MFE: BOOMTOWN: "The David McNorris Show"

Multi-Fungal Experimentation?

My Favorite Episodes.

Boomtown was a massive case of being too clever for the average audience (something to be applauded and to never be afraid of, because sometimes, you click with them). The premise was that we saw a crime, one point-of-view at a time. Over the course of the hour, these POV's (jumping back and forth in the chronology) added up to the complete story. Usually with some kind of twist coming in the last one which would pull it all together. It was a challenging show that expected you to pay attention and use your 3 pounds of head meat for 42 minutes out of an hour. Then the show got simplified, but still remained interesting through the remainder of a shorter-than-usual season. The second season just didn't work at all and was cancelled before the some of the six produced episodes hit the air.

One of the best parts of this show was Neal McDonough's Los Angeles Assistant District Attorney, David McNorris. Here was a broken man. Through the year, we watched his alcoholism grow. And it wasn't a typical TV alcoholism that destroyed his life. He didn't have affairs because of his alcoholism. He wasn't a dick because of his alcoholism. Jack Daniels just kind of piled on to this guy and, as expected, "The David McNorris Show" (by Laurie Arent) shone a spotlight on him.

In short, McNorris is called upon by a Hollywood producer to handle a dicey situation for him in which his son is accused of murder. The producer is unconcerned with whether or not junior did it, as long as he gets away with it. Yeah, Dad is a slimeball. More literally than you think.

McNorris's father, we learn was questionable as well. He was a "fixer." He made ugly problems go away...know what I mean? And here McNorris, a hard-edged and justice-minded D.A. was now being called upon to do the same thing and in doing so, his political career would be aided.
Does our hero make the right choice?



Fuck, no. That's why this one stands out to me. To quote a guy quoting another guy, "As if it matters how a man falls down? When the fall is all that's left, it matters a great deal."

Some mention should also be made of "Blackout" (by Fred Golan) in David's alcoholism comes to a head and he tries to cover up a drunk driving incident that resulted in a...fatality.

Boomtown on DVD.

CANADIANS ARE GOOD FOR SOMETHING

Well, we knew that already, because of Denis McGrath and John Rogers and William Shatner and having a functioning healthcare system and Vancouver and-- yeah there goes the whole premise of the title, but there is...another.

The check is in the mail. Okay, there is no check, because there is no fee for the ABC/Disney Writing Fellowship, but every other damn thing is in the mail. From the agreement letter (which I had do a little reorganization so that the notarization is actually on the same page as the signature and in accordance with the instructions) to the proof of registration (which I forgot last year, due to a case of raging stupidity) to the script itself (the one thing I could be sure not to screw up in any way other than in the writing of it).

Yeah, I like parentheses. Fuck you.

I sent in my Veronica Mars spec and I think it's much better than it once was and I'll tell you why. It's because of a (more or less) random Canadian, whom we shall refer to as Random Canadian. A film student and a Veronica Mars fan, Random contacted me both out of professional (academic?) curiosity and VM withdrawal. He said he'd like to read my spec and I agreed with the caveat that he would provide me with notes on it. They didn't have to be extensive, but they had to be honest.

"I don't know you, you don't know me and we're not likely to ever meet each other, so tell me what you really think and don't hold back."

Just because I said it...or rather wrote it, doesn't mean anything. I'd just have to see what I got back from Randy. When I give a script to a friend to read (which I don't do very often at all) I tell them I want an honest assessment and that if there isn't one negative criticism in what I'm told, I'll likely disregard all the positive ones. Very few scripts in the world are perfect, if any, and it would be the height of hubris (who I understand is about 5'9") to think that anything I write is every perfect. Orson Welles once said something about I'm about to paraphrase in the same way a tornado rearranges furniture. "A script is never finished, just abandoned."

So I heard back from RC and there was praise for capturing the characters voices and the general feel of the show. There were other favorable comments and then...there was the negatives. How sick is it that seeing some negative criticism warmed the cockles of my cold, dead heart?

