Gilligan, it turns out, was a fan of Da Vinci’s Inquest, having come across it back home while channel surfing. “I was really struck by the writing and the pacing,” Gilligan says. “I thought it just seemed like a more grown-up procedural than I was used to seeing. The characters in it just seemed like real people … not over-baked and overblown like we sometimes see on American TV.”

Gilligan didn’t know anything about Intelligence, though. So after that first meeting, Haddock sent Gilligan and Overmyer some DVDs. Gilligan liked Intelligence even more than Da Vinci. “It’s just a tremendously written show,” Gilligan says. “It’s wonderful storytelling, very intricately plotted.” He says he mentioned Intelligence to a “bunch of writers” in Los Angeles, and to his own agent, who signed Haddock.

Last September, Haddock met with HBO in L.A. They batted around ideas for new series, but within an hour after the meeting, Haddock got a call: Would he consider working on somebody else’s show? “I said it depended on what it was, and they said ‘Well it’s Boardwalk Empire,’ and I said ‘Yeah I think I’d probably consider that.’” Haddock says that with a laugh. By the end of the month, Haddock had relocated to Brooklyn Heights, his new apartment a one-stop ferry ride up the East River to the show’s offices at Steiner Studios.

Intelligence also seems to be getting more intention in America in general. It’s one of the shows that gets recommended to people after they’ve watched The Wire and want something similar.

The cancellation of Intelligence was a sad moment in Canadian TV, but it’s hard to argue that it was anyone’s fault (unless you put a lot of stock in the rumours Continue…

Roseanne and the Cosby Gambit

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 10:21 AM - 0 Comments

I mentioned this on a message board the other day, but I thought it was worth a quick post as well, if only because it’s the latest chapter in the strange history of the NBC network. to understand what’s going on with NBC trying to reunite Roseanne Barr and John Goodman, we may have to look back to an era when Roseanne was still on the air, and another network was trying to pick its ratings up out of the basement. In the mid-’90s, Leslie Moonves took over CBS, which had been floundering pretty much since M*A*S*H went off the air; it had a few hits in the ’80s, but few huge ones, and by the ’90s most of its mid-level hits were gone. Just before Moonves came in, the network management attempted to revamp the network’s whole image by adding a lot of young, sexy shows in the mold of the hits on NBC and Fox (most notoriously, a soap created by Melrose Place and 90210 mastermind Darren Star), but they all failed.

Moonves’s strategy for turning CBS around was built around doing what other networks had done, but in a different way: he signed up NBC’s former superstar, Bill Cosby, to do a CBS sitcom. And after some cast replacements, Phylicia Rashad wound up playing his wife again. According to Bill Carter’s Desperate Networks, this was part of a Moonves plan of “signing up stars who had had hits on NBC and ABC when they were younger. As they hit their forties or fifties, Moonves would bring them into CBS.” Some of Continue…

King of the Hill Revisited: “The Unbearable Blindness…”, “Meet the Manger Babies”

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 10:17 AM - 0 Comments

“The Unbearable Blindness of Laying” (airdate: December 21, 1997)
Written by Paul Lieberstein
Directed by Cyndi Tang

People sure do go blind easily on TV. We’ve seen people go temporarily blind from explosions, from being hit on the head with a tray, and in this episode, by seeing an unpleasant sight. Hank walks in on his mother (Tammy Wynette) having sex with her boyfriend (Carl Reiner) and suffers hysterical blindness, which can only be cured if he faces up to what’s bothering him. Of course, Hank would rather stay blind than face up to any emotions, so his friends are free to mock him and play “blind” jokes on him for a large portion of the episode.

This was the episode that was covered in a 1997 article about the writing process of a King of the Hill show; it started with that basic idea – Hank goes blind when he walks in on his mother and her lover – and went through lots of late-night rewrites before the table read, nothing unusual for a weekly TV series. The article said that
Continue…

How Whitney Houston changed MTV

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 10:11 AM - 0 Comments

Race in popular culture is still a touchy subject, but Whitney Houston may be one of the people who made it a little less touchy: according to Tris McCall of the New Jersey Star-Ledger, she and Michael Jackson played a crucial role “in the desegregation of MTV.”

The music video channel took over pop culture at a time when racial divisions were particularly acute in pop music, after the ferocious backlash against crossover forms like disco. It was often alleged that MTV was not a hospitable place for black performers, initially reluctant even to play Michael Jackson. “There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I’m surprised aren’t used on MTV,” David Bowie said in 1983, to which MTV host Mark Goodman dismissively replied “we have to play music we think an entire country is going to like.”

Whitney Houston was one of the artists who proved Goodman wrong. In the mid-to-late ’80s, when Jackson and Prince weren’t making as many videos, it was Houston who became one of the signature artists on MTV: in a 1987 book on MTV culture, author E. Ann Kaplan wrote that “until the recent advent of Whitney Houston, Tina Turner was the only female black singer featured regularly, and even so, her videos were few and far between.” Houston’s famously eclectic, broadly-appealing style ruled out any attempts to pigeonhole her as appropriate for only one segment of the audience or one type of time slot. Like Jackson, she helped to erode the disco-era bias against dance music and its ability to appeal to white suburban viewers on MTV. Continue…

Blogs as Mean as You’ve Ever Seen

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 4:43 PM - 0 Comments

I sometimes defend the idea of the TWoP-style snarky TV recap, but I have to admit I’ve lost interest in snarky recaps to a certain extent. The reason is that anything can be discussed in a snarkily dismissive tone: it doesn’t even matter how good or bad something is, all you have to do is refuse to engage with it, and recap the plot in a disbelieving or nit-picky way. Any story sounds ridiculous if you want to make it sound ridiculous. So for snark-caps to get my attention, they have to have a point of view that goes beyond a detached cataloguing of plot holes and bad hair.

