Can sci-fi be saved?

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 8:50 AM - 2 Comments

Brook Rushton/FOX; ABC/Getty; Archive Photos/Getty; USA Cable Entertainment LLC/Keystone

Seeing the kind of publicity buildup Fox is giving to Terra Nova (premiering Sept. 26 on CityTV), you might think it was the last hope for science fiction on network television—and maybe it is. The show is about a family from a dystopian future that escapes to a prehistoric past, complete with CGI dinosaur fights and hints about hidden conspiracies. The network has high hopes for it: Landon Liboiron (Degrassi), who plays a rebellious teenage son, told Maclean’s the network has made the publicity into “a huge thing.” There’s a special sense of urgency surrounding both this show and the same network’s Alcatraz, from J.J. Abrams (Lost) about mysteriously ageless prison escapees. Every season there’s a science fiction show from a broadcast network that is supposed to be a big hit like Lost, or the drama that made Fox’s reputation, The X-Files, but it’s been years since any of them worked. If audiences reject this year’s sci-fi shows, it might be taken as a sign that no matter how much money a network spends, sci-fi isn’t mainstream anymore.

In the last few years, sci-fi movies like Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Avatar have been big hits. But television has been another story. “It’s really bizarre,” says Jeff Pinkner, a showrunner on Abrams’s Fringe (in which an FBI-led team investigates unexplained phenomena), “People really want to accept it in a movie theatre, but on television, they’re like, I don’t know.” Ajay Fry, who covers science fiction as one of the hosts of Space’s InnerSPACE show, thinks the networks have been “too focused on trying to create something ‘like’ Lost or ‘like’ Battlestar Galactica,” and the result has been a lot of expensive, highly hyped failures. Some of those failures were original creations like last season’s The Event, a wildly promoted drama about a huge mystery involving aliens. Others attempted to recreate the days when sci-fi was popular: ABC spent two seasons trying to get an audience for a new version of V, the ’80s invasion allegory. One long-running sci-fi show after another has retired with nothing much to replace it; the CW network’s Supernatural is the only remnant of the youth-oriented genre shows that were popular in the ’00s.

On cable, things brightened up this summer with Falling Skies, where ER’s Noah Wylie leads a resistance movement against alien oppressors. But other cable networks are cutting back on the genre: the Syfy network has introduced the dramas Warehouse 13 and Alphas, but also some inexpensive reality shows. And on highbrow cable networks, viewers seem more willing to accept fantasy shows than sci-fi. Game of Thrones and True Blood are two of the most popular shows on HBO, a network that does not program sci-fi. Ron Moore, creator of the revamped Battlestar Galactica, once told Entertainment Weekly that high-end audiences avoided his show because of the subject matter. “Science fiction sort of has a rap,” Pinkner adds. “We’re running against that as far as viewership goes.” Magic and vampires are in; alien conspiracies and futuristic devices are a harder sell.

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Intelligent viewers have spoken

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 5:05 PM - 2 Comments

Franco Bellomo/WGBH

In an era of moribund network ratings, PBS’s Sunday stalwart Masterpiece has done the impossible, becoming TV’s standout program, with a 44 per cent increase in ratings. And the show accomplished it not by dumbing down or skimping on content but by doing the opposite: churning out more and more intelligent, sophisticated series. Everyone in the industry gives credit to one person: its executive producer Rebecca Eaton, 63, who’s had the job for 25 years. But the show wasn’t always flying high. Three years ago, it was floundering, a “dusty jewel,” Eaton recalls. The home of classics such as Traffik and The Jewel in the Crown looked and felt dated. Though it was showing acclaimed dramas such as Bleak House, viewers labelled it their “grandparents’ TV.” Making matters worse was a scheduling schizophrenia: a Brontë period drama would be followed by a contemporary thriller like Prime Suspect and then a Hercule Poirot cozy mystery.

Eaton gambled on a down-to-the-studs renovation. She wiped the fuddy-duddy name “Theatre” from the title. To cure the “head snap” scheduling problem, she divided the show into three seasons: contemporary dramas in the fall, classic fare in the winter, and mysteries in the summer. Each section got a distinct new look and a talented actor as a host. Acerbic Alan Cumming (The Good Wife) eagerly snapped up the Mystery! gig. “I think the whole notion of being a host announcing a drama that is about to unfold is a very rare thing these days, and it just really appealed to me,” he explained.

