DIRTY MEDIUMISTS

"Oh, we don’t watch television in our house."

Smack that person with a Sony Grand WEGA.

This is one of most stupid and usually ill-reasoned things I hear come out of otherwise intelligent people's mouths.

“It’s just so full of mindless tripe, sex and violence." Yes. It is. Name me a medium that isn't. For every tome with a National Book Award seal on the cover, there’s a hundred bodice-rippers with thirty-seven different euphemisms for the penis per chapter. For every scholarly book by the likes of David McCullough or Shelby Foote, there’s a cash-in hackjob on Michael Jackson, Robert Blake, O.J. Simpson or whoever the sensationalist news story of the month might be. Just look at the New York Times Bestseller List. Not all of those books are exactly aspiring to high art.

You can read Jonathan Lethem or you can read Danielle Steele. You can listen to Bach or to Backstreet. You can read the Times or the Post. You can subscribe to Atlantic Monthly or to Swank. You can watch Cops or The Wire. It’s all a choice.

This tells me that the TV affects the Mediumists so that they must not have the capability to pass up The Simple Life. They would rather see a girl famous for being a rich slut when they could be watching a show with the wittiest dialogue this side of Dorothy Parker, Gilmore Girls. If given the choice between the amazing writing of Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing in which the dialogue is not unlike music, the ideas are challenging and the characters are fully realized, and the pretty, vapid denizens of the Big Brother house, they fear they'll go for the latter. Because The Job co-existed in the same medium as Baby Bob, they can't risk that they might turn on the wrong channel...and like it.

The biggest complaint I get from these Mediumist bastards is that the quality television gets cancelled and the idiot-box stuff continues on. Never mind that The West Wing is now in its seventh year, that Homicide ran for seven years, Gilmore Girls is in its sixth, and if you’re into sappy family oriented stuff, Seventh Heaven has run for ten years. I won’t even get into the edifying nature of entire channels like The History Channel, The Discovery Channel and PBfuckingS.).

Okay, so the quality stuff gets cancelled. Sure. The list is long. Sports Night, Boomtown, Firefly, Arrested Development, even eventually Homicide all were a little too good to last. Anything that’s particularly challenging in any way seems to have a strike against it going in, thus the craptacular reality shows and juvenille sitcoms thrive. Could it be because the people who should be watching these quality programs are too busy eschewing television all together. The Mediumists have created their own problem. What if everyone who thinks there isn't enough quality fiction out there just quit buying books altogether? I imagine there'd be even less of it.

I’ve also noted that they have no compunctions about dropping ten bucks per to go see two hours of entertainment that has generally been hacked apart and rewritten to satisfy studio notes that tend to belie a lack of audience understanding more than anything. The writing on television tends to be superior in many ways. There isn’t time to second guess the audience as much and there’s isn't as much concern with non-story considerations like how long people will stay in their seat and how many showings can be crammed into a day. A TV show is bound to treat it’s audience a little more intelligently that a movie that values effects and stunts over plot.

Look at TV another way. From Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, and Stephen J. Cannell in the past to the likes of Tom Fontana, Joss Whedon, Aaron Sorkin, Amy Sherman-Palladino, Ron Moore, Shawn Ryan, Denis Leary, and Rob Thomas today television has given us our modern Shakespeares. Before you think I might be overstating it or something, consider it this way. Who did Willy write for? Unwashed, uneducated groundlings who packed the dirt floor of the Globe for a few hours of escapist entertainment. Billy-boy was a TV writer. Now his works are crammed down the throat of every school kid despite the fact that the English language bears little resemblance to the form it took in the days when William had to make up words to get his point across (or to hit a rhyme). Will kids in a hundred years be studying scripts from The Twilight Zone? I think they should be now.

So next time somebody looks down their nose at you for watching television with its sex and violence, beat their ass like Buffy...and then do unto them as was done to Aceveda. And do it with a copy of The Da Vinci Code.

Then there's comic books...(sigh)

RNDOAM SFUTF

Alias is, as was generally conjectured, done after this season. As such, my Alias spec is next out of the rotation. A Supernatural spec is now in progress to take its place.

Hey, look. I got T-shirts. I'm making basically nothing on these, I may even lose money after fees. I just wanted one for myself, but I got carried away. Go take a look. Great for gift giving. I reserve the right to add designs at my whim, so check back every so often. This is likely going to be a temporary thing, so don't dawdle.