“Full House Reviewed” is such a site. The concept is simple. The creator of the site decided he would watch an episode of Full House every week, from the beginning, and review it. He’s done half the series, with the other half still to come. He loathes the show, loathes the characters (interestingly, he considers Joey the worst character in the history of television; Joey’s bad, but I always remember people hating Michelle more) and loathes himself for watching, and every word of every review is filled with rage against these idiot characters and their sense of entitlement. Some of it is just plot-hole-picking, like getting mad because guest characters are there for one week and never mentioned again. But overall, it has a theme that goes deeper than that: he hates Full House because he hates the characters as human beings, and he sees the full house as a monstrous entity full of evil people, who behave abominably to everyone and think they’re the nicest people on earth. The anger, plus the meta-theme of a man slowly going crazy as he watches episode after episode of people he dislikes, is what makes it work better than most snark-blogs: it can’t be accused of detachment.

Apart from the lines I laughed at, and there were a lot of them, I also like his point that in the full house, the cheesy music seems to have strange powers: characters who have been fighting for 20 minutes will suddenly be forced to make up and hug, not by anything that happens, but just by the synth music.

DJ stops her from storming out of the house and the music comes on, which abruptly changes the tone of their interaction. It’s weird how sometimes the music itself seems to be the cause of conflict resolution. I guess that when you are having a conflict in the full house you know it’s time to resolve things when you hear the music come on.

As you might expect, he thinks Kimmy Gibbler is the only person we can truly identify with, because she has a personality and the Tanners all think she’s weird for daring to have a personality. Also as you might expect, he’s not too fond of the catchphrases.

The switch between Jesse and the motorcycle stuntman in this scene is as obvious and inorganic as possible, even though they have a dub of Jesse exclaiming “have mercy” over the footage. Golly, does this guy have to say his lame catch-phrase anytime he does anything or what?

The End of 2004-5

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

The significance of House going off the air is that this is going to be the end of a television era, one that started in the 2004-5 season. That is generally considered one of the best seasons for TV drama, and maybe the last great season for broadcast network TV drama. House started that season, so did Desperate Housewives, so did Lost, and so did Grey’s Anatomy. Along with cult favourites like Veronica Mars and flawed-but-fun new shows like Boston Legal, it was a very strong season, which seemed to prove that broadcast networks were going to be fine up against the onslaught of cable. It completely turned around the ABC network, and gave Fox a new flagship scripted drama in House (which they followed up the year after with Bones, also created by a Canadian). Since then, basic cable has become a bigger player in drama, the broadcast networks have had trouble developing new drama hits, and the explosion of 2004-5 seems less like a new golden age and more like the last flowering of a previous era: the last big burst of big hit mass-audience drama. We may never see its like again.

Update: I forgot to add that many of the shows from 2004-5 were not only traditional network dramas – in the sense of being broadly-appealing shows that had a point of view within the limitations of a 22-episode season and a major network – they were built into hits in traditional ways. The ABC shows were mostly explosive out-of-the box hits, shows that opened much bigger than anyone (including network executives) expected. House wasn’t as big a hit from the beginning, but Fox built it into a hit through the power of a lead-in, American Idol. Most of these were also shows that were considered risky propositions when they began; Desperate Housewives was famously turned down by a lot of networks, and NBC, which produces House, could probably have had it for its own network. The era of the surprise drama hit is not over: arguably Once Upon a Time qualifies. But the magic moments described in Bill Carter’s book Desperate Networks, where executives wake up to discover that a drama has gotten bigger than it was ever supposed to be, seem to happen more often with reality (think The Voice) or cable drama (think The Walking Dead). It may simply be that there are so many hour-long dramas now that it’s hard for any broadcast network drama to create a sense of being an event.

Of this batch of shows, House was arguably the most conventional in form, a medical mystery show that famously hit a lot of the same notes from week to week, and the most successful attempt by another network to emulate CBS’s success with the CSI franchise. In its prime, though, it was an intelligent and gripping show that worked the way good mystery drama is supposed to – using the formula, and our knowledge of it, as a given, it then tried to deal with interesting ideas or give us a deeper look into the title character. The show ran out of gas in recent years, but at its peak it was pretty much an ideal example of what a procedural can be.

Not a lot needs to be said about why the show worked in its good years, because the reasons it worked – as with many shows – are fairly simple: interesting, well-executed premise, interesting, well-cast character. (Exploitable premise + good casting is almost the baseline formula for a workable television series.) The show demonstrated something about the concept of relatability: is shows do need to be relatable, but not necessarily by presenting situations and lives that resemble our own. House was a relatable character not because he reminded us of us, but because he gets away with things we might sometimes like to do (but don’t, because we’re not geniuses and/or sociopaths). And the whole show was built on a very relatable idea: when you get sick and go to the hospital, your secrets are stripped away. The vulnerability of a person in hospital has to do with more than illness; it has to do with the fact that the doctor has to know everything about you – anything you’ve ever done might suddenly turn out to be relevant.