Ratings increased steadily before soaring this past year—its 40th on air—as Masterpiece pumped out hit after hit, including the acclaimed Sherlock, a new Upstairs Downstairs and the blockbuster Downton Abbey. The latter attracted 12.6 million viewers, with another one million watching it online. The drama about an aristocratic family and its servants was a hit in the prime early 20s age group, a market the show doesn’t target.

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Running (shoe) joke

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments

YOUTUBE

K-Swiss has come a long way since debuting the world’s first leather tennis shoe on the hushed grass courts of Wimbledon in 1966. It recently released a profanity-laced video on the Web featuring Kenny Powers, the fictional former baseball pitcher from the HBO show Eastbound and Down, who sports a goatee, curly mullet and attitude to match. The spoof suggests Powers acquired control of the California company and installed himself as CEO. His strategy? Drop f-bombs and hire a roster of athletes to run K-Swiss, including Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Matt Cassel, who proudly comes up with the tag lines, “Come at me, bro,” and, “We let the dogs out,” for a line of sneakers. The video is designed to generate buzz around K-Swiss’s fading brand, which it accomplishes in spades. Now the question is whether K-Swiss’s decision to soil its tennis whites in pop culture’s gutter will actually boost sales.

Testosterone on and off the screen

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

HBO Canada

Incest, fratricide, rape, murder, corruption—no, not The Borgias, even if there is a family resemblance between the Renaissance poisoners and the viciously perverse aristocratic killers of Game of Thrones. But there’s more of everything sex-and-blood in this 10-hour series, debuting on HBO on April 17. Producers working with the first book in George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy, A Song of Ice and Fire, weren’t constrained by any sort of historical record—they weren’t even constrained by Martin’s record. The novel opens with the discovery of a group of dead people in a wintery landscape, all lying peacefully as if they had perished from the cold; the TV version prefers to have their heads stuck on stakes, except, that is, for the little girl nailed to a tree. This is HBO, after all, and not only are there buckets of blood—beheadings are full-screen experiences—the whores (and the odd heroine) get to bounce around topless.

They do their bouncing in a faux-medieval world in which seven great noble families jockey for power in a realm recently racked by civil war and now ruled by a parvenu king. It’s hard to say much more about Martin’s saga without posting all-cap SPOILER ALERTS every few lines. Martin is a master plot-maker with a penchant for killing off characters, even ones who seem vital to the story, even the ones fans love best. His other guiding principle is that no good deed goes unpunished: mercy and folly are much alike.

Oddly enough, it’s what’s missing in any summary of Martin’s saga that stands out: the most talked-about fantasy series going actually has little in the way of traditional fantasy elements in its early stages. (The series promises more in the future: the Others, ice-cold malevolent beings from the North, haven’t been seen in 8,000 years; as any fantasy reader knows, that means they’ll be disembowelling unlucky peasants soon enough.) Thrones, inspired by England’s 15th-century War of the Roses, relies on real-world treachery and sex for its appeal. The TV version’s closest comparison is actually HBO’s earlier series Rome, often referred to as “Sopranos on the Tiber,” in tribute to the series that was the making of HBO; Thrones could be called “Sopranos in Camelot.” For the network, the low fantasy quotient must be a bonus. Thrones will capture Martin’s rabid fan base—seven million copies sold of the four volumes he’s published so far—without risking Rome fans tuning out a show derived from one of publishing’s most disparaged (if lucrative) genres.

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The woman who shoos off sacred cows

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 10:58 AM - 1 Comment

Every time a man tells me he doesn’t want to marry me after all I buy a horse. That’s not my thought, actually, because as diligent readers know, I am happily married. Anyway, buying horses while my husband is on bail, and all sorts of Nosy Parkers in Ontario have to be told about every little investment we make until his contretemps ends, puts a bit of a crimp on things. No, the sentence belongs to Melissa Kite, who used it once as the opening of her Real Life column in The Spectator, and I liked it so much I was determined to use it at the first opportunity. Canadian readers would be absolutely venomous if I wrote that I was purchasing a horse and would inform me that since most people couldn’t possibly afford such a purchase, mentioning it shows how callous and uncaring I am about real life in downtrodden Canada.

