The Ashton Kutcher phenomenon

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 1 Comment

CBS; FOX; Keystone Press; Photo illustration by Taylor Shute

When CBS announced that Two and a Half Men had signed Ashton Kutcher to replace Charlie Sheen, the executives were probably hoping it would be a unique piece of news: a young movie star, who had just made a successful film with Natalie Portman (No Strings Attached), coming back to television. But it simply became part of a larger story about the new fall season. Instead of the usual tactic of snapping up aging movie stars—like William H. Macy on Shameless, or Glenn Close on Damages—the new U.S. shows for the fall season are full of feature-film actors in their twenties or early thirties. Actors normally graduate from television to movies, but many young actors this year seem to be realizing that, as Variety TV columnist Brian Lowry puts it, “TV can be extremely helpful to an actor’s career, and quite lucrative in its own right.”

And so when Canadian networks fought over who would get to simulcast other new U.S. shows this fall, they were fighting over shows starring these young movie people. Citytv snapped up 2 Broke Girls (which CBS executive Nina Tassler touted as her “highest-testing pilot ever”) with Kat Dennings from the summer blockbuster Thor. The same network took The New Girl (touted by its own production company as one of its “highest-testing pilots ever”), in which Zooey Deschanel will go from playing adorably quirky movie characters looking for love to playing an adorably quirky TV character looking for love. CTV got the ’60s period drama Pan Am, one of several attempts to copy Mad Men (even though Mad Men doesn’t get many viewers); it will star Christina Ricci of The Addams Family fame.

It’s no surprise that television networks want to get movie stars to headline their shows. Though there has been a lot of talk about TV being better or more prestigious than movies (“TV is replacing movies as elite entertainment,” wrote critic Edward Jay Epstein last season), no one really seems to act like they believe it: “On the food chain of entertainment,” wrote sitcom writer and blogger Ken Levine, “it goes like this: movies, television, street performing, radio. Movies look down at television. Television looks up at movies with awe.” When Sheen was fired from his show, TV Guide said that the producers felt the only possible replacement would be someone bigger than a mere television star: “They were going after movie stars,” an anonymous insider told the magazine’s Michael Schneider.

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More Mad Men musings

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 4:22 PM - 3 Comments

Something I didn’t say in my previous post on the Matt Weiner vs. AMC fracas: As usual, there’s a lot we don’t know about what’s really going on in these negotiations. Especially since most of the leaks appear to be coming from one side – Weiner’s. And frequently, from Weiner himself. He gave an interview saying that contrary to initial reports, the network wants to cut not just two characters but a total of six, two a year. “A person familiar with the negotiations” gave the same story to another outlet, but the person is clearly on Weiner’s side and for all we know could be Weiner himself. Continue…

Time and tide wait for Mad Men

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 11:21 AM - 10 Comments

The latest twist in the negotiations over the long-delayed fifth season of Mad Men is that most of the issues between the network and studio have been worked out, but the deal has now gotten stuck over advertising and budgeting. The network and the studio want to cut the show’s budget by reducing the size of the cast, and also incorporate more commercials through strategic product placement and, most controversially, a shorter running time (which might also reduce the budget a little). Matt Weiner, a man not known for being laid-back in his dealings with the network, is not taking this lightly. But neither is the network: They’ve announced that they will be doing a fifth season of the show in early 2012, many months after it was originally supposed to come back. They don’t have a contract with Weiner yet, so this is essentially the network saying that the wacky Draper antics are coming back with or without him.

Two years ago the network also wanted to cut the running time of Mad Men, which now runs about 48 minutes per episode — in other words, the length of a TV episode from the ’80s, but without all the stock footage and long shots of people driving cars. Though the network pulled a similar stunt, threatening to go on without him, Weiner stood his ground and got the network to accommodate the longer running times. This time he’s doing a similar thing, holding out to do the show without length or budget cuts, and hoping that the network will back down again. As a fan of long running times for episodes who is frustrated by the ever-shorter amounts of time broadcast and basic-cable shows have to tell a story, I salute him.

Will the network back down this time, though? Mad Men is more popular now than it was then, but AMC is also a more successful network now. Weiner was negotiating from strength two years ago because his show almost single-handedly created his network’s new brand, and because they couldn’t just fire him and do the show without him. (They’ve done that to other shows, as have other networks, but Weiner has made himself famous enough and essential enough to Mad Men‘s reputation that the network would instantly lose all its prestige if they went ahead without him.) He’s still in a strong position because he knows, and AMC knows, that any other network would be happy to have him now. But AMC could argue now that Mad Men is not their biggest hit, let alone the biggest hit on basic cable, and the longer its fifth season is delayed, the more the network can claim it doesn’t really need Weiner.

I still think the fifth season will probably be done on Weiner’s terms, but it doesn’t seem as certain as it did two years ago. The whole “creator as god” meme, which prestige networks depended on in the Sopranos era, seems to be fading away just a little bit. Not every prestige network is like Showtime, where creators seem to be virtually anonymous or submerged by the overall brand of the network. But even HBO creators don’t get as much ink as they used to, and networks are increasingly going for properties that reduce the influence of the showrunner a little bit, like adaptations.

Look at AMC’s recent shows: one show where they fired the creator and replaced him with someone more pliable (Rubicon), an adaptation of a pre-existing property (The Walking Dead) and a remake of a European show (The Killing). Yes, showrunners are still important to them, and producers still want to bring them ideas. But they no longer depend mostly on attracting veteran TV writers with the great ideas they can’t sell to regular networks, like Weiner with Mad Men or Vince Gilligan with Breaking Bad. If they do a fifth season without Weiner and lose their reputation as the place for showrunners to have absolute freedom, then that doesn’t hurt them much any more. At least it doesn’t hurt them as much as letting Mad Men fall off the schedule.