Most medical shows play on this idea sometimes, but House put it right at the centre a lot of the time. This led to a lot of jokes about the formula of the show (“A patient has a secret” is House‘s version of “Gilligan screws up”). But it helped to make the guest characters interesting, something that a lot of procedurals have trouble with. And I felt like that was at the centre of the show’s relatability. If you’ve ever been embarrassed answering a doctor’s questions, or if you’ve just been placed in a position where you have to answer questions about your life to a total stranger, then the typical House episode had some meaning.

Dickens and Me

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 5:34 PM - 0 Comments

I love today’s 200th birthday boy, Charles Dickens. I read him a lot in high school, and my favourite things of his were the big, long, rambling novels – I started with The Pickwick Papers, which is barely a novel at all for much of its length, and went on from there. I think I blame Dickens more than anyone else for my decision to become an English major. His novels can be tedious if you’re forced to read them, but if you pick one at the right time, and are in the right mood for it, they can enthrall you. I think the sense of detail is part of what accounts for Dickens’ power. A lot of novels either skimp on detail, or make the details very dry (dutifully cutting and pasting in all the research the author has done). Dickens not only describes everything, he puts his own personal spin on everything he describes. Every minor character has his or her own distinguishing details, catchphrases, and tics. Every place he takes us to is filtered through his unique perspective, his combination of realism and fantasy, so that you never see anything in a conventional way. It can be exhausting, but it can also teach you to see the world differently and not take anything for granted. And as a picture of life from another time – and most of his novels were period pieces, even at the time – it’s more vivid than a straightforward historical portrait.

You do have to be in the right mood for it, though. And one of the things you have to be in the mood for is a willingness to forgive, or to take the good with the bad. Almost any Dickens novel has good patches and bad patches all through, not just the inevitable falling-off at the end. (Most long novels lose steam towards the end, and Continue…

The Scary Ad that Sold Out Dirty Harry

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 1:05 PM - 0 Comments

The latest manufactured controversy in the world of punditry is over this ad, which ran during the Super Bowl to tell viewers that U.S. auto companies have recovered and that everything’s going to be fine. Clint Eastwood, a Republican, has said that he had no thought of this being a political ad, yet it’s been attacked all over conservative media as being an Obama campaign ad in disguise; Karl Rove said that this was another example of “political patronage” and, of course, “Chicago-style politics.” (That one must be one of the most popular new catchphrases of our time, along with “Alinsky.”)

How did this turn into a political controversy? One way to understand it is the u-word: unions. Much of the opposition to the bailout of the auto companies in the U.S. has portrayed it as a sop to unions, as the Obama administration’s attempt to keep the auto industry from becoming de-unionized. Rush Limbaugh has, as usual, been very skilful at weaving different themes into a unified whole: he says repeatedly that the whole bailout was a sop to “union bosses,” that it involves the government telling companies how to make their cars, and that the ultimate goal is to force people to buy “green” cars they don’t want or like.

I’ll tell you what’s headed down the road, you’re going to see union members on the board of directors, you’re going to see green wacko environmentalists on the board of directors, and General Motors is going to be designing and building cars, selling cars that satisfy Obama’s desire for green, environmental friendly cars, blah, blah, blah, blah — that’s what you’re going to see coming down the road. Plus, everybody in the auto industry has to make concessions here except the unions. This is also payback for the unions.

Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, explains what conservatives would have liked to see happen in Detroit:

What Chrysler and GM desperately needed in their extremity was to go through Chapter 11 reorganization to pare down wages and benefits, shed uneconomical dealerships, and ditch unnecessary brands. When the government got its hooks in them, it politicized this process and threw some $80 billion at the companies. Since we’ll never get an estimated $23 billion back, we all must be “pulling together” behind Detroit still.

From this point of view, whether the bailouts “worked” is something of a false issue: the government shouldn’t have gotten involved, and the best thing in the long term is for companies to cut salaries and downsize. To celebrate the bailouts is to take an ideological stand on the extent of government involvement in business, and on whether or not the auto industry should have cut the unions loose.

That’s what Eastwood didn’t seem to realize; he thought he was lending his voice and craggy face to a bit of feel-good apolitical puffery. He wasn’t, because it really has become a political, ideological issue – and maybe it should be, since these ideological differences are real and serious. Besides, this is the way the game is going to be played this year: because Obama likes to portray himself as a moderate technocrat who chooses the solutions that “bring people together” (I am not saying he is those things; that’s how he portrays himself), an ad that also hits those themes is going to be scrutinized as a possible Obama endorsement.

People Who Think About Televisual Entertainmentation

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, February 6, 2012 at 4:33 PM - 0 Comments

Two links to people doing some smart thinking about television programs:

- Robert David Sullivan, whose work I’ve been reading and enjoying ever since I read his 1997 survey on the most influential U.S. television programs (this was before TV criticism was nearly as big online as it later became, and it’s still a great guide to milestones in TV before the Sopranos revolution), has been doing a blog series on “The 100 Greatest Sitcom episodes of all time,” covering half-hour comedy episodes from the U.S. and the UK.