I was reading Melissa Kite because whenever I contemplate my underachievement, I read people I admire—Orwell, Camus, Melissa Kite, Dorothy Parker. And Fran Lebowitz—who is actually the point of this column and appears in a must-see HBO documentary called Public Speaking, available on DVD in May. Lebowitz is pea-green enviously literate and very funny. Even if she is not writing books anymore.

Meanwhile, absolutely everyone I know, except me and Lebowitz, whom I do not know, alas, is publishing a book even if sans words. Like Wagner’s Eternal Ring, published by Rizzoli, whose “author” told me all about it at the last dinner party I went to. The book arrived from her today and it is huge, 240 pages of photos each 34 cm x 22 cm. Even my sister co-authors books every new moon when not in the kitchen updating recipes in her husband’s The G.I. Diet books.

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‘Boardwalk Empire’ takes on ‘Mad Men’

By Jaime Weinman - Saturday, September 18, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

HBO

HBO has lost some of its prestige lately: none of its continuing series won major Emmys last month. So Boardwalk Empire, the Prohibition-era crime drama premiering this Sunday on HBO Canada, isn’t just a new series with big names (like star Steve Buscemi and pilot director Martin Scorsese). It’s HBO’s chance to beat the period drama it turned down, Mad Men; when that show won its third consecutive Emmy for best drama series, San Francisco Chronicle critic Tim Goodman wrote that “maybe next year HBO can get up there for Boardwalk Empire.” Creator Terence Winter describes the show as “a history of Atlantic City from when it was a mosquito-infested swamp until today”—it may prove that the only way to outdo Mad Men is to go back 40 years earlier.

Not that Boardwalk Empire is a Mad Men clone. With Buscemi playing Nucky Thompson, a man who helps the bootleg alcohol industry flourish as long as he gets a cut, the show has all the crime and violence the more sedate Mad Men never offers. But Winter is a colleague of Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner (they both wrote for The Sopranos), and they both love using TV to recreate a whole era of U.S. history. Winter told Maclean’s that “the success of Mad Men makes me happy because I know there’s an audience” for a drama that “assumes a level of knowledge about history,” and he’s trying to live up to Weiner’s example in “making it as true to the period as I can possibly do it.”

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Get a Show On HBO and You’re Set For Life

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 3:48 PM - 0 Comments

If young writers came up to me and asked, “Mr. Weinman, sir, oh, great Guru, I have several networks fighting over the right to produce my show, who should I go with?” (Note: No one asks me this) I would reply “Go to HBO, young man or woman as the case may be.” Why would I say this? Because under the current administration at HBO, if you get a show picked up to series, you can basically never get canceled. They just renewed Hung — a show that is not popular, not critically acclaimed, and hasn’t grown from its first season — for a third season. The only show they tried to cancel recently was The Life and Times of Tim, and they just un-canceled it; if a show goes away, it has to be because the creators decided (perhaps with some prodding from the executives) they wanted to end it. As it presently stands, HBO is not the network that canceled Deadwood and Lucky Louie and so on. They’re more like the network that kept on renewing Arli$$ and got roundly mocked for it.

My reading of this, and I could be wrong, is that HBO now sees its refusal to cancel anything as part of its all-important brand. Cancellation is an admission that popularity matters — that if a show is not popular with audiences, it gets pulled. And that’s a very “network” way of looking at things. By picking up everything, they can retain their “it’s not TV, it’s HBO” image. It does seem to be part of a high-prestige cable brand that it’s easier for a show to get picked up for more seasons than it is on a broadcast network or a low-prestige cable network: the renewal is not necessarily a statement that that particular show is great, but a way of avoiding that moment where the network gets a reputation like, say, Fox. (Fox is famous for ordering unusual or experimental shows, but the difference between Fox and a high-end cable network is that Fox has to cancel these shows when they do poorly. And so they have a reputation that focuses more on their cold-hearted business decisions than on their artistic risks.)  And it’s sort of working: David Milch, after doing two HBO shows that got canceled prematurely, is coming back to them this year to do Luck. The premature cancelations are past history, what can attract creators now is HBO’s current reputation as a place where you’re set for life if you can get a show on the air.