The budget and commercial issues also offer another reminder of the difficulty basic cable networks have in the current environment. They’ve already proven that they can compete with pay TV creatively or surpass it. But they don’t have as much money as networks that get their viewers to pay them directly. This leads to cost-cutting, shorter running times, shows that have to be canceled even though the network likes them (most recently Lights Out on FX). It also means a basic cable network can’t bombard us with promotion as much as the big pay-TV networks do. I’m skeptical that promotion was what did in the recent flops on FX and AMC, but look over at Showtime and you’ll see a network with an incredible promotion machine. So-so shows, but tons of promotion.

Finally, I couldn’t begin to guess how the delay will affect the revival of How To Succeed In Business With Really Trying with Daniel Radcliffe, which was clearly mounted as a response to Mad Men mania (from the same director who brought a Mad Men vibe to a revival of Promises, Promises) and which normally would have been a couple of months into its run when Mad Men started back up.

Jon Hamm Says "What?" For A Minute and a Half

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 1:21 PM - 0 Comments

The maker of this YouTube video has figured out the secret of Matt Weiner’s success in writing Mad Men: have your main character say “What?” as often as possible. Of course this may all be part of his multi-season master plan leading up to the big revelation: Don Draper needs a hearing aid.

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The real mad men

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

Want more proof that the U.S. auto industry is starting to recover? There are more celebrities than ever lending their voices to car commercials. Jon Hamm, the star of Mad Men, recently lent his perfect advertising-man voice to a commercial for a Mercedes-Benz hybrid vehicle, which he assured us would lead to a “cleaner, safer future.” Not to be outdone, Ford hired Hamm’s Mad Men supporting player, silver-haired John Slattery, to do a commercial for its Lincoln line of cars. Last month, General Motors announced that Tim Allen will be “the new voice of Chevrolet,” while Jeff Bridges continues to do voice-overs for Hyundai, though an arcane Academy rule forced them to pull his voice from a commercial the night he won an Oscar.

Which stars are picked for which cars? That depends on whom the company is trying to reach. Mad Men, which has a small viewership but an older and more affluent one, is perfect for selling expensive luxury vehicles. Ford marketing director Matt VanDyke told the New York Times that his company picked Slattery because he “represents the potential customer” they’re seeking—men in their 40s and 50s with a lot of money to spend. Chevrolet’s Cruze, a compact car, needs a star with broader appeal: Allen, whose voice is recognizable all over the English-speaking world thanks to Toy Story, is the perfect choice to tell us that we should spend what little money we have on a car.

What we’re not seeing much of, yet, are commercials where the actors appear in the flesh, like Ricardo Montalban selling “Corinthian leather.” Slattery is the only one of these celebrities who does his selling on-camera, wearing glasses and looking pensively at us while he drives. This may be not in spite of the fact that he’s less of a star than Hamm, Allen or Bridges, but because of it: car companies worry that people, as opposed to voices, may be too associated with their characters, whereas with Slattery, VanDyke said, “Whether you know him from Mad Men or not, it doesn’t really matter.”

‘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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Planet Mad Men

By Andrew Potter - Monday, September 13, 2010 at 3:28 PM - 0 Comments

Mad Men has now officially replaced The Wire as the most footnoted and overanalyzed television show going. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

As usual, The Awl’s Natasha Vargas-Cooper leads the charge with her Footnotes of Mad Men. I don’t think this is her best effort though — the Cheever references were bouncing around the Twitterverse last night, and her report doesn’t add much to that, while neglecting some of the more important themes in the show. Gawker’s usually solid replay of the previous night’s episode hasn’t been posted yet is here, and Slate’s trio of Julia Turner, Michael Agger and John Swansburg have  weighed in starting here. I think Agger’s is the best of the three.

Meanwhile, our own Jamie Weinman argues that the show has become a show about television writing, while over at my other blog, I advance the thesis that last night’s episode marked the turning point in the series, from a show about the alien fifties to one about the all-too-familiar sixties.

'Mad Men' meets 'NewsRadio'

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, September 13, 2010 at 1:12 AM - 0 Comments

I don’t know if this is the best Mad Men season yet, but so far it’s certainly the one I’ve found most entertaining. The cold, distant tone and anthropological feel have given way to more complete involvement with at least some of the characters, and because the show is going so fast through the mid-’60s (apparently in a hurry to get to Nixon, which Henry’s Republican Party connections will presumably bring in somehow) it creates a sense of momentum and individual episode identity. And another thing I like, perhaps perversely, is that the show is becoming less and less about an advertising agency and more about the business the writers know — television writing.

That’s what I meant by the weird subject heading, because NewsRadio is the only show I can think of that sent out more signals that it was really about a TV writers’ room, no matter what it was ostensibly about. That show just more or less admitted it — taking stuff that happened to the showrunner and making them happen to Dave Foley — while Mad Men is leaving room for doubt. But when Don and Peggy had their argument  about whether she’s getting enough credit, it was hard not to think of Matt Weiner and his famous tendency to put his name on every script, or of the young assistants that he promotes to co-writer status in the least flattering way possible. Here’s Weiner talking about those assistants:

There’s sort of the tradition that if they work the whole season, I will let them write the finale with me. It’s not a given, and they know that. There are certain things I learned as the process went on. This may make me sound like an old person — I don’t know if it’s generational, but I’ve found that with a lot of people between 25 and 35 there’s sometimes this real sense of entitlement, a real sense of “Why don’t I have your job?”

And here’s Don saying basically the same thing to Peggy:

[vodpod id=Video.4432682&w=640&h=385&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

When we have Peggy herself, whose situation makes sense in any workplace but seems particularly informed by TV writing, which is still a man’s world and where the issues she’s dealing with — how to assert authority over men without living up to negative stereotypes of women in power; how to handle the treatment of lower-level female employees — are reportedly as big as ever in some rooms. And the main Peggy situation in last night’s episode had her dealing with the lewd, frat-boy “humour” of her colleagues, which is so redolent of the questions that arise in TV writing rooms that you don’t even need to be an insider (I’m not) to see the connection.

If you want some evidence that things have changed in the last decade and a half, these metaphorical issues are being handled differently than they were on NewsRadio, where the episode “Jackass Junior High” — one of the weaker episodes of the generally stellar fourth season — was pretty much a 21-minute justification for the writers’ refusal to hire women writers (you’ll recall that it was about Maura Tierney asking the guys to act as if she weren’t a woman, upon which they start acting, well, exactly like an all-male TV writing staff).