With each episode, he not only tells us why it’s great, but makes some larger point about the whole half-hour comedy form, what it tells us about us or the way we see ourselves, and how the style of a show becomes part of its storytelling. In doing so, he manages to make every review interesting even if it’s not an episode or a show you yourself would have put on such a list. I’m not a great fan of “Designing Women,” but in writing about the episode “Big Haas and Little Haas,” he also writes about one of the most common sitcom plots – people trying to change their appearance – and the most common of all TV themes, be happy with who you are (which is of course high on the list of things showbiz people don’t actually believe). Starting at #100, he’s now up to #86, and I look forward to every one of the 85 posts to come.

- Chandler Levack pays tribute to Being Erica and how it did some of its best work as a sort of “novelization of ’90s Toronto,” that examined the ambiguous relationship Torontonians have to their city, and implied that Toronto “was a secondary character that had enforced its own psychological pain on Erica’s subconscious.”

- No one can ever get enough of mixed reviews of Smash, just like no one can get enough Smash promos. So here’s a review from Matt Seitz, who basically likes it but finds it a bit cautious.

You can’t do that on TV, but you can do that

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, February 6, 2012 at 12:27 PM - 0 Comments

So you may have heard that there was a brief flash of the middle finger on the Super Bowl last night. Will this change TV? That’s not an idle question, even if the controversy is silly. The Janet Jackson incident really did change television, setting back years of censorship relaxation and returning broadcast TV almost to early ’80s standards of censorship – on some things. You could say that it’s because of Janet Jackson that broadcast TV in the U.S. has its current bizarre mishmash of standards, where extreme violence and sadism is fine (as Jon Stewart pointed out in a memorable montage recently), and sexual innuendo goes beyond anything that was previously allowed, but nudity and onscreen sex are strictly self-policed. Continue…

Musical Addendum

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 12:50 PM - 0 Comments

Watching Smash, and thinking about untold stories about the making of a musical, reminded me that I recently enjoyed reading William Goldman’s book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway. He saw and wrote about every Broadway show in the 1967-8 season, incorporating his own opinions about what was wrong with Broadway as well as interviews with many insiders (some anonymous, some not, all with axes to grind). I recommend the book both as a snapshot of the attitudes of the time and as a repository of Broadway gossip. It includes at least two fascinating stories of how highly anticipated musicals, The Happy Time and Golden Rainbow (hopefully you haven’t heard of them; they weren’t very successful) arrived on Broadway with their original stories distorted completely beyond recognition by the “Muscle” of the production, the person with the power to shape the show: a powerful director-choreographer in the first case, a powerful star in the other case.

But I thought this would be as good a place as any to present Goldman’s list of reasons why a song might bomb in front of an audience. Goldman, who had already written a Broadway musical with his brother James, was Continue…

Quick Thoughts on “Smash”

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 11:16 AM - 0 Comments

The thing about Smash that was most striking to me, almost from the first non-musical scene, is that it is one of the best-directed shows I’ve seen in a long time. Michael Mayer, who has done mostly Broadway shows like Spring Awakening, was chosen to direct the pilot and the first two episodes, and he was an exceptional choice (NBC must be pleased, as they’ve just signed him to do another drama pilot for them). The musical scenes are not cut to pieces and usually give you a clear idea of where everyone is – essential for a show where most of the numbers take place in a real space. The dialogue scenes avoid hamminess and aren’t artificially pumped up: Mayer isn’t afraid to keep the camera steady or hold a shot for a few extra seconds, and the whole thing feels almost like a classical movie in its un-fussy style. That style goes a long way toward making this show work. A more obviously interventionist director would just wind up making the thing look glitzier or grittier than the subject can bear. Continue…

Simon Cowell Fires Everybody

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 1:49 PM - 0 Comments

I don’t really know what to say about the X Factor fire-pocalypse, with everyone except Simon Cowell being booted off the show as Cowell attempts to fix the U.S. version. I guess if you’re going to retool, you should retool this way, because it guarantees a lot of media coverage, a lot of stories, and a whole round of new stories when they roll out the new hosts and judges. Firing one person, or firing all these people at different times, wouldn’t have the same impact.

The ratings of The X Factor for the first season were, let’s remember, quite good by today’s standards – better than almost anything else the network currently has. They weren’t what Fox and Cowell were apparently were hoping for, so the key issue for them is whether they move up or down in the second season: some shows start well and do better, others start well and then do worse. If The X Factor stays at its current level or builds, it’ll be fine, but if it drops, it could be in trouble. So the retool is an attempt to make it go up, rather than down.

Will it work? It sometimes works. Throwing out a lot of the weak points and revamping a show while ratings are still good is sometimes a viable strategy. Especially when it’s clear that the show doesn’t offer anything in particular that people really love. (With a bigger hit show, a retool faces the risk of throwing out the stuff viewers like; they can toss out the weak elements, only to discover that those were actually a bigger part of the show’s popularity than they realized. But The X Factor doesn’t inspire strong feelings. It’s mostly coasting on American Idol‘s brand name. So the number of people turning away because Steve Jones is gone may be even less than the number of angry Brian Dunkleman fans.) However, most retools don’t really help; they just move pieces around and end up with the same problems as before, just with different names. Since The X Factor in any version is pretty much the same show as American Idol, it can’t really change all that much. So it may be that the best it can do is make a lot of noise about personnel changes, get itself into the gossip magazines a lot, and hope that that draws people in to what is fundamentally the same show.