Fangs down, ‘True Blood’ is the trashiest show on TV

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 10:17 AM - 19 Comments

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRADLEY REINHARDT

A decade ago, HBO was touting its willingness to make something different from the escapist soapy programming on the broadcast networks. Now its biggest hit is True Blood, an escapist, soapy, and sometimes campy show about vampires in the U.S. South, full of bad accents, severed limbs, and lines like “you were fighting the Nazi werewolves.”

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Clinton was right about everything

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 28, 2010 at 4:18 PM - 0 Comments

Nicola Dove

Tired of 1980s nostalgia? Here comes The Special Relationship with 1990s nostalgia. The HBO TV movie, premiering on May 29 and written by Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon), gets its title from the relationship between Tony Blair (Michael Sheen, who played this part for Morgan in two other films) and Bill Clinton (Dennis Quaid). Though it gets a publicity boost from the U.K.’s electoral shakeup, Morgan’s script stops in the year 2000, requiring director Richard Loncraine to create a Clinton-era period piece. “The ’90s have got less personality than, say, the ’60s,” Loncraine sighed to Maclean’s, regretting a lack of distinction in “the hair, the clothes, the cars.” But the film suggests one thing the ’90s had in common with the ’60s: they had infinite hope and promise, and it all went to hell.

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Way nicer than those Seinfeld guys

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments

Curb Your Enthusiasm is one of the most formulaic sitcoms on television today. Every episode of the show, beginning its seventh season on HBO Canada on Sept. 20, has a similar plot—creator/star Larry David plays a lovable loser hatching zany schemes that don’t work out, in the tradition of The Honeymooners. The story arc of the new season, a reunion of the cast members from David’s previous show, Seinfeld (as themselves), will bring new viewers to Curb. But it might also highlight the fact that Curb is less revolutionary than Seinfeld was.

Not that David’s production method on Curb is the stuff of traditional sitcoms. The lines on Curb are improvised on the set, a process that Seinfeld and Curb producer Larry Charles says “allows for a very spontaneous experience on-camera that then translates to the audience, I find, and enhances their experience as well.” But the plots are scripted in advance, and like an old-fashioned sitcom, David builds them around certain story ideas repeated over and over, usually involving Larry becoming obsessed with some social convention; in a typical story, he becomes determined to find out if someone is tipping more than him in a restaurant. Seinfeld sometimes repeated plots, but it was also known for minimalist storytelling, like the episode where the characters spent the whole time waiting for a table. Not Curb: the new season’s plots are built around sitcom tropes like wacky misunderstandings, but in R-rated versions (Larry mistakenly thinks a couple is having oral sex in their car). “It looks like it has no form,” says Kevin Wright, senior vice-president of programming for HBO Canada, “but it actually has the bones of a classic sitcom in terms of hitting the marks and paying off jokes and bringing together B and C storylines.”

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HUNG Up

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 5:10 PM - 2 Comments

The Hung portion of HBO’s TCA press tour was (reportedly) one of the more interesting bits of what is usually a not-very-interesting event. I mentioned this in an earlier post, and Todd VanDerWerff talks more about this in his review of the latest episode of Hung, but basically the producers got called on their decision not to show the main character’s penis, and replied with a mixture of the snickering double-entendres that characterized the whole presentation, and slightly pretentious justifications about the “Platonic ideal” and such. For people who, like me, don’t really care for the show (I think of it as like Loverboy only not as good, and certainly not as funny), it seemed to sum up what Hung is: sophomoric penis jokes plus pretension plus a lack of courage when it really counts.

Many others like the show, and Todd makes a good case for it. On the subject of their actual excuse for not showing the Memorable Member and whether it makes sense, I see their point — nothing they could show could possibly live up to the myth they’ve created — but I think it’s a case where a half-decent excuse neatly coincides with what their audience will accept, and the double standard for male/female nudity is well-known at this point. If the network would prefer that you not show something, then you can always make up some kind of explanation about why it would spoil everything to show it. But it’s doubtful; with the right writing, lighting and special effects, you can get the audience to go along with the idea that something is “ideal” or “perfect,” whether or not the audience member (there’s that word again) agrees with the reactions of the characters onscreen. It’s like — though this did not involve nudity — Al Capp created a character for the Li’l Abner comic strip called “Stupefyin’ Jones,” whose figure was so unnaturally perfect that men would literally freeze in their tracks at one sight of her. Capp kept the character obscured behind trees or walls every time she “appeared” in the story where she was introduced, because nothing he could draw would live up to the characters’ reactions. But when Li’l Abner was made into a stage and screen musical and the character was included, they rightly felt that they couldn’t get away with hiding the character; they had to show her, so they hired the young Julie Newmar to play someone whose body could semi-plausibly paralyze men. What Hung is doing is, in essence, the equivalent of trying to hide Stupefyin’ Jones behind a tree every week.