I may be reading things into the Mad Men workplace dynamic that aren’t there, of course, but I think it is the case that the show is more about workplace dynamics in general. It still has advertising-specific plots, of course, but I feel like it also has more moments that could not only take place at any office, but in any time — and not just because it’s a few years later. This sort of thing is common to nearly all workplace shows except for crime-solvin’ workplaces (and sometimes even then): they tend to focus less on the specific work being done and more on what happens when people work together. For one thing, the characters are now well-defined enough that throwing them together tends to resonate beyond whatever work they happen to be doing: I sometimes find my mind spipping over the advertising talk as if it’s Treknobabble, the better to focus on Don and Peggy and the rest.

This is more noticeable in comedy where NewsRadio stopped being about a radio station after about six episodes , but it happens all over the place. The writers run low on stories about the job they don’t know (or, in the case of 30 Rock, the job they used to know but don’t have any more). But what they do know is what most of the viewers know: the experience of being in the workplace. So the workplace show incorporates more of the writers’ own experience, generalized so it can fit the experience of the characters, as well as the experience of the average viewer.

A Golden Age of Taking TV Seriously

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 at 11:29 AM - 0 Comments

I don’t think this is a golden age of TV drama. For one thing, I don’t believe in golden ages as a general rule. For another thing, I think there are other eras that have a claim to be as good as the ’00s or the current period, if not necessarily better — particularly in terms of sheer variety. (Even with cable, the good dramas often seem to cluster around certain rules for tone, style and particularly story structure.) But it certainly is a golden age for shows that are taken seriously enough to be the subject of in-depth critical discussion. This is partly due to the internet, of course, but when the internet first got popular, TV discussion was to some extent dominated by fandom: people who liked (or even hated) a particular show gathering to talk about it. Such discussion could, and often did, include episode reviews and in-depth discussion, but there wasn’t exactly a TV critical community per se.

Now, with the decline of newsgroups and the lower profile of individual TV show fan clubs (they’re there, but you don’t hear about them as much as you did about, say, the Buffy fans of the ’90s), much online TV discussion revolves around TV in general, or at least more than one show: people who a decade ago might have picked one show to focus on are instead talking about several. Some of this is about TV criticism migrating from newspapers to the internet, but some of it has to do with the emergence of the individual episode review as the main unit of television discussion. Many of these reviews are still referred to as “recaps,” which Myles McNutt, one of the best-known online TV critics, has been trying to change. But while the term “recap” is now inaccurate, it reflects the fact that most individual-episode discussion used to be looser and less analytical, something like the Television Without Pity pieces where the writer would — literally — recap the story of the episode while throwing in snarky comments. Now each episode of a show is discussed as if it’s the latest book in a never-ending Lord of the Rings series; there’s an amount of in-depth criticism of, say, Mad Men episodes that even The Sopranos didn’t get in its prime.

Not only has there been a welcome explosion in the number of online TV critics, both professional and amateur, but they’re congregating around more shows (particularly in the drama field) than ever before. The semi-decline of HBO, and the rise of other networks as a competing force for Appointment Television, has made it possible for almost every network — whether broadcast or cable — to have a couple of shows that fit the criteria for online critical favourites. (These include, but are not limited to, ongoing storylines that provide room for argument about what’s going to happen to characters and what the next twist will be; some kind of grounding in a particular genre, but with a twist on its own genre so it doesn’t just seem like another mystery/spy show/soap.) If you look at the shows that The AV Club will be covering this fall, the thing that’s most fascinating is just that this is a long, long list, even though it leaves out a bunch of very popular shows.

As I said, I don’t personally think the number of great shows is at an all-time peak. (FX is certainly doing well in generating buzz for its shows, but except for Louie and the gripping Sons of Anarchy — which returns tonight — I find that many of their shows apply a coating of “edge” to stories that would work better without the FX brand beating down on them; Sons of Anarchy works because it’s a show perfectly calibrated for that brand, but some of their shows are as obviously compromised as any network show that is forced to be lighter and sweeter.) But the number of critically respectable shows is definitely at an all-time peak. Small cable networks like AMC make shows that they specifically think critics will like, since they need critical buzz to stay alive; I don’t personally think Rubicon is a good show, but it has been injected with everything a show needs to be discussed as a good (or potentially good) piece of television. Even a provider of lightweight fun like USA makes sure to put high-class elements into most of its shows, so we won’t be mistaking them for disreputable, disposable entertainment. Almost every drama features the serialized elements that lend themselves to modern TV analysis, so that critics can discuss where the characters have been and where they’re going, rather than just talking about the episode. During most eras of television, critics tended to try and identify the few “quality” shows in what was considered a Vast Wasteland otherwise. Now it’s reversed; not all shows are considered great, but the shows that have the signifiers of Quality may actually outweigh the ones that don’t.

The big, glaring exception to the new critical respectability, as that AV Club link notes, is the straight-ahead murder mystery — well, they’re called “procedurals” now but I’m going to just call them by the old name. Though I’ve stuck up for NCIS at times, I don’t watch that show nearly often enough to review it (and I personally don’t feel inclined toward the episode-review format, though I certainly love to read the work of many people who do) or even to consider myself a fan. But do feel like there’s a bit of a hole in the critical community that shows like these aren’t discussed all that often. Not because they’re popular, but because there’s actually some validity in the approach they use — essentially, to have certain rituals and patterns that occur week after week, and build viewer loyalty to the characters not through development but through subtle variation. (This probably should be another post, but I think one reason why shows with unchanging characters are often the most popular is not just that they’re comfort food, but that they may strike viewers as more true to life: the amount of change characters go through on Breaking Bad is quite extreme, while the premise that people do more or less the same things most of the time is the way most people really live their lives.) One show that managed to use that approach and break through to critical respectability was House, Fox’s canny variation on the modern mystery format, a show that had the same plot every week and, like most successful shows in that vein, kept audiences guessing about what the slight twist on the formula would be this time around. But apart from that, there’s not a lot of talk about the aesthetic of the so-called procedural and how it gets the audience invested in the characters and themes.