Romney and safety nets

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 11:34 AM - 0 Comments

Mitt Romney on CNN this morning made a classic “Kinsley gaffe,” a case of a politician accidentally saying what he thinks. The quote, “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” is going to be ripped out of context and bounced around the news all day today. It’ll also be a good opportunity for conservative pundits, who have mostly been lukewarm on Romney, to come to his defense now that he’s clearly going to be the nominee: because the quote is being taken out of context, the Fox and talk radio pundits will be able to push back against the coverage with a fairly clear conscience.

In context, what Romney was saying is that very poor people have a safety net to protect them; leaving aside the question of whether that safety net is enough or whether the language is insensitive, he’s saying that the issue that is foremost in our time is the issue of people who have too much money to be covered by the safety net, but not enough to get by.

I’m not concerned about the very poor. Continue…

Feel My Skills, Donkey Donkey Donkey Donkey

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 5:01 PM - 0 Comments

NBC just can’t catch a break, and by “can’t catch a break” I mean that they bring all their problems on themselves. The latest news is that the network’s re-launch of Fear Factor, one of the few things that has even come close to working for them this season, has canceled an entire episode due to complaints about one of the scenes, where contestants were forced to drink the Precious Bodily Fluids of donkeys. Now the episode will be replaced with a rerun, which means that it hasn’t had a new episode since January 9 – and a month off the air is never good for a show’s momentum.

Some reports have implied that Robert Greenblatt, the president of NBC, may have jumped on this controversy as a way of getting rid of Fear Factor. He’s the one who put out the press release saying he had pulled the episode because it was “a segment we should not air,” and Deadline claims that it “clashed with his mantra for rebuilding NBC with upscale shows.”

Greenblatt has been at NBC less than a year, and it’s unfair to judge his tenure this early, but having come from Showtime (where he helped build that network into a major player, though most of the shows he picked up weren’t anything spectacular) he seems almost notstalgic for the atmosphere of pay cable, where you don’t have to pull so many stunts to get ratings. During the TCA he expressed his disappointment over the failure of his pet NBC project, Prime Suspect, arguing that on cable, he’d have declared it a hit and it would have run for years. Which is probably true, but it sounds uncomfortably like the philosophy that has helped drag down NBC: cable is better, and networks should be more like cable.

The other three networks are all, in their different ways and with different types of shows, trying to maximize their share of the shrinking audience; NBC spent years playing for the day when the broadcast audience converges with the online and cable audience. Now it’s in the position of knowing it needs to be “mainstream” but not really knowing how to go about it, which explains shows from the Fear Factor revival to Are You There, Chelsea? (a sort of feeble Chuck Lorre imitation, written by people who used to work with him on Dharma & Greg) to The Playboy Club – shows that seem to be based on a sort of vague idea of “what people like” these days. Its reality division does seem to have a better idea than most of what will catch on – hence The Voice and the decent ratings for the return of Fear Factor – but reality can’t prop up an entire broadcast network, and NBC probably wouldn’t want it to anyway. But that’s the fun of watching NBC make behind-the-scenes moves; it seems torn between the need to get back in the game and the knowledge that getting back in the game would require some pandering.

If you want to see this as history repeating itself, you could get some backup from this 1984 interview with Grant Tinker, when he had been running NBC for three years and still hadn’t been able to turn it around. He claims that the network is just about to turn things around, and for once, he’s right, and . But you can see how the problems NBC had then are similar to the ones they’ve been having lately: they had some great shows that appealed to a young, affluent audience but didn’t get great ratings across the board (Cheers is cited in the article) and to get back some mainstream appeal, they spent the 1983-4 season launching truly terrible shows that had contempt for the audience (I don’t mean The A-Team, which didn’t have contempt for us; I mean Manimal, Mr. Smith, Jennifer Slept Here). Shows that were thrown at the audience with an air of anger, as if to say “if you want crap, we’ll give you crap.” But as I’ve noted before, hits are rarely made with contempt. NBC turned itself around when it was able to come up with a show that satisfied Tinker’s quality-TV mantra and the populist instincts of Brandon Tartikoff. NBC is going to have a much tougher time turning itself around today, because if it was getting harder to launch a hit in 1984, it’s much harder now. But the network’s fortunes will probably turn around with a show that Greenblatt likes and has broader appeal than a cable show. If I knew what that show was going to be, I’d be there pitching it right now.

Takin’ a Train

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 3:43 PM - 0 Comments

A long time ago, I used to joke that all of Canadian politics could be explained in terms of “Jem” songs. Then “Jem” got popular again, and it no longer seemed an obscure enough reference, so I retired it. But when I read Rob Ford’s instant-classic interview, where he repeats “it’s all about subways” an infinite number of times. And I was reminded of this song, which is also about taking a train. Taking a train. Taking a train.

I’m not that up on “Jem” fandom, but I’ve heard that this is often voted the worst song in the show’s canon of original songs, because it mostly consists of those three words repeated over and over. But I think Jem makes a good case for rail transportation.

