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.

Brill-Building

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 3:30 PM - 0 Comments

Eddie Brill, the man in charge of booking comedians for David Letterman, was the subject of a New York Times profile a few days ago, where – almost as an aside – he was asked to deal with the question of why the show only booked one female comedian last year. His response was:

There are a lot less female comics who are authentic. I see a lot of female comics who to please an audience will act like men.

This was actually sort of mild by the standards of some of the things that are said about women in comedy, but it wasn’t a great choice of words in responding the (accurate) charge that late-night comedy has a problem hiring female comics and writers. So now Brill has been removed from power, and will stay on only as a warm-up comedian.

As the second piece mentions, Brill commented on this Mirth magazine post and claimed that his words had been taken out of context (“I wasn’t talking about all female comics or female comics in general. I was talking about a couple of comics the writer had brought up to me”) as well as claiming that the writer of the article had it in for him, though that would make more sense if it hadn’t been for his generalized claim that there are “a lot less” female comics who are authentic. He also claims that he’s being singled out for a problem that is just as bad on other talk shows (and that one is true enough).

The post, by Larry Getlen, has some good things to say about the concept of “authenticity” in comedy, though it seems like he’s a bit too quick to say that there’s been some kind of authenticity revolution in the online era; the fact that people talk more about themselves could just as easily be balanced by the fact that we’re trained to adopt public personas from an early age.

Also, this doesn’t have anything to do with Brill, but Getlen’s point about Letterman – that he actually wants to cultivate an old-fashioned, slightly out-of-touch image – is an interesting one. Most comedians Letterman’s age (or much younger) wind up sounding old-fashioned, but it sometimes seems like Letterman aggressively works at it. His material is written to make him sound like a guy who is proud of being old and cranky. This is better for a comedian than sounding old and cranky while trying to be hip.

Oh, Ricky, you’ll say anything

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, January 16, 2012 at 10:54 AM - 0 Comments

Poor Ricky Gervais. He couldn’t possibly live up to the kind of hype he got from the moment he was invited back to host the Golden Globes a second time. In the press releases, the initial coverage, the Saturday Night Live sketch, it was like he was Gabbo from The Simpsons, a little character who was going to take the world by storm through his willingness to say anything about anyone.

His comments last year were only mildly critical—really, the jokes everyone was making about Charlie Sheen or the Sex and the City women, except that awards-show hosts are traditionally expected to be a little less blunt about them—so it was hard for him to live up to that fearless truth-teller reputation. Plus there has been a bit of Gervais backlash recently (though less in North America for the moment, if only because Life’s Too Short hasn’t aired there yet) and a lot of parodies of his style. So even if he’d wanted to shock and surprise us all, he couldn’t have done it. It was left to the unscripted moments, like Meryl Streep’s s-bomb, to liven up a less than lively evening.

And yet Gervais is a good fit for the Golden Globes, and might someday be a good fit for the Oscars. These shows are primarily for celebrities—the Golden Globes are an excuse for stars to dress up and get drunk; the Oscars are literally the awards showbiz people give themselves—so the host has to appeal to the celebrity audience while also appealing to the home audience. Maybe Gervais isn’t quite well-known enough in North America to have the kind of direct link to the home audience that other hosts have. (The trick of a really good host is to be loved by the stars while also being loved by the regular viewer, who has a sort of love-hate relationship with stars.) But his humour captures the way celebrities think about themselves and their peers: loving them, considering them the most important people in the world, while also poking fun at how little they deserve their god-like status. Gervais’s joke about Natalie Portman taking time off to have a baby was, I thought, a good joke and a good summation of the way Hollywood people see themselves: they see themselves, or say they see themselves, as putting family and children first, even as they know perfectly well that taking time off for family and children are bad for their careers.

Gervais also has what we might call the Bob Hope sweet spot in terms of his career: someone who is famous enough to be a genuine peer of the celebrities in the audience, but is also able to portray himself as an outsider in a room full of beautiful, award-winning people. (Gervais has won awards; he just won’t win an Oscar; at least not for a while.) He’s not actually an outsider, but he can play the part.

Giving Up on Panavision

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 13, 2012 at 3:22 PM - 0 Comments

The trailer for Wes Anderson’s new film Moonrise Kingdom was released yesterday, and everyone, supporters and detractors alike, agrees that it is very Wes Anderson-y. I – generally a supporter – was a bit surprised to see that the trailer is in non-anamorphic, 1.85:1 aspect ratio.

Ever since Rushmore, Anderson has been one of the most frequent and distinctive users of the anamorphic widescreen Panavision screen shape; part of what we associate with an Anderson movie is people spread out carefully along the “‘Scope” frame. But he went back to 1.85:1 for Fantastic Mr. Fox, and now he seems to be (unless the trailer is misrepresenting it) continuing it with his new live-action movie.