This is not said to chide critics for not covering those shows. (If I, a real booster of the episodic format, am not reviewing those shows, I don’t see why serially-inclined critics should force themselves to say something different each week about episodes that are more or less the same.) Just that while I’ve been able to learn a lot about serial and semi-serial shows thanks to the great work of online critics, there are certain types of shows that are a bit mysterious to me. That’s why I’m going to try and search through The Google to see if I can find some amateur critics who do good, in-depth reviews of the NCISes and CSIs and the like; they’ve got to be out there.

Though I think that in the case of some of these shows, the gap in criticism is filled by that old standby, fandom: much discussion of your CSI-type shows seems to take place on message boards and the like, where fans congregate to discuss their favourite characters, when the show went downhill and whether it can get back on track, and so on. It may just be that these shows lend themselves better to fan arguments than criticism, since their impact is cumulative (watching enough episodes to notice the little variations on the formula) and somewhat inaccessible to people who don’t watch regularly. Paradoxically, it’s easier for newcomers to get the appeal of Sons of Anarchy, because even if you aren’t aware of all the twists that have taken place in the past, the spectacular and shocking twists will still play as spectacular and shocking (you may not know why they’re supposed to shock, but you’ll sort of get that they are). But the episodic formula shows seem to play much deeper for people who are devoted fans than for people who aren’t.

The Emmys: Accent on Youth

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, August 29, 2010 at 11:01 PM - 0 Comments

It’s frivolous and pointless to try and impose a theme on a whole night of awards, but everybody does it, and the theme of this year’s Emmys seemed to be “New blood.” (As opposed to True Blood, which didn’t win much. Luckily for HBO, they proved once again that their real domination is in the field of miniseries and TV movies, where they brought home all the Emmys that they lost in the continuing series categories.) There were some old-guard shows and performers that won: Bryan Cranston kept up his basically well-deserved streak, while Edie Falco won best actress in a comedy because her show isn’t a comedy (as she herself pretty much admitted) and the voters can’t resist the chance to vote for Real Acting in that category. Plus the Best Actress in a drama category didn’t have any non-veterans except January Jones, and few people were upset that she didn’t win. And Mad Men won again because, as I said, it hits the Emmy voter sweet spot — but how strange is it that it’s dominated to this extent while never winning an acting award?

But many of the winners were newish. The biggest surprises of the night were in the drama supporting categories, where two relatively unfamiliar performers beat out a number of more familiar competitors. Aaron Paul, who won for Breaking Bad, is the archetypal young Hollywood journeyman who has been acting in TV in small parts since he was 19 years old, and became a fine actor without hardly anybody noticing until it became unavoidable. And Archie Panjabi, the biggest surprise by far (as well as the only hint of ethnic diversity in the acting awards), was not the youngest person in her category but is a relative newcomer to Hollywood. I sometimes wonder if this might be a case of two other young performers — Moss and Hendricks from Mad Men — splitting the vote for their show, allowing Panjabi to get a prize for a show that is much admired in the business, particularly among older voters. But since most of the other winners were for showy parts, it’s good to have one winner who had to make an impact with mostly non-showy material (and made much more out of her character than might have been expected).

Jim Parsons, obviously, is an example of the young guy making good (and, like Jane Lynch winning for Glee, allowed the Academy to recognize a phenomenon without giving it many other prizes). And Modern Family, whatever my reservations about it and its sledgehammer moralizing, is a new show that took lots of awards including the big one,  and the narrative before the show was based on the question of whether it would win or if another freshman show would take it.

There was a feeling for much of night, but reaching its peak with those supporting prizes, that there was a reaction against the relative predictability and familiarity of the last couple of years’ winners. And in general, the show — at least those parts of the show not involving Jewel — felt looser and less button-down than usual; the banter between the presenters was mostly bad as usual, but Fallon once again demonstrated that he’s become a pretty decent host by more or less embracing the fact that he’s not all that funny. However, the first part of the show felt much more entertaining and fast-paced than the second, because the awards in the second half (loading all the HBO mini and movie awards into it, for example) caused the pace to sag.

How did NCIS get to be so cool?

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 10:46 AM - 29 Comments

Why is one episode of NCIS, a forensic murder mystery with a military setting, more popular with young viewers than an entire season of Mad Men? The JAG spinoff, in which Mark Harmon investigates crime in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps (Tuesdays on Global at 8 p.m.), has seen steadily rising ratings since it premiered in 2003; this season, it became the No. 1 show on TV and launched its own spinoff, NCIS: Los Angeles. But it’s also in the top 10 among the 18 to 49 age group, and gains an extra two million viewers from new-media formats. Shane Brennan, who runs NCIS and created the spinoff, says that there are even “college parties where they sit and watch NCIS reruns.” How did this show become cool when no one was paying attention? Maybe because it’s not a procedural like CSI; one of NCIS’s stars, Michael Weatherly, described it to the Los Angeles Times as a throwback to Barney Miller. NCIS is secretly a sitcom with dead bodies.

Brennan, who has also worked on CSI: Miami (as well as the teen drama One Tree Hill), says that other procedural shows spend a lot of time “putting the clues together in a scientific way.” NCIS spends less time on science and therefore has “more time to develop character.” The mysteries on NCIS are sometimes perfunctory or pointless. A recent episode had Agent Gibbs (Harmon) solve the crime at the last minute without explaining how he figured it out; the culprit was a guest character who had only one scene in the episode (and who, inexplicably, confessed right away). Brennan says that on NCIS, “it really doesn’t matter so much what the story is: it’s how the character reacts.” That makes it different from shows where the characters are secondary to plot twists, or procedurals like Law and Order, where topical issues dominate. NCIS has more in common with young-skewing comedies like The Big Bang Theory, which also has simple plots. Like those shows, NCIS is an excuse for viewers to hang out with characters they love. Continue…

Getting the band back together (UPDATED)

By Andrew Potter - Monday, November 9, 2009 at 9:04 AM - 15 Comments

UPDATE: Go now and read the Daily Beast’s interview with Matthew Weiner. He’s unquivocal about the fate of some of the characters,  unsure of some others.