People will still pirate if George Clooney says not to

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 4:35 PM - 0 Comments

Producer, agent and New York columnist Gavin Polone is a show-biz insider if ever there was one, so his column on why he’s for SOPA – and why he thinks the entertainment industry got beaten this time around – seems like it might be a barometer of what show-biz insiders have learned from this fiasco.

The producers and studios were taken aback by the negative public reaction, and feel that they were the victims of misinformation spread by their enemies, like Google. Google, in the minds of at least some insiders, has an interest in encouraging (or at least not discouraging) piracy; I’ve even seen mutterings that Google and other companies want to reduce the value of the studios’ libraries, to make it easier to compete with them or buy them outright. From the producers’ point of view, the talking point that SOPA would “break the internet” is an example of how they can’t compete with Google when it comes to spreading a message. Websites were able to spread this talking point at great speed, and start a viral campaign that the studios simply couldn’t match.

This is why you see Polone arguing that they could have won this if they had simply had better messaging, and making a rather hilarious suggestion about what kind of messaging would work: “Motion picture, television, and recording executives should produce 30-second commercials starring famous actors and musicians that say, basically, this is not about censorship, it is about protecting American products from overseas thieves.” The idea that a 30-second spot with a movie star arguing for SOPA could have helped turn it around seems very, very dubious. Especially since any movie or music star famous enough to make an impact in a commercial is already wealthy, even with the existence of online piracy. Their presence in such a commercial would just come off like that South Park episode where illegal downloads forced Britney Spears to get a Gulfstream III jet instead of a Gulfstream IV.

What the producers are doing is what people often do when they’re on the losing side of an issue: they assume that they could have made it popular if they had just had the right framing. But some messages aren’t popular. Quite apart from the potential unintended consequences of SOPA, there’s simply no way to convince most people that having less free stuff, and having more websites shut down (by the government or by copyright owners) is a good thing. Maybe more people could be made to believe it’s fair, but you can’t mobilize people in favour of it.

The producers probably knew on some level that it wasn’t popular, which is why they tried to get it through the way these things usually go through: very quickly, without a lot of attention paid to it. Once the law was noticed, they were sunk. What has thrown the entertainment companies for a loop is that they are used to having a great amount of lobbying power, and the tech companies like Google have now grown to a point where they can match the entertainment companies in lobbying power – maybe not in the amount of money they give to politicians (yet) but the amount of attention they can bring to something and the number of voters they can mobilize over an issue.

Whether the entertainment companies need something like SOPA is unknown to me; they can’t prove that they’re not just using the internet as a scapegoat for their larger problems, which is certainly what a lot of people suspect. But this was their last chance to, basically, write a bill themselves and push it through. U.S. politicians tend to be very receptive to entertainment producers, not just because of the money, though that helps, but because entertainment is one of the few popular things the U.S. still produces, and everyone is terrified of reducing its value. But the SOPA fight introduced a competing fear – the fear of hobbling the internet and the tech companies that are also producing things with a worldwide reach. In the future, the studios may have to split some of their power with these companies.

Not that internet-based companies are paragons of freedom. People may, for now, trust them more than the old media companies, because they’ve had less time to make us distrust them. But the internet has given people a lot of choice and freedom, and if the studios didn’t realize that regular people would be upset at a threat to that freedom – or that they wouldn’t be believed when they claimed there would be no unintended consequences – then they’re even more out of the loop than we thought. I don’t always agree with every charge lobbed at the studios; you often hear that the blame is entirely with their antiquated business model and lack of “innovation,” as though “innovation” is some kind of magic talisman (it’s sometimes used as a catch-all term for anything that results in success). But the SOPA battle definitely was the old story: a lobbying group assumes that it can get a law passed on favourable terms, only to be caught completely off-guard when a competing group turns up to lobby against it.

How Many Episodes Should We Watch at a Time?

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 5:10 PM - 0 Comments

I highly recommend Todd VanDerWerff’s latest TV think piece, “In Defense of Slow TV,” where he argues that sometimes it helps to take a show slowly, one episode a week or so, rather than in marathon or “binge” form. He notes that some shows, like later seasons of The Sopranos, benefit from the slower pace of one-episode-at-a-time viewing, and may not come off as well when the episodes are treated as one long movie (with the resulting emphasis on plot momentum). The piece isn’t an argument against the marathon/binge method. It’s just pointing out that that we see a show differently depending on how we choose to consume it, and it may come off differently – and sometimes better – when taken slowly. We’ve all heard about shows like The Wire that work better on DVD than one week at at time; this is just the flip side of that.

We might be approaching the point where, at least for some shows – particularly cable shows – there may not be one preferred or intended method of viewing. Right now most shows are still made for once-a-week viewing, because that (along with the once-a-day method of syndication) is where they make most of their money. But you can see how, once the audiences along other platforms become bigger, there might be some shows that are made primarily with the marathon viewer in mind. Let’s say a hypothetical show is offered in a package of five episodes at a time. Then the five-episode arc would be more important than a single episode, and maybe even more important than the full season.