One really hit me. I didn't use more of the supporting cast. I had kept it pretty tight between Veronica, Wallace and Weevil. I had to get Logan in there better. And a new C plot came to mind. One that creates a little twist in the B plot. Just the kind of interaction I was looking for. I wanted something like that between B and A, but there just wasn't enough time. Which isn't to say that I'm unhappy with it. I'm not. And I'm not going to send out a script I'm not happy with. Why should anyone else be happy about it to the tune of a fifty grand stipend and what-not if I can't get at least 90% behind it (because no script is perfect).

This maybe this spec's last chance to work for me, seeing as next year Veronica goes to UC Sunnydale-- I mean Hearst College, Neptune CA. The basic idea could likely still be used, but it will be a page-one-rewrite.

So it got all packed up, checked and rechecked for all components, and sent via Priority Mail to the House of the Mouse and the Land of the Lost. Now, I just don't think about it at all until it's clearly much to late to still be expecting a call.

MFE: THE WIRE: "Old Cases"

Moroccan Fez Exchange?

My Favorite Episodes.

I will not even get into detail about this particular first season episode of The Wire. There's a lot to this series and it just doesn't break-down so easy. It is a unique beast in series television that expects you to pay close attention to every episode, doesn't cheat real-life at all (meaning it can pace out slow and it doesn't care) and pays off big at the end.

This one (by David Simon) is singled out for the scene. The fuck scene. Not a sex scene. Detectives Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) and Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce) examine a cleaned-out, vacant apartment, trying to piece together a murder that happened there from old crime scene photos. The only dialogue in this entire scene is the word "fuck" and variations thereof. A couple dozen-plus times. Each one means something, but they do not tell the story.

Television is a visual medium and a writer must not forget that. This is the ultimate (well, it's up there) example of show, don't tell. We see an entire crime reconstructed by two guys walking around a small apartment and explaining nothing. Their dialogue (such as it is) serves to tell us about them as they move through the story of a young woman's last moments.

This one, however, has a great example of "tell, don't show." When a character relates an anecdote. In this case, Lester (Clarke Peters) relates to McNulty the story of how a good police winds up working the pawn shop unit for fourteen years. Some things are a story to be literally told. It's also the source of a great callback nine episodes later.

BTW, if you were a fan of Homicide: Life On the Street and you're not watching this, on either cable or DVD, then...seriously...what the fuck be wrong with you? This like Homicide II!

WHEDON & MAMET & MILCH, OH MY!

Go have a butcher's. CLICKEDY.

SO COMPLETELY IN THE DARK ON SO MANY THINGS

Being awake at around noon is not just rare for me, it is an undesireable state of being and I avoid it like I avoid mentioning Jennifer Aniston in polite conversation.

Damn.

That said, I found myself in a very suburban Borders the other day (so suburban that it was neither in CA or NY, but that's a whole other story in a post that is going to have so many tangents in it, there may be a need for a mathematics degree), in the magazine section, when I overheard a cell phone conversation and by "overheard" I mean "was actively listening to and should have taken notes." This was a guy with a generally Land's End sense of style and figured him for being a mid-six figures kind of guy and is probably about to peak his mid-life crisis by year's end. He's probably driving an augmented penis. You know. That guy.

So he's on the phone and he's talking to someone who I thought was named Tom, but it might have been this cell phone guy's name. He's berating the fellow for just getting out of bed. He called to say "You're on the cover of Harper's Bazaar this week, did you know that? You didn't know that? You'd think you'd keep track of that sort of thing."