I gorged on Mad Men and meatballs last night, making supper while catching up on three previous episodes before  the second showing of the season finale on AMC…

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Writing Credits! Glamour! Excitement!

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, November 2, 2009 at 4:34 PM - 1 Comment

This is not something that’s worth a whole lot of attention, but someone pointed out something I find interesting about the credits on Mad Men: Matt Weiner, the show’s creator and showrunner, takes a co-writing credit on most episodes. Creators normally take a lot of writing credits in the first season and then fewer as the show goes on and the writing staff gets larger, but this season has had Weiner as one of the names after “written by” on almost every episode, including last night’s Kennedy Assassination Spectacular. In many cases, when a showrunner has a co-writer credit most weeks, it means that he assigns the script to one or more staff writers, rewrites their work extensively, and then adds his name to the writing credits (presumably having written enough of the script to satisfy Writers’ Guild requirements for such a credit). It could also mean that the episodes are written in the room by several writers and that Weiner is usually one of them; I don’t know.

This does not mean that Weiner does more writing than another showrunner who isn’t credited with writing a lot of scripts. David Milch or Joss Whedon don’t normally take script credits unless they assign the entire script to themselves, but no matter who’s credited, the voice of the show is largely theirs and a lot of their writing is in the script. (On Buffy, the dialogue in the early episodes as well as later ones like “The Zeppo” is largely Whedon’s, while he and co-showrunner Marti Noxon wrote the bulk of the scenes in the final season’s “Conversations With Dead People” episode without credit.) Script credits on any show with a writing staff can be misleading, obviously, since there’s so much rewriting that goes on, and since everything is ultimately filtered through the showrunner. The episode is usually credited to one person or team for various reasons: royalties, acknowledgment of the important work involved in writing the first draft of the script. But obviously, except for individual lines or jokes, it’s extremely difficult to tell anything about individual writing styles based solely on the episodes someone was credited with scripting.

The practice of showrunners or head writers adding their names to the episode, even if they did do a lot of rewriting, is generally frowned upon. One writer told me — this was ten years ago; no current show involved in this anecdote — that two senior writers on his show were prone to what he called “credit hopping,” taking a co-writer credit for the standard rewriting that goes on in any episode. He felt this was an insult to the hard work of the original writer, and didn’t seem to look kindly on the writer-producers involved in the practice. It might be different on Mad Men, though, because the show is serialized and therefore it’s hard to tell where one episode begins — and therefore where one script begins — and ends. A traditional assignment of one writer, one script might not even work. In any case, the point remains that someone who has only a handful of writing credits on his show may in fact write just as much of it as someone who’s credited as co-writer every week; it really all depends on how the credits are doled out, and has little to do with the actual contributions.

Mad Muppets

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 1, 2009 at 1:06 AM - 5 Comments

While my anti-Elmo position prevents me from saying much about Sesame Street – though considering that I grew up considering the third Gordon to be the “real” Gordon, it would be pretty hypocritical of me to chide today’s kids for considering Elmo the star of the show — I must embed this clip.

Also note that there’s a lot of interconnectivity going on around here: Jon Hamm appeared on 30 Rock, which not only did a Muppet-themed episode and featured Muppet references in two of his episodes, but is itself a secret remake of The Muppet Show. All of this leads me to believe that the secret arc of Mad Men is that the whole show is leading up to an important historical event: the creation of Sesame Street and Don Draper’s previously-unknown role in selling it to America. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the current season takes place in 1963 — the same year Jim Henson moved to New York? (And what was he mostly doing with his Muppets? That’s right: advertising.) No, the writers have a plan for the series, and this is clearly it.

The Cold, Cold Emmys

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 5:20 PM - 6 Comments

Well, there isn’t a lot to say about them, since they mostly gave the awards to the same people as last year. I keep thinking that the Emmys’ preference for Mad Men and especially 30 Rock signifies a certain preference for hard-hearted coldness on the part of the Emmy voters. For some, Mad Men is easier to admire than to love, and encourages a certain amount of audience distance from the subject, characters and time period (though there’s a very valid counter-argument that the distancing effects don’t actually preclude emotional involvement, they just make us look at the issues in a more clear-eyed way). And 30 Rock is sort of a technocratic comedy, where the joke writing is on a high level, but almost every character is a cartoonish lunatic. The closest thing the show has to a human being is Jack, who — and I’m sorry for repeating myself — has become the show’s straight man and voice of sanity as Liz has become a complete psycho. Its lack of mainstream success is no more surprising than that of Arrested Development, another extremely well-crafted comedy that didn’t have a lot of characters who bore much resemblance to human beings.

I think Mad Men deserved its repeat win, 30 Rock, not so much (its inability to grow, and the fact that it’s let certain holes get bigger like the almost complete wasting of several characters/actors, suggests to me that it’s an entertaining show that peaked in its second year, and isn’t really going to get anywhere near being a great show). But taken together, we can get a sense that Emmy voters, and therefore the majority of TV industry people, don’t worry too much about the emotional temperature of a show; for a show to have a reputation for coldness or lack of charm is not a problem at the Emmys. You could say that dramas have had this going on for some years now, in that the Emmys love showy displays of pure technique like The West Wing, and rarely give the Best Drama award to a show about regular everyday human beings. In fact, by that standard, Mad Men may be more down-to-earth and relatable than most of the other recent winners. But the Emmys used to have a strong bias toward comedies with an element of charm or sentiment, which is one explanation of why Seinfeld and Arrested Development only managed one win each. (And both pulled off their wins before the characters became complete monsters.) Now 30 Rock seems destined to win every year. I don’t know if this is a sign that Emmy voters have now equalized their standards for comedy and drama, or if Emmy voters hate people more than they did a few years back.