Reunion is cancelled. Not a tremendous surprise. I was kinda of digging it, though it is 99.44% pure soap. I admit I got dragged in by the one year per episode format and I liked trying to outguess it year-to-year. I was interested to see how Amy might have developed from fetus in the first episode to 19 year-old by the end of the season. The only reason I'm even mentioning this is because this series was doomed from the beginning. It premiered early in the season on September 8, then the following week it wasn't there, then the week after it was back, it maintained this schedule for...a week. Then it was gone for a month. When it came back, it took a hit of like 27% (I don't recall exactly and I don't feel like looking it up.) What did Fox think was going to happen?

Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Leonard Dick's Lost commentary podcast was much better than the usual 20 minute all promo junk podcasts and the Lost writing staff should do this more often. Nothing like adding value to free TV.

HANG A LANTERN ON IT

From this week's episode of House, "Hunting" by Liz Friedman.

HOUSE
I don't want to repeat myself.
People will say I'm formulaic.

I like House.

"NOT TO PUT TOO FINE A POINT UPON IT"

First thing's first, but not necessarily in that order.

If there be a kind soul out there what might be willing to slip me an illicit copy of Aaron Sorkin's pilot script for Studio 7 on the Sunset Strip, I'd be indebted to ye. What exactly that might be worth is a whole other thing.




So I grabbed the first episode of BBC's new version of Bleak House by Charles Dickens. This is what Gillian Anderson has been up to lately, so it's already got points with me. She very much was (and continues to be), as one British interviewer put it (though stealing from Frank Muir), the "thinking man's crumpet."

What makes this different from some of the stodgier adaptations of classic English Literature is that, despite it being a period piece, the feel is very modern. The director has effectively established the visual language he'll be using in just the first three minutes or so. It has elements of the pseudo-documentary style as seen on such recent fare as The West Wing (campaign road episodes) and Battlestar Galactica. In the first few seconds there's a rack focus that says this ain't yer daddy's Masterpiece Theatre. Also some little visual tricks like high-speed zooms and jump cuts. Most of the show is fairly normal Steadicam, not too gimmicky or overly shaky. Just not stuff you usually get from this sort of thing.

Andrew Davies wrote this adaptation. He also adapted the delightfully devious House of Cards series some while back. He takes on Dickens' skewering of the arcane British legal system and gives the dialogue a realistic-feeling charge where many other historical dramas may be inclined to go all flowery.

Bleak House will run fifteen episodes. I've learned that Region 1 DVD's are in the near future so I'll catch up with it at that time.

Right. They can get Bleak House out in short order, but where's the hell's the new Doctor Who series on American shores, eh? I'll be getting the Canadian Region 1 release, that's for damn sure. Health care system and Doctor Who. Sounds like good enough reason to migrate.

I would like to, someday, adapt Dickens' greatest and most overlooked work, Strumpet Yard, into a television mini-series. A feature film wouldn't do it justice. It was written to be serialized in Smatterly's Stories for Guttersnipes in 1833-34 and is perfect for twelve one-hour episodes. And Mister Farquhar is too complex a character to be given short shrift in anything less.

It amazes me that of the BBC, Merchant-Ivory, whatever...no one has made this.

COMMERCE HOLES

I am one of those people who don't bother with racing through the commercials when I time shift. Usually. I don't have that much of a problem with them. Sometimes, I welcome the opportunity to hit the fridge and I recognize they're a necessity in network television.



Knock it off!!! Just stuff extra commericals into the four act breaks, okay? The pacing is a little off a little too often. On Lost, I think it really hurts some episodes.



The one where it really bugs me the most is on Commander In Chief. While I have enjoyed the season up until the first Bochco episode, "Rubie Dubidoux and the Brown Bound Express," (I'm a little concerned now and that title...ugh). I think most episodes have suffered from an abliity to establish a good rhythm with the viewer. I still liked the show, but I thought it could have been a little better with out the "chunking." I dare say that in some episodes, it's easy to see where an act got broken in half to accomodate the commerical structure. I remain glued to the continuing misadventures of Nathan Templeton (R-Florida).



The thing is, this extra segment doesn't have to screw things up. Whatever one may think of Star Trek these days, Star Trek: The Next Generation, from about third season to sixth season, was one of the best written shows on the air at the time. Teaser and five acts. Worked much more often than not. Same goes for Deep Space Nine.



Another thing is that we're getting more soft outs going into commecials. I don't generally have a problem with a soft out here and there, but sometimes, it's getting forced to fall somewhere that really breaks the pacing. I guess those would be the broken acts.

(Okay, I'll stop.)

Does it really make a difference? There's TiVo, which makes ad-skipping easier than it had been with VCRs. There's DVD's, where you can now watch last year's shows in big commerical-free chunks. I know one guy who's taken to just skipping watching Lost with every intent of grabbing the DVDs (from comics, this is called "waiting for the trade"). Are today's professional TV writers pacing their shows to be time-shifted or watched live (that's an invitation for comment for those actually writing some TV (which presupposes that someone's reading this (I really enjoy parenthesis (overuse of which is considered to be a trait of Generation X by Salon))))?