That’s just a random hypothetical, because I don’t really know how TV storytelling will change; I just figure that it will change. In the ’00s, with TV on DVD becoming popular and making it possible to watch every episode of a show if you wanted, shows started putting in more things that took advantage of this market – more callbacks to earlier episodes, for example, which previously would only work if somebody onscreen told us what had happened in those earlier episodes. And DVD was never more than a subsidiary market for TV shows; the markets to come may wind up being as important as live viewing (or more), and that will change the expectations TV producers have of their viewers.

Now, the direction TV goes in might not necessarily be one that is friendly to the marathon format. Some types of online distribution are similar to the DVD format, where you buy a season and go through it. But others are more like syndication, where you happen on an episode and watch it, and may not even know what season it’s from or what order the episodes are in. Things may be different on how TV is monetized online. And also, how TV episodes are presented; this isn’t relevant to Canada, but the format of Hulu tends to discourage marathons and encourage watching whatever episode happens to be first on some list.

In any case, there will always be many different options for viewing a TV show, and one isn’t necessarily better than the other; the best way to watch a TV series is the way that gets you so emotionally involved in it that you have to keep watching. The question with any show is, what viewing method will get you to that point, where watching it is no longer a casual thing, or a slog, but something that absolutely must continue? With some shows, viewing a whole season very quickly can create a hunger for more seasons. But sometimes it can feel like work: a huge investment of time for a payoff that never seems to come. That may mean the show isn’t for us, but in some cases, it could mean we’d enjoy it more if it got a chance to creep up on us gradually, bit by bit.

Sometimes emotional involvement can even come from a way of watching that no one would recommend as the best choice: watching randomly and skipping episodes, or coming into a series in the middle. People do this constantly, even with serialized shows (most of which would be perfectly happy to have a new viewer jump in during season 4 or whatever; a viewer’s a viewer), but it’s nobody’s ideal. Still, there can be a wonderful moment where you thought you were only a casual or sometime viewer of a show, and then suddenly something clicks. The characters go from being merely interesting to enthralling, you become completely accustomed to the style of the show, and you realize that at some point you got hooked on the show. You’re no longer a casual viewer. Then you want to watch the series regularly from that point on, and you also want to see all the episodes you missed. The ideal, as always, is to see every episode and become immersed in everything that happens to these characters. There are several different ways of getting there.

Spielberg Didn’t Get It!

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 10:49 AM - 0 Comments

Every time Spielberg doesn’t get a directing nomination for a movie that got nominated, I feel obligated to pull out this old clip of him not getting nominated for Jaws. Others have pointed out that he’s probably not so much being whiny as deliberately hamming it up for the cameras, but it just seems like the way a man-child Spielberg character would act if Frederico Fellini beat him out for an Academy Award nomination.

The increased number of Best Picture nominees makes it harder to get one of the few entertaining things about the Best Director award (which often seems to draw a meaningless distinction between being the best director and making the best film): that fifth nominee whose film wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. All five of this year’s Best Director nominees are from nominated pictures.

Everything’s On YouTube

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 5:28 PM - 0 Comments

As part of its campaign to get us all watching Smash before it airs “live” on February 6 (more thoughts on Smash itself coming later) NBC has placed the entire pilot – and the preview of coming attractions that follows it – on YouTube, with no apparent geographic restrictions. As one commenter says, “that’s how you beat the piraters.”

Update: The video was working in Canada when I posted this. Now it’s not. So the “no apparent geographic restrictions” turns out, as it always does, to be a mirage – that’s the worst part, that sometimes a video is available, briefly, giving us a false sense of hope before they block it.

Several networks have tried this technique of making pilots available for free in advance; Fox did this with New Girl, and the live ratings for the pilot were excellent. Of course you can’t prove that this kind of thing doesn’t hurt the ratings; no one can prove definitively that a show would have done better in the ratings. But it at least is arguable that the audience for shows online is somewhat different from the audience for shows live on TV, and that at least some of the people who are watching on YouTube would not have watched it live anyway. But theoretically, some of those YouTube viewers might talk to the people who will watch live – people who use TV viewing as appointment time to spend time with their families, let’s say, might be tipped off by one family member who doesn’t mind sitting through it again.

I’m a little uncomfortable advancing the theory that people who watch in one format probably wouldn’t have watched in another format, because it is a bit close to one of my least favourite arguments from the SOPA flap (obligatory disclaimer, SOPA seems to have been a very poorly-thought-out idea): that piracy is not a problem because most people who pirate would never have paid for the product anyway. This assumes that everybody has money that can only be used for one purpose, and that the possibility of getting something for free doesn’t change the way we use our money (let’s say, if the choice is between buying something we can get free, and buying something that we can’t get unless we pay for it). Individually, we may sometimes watch things for free that we would never have paid for; collectively, the availability of free stuff probably does change things.

So I don’t know if broadcast TV networks are better off pumping more free episodes into the system – making it easier for us to get them legally – or making it harder for us to get anything for free. It’s the same problem other advertising-supported media have had to face. But for a pilot, at least, I think it makes sense; certainly for a heavily-promoted pilot like this one. When a network puts this much promotional muscle into a show, the pilot is almost guaranteed a lot of viewers. So even if Fox lost viewers by making New Girl available before the premiere (it probably didn’t lose viewers, but let’s just say for the sake of argument), it was always going to get a lot of people tuning in. The problems with a show like this start to emerge in episode 2 and beyond, when the viewers decide if they actually like the show and want to come back. So the method being used here is to give away the episode that will get a lot of live viewers, building as many viewers in as many formats as you possibly can – and then hope that that gives you a bigger pool of interested viewers when episode 2 rolls around.