The constant focus on something that is, essentially, self-censored puts Hung in a class with lots of broadcast network comedies that make jokes about something they’re not allowed to show. That’s not a deal-breaker, and a lot of comedy can be mined from the fact that something naughty is kept offscreen (going back to that episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show where Laura was trapped in the bathtub, offscreen, with all the world making a mental picture of Mary Tyler Moore in that unseen state — or that other Dick Van Dyke episode where a nude painting of Laura was never shown, only the reactions of the characters to seeing the painting). I don’t think Hung has played the central conceit for that kind of comedy, mostly because I don’t think it’s funny enough; its comedy scenes are kind of bog-standard stuff. And since I don’t really feel any reason to care about the predicament of the central character — he’s the sort of person that only Hollywood could consider a potentially tragic figure — I can’t find myself cheering for him.

You can also argue that the central conceit is not as central as the title implies; it feels like something grafted on to, er, enhance a premise — a guy rents himself out as a gigolo, thereby furthering the ensuance of adventures that are sometimes of a nature that could be described as wacky and/or hijinks — that is not all that new. One way of looking at this situation is that HBO has gotten to the point that it requires big high-concept gimmicks to sell its shows, and this may just be a high-concept gag that overshadows the rest of the show. That, as I said, is one way of looking at it. But, from another point of view, it could be that the gimmick is necessary to provide the note of fantasy and whimsy that Hung is going for. The idea of the show, as Todd VDW explains, is that Ray has a special, almost magical power that can lift him out of the gloom and doom of the economic crisis and the crumbling city he lives in: “the entire series is built around the idea that Ray can use the special gift he never knew he had to ride out the recession and that the attempt in doing so will unlock special gifts within Tanya that she never knew she had, just like in Wizard of Oz.” The writers are hoping that this show will be something more than another gigolo story (note to Rob Schneider: “male gigolo” is redundant). Their idea is that in the midst of sort-of-realistic misery and problems, there is a fantasy character who can change things in unexpected ways. Sometimes the fantasy character is Ray, sometimes it’s like he’s a realistic character attached to a fantasy character (the unseen magical thingamajig with its amazing power to please), but what seems to be fairly consistent is that Ray wants to live up to his gift and be the best darn gigolo he can possibly be.

Conceptually, this doesn’t appeal to me all that much, because the show wants to have it both ways: it wants to be a fairy tale and it wants credit for having something big to say about the times in which we live and what people have to do to survive in a new economy. The Sex and the City comparison is apt, but that show usually knew that it was escapism; Hung is also a work of escapism, but thinks it’s something else (as if the very act of setting the show in an economically-ravaged city, as opposed to an upscale area, automatically precludes it from being escapist. But Li’l Abner was escapist and Dogpatch is way poorer than Detroit). But whimsy is something that hasn’t been seen much on pay cable lately, so I suppose it’s worth being grateful that they’re at least trying it, however haltingly.

Ultimately, though, I think what they’ve got here is Loverboy without Patrick Dempsey and with a  veneer of social consciousness.

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The Least Promising TV Pairing Since Mel Gibson and Mike Scully

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, July 31, 2009 at 4:32 PM - 0 Comments

When I wrote the HBO-skeptical section of my last post, I hadn’t yet seen the news that HBO will be doing a half-hour comedy starring Diane Keaton and created by Marti Noxon. There’s something strangely apropos about the teaming of cinema’s most neurotically self-indulgent star and TV’s most neurotically self-indulgent showrunner, but it doesn’t fill me with great anticipation.