I only bring this up because I used to like to observe, a few years ago, how many filmmakers in the U.S. and elsewhere were adopting ‘Scope as their preferred format. It seemed like almost every movie, even a small romantic comedy or something, would use the widest screen possible. Scorsese, who never made a ‘Scope movie before Cape Fear, made almost nothing but ‘Scope movies after; filmmakers like Brad Bird helped make ‘Scope popular even in family-friendly animated films.

But recently it seems like there’s been a move back in the other direction, to movies that are the same shape as a modern TV screen. 3D movies like Avatar and Hugo are in 1.85:1, and 1.85:1 seems to be on its way back to becoming the normal format for movies that aren’t epic in scale, especially comedies.

I don’t know what exactly is driving the trend; all I could find was a quote from James Cameron saying that he did Avatar in 1.85 because he likes the way 3D looks in that aspect ratio. I just wanted to make a note that in the ’00s, just like in the ’50s, 2.35:1 became something like the default screen shape (both, probably not coincidentally, were eras when the movie industry was desperate to compete with home viewing, including offering a wider screen than the TV or computer), and now the trend could be reversing itself.

Though now that I’ve said it, we’ll see a new screen process developed that is three times as wide as it is high, and everyone will make every movie that way. Things change fast.

He Is the King!

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 4:09 PM - 0 Comments

I have to admit that I counted 2 Broke Girls out after the second episode and could never quite get back into it. I have a high tolerance for this type of sitcom, and am happy when one succeeds, but after the Sex and the City movies I don’t have a high tolerance for the work of Michael Patrick King. And the second episode of 2 Broke Girls was so weak that I just assumed it was never going to live up to the good parts of the pilot. I’m not saying all the good parts of the pilot were from Whitney Cummings, though I think she clearly has talent. It’s more that the second episode indicated that King thought the pilot was perfect the way it was, and he just had to do it again, except louder.

I’ve returned to the show off and on, and every time I do it strikes me the same way: King made a very good choice with the unknown Beth Behrs, and she and Kat Dennings are fun to watch together. (And when actors are good together in a TV show, I think the writers deserve some credit for putting them in situations where they can be good together; chemistry is written as much as it’s created on the stage.) But King is not a good joke writer and never has been, so the girls sometimes seem to be funny in spite of the things they say. And the three male characters are excruciating, and no one is trying to make them anything else. Even Mike and Molly, which has settled into a mediocre groove, made some effort to attack the problem of its weak supporting characters, giving all of them some stories, relatives, love interests, chances to play off the leads. But the men from 2 Broke Girls stand around and say the same thing every time they appear, and I haven’t seen any stories that would be different if those three guys did not exist. And there’s nothing worse than a sitcom character who has no reason to be there at any time. It’s like if the cook from the pilot of The Golden Girls had stuck around for the entire series.

King appeared at a panel for 2 Broke Girls today where critics, who tend to really like the scenes with the girls and hate the scenes with the three walking stereotypes, asked him about these problems. Except King clearly didn’t think he had any problems, so it got heated. And he really did seem to confirm the idea that he thinks there’s nothing wrong with the show. Here are two of the better reports from that panel: Alan Sepinwall has a detailed play-by-play, and Alyssa Rosenberg has a shorter take on how out of touch King seemed to be.

I guess you can see his point; the show is a big hit, so as far as he is concerned he is doing fine. But there’s something strange about his belligerent answers to critics, his bizarre analogies (he likes to trot out the idea that making fun of hipsters is the same thing as stereotyping an ethnic minority) and his general surprise that he wasn’t being asked about how great he’s doing. If he’d just say “the public seems to like it” and move on, I wouldn’t agree, but I’d understand. Instead he just seemed to suggest that he thinks the show doesn’t have anything that needs working on. (I don’t know how great a recipe this is for long-term success; you’d think a show with no interesting male characters would eventually lose some viewers. Even Laverne & Shirley had Lenny and Squiggy. Even Big Bang Theory, a show that’s basically about guys, spent most of its first season strengthening its sole female character.) And just like that, the people who thought “this show could eventually improve” were changing that to “this show could improve if someone else were running it.” Maybe that’s unfair, but it was hard not to get that impression.

Ah, well; there will be better traditional sitcoms coming along eventually. And while waiting, there’s always that episode where Laverne and Shirley worked in a diner. Who would have thought we’d look at a show and think that the supporting characters are weaker than the Big Ragu?

Music: Goin’ Indie

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 1:29 PM - 0 Comments

I recently purchased this new recording of Berlioz’s Requiem, an extremely ambitious project for the modern classical music recording business. It was made in Poland by a Historically Informed Performance conductor, Paul McCreesh, who spent 15 years recording early choral music and big oratorios for Deutsche Grammophon. Like many classical artists, he discovered that the major labels no longer have room to do much recording, and he was either dropped from the roster or left (or both). And like many artists who left big labels, he started his own independent label, which he calls “Winged Lion.” (This is better than the HIP conductor Philippe Continue…

The dot-com era all over again?