I even cooked in my Mad Men days

By Barbara Amiel - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 6:04 PM - 8 Comments

Last weekend was a nostalgia rush and all things considered I prefer yesterday’s madness to today’s. More challenge, more style. First, I took in Julie & Julia, the film biopic of the great American TV cook Julia Child set in the sixties. The lobster scene brought back my own ghastly attempts at being a murderess. “You can keep live lobsters in the refrigerator at around 37 degrees for a day or two,” Mrs. Child advised us all on PBS—now there’s a thought—and after the kill, “locate the stomach sac with your fingers, twist out and discard . . .”

Something of a shame, I thought, as Meryl Streep’s Julia Child plunges her knife into the writhing lobster, that she and Martha Stewart couldn’t have met, two splendid women wielding cleavers—probably on one another as they wrestled for camera position. On Sunday came the premiere of Mad Men’s third season about advertising men in the early sixties, when everyone smoked, wore uptight clothes and political correctness was being on the right rather than the left. Continue…

Bye Bye, BIRDIE Ballet

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 4:55 PM - 1 Comment

This is actually sort of TV-related because of the most recent episode of Mad Men, which built part of the story around the sensation Ann-Margret caused in the film version of Bye Bye Birdie in 1963 (and the differing reactions of Don, who likes what Pauline Kael called A-M’s “slick, enamelled and appalling” persona, and Peggy, who’s uncomfortable with the fakeness of it all and the idea of selling that fakeness to women). There’s a stage revival of Birdie coming up — which now turns out to have very good timing, since this episode helped to revive some interest in the property — and Gina Gershon, who is playing the female lead, says that the big ballet scene in act two was cut because it’s… “gang-rapey?!”

In the scene, Rose, originated on stage by Chita Rivera and on film by Janet Leigh, crashes a Shriners banquet, flirts and cavorts on, around and underneath a table with the fez-heads.

As written, it’s a funny dance showcase. So why is it too hot to handle in 2009? Gershon told The News’ theater critic Joe Dziemianowicz, “It seemed a little too gang rape-y.”

That should come as interesting news to countless high schools, parochial academies and theater camps where this number has been performed for nearly 50 years.

The idea that a silly comedy scene that kids have been performing without incident since 1960 is “gang-rapey” is so crazy that even an objective news item can’t quite take it seriously, so people are left wondering whether:

a) The scene was cut because Gershon couldn’t handle the dancing (it didn’t work well in the movie because the unbelievably miscast Janet Leigh wasn’t really up to it)

b) The scene was cut because the producers decided it didn’t work any more (it is kind of a relic of an era when every musical had to have a ballet in it at some point).

Either one sounds more plausible than Gershon’s semi-official explanation. Anyway, here’s Chita Rivera re-creating the number in (I think) 1984:

I’m not expecting much of a revival of Birdie, which is one of my favourite stage musicals but is never treated with the respect it deserves. (The revival will have the music re-orchestrated for a smaller orchestra, even though the original orchestrations, by Robert Ginzler, are among the five best sets of arrangements ever written for a musical.) The movie threw out many of the songs, completely re-wrote the script, and gave additional material to the character played by Ann-Margret. (The title song that Don and Peggy argue about was filmed after principal photography had wrapped; the director, George Sidney, realizing that A-M was the key to the film, commissioned a new song and paid out of his own pocket to film it with her.) All of which turned out to be very good box-office — because Ann-Margret made it a hit — but has caused the original stage version to be performed thereafter as if it’s a broad, cartoonish, loud show like the movie. It’s actually a rather quiet, gentle, warm-hearted satire of early ’60s America, with a musical style mostly influenced by ’50s jazz bands.

But it was a good idea for Mad Men to use the movie, because it is one of the key works of that era: absurdly fake and artificial in every way, sometimes deliberately, sometimes just because so many people are miscast (Ann-Margret as an innocent teenager, Janet Leigh as a Latina, Paul Lynde — repeating his Broadway role — as a suburban dad), and with Ann-Margret projecting a sexuality that is halfway between studio-manufactured gloss and something more dangerous and uncontrolled. That whole movie so perfectly embodies the whole Mad Men world — artificiality and order with cracks and flashes of unpredictability — that you almost need to rent the movie to understand what the culture was like in 1963.

However, Peggy’s being unfair in one way: it’s clear that Ann-Margret is being deliberately “shrill” when she sings the song before the credits. When she sings the second half of the song at the very end of the movie, she sounds better (in part because extra reverb has been added to her voice). Apparently George Sidney figured this would get audiences thinking that she had progressed from teeny-bopper innocence to full-blown sexualized womanhood, and he seems to have figured right. (I should add that the film-geek in me thinks that Sidney and Ann-Margret are a director-star combination as fascinating and important in their own way as that other iconic ’60s pairing, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.)

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Why the Emmys hate ‘Mad Men’

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 1 Comment

The people who run the Emmy Awards have learned an important lesson: if you’re going to do something for crass commercial reasons, don’t admit it. The U.S. Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced recently that when the annual TV-industry awards are presented on Sept. 20, several major prizes would be pre-taped; only clips of the acceptance speeches would be shown on the live broadcast. In itself, this strategy might have produced only some angry grumbles. But Emmy producer Don Mischer made the mistake of telling the Television Critics’ Association why these moments were pulled from the main show: they honour “shows that mainstream viewers did not know and were not interested in.” There were so many angry responses, and so much bad publicity, that the Academy had to reverse itself and agree to show all the awards on the live broadcast as usual. But at least the people who run the Academy have made their preferences known: since industry professionals vote to nominate unpopular shows, the Emmys will try ignore them and focus on something else.