The show appears to be HBO’s attempt to get back the Sex and the City demographic, though the premise — an aging feminist pioneer vaguely based on Gloria Steinem tries to start a sexy-yet-empowering magazine — sounds like Just Shoot Me with nude pictures and an older version of Laura San Giacomo. But the network has been on the lookout for another show that can have its cake and eat it too the way Sex did, providing sexually-frank material with a feminist veneer, so maybe this will be it. It’s a reminder that HBO’s programming choices are often, in their own way, as cynically and obviously calculated as any of the broadcast networks’; it’s just that the calculations are different and the formulas are a bit different.

And no offense meant to Diane Keaton fans; I’m one of those who finds it difficult to like her acting style (and I always have, even in her ’70s prime), but that’s personal taste. (I do feel a great kinship with her character in Manhattan, because when she tells Woody Allen that his hated lowbrow sitcom is “brilliantly funny,” she’s pretty much me.) On the other hand, offended Marti Noxon fans can lump it.

Is a therapist allowed to do that?

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 9 Comments

Early on in the half-hour HBO drama In Treatment, Dr. Paul Weston, a therapist portrayed with understated aplomb by the Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, is seen struggling to unclog the toilet in his home practice. Soon, Laura arrives, an alluring 30-year-old anesthesiologist who insists both that she is in love with him and that he secretly loves her. “I am not a realistic option,” Paul tells her, addressing an infatuation common to psychoanalysis called erotic transference. Suddenly, Laura stands. “I need to pee,” she says. “It’s blocked up,” replies Paul. Laura moves to the door to Paul’s home, domain of his wife and children. Paul grows uncomfortable. “I bet that didn’t come up in med school—a patient in love with the therapist asks to use a bathroom,” says Laura. “What should the therapist do?”

Actually, the question rarely comes up. “This is why I have ambivalence about the show, it seems like there’s a career’s worth of ethical dilemmas in every season,” says Ryan Howes, an L.A. psychologist who groans each time an episode appears in his TiVo cue, so much does it feel like a continuation of his workday. “I find myself doing a lot of backseat driving.” Yet he’s hooked, as are many therapists, who hail the drama as the most accurate depiction of their work yet to hit movie and TV screens. At once cerebral and earthy—how often do TV plots turn on a toilet plunger?—as well as gloriously talky, In Treatment, now in its second season on HBO Canada, is as close to theatre as it is to the 50-minute sessions it so faithfully reproduces. And it’s at least as prone to hyperbole.

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Shows Without Music

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 2:01 PM - 0 Comments

I just watched the season premiere of In Treatment (based, like the previous season’s episodes, on an episode of the Israeli show it’s based on); the session takes place in a law office, where Paul finds that a former patient will be representing him in a malpractice case. The show still is what it was last year: compelling and claustrophobic. In a way, despite the soap opera format, In Treatment is weirdly reminiscent of a certain type of half-hour sitcom, the Norman Lear type of show that has few characters and few sets, and does many episodes in something resembling real time. Most sitcoms today, even the multi-camera ones, have multiple scenes and sets in every episode, so it takes In Treatment to remind us of the virtues of doing an episode that’s literally like a one-act stage play. Also, the format of the season premiere reminded me a little of some episodes of Frasier in the way Paul uses his therapy skills no matter where he is, and winds up helping people who are supposed to help him. I’m not saying In Treatment is a sitcom, just that it has some of the qualities we used to associate with such things.

It also occurred to me that while I’ve said often that network TV shows have too much background music these days, HBO almost has the exact opposite policy: while they operate on a case-by-case basis, they clearly feel that shows shouldn’t overdo it on the music. They’ve had plenty of shows like The Sopranos and The Wire which use only source music. And one of the big differences between In Treatment and the original series, Betipul, is that the original series has plenty of background music, much like the regular soap operas it’s emulating; it uses mood music to underscore and emphasize emotional scenes.

But on In Treatment, the score is used much more sparingly. The season premiere has only one music sting besides the main title and the ending: there’s a musical score for a silent scene where Byrne walks around the office and gets a sense of what’s in there and what it says about the lawyer. Otherwise it’s all ambient noise, particularly the jackhammers from the street, which are then referred to in an important speech. Even big emotional moments tend to be un-scored. It’s not necessarily better or worse, though I do think that makers of North American “art” TV are a little suspicious of mood music (and correspondingly, a little too anxious to use source music), but just an example of the HBO approach.