That's something I try to balance in writing specs. I want to show that I can pace for breaks, but I also know that these specs will only ever be read and never shot, so I want it to read well.

I'm just happy that there are more people just sitting around watching TV when it happens than not. If everybody skipped the ads and waited for the trade, then we'd be down several channels and that's considerably less job opportunities for the TV writer who already has to contend with reality television.

SUPER CONCENTRATED

How about the half-hour drama?

There used to be shows like this, but now the half-hour format belongs to the comedies. Why not try a few half hour dramas? They worked before? Dragnet was half an hour. Have Gun Will Travel. Even Gunsmoke started out in a thirty minute time slot.



I know there's probably some discussion about what the audience will accept. Well, there hasn't been one of these in so long, how can anyone really know what the audience will accept at this point. There have been syndicated attempts like Jack of All Trades (which I loved, but it was really a comedy) or Cleopatra 2525 (which I did not, but was a straight-up sci-fi adventure program), but I'm on about some serious game networks or cable channels.



What got me really thinking about this is another visual medium close to my heart. Comics. While the done-in-one story has been a rarity in comics for about twenty-plus years, they're creeping back in. Warren Ellis' Fell is predicated on the slab-of-culture format that says you should get a complete story for a low price. It's also bloody fantastic. A dark, edgy detective story (where "dark, edgy" is defined as if all other dark, edgy detective stories are kind of smurfy).



Then, last week, I picked up the first issue of a new run of Jonah Hex from DC Comics. In the seventies and early eighties, Hex was like a gritty western TV series on paper. Each issue was a complete story. A morality tale usually. Jonah would pick up at the end of the issue and move on to the next town, or the next job. This new run appears to be doing the same thing. The first issue is a complete, edgy western tale with a slight dose of the strange.



Either one of these books could easily be a TV show, but the content of the issue, taken at face value, would give you about 22 minutes of screen time. That's a half hour show. No extraneous stuff, the format would force some tight storytelling. Thirty minutes seems a great format for escapist adventures, like Fell or Jonah Hex.

When I wrote my spec pilot, King Vs. Queen, what I really wanted to do was write it as a 30 minute crime drama with lots of shooting. Well, there's not much of a spec market place for such a thing, so I went with the typical 55-60 pages of crime drama with just some shooting.

Surely there's budget versus return issues, but there must be a way to work that out. I leave that to people better than me. People who can count.

Maybe someday.

Not today.

MICHAEL PILLER 1948-2005

Michael Piller died this week.

Piller was not one of those uber-popular showrunner types like Whedon, Bochco, Carter or whomever. He probably should have been though. He started out on Simon & Simon, went through Miami Vice and landed on Star Trek: The Next Generation in the third season where he turned it around and made the show...for lack of a more accurate term, good. Because before he got there, it sucked harder than a than a hooker named Hoover.

It was on ST: TNG that he began a policy that he carried with him to one of his last shows, The Dead Zone. Open script submissions. He knew full well that the best way to find some kick-ass stories was not to only listen to pitches from people who just happened to live in the area and had more to suggest that they were good networkers rather than good writers. He took pitches from Arizona postmen, New York waiters, and midwest college drop-outs. Sometimes he bought those pitches. Sometimes those pitches yielded something really good. Without this policy, we probably wouldn't have Ron Moore or Rene Echevarria.

For that alone, he kicked some mighty cathode ass.

Additionally, he was a carrier of the Minear curse well before we had a name for it. He was involved in a couple of shows that were too good for the available audience. One was Probe, which starred Parker Stevenson as an acerbic super-genius who solved various crimes. A little too smart, maybe.

The other, and a favorite of mine to this day, was Legend. One of the earliest of the UPN series. It starred Richard Dean Anderson as a drunken writer in the 1880's who impersonated the main character of his dime novels. He was accompanied by John DeLancie as Janos Bartok, who was basically a fictionalized version of Nikola Tesla (a real life mad scientist). A sort of sci-fi western. It was heavy on the comedy and the roles suited those actors better than anything else they have ever done. Ever. Well, we all know what tends to happen to westerns on TV. (And I will totally pay cash money for illicit decent quality DVD's of the series to replace my fading VHS tapes because both this and Probe need DVD releases and will probably never get them).

He was a good showrunner and a good writer who seemed to have a real love for the medium and an understanding of the struggles of the aspiring writer and, ultimately, he is probably the reason I hack out specs like I do.

Thanks, Mike.