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, January 9, 2012 at 5:10 PM - 0 Comments

There is going to be more original content, and more ambitious original content, produced for online streaming. This is a given as the boundaries between TV viewing and online viewing start to blur more and more. But when I’m reading John Seabrook’s article about YouTube’s plans for original content, what I hear in the back of my mind is the things creators were saying about original content back in the dot-com era. And they’re the same things: producing online programming will allow them to create (and own) shows without a network filter.

This was the same thinking that was behind a lot of the webisodes of the late ’90s and early ’00s, often created by people taking time off from working on big, high-profile TV shows. The bet was that these webisodes would grow into a new way of producing TV, free from the companies that were gobbling up all the TV production in the U.S. (as we had more shows to choose from, the people who made those shows had fewer studios to go to get them made). The bet didn’t pay off, as the “Angry Dad” episode of The Simpsons commemorates the collapse of that dream. Now YouTube is making a similar promise to professional content creators, that they will produce the shows without a lot of resources, but they will have the advantage of owning the content they produce (YouTube will have the broadcast rights at first, but the creators will own the shows). It’s unclear how well that will work out. Continue…

Free TV at its Best

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 6, 2012 at 5:00 PM - 0 Comments

I usually like Parenthood and have been liking it more and more as time goes on – it’s one of those shows that sneaks up on you and makes you suddenly realize you like it, rather than a spectacular show that blows you away. But the most recent episode, “Road Trip,” was pretty spectacular in its own way. I was about to say it’s one of the best things I’ve seen this year, but then I looked at the calendar; you know what I mean. It was really good. I love a good standalone episode that builds on the characterizations we’ve seen in the earlier, more arc-centred episodes (and, maybe, leaves us knowing the characters better by the time the arcs really get going again). And this episode, mentioned a couple of months earlier by creator Jason Katims as their most stand-alone of the season and “a fun one,” did almost everything right.

 Parenthood is one of the few dramas on TV, maybe the only one, that can tell moving, exciting stories without becoming melodramatic – in fact, based on the failed murder plot from Friday Night Lights, you could argue that Jason Katims’ shows are at their least exciting when they are at their most melodramatic. Anyway, because Parenthood tries to be a more or less realistic, relatable drama, it has a style that hasn’t been seen all that much in U.S. TV drama in a long time, maybe since the ’70s or ’80s. It is a drama that tells relatable family stories from a somewhat objective point of view. The point of many of the great realistic TV dramas of recent years, like Freaks and Geeks or My So-Called Life (which Katims worked on) is to make us feel what it’s like to be young; even if not everything is seen from a teenager’s point of view, the overall feel is subjective. (Friday Night Lights is sort of in between, though leaning more toward objectivity.) Parenthood is an ensemble drama, not as big in scope as Friday Night Lights but still going for the feel of a big sprawling indie movie, rather than a carefully controlled and planned movie like Ron Howard’s original.

And it wants to shock you not with plot twists, but with recognition: that either seems like the way people behave in real life, or even if it hasn’t happened to you, you feel like it could be real. The road trip episode may not have been realistic in every way, but it incorporated all kinds of realistic or recognizable things – the boredom of a car trip, a man snapping at his family when he’s really concerned about a situation with his mother, the chaos of a family trip to a restaurant. Things that you mainly see in comedy shows, but are here liberated from the need to be funny all the time. (The show can be funny, but if it were a comedy it would have to find a funny angle on every realistic thing it takes in.)

This is where the style of the show is most effective. A number of shows are trying to go for an improvised feel lately (which is not at all the same thing as actually being improvised). Sometimes, as with Up All Night, I feel like it has its drawbacks. But the quasi-improvised style of Parenthood, people repeating their words or overlapping their lines, is an asset. It helps break the show away from the slick style of the original and push it closer to Robert Altman than Ron Howard. (The shaky-cam is also justified in Katims’ stuff because it keeps them from feeling too slick or contrived; that would be death for the subjects he deals with in his shows.) The show is basically rooted in the mix of comedy and heart-warmth that Howard, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel came up with; it just lets it breathe a little more and tries to find the reality in it, and the naturalistic performances are part of that. And because the dialogue tries to sound like it could be improvised, avoiding poetic language and one-liners alike, it doesn’t feel like the characters are being forced into reconciliation scenes and touching moments by the writers. Some scenes would feel fake coming from a bunch of impossibly eloquent people.

A perfect show it’s not, and maybe it’s a sign of something odd that a light-on-plot, change-of-pace episode works better than some of the regular ones. But it’s definitely a lovable and touching show, and “Road Trip” was an example of what the 22 episodes per season type of network show can do that cable dramas can’t always do. Those shows are frequently heavy on plot, or heavy on theme, and can’t “waste” a single episode; a show with a lot of episodes can almost move at the pace of life, examining little moments in lives that have gradual changes rather than huge upheavals.