By the way, for a sort of backhanded preview of the new season of In Treatment, here is the opening scene of the same episode (that is, the second season premiere of In Treatment) in the original Israeli version. Click “Continue” to see it. Most of this scene, like its counterpart in the American version, is un-scored, but it does use music at the beginning when the main character is walking to the door, which the American version does not.
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When Executives Become Producers

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, February 27, 2009 at 5:51 PM - 1 Comment

You may have read the news that Chris Albrecht, the former mastermind of HBO (until he had to step down due to his arrest in 2007), has set up his first show as an independent producer: “The Borgias,” a Franco-American co-production to be created and written by Tom Fontana (Oz, Homicide). The concept itself is plausible enough as a way of piggybacking on the success of The Tudors – pretty soon there’ll be a show about every scandalous aristocratic family — but what interests me is the question of what happens when a TV executive goes into producing.

Different executives come from different kinds of backgrounds, and some of them actually started out as producers before going into the development/network side of things. But when they can no longer get work running a network, they usually announce that they’re going to develop their own projects, and it doesn’t always go well. Jamie Tarses, former NBC and ABC head, did manage to put together the reasonably successful My Boys for TBS. But Warren Littlefield, who was a well-respected development executive at NBC in its ’90s glory years (and who was affectionately parodied by Bob Balaban as “Russell Dalrymple” on Seinfeld, a show Littlefield oversaw), couldn’t come up with much more than the quirky cult flop Keen Eddie, and he did better than his mentor Brandon Tartikoff, whose post-NBC career as an independent producer was quite dismal.

It’s not exactly big news that the skills required to develop a show as a network executive are different from the ones needed to develop a show as a producer, even a non-writing producer; the jobs may both be essentially executive positions, but the objectives are different. The network executive mostly needs to have, or pretend to have, a sense of what the audience will want to see. The producer has to have a sense of what the network executives will want to buy. It often turns out that executives, after they leave the network, don’t necessarily understand what it is that makes a network executive want to buy a show. Can you blame them? No one really knows, not even the executives themselves.

I end this post with this only marginally-relevant clip of TV executive Jordan Levin, who, after being one of the people who helped found and run the WB, now produces what appear to be the equivalent of very expensive YouTube videos.

Okay, Entourage

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 12:37 PM - 1 Comment

I watched the first episode of the new season of Entourage (premiering September 7), entitled “Fantasy Island.” This wraps up the two year story arc about Vince (Adrian Grenier) starring in his “dream project,” the Scarface knock-off Medellin. I am not giving anything away by saying that the movie is a disaster, and Vince is ready to just give up, abandon Hollywood, and live on a Mexican island paradise with bikini-clad babes. Oh, and Turtle. But mostly, bikini-clad babes; you can’t have an Entourage episode without them.

The arc of the season is clearly going to be about how Vince and his entourage deal with his career troubles; the first four seasons were about the life of a successful actor, so it makes sense that the fifth season — where shows often shake things up a bit or make characters change jobs or whatever — looks at it from a different perspective and asks what happens when Vince is no longer the hot young star he used to be. By changing the set-up just a bit, you can re-examine the characters’ relationships, and have some new material to work with when the series goes back to status quo, as it usually does. I don’t know when Vince will be back on top again, but he probably will be. Shows, particularly comedies, don’t change things for very long, just long enough to try out some new stories; remember that one season where Frasier lost his job, only to have it back (along with Roz) by the end of the year? This is the same kind of thing.

The fifth season is a frequent Jump The Shark point for television shows, not because they shake things up Continue…

They Called Him Mad!

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 20, 2008 at 4:25 PM - 0 Comments

A reader wants to know if I have any thoughts on The New York Times Magazine‘s big piece on Matt Weiner and Mad Men. I don’t have very many thoughts that could be considered original. It’s a good piece on a good show, though obviously it follows the same pattern as most in-depth reporter-on-the-scene articles on cable TV shows. That’s not meant as a criticism of the writer, Alex Witchel. These articles follow the same pattern because the shows follow the same pattern behind the scenes: there’s this guy, this writer guy, who has been kicking around network shows for years, wasn’t happy with many of the shows he worked on, the major networks wouldn’t let him in the door to pitch his stuff, and finally <fill in name of network> took a chance on his dream project despite the offbeat concept and apparently unlikeable characters, and now he’s the hottest writer in town, but he’s still an iconoclast who doesn’t fit into the whole Hollywood scene. The name changes from “David Chase” to “Alan Ball” to “Matthew Weiner” but the pattern is the same.