The awards that would have been removed from prime time were all dominated by little-watched cable shows that Mischer called “niche shows.” The prizes for TV movies and miniseries are dominated by HBO productions, like last year’s big winner John Adams, so these awards have been “time-shifted.” The broadcast also planned to cut the award for best writing in a drama, a category dominated by AMC’s Mad Men, but keep the full presentation of the prize for comedy writing, presumably because the likely winner is NBC’s 30 Rock. The time that would normally be used for the writers of Mad Men or the producers of Generation Kill would have been used for clips of popular but non-nominated network shows like American Idol. Like the Oscars, which expanded the Best Picture category to 10 films in hopes of getting some actual hits nominated, the Emmys are desperate to get some mainstream entertainment into the mix. Continue…

Watching "Mad Men"

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, August 16, 2009 at 10:01 PM - 12 Comments

It’s 10 p.m. and time to travel back to the days when Allan Sherman ruled the pop charts and Italian movies were popular. I refer, of course, to the third season premiere of Mad Men. While this isn’t exactly a full-fledged live-blog, I’ll write down some thoughts if they occur to me while watching.

- The credits. Why don’t network shows try putting all the credits into the main title? I used to think it was time limitations, but Mad Men only takes 30 seconds for the main title and still fits all the credits in, sparing us the indignity of seeing “supervising producer” credits plastered over the action. I guess it helps that they have a small staff. (One of the things that made me feel affectionate toward My Name Is Earl is that they tried putting all the credits at the end, leaving only the writing and directing credit to be superimposed over the action. But the network made them give that up toward the end of the run.)

- It’s been said that the way the secretarial-pool scenes are shot — low-angle shots so that you can see the ceilings — is supposed to give a physical dimension to the “glass ceiling” metaphor, but it also feels like a vague visual throwback to some old movies, where the director made a special effort to get the ceiling in the frame (to make it clear to the audience that they had in fact bothered to construct a ceiling). It gives a slight retro-ness to the look, along with the slightly old-school use of colour, with Joan’s red dress and other such fashion choices standing out in bold relief from the rest of the scene.

- Because of my inclinations, one of the things I like best about Mad Men is the old-school editing and camerawork, with most scenes shot from relatively few angles and simple ones at that.

- This has been, except for Don’s imagi-flashback at the beginning, a surprisingly light and funny episode so far. (Not that there haven’t been serious issues raised and stuff, just that overall most of it has played as comedy.) I guess that means heavy stuff coming in the second half.

- Minor thing that nobody else cares about, but given that Mad Men doesn’t have fade-ins or fade-outs before/after commercial breaks, they should eliminate the blackouts on the DVD and just have the episodes without interruptions (which is clearly the way they are made: Weiner cuts the episodes and then figures out a place to put commercial breaks).

- The farcical conclusion to Sal and Don’s hotel escapades might be the funniest part of the episode so far, mostly because of Sal’s facial expressions. Actually, Sal and Don are a generally great comedy team.

- A real gift to an actor is what I might call the “anticipated question” scene — the kind every show does sometime, where one character acts like he’s going to bring up something embarrassing or harmful, and then changes the subject (while making it clear what the conversation almost was about). It’s great for actors because it has built-in subtext for them both to play. Which is to say that it’s  a common scene, but it usually works, and is a great alternative to an on-the-nose discussion. (This is a subject that Don and Sal probably wouldn’t talk about openly anyway.)

- AMC is using commercial time to plug its upcoming broacast of Rudy. It’s as if they want to reming us that most of their programming is nearly worthless.

- Betty hasn’t had much to do in this episode so far, but that will change later this season.

- I have never been terribly fond of the music of Mad Men, I mean the musical score. The scoring in this episode just seemed to scream “The Past, This Is Remembering The Past” without any particular relevance to the characters or the setting (though I realize that Weiner wants the music to go against period, rather than be part of it).

- A show like Mad Men, where the episodes often don’t have a strong individual identity or structure of their own — because the serialized, multi-plot aspect inevitably turns the episode into a series of vaguely-linked scenes — will often try to give some structure to the episode by thematically linking the first and last scenes of the show.  Which is pretty much what happened this week.

- Every time I see Vincent Kartheiser and Robert Morse in the same scene I expect at least one of them to start in with this. Pete will sing it someday, and Cooper did sing it in the past.

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The Women of MAD MEN

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, August 11, 2009 at 3:31 PM - 6 Comments

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the strength of the female characters on Mad Men, an unusual thing in a time when most shows do not have a lot of multi-dimensional parts for women. Amy Chozick’s article in the Wall Street Journal talks about the predominantly female writing staff of the show and the way they write for Betty, Peggy et al.

I think that the historical element in Mad Men, which I sometimes have reservations about (because of the museum-piece quality it lends to some stories and the way it invites us to distance ourself from the story) really works for the female characters. The problem with most female characters today, and indeed for hundreds of years, is not just that they’re written entirely from a man’s point of view, but that they define themselves mostly by their relationships to men. This was true even of the “butt-kicking babe” characters, or professional women like on Grey’s Anatomy, who tend to start strong and slowly sink into a morass of ‘shipping and getting caught between two men and stuff. And yet, because they are supposed to be modern liberated women, the show can’t really make an issue of its problem with defining its women or with giving them interests, lives, and feelings that don’t revolve around men. For the writers to deal with that problem head-on would be to admit that they have not, in fact, created super-liberated role-model characters, and not only don’t they want to admit it, they’re not even necessarily aware of the problem.

With Mad Men, the writers have given themselves an advantage: they admit up-front that the show is set in a time when women played a subservient role, and that this is an actual issue in the show. It’s an issue in present-day shows too, but the writers aren’t aware of it; with Mad Men, they are, and the plots therefore have the women examining the issue, trying to figure out how to gain some kind of autonomy (or how much of it they want) and how much of their lives should revolve around men, being what men think they should be, acting like a man in order to get ahead in their world, and so on. They have to address these things, because they’re looking at the past from a present-day point of view, analyzing the roles characters play in this environment. Because the writers are so aware that these women are expected to define themselves by their relationships to men, they wind up thinking about what these characters are beyond that basic definition.

All these issues, as I say, still apply in today’s world and especially on TV, because TV and movie plots have an unconscious habit of forcing women into subservient roles. (What I mean by this is that in real life, it’s possible to go a long time without focusing on romance or relationships. On TV, it isn’t, because the easiest stories to come up with are relationship stories. But relationship stories, at least in fiction, have a way of making the man the dominant character in the relationship, thereby turning strong fictional heroines into weak ones through the gravitational pull of these old storylines.) Mad Men finds them easier to deal with because they’re part of the environment in which it’s set, but there’s no reason it can’t happen on a present-day show. It’s just that it usually doesn’t.