King of the Hill Revisited: “The Company Man” and “Bobby Slam”

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 2:34 PM - 0 Comments

The Company Man (air date: December 7, 1997)

(Note: The last review in this series was here; reviews of season 1, where “The Company Man” is included on home video releases, are here.)

This episode was produced for season 1 but didn’t air until the middle of season 2, looking very strange with the recognizably different season 1 character designs. While it’s not one of the stronger episodes from the first season cycle, the reason it was delayed probably had to do with some very extensive re-takes that were required, including the creation of a whole new ending after it came back from animation overseas. The story of the Continue…

What Do TV Ratings Mean?

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 4:01 PM - 0 Comments

This is a question that I occasionally have to turn over in my mind when I think about something like the ratings of American Idol. As you may have heard, the ratings for the season premiere were down considerably from last year, somewhere between 20% and 24% depending on what metric you use. But what does that mean exactly?

On one level, it means nothing, or at least nothing to us: the only ratings metric that really matters to a viewer is whether the show is low-rated enough to be canceled. American Idol remains the most popular show on television by almost any metric. It could lose 20% of its audience for years and still be considered a hit by today’s standards. It matters very much to networks whether their hit shows are doing better than the other network’s hit show; the winner gets bragging rights and higher advertising rates. But I don’t know that it really matters to us.

On another level, ratings matter because they’re a picture of trends – and in fact, like any poll, Nielsen ratings are probably better at showing trends than telling us exactly how popular something is. (Ratings can tell us, Continue…

Not a Parody

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 10:33 AM - 0 Comments

The great thing about YouTube and its supply of not-entirely-legal uploads: just when you think you’ve seen everything, the right combination of search words or a recommendation from another video will lead you to the craziest thing you’ve ever seen. So I thought I wasn’t capable of being surprised by a TV opening sequence that seems like it should be a parody, but I don’t think I’ve seen this one before. “He’s the cop of the future… a future cop!”

Of course, 35 years later, TV still hasn’t lost its ability to create moments of unintentional self-parody. You may have heard about this bit on Hawaii 5-0, where a plug for the sponsor was inserted into the show with incredible ham-handedness; it seemed like the writers saw the Burger King stuff on Arrested Development (“It’s a wonderful restaurant!”) and thought that was seriously how you’re supposed to do product placement. The writing on Hawaii 5-0 is heavy-handed in all ways, so it’s arguably just an example of them writing product placement the way they write everything else.

Ricky Rouse or Monald Muck

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 10:46 AM - 0 Comments

The season premiere of Justified was good, but I’m looking forward even more to the second episode, because it will introduce a guest character named “Karen Goodall,” a U.S. Marshal played by Carla Gugino. One of my favourite TV shows of the ’00s was Karen Sisco, an ABC series starring Gugino as the Marshal from Elmore Leonard’s novel Out of Sight. You can read some background and reviews of all ten episodes at this blog (the Wikipedia blackout is cruelly forcing us all to find other sources of information on obscure shows).

Sometimes, when a show flops, you can understand why it flops; you figure it was over people’s heads, or too dark, or too sophisticated. And some shows are are so entertaining that you can’t believe they’re not popular. Karen Sisco was one of them. I thought it was a very enjoyable show with everything it needed to be a hit, including two fine leads with an interesting relationship: Gugino as the title character and Robert Forster as her dad. I still don’t know why it failed and was pulled after only seven episodes had aired. A friend suggested last night that it was a bit ahead of its time, in the sense that today it would be a show on USA or TNT, and doing very well there. I guess that’s true. 2003-4 was a time of grim, tech-obsessed, CSI-style cop shows.

Anyway, cable now has a successful show based on Elmore Leonard, and it’s called Justified. And the head of Justified‘s network, John Landgraf, was a producer on Karen Sisco. So it makes sense that they would want to bring Gugino and her character in for a crossover. Except that Justified is a Sony production, airing on the Fox-owned FX network, and Karen Sisco is owned by Universal (which produced the movie version of Out of Sight). And apparently, as Timothy Olyphant hints in an interview, the various copyright owners could not come to an agreement, so the writers just decided to have Gugino on anyway as the same character in all but name:

I’m legally obligated to say nothing.

It looks a lot and plays a lot like Karen. I just remember being told to leave that alone, because of possible litigation and lawsuits. As I understand it, TV studios and the networks are run by lawyers, so it’s best if I stop talking about it. I can say that Carla is fantastic and it was great to work with her.

There are always examples of this kind of thing – characters who are thinly disguised versions of other, copyrighted characters, or of people the actor has played before – but the combination of circumstances here seems kind of new. A similar recent example might be Justice League, which was sometimes unable to get the rights to certain characters they wanted to use, generally any character who was partly owned by someone other than DC Comics. So they’d make up similar characters to do the crossover anyway, like the “Ultimen” to stand for the Hanna-Barbera Superfriends. But using a Captain Ersatz played by the same actor, who may or may not be the same character under a different name, is a new one on me.