There’s one big difference in the pattern here: instead of reading about how the show was turned down by the major broadcast networks (see Sopranos, The), articles about Mad Men note that it was turned down by HBO, the network that used to pick up the awesome ideas the broadcast networks didn’t want. The article doesn’t go into much detail about it, and HBO executives wouldn’t comment on why they turned it down, but she does get someone to note, off the record, that HBO had a bad case of resting on its laurels — what we might call NBC’s disease:

No one at HBO was willing to speak on the record about why the network passed on “Mad Men.” Off the record, I heard plenty about the insularity of the previous regime, flush as it was with the success of “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “Six Feet Under.” One employee summed up Weiner’s situation this way: “David Chase says the guy’s incredible, he’s writing shows for your iconic hit and you don’t shoot the pilot? Line up 10 people in show business and ask if that makes sense.”

There are a couple other reasons why Mad Men might not have been seen as a great fit for HBO, starting with the fact that it doesn’t have a lot of sensationalistic elements. On HBO it would have had more swearing and sex than on AMC, but the story simply doesn’t have a lot of opportunities for that kind of thing; Weiner has said that when he wrote the pilot in the first place, it had only one swear word in the whole script. HBO is very much a high-concept network, and part of the high concept is to pull viewers in with stuff that would be censored on most other networks: language, nudity, violence. Three very good things, don’t get me wrong, but Mad Men may have been a tough sell to HBO because you could actually do most of it on a network. (Not that any broadcast network would touch it, but Standards and Practices would be fine with most of the pilot because, in the great prudish tradition, the camera pans away the first time two characters are about to have sex.) It can’t be good for HBO to have one of their graduates out there saying that he doesn’t mind the tighter content restrictions of other cable channels.

Also, Mad Men may be a better fit for AMC because it shows more old movies than HBO. Compared to what it once was, and some of us still remember seeing great uncut movies on AMC before TCM even existed, AMC is a sad case; most of the classic movies are chopped up by commercials and relegated to the morning slots. However, it still shows old movies, many of them from the same period that Mad Men takes place in. HBO mostly shows current or very recent movies, so it needs shows that fit in with the kind of movies it gives us. AMC shows a lot of period movies, so a period piece like Mad Men works for them, just as AMC’s much-missed Remember WENN was a good fit for the good old days of AMC.

But, Mr. Adams

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 12:07 PM - 0 Comments

Kirk Ellis, the writer of the John Adams miniseries, has an article in the New Republic on the liberties that he took with history — John Adams is shown doing things that never happened, saying things he never said, events are telescoped and rearranged — and why this is just part of the process of writing a good “historical” movie or show:

A screenwriter always seeks economy in storytelling. Of course I knew that there were two Boston Massacre trials, not one. But the audience would not have thanked us for devoting the whole of the first episode to an examination of courtroom procedure, with two separate verdicts rendered. The key dramatic points are Adams’s decision to defend Captain Preston and his soldiers, and his success at exonerating them on the charge of murder. Both points are “factual.” Has there been some manipulation involved in the dramatization? Absolutely. But the outcome of the proceedings has not been altered.

In the age of the internet, it’s harder for shows and movies to get away with the kind of gigantic historical whoppers that used to be a matter of course in bio-pics. (Remember that Errol Flynn movie where Custer is an enlightened, progressive figure who deliberately causes Custer’s Last Stand in order to prevent the evil corporate bad guys from starting a big war? And that didn’t go as far as some Hollywood movies, ’cause at least they didn’t let Custer live.) But it remains true that every historical story not only does deviate from the historical record, but should. A dramatization of history, with actors play-acting at being people who are now dead, isn’t supposed to teach us exactly what happened, it’s supposed to tell a good story about historical figures or situations. Of course the adaptation should stay true to the spirit of the person or event it’s about — if only because otherwise, it raises the question of why you’re making this story into a show at all. But as the article implies, a writer should not sacrifice dramatic effectiveness to get all the facts right. If you want the straight-up facts, read a non-fiction book. (Well, non-fiction books pick and choose their facts too. But unlike movies and TV, they don’t have a creative obligation to disregard facts if they don’t work dramatically.)