Matt Weiner Strikes a Blow For Longer Episodes

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 5:59 PM - 1 Comment

This has not been a great time for those of us who would like to see longer running times and fewer commercials in TV programming. (This isn’t just about the boredom of commercial breaks, which after all can increasingly be skipped; it’s about the limitations on storytelling that are imposed by the ever-shrinking running times.) The failure of Fox’s “Remote Free TV,” even after it proved that audiences are more likely to watch the commercials in short breaks, seemed to demonstrate that the networks probably won’t return to selling 10 minutes of commercial time per hour, as opposed to 20.

That’s why it was good to see Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, actually stood up for the idea that a minute of screen time is a precious and valuable thing. Mad Men has a running time of 47-8 minutes per episode, which isn’t long by historical standards but is several minutes longer than usual for a show with commercials (we’re usually talking 43-4 minutes on basic cable, 41-2 on network). It is the running time an hour-long show would have had in, say, the late ’80s. When AMC decided that it needed to sell more commercial time on the show, this wasn’t an unreasonable decision. The show still isn’t a big hit, it’s not cheap to make, and the network needs all the advertising revenue it can reasonably get. But Weiner absolutely refused to cut his episodes back to today’s standard length:

A very hands-on creator, he fought back and got AMC to instead let the show run longer than an hour with the additional commercials so that he wouldn’t have to trim dialogue and scenes from the show. Of course, AMC and cable operators will have to find a way to insure that the show’s post-11 p.m. end time doesn’t screw with our TiVos and DVRs.

To a certain extent, Weiner is being the unreasonable one here, forcing the network to inconvenience itself, its viewers and cable companies so he can have three extra minutes of time on the show. But artistically, he’s right. Mad Men is a show whose pacing is part of its style: it takes its time, lingers on certain shots, extends conversations to a length that suggests (but doesn’t actually resemble) real life, and sometimes even shows people walking in and out of a room. None of these things are possible in today’s shorter-length shows; where Mad Men will have people shaking hands and exchanging small talk as they sit down in Don’s office, a shorter show would often have to start with the first line in the scene that advances the plot.

(The curse of the short running time is that you have to cut out everything that doesn’t “advance the plot,” even though some of the best moments can come from seemingly extraneous moments. It’s why many classic shows seem less interesting in syndication than they do in their complete versions, because in cutting from 25 to 22 minutes you lose all the cool stuff that wasn’t plot-specific.)

So while Weiner’s decision may not be great for AMC, and may not even have any ramifications for other television shows, it’s nice to see someone standing up for the basic principle that a few minutes more or less really do matter. They really, really do.

An alternative view is Ron Moore’s, that “I’ve got to cut this thing down, but the real episode will be on DVD.” But as I’ve said before, the “extended-length” DVD episodes are rarely better than the aired ones. The advantage of a longer running time is not just the ability to include extra scenes, but to subtly change the way shows are written and shot. A show is either a 43-minute type of show or a 48-minute type of show; if Mad Men had to be 43 minutes in its initial airings (and still make sense), it would not magically become its original self again on an extra-length DVD.

Better Her Than Caroline Kennedy

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, December 8, 2008 at 5:33 PM - 0 Comments

Fran Drescher has volunteered to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate. She already has experience speaking out against explicit content in the recording industry.

And since I’m too late to make the 478th “Nanny State” joke, I’ll just say that I think Fran should have a job since Mr. Sheffield left her to merge with Sterling Cooper.

MAD MEN = SEX AND THE CITY?

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, December 8, 2008 at 3:57 PM - 1 Comment

I don’t just mean that they’re both Emmy-winning, critically-acclaimed, somewhat heartless cable shows with attractive casts and great clothes. I mean that Mad Men is on its way to becoming to men what Sex and the City was to women in the late ’90s and early ’00s (also Ally McBeal, for a little while): something that gets dragged into every cultural analysis of what women want, or what men want, or what women want in men or vice-versa and back again. Remember when you kept reading about Sex and the City and the question of what it meant for feminism? Well, the same thing is happening with Mad Men; it’s a convenient symbol of cultural longing for a time when men were men:

The popularity of the likes of Mad Men comes from a wave of nostalgia, says Kimmel, for a time when men were less confused about what it meant to be a man: “It’s the vicarious thing of ‘Look at how entitled Don Draper is! I wish it was like that in the workplace now, but now the women aren’t just the secretaries, they’re my goddamn boss!’

Continue…

Matt Weiner, MAD MEN and MAD Money

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 10:43 AM - 6 Comments

This has been rumoured for a while, but it’s now been confirmed that Matt Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, is demanding a big raise if he’s to come back for the third season and that the production company is considering replacing him.

As Jim Henshaw notes, “this is less art vs commerce than commerce vs commerce.” The controversy has little to do with Weiner’s vision for the show; it’s about money. Weiner wants to be paid comparably to the creators of other Emmy-winning cable shows; Lionsgate and AMC don’t want to pay that much. Scratch that: they probably can’t pay that much.

We don’t know the details, but it would be a mistake to assume that this is a case of the greedy network/studio stiffing the creator of the show. Mad Men is doing better in the ratings since it won the Emmy, but it’s still not a huge hit, and AMC is not HBO; it’s a collapsed basic-cable channel trying to build a brand as the basic-cable equivalent of HBO. There’s no way the creator of a show on AMC is worth as much as the creator of an HBO success, and it’s hard to believe that Weiner or his agent really expect to get that much. If I were conspiracy-minded I would speculate that he’s just not that interested in continuing with the show; I mean, I’m sure he loves the show, since it’s his life’s work and all, but he’s presumably getting bigger offers now, and it might be hard for him to justify turning down those other offers unless he can get something similar from AMC.

On the other hand (this is a very wishy-washy post) this could be just really, really hardball tactics on both Continue…