Well, this got me interested. Because, for one thing, Jennifer Aniston (fuck!) is on that cover, not some guy named Maybe Tom. And she was photographed by Alexi Lubomirski, not Maybe Tom. Alexi, according to his managment's website, is based in New York City. This guy (Maybe Tom), based on my NSA imitation, was in Miami. Not entirely impossible Alexi was in Miami. My read of Ass (as I'm calling cell phone guy) was that he doesn't hang around with high fashion photographers from New York. I suspect he only hangs around with the Vice President of Marketing. The one he can beat at golf. Not the cool one.

It then occured to me that this guy is quite possibly only knowledgable in whatever his chosen profession might be and completely ignorant in everything else (like the vascular surgeon who doesn't know how to pump gas or The Todd). Ass looks like the kind of guy who frequently blanks on the name of his third and current wife. Maybe he meant Harper's Magazine. Hell, it could be anything at this point.

Harper's has got an Art Spiegelman illustration cover. No fucking way this guy knows Art Spiegelman. As I said, Ass is an ignorant ass. The kind that will sit there and read Travel Lesiure for the rest of the time I was in the store after telling his pal "I have to go. I've got to get some food."

Maybe it was Kevin Baker. I dunno.

All that is the stop-over-in-Minneapolis way of getting to this. Ass's buddy is on the cover on a national magazine, and be it Harper's Bazaar or the other Harper's, he got there sleeping until noon. What the fuck magazine are you on the cover of?

It was also here that I noticed that the latest Scrye Magazine, for which I wrote an interview with the designers of the Battlestar Galactica CCG had two covers this month. The one I got had Magic: The Gathering on the cover, but the one in Borders had Jamie Bamber and Katee Sackhoff. That means I had the cover story. Not that it changes the size of my check.

Back to the pack.

"Wasting the day," Ass said. As these...these...circadianists frequently say. Those who can't wrap their minds around the fact that one can never even see the sun except in pictures can be productive. What difference does it make if there's light out or not? It's as arbitrary as saying "hey, eat a peanut butter sandwhich because it's raining." If one needs to conform to banker's hours for a reason, then we'll do it and then get right back to one's own schedule.

You know what else? No traffic at night.

Oh, and then there's the productivists. Maybe I don't want to be productive, and if I have the resources to live as I wish without being productive, then so be it. Hell, if you spend money, then you're productive. You're fueling the economy.

Occasionally someone gets on me (not the fun way) for being a "vampire." What do I need daylight for? I'm a writer. I have worked exclusively as a writer for a little while now (yeah, that's not gonna last). I can do that anytime. I choose to do it from about 11PM to sometime before the big burning baby head comes up.

There's someone I work with on one of the things on which I work who calls me before two. Nothing with that thing happens urgently. Before noon, I don't answer anymore. It goes to voicemail. Before two, it's 50/50. He's not reading this. And that's what people I know get for not reading this.

I don't need the day and the day doesn't need me. And if by some chance I manage to get myself staffed next staffing season (through use of blackmail photographs of Sorkin or Lindelof or Ryan or whomever doing naughty things with a length of Twizzler, a can of Play-Doh and four meth-addicted truckers (because the meth-addicted truckers alone just isn't enough), then keeping office hours is going to be a thing.

Unless there's some chance I'll get to see Jennifer Aniston on the lot.

BOX OFFICE COLD WAR VICTIM

So Lionsgate has apparently dropped plans for a film based on Marvel Comics' superspy Black Widow. This is based on disappointing box office for leading action heroines, such as Ultraviolet and Æon Flux. Never mind that those movies are just excuses for wirework in a flashy package and looked like crappy video games.

It's like some kind of cold war manuevering, trying to out-think the market. This manuever is called total surrender.

I'm not entirely certain what writer/director David Hayter had in mind, but I doubt that's the model he was going for, based on the comments in one of the above links. I think Black Widow should be closer to a female Bourne flick with just the slightest, slightest bit of Alias thrown in. A mix of politics and action in a black catsuit (because come on, she's supposed to be hawt, throw the guys a...well, a bone).

Check out the two mini-series by Richard K. Morgan, you'll see what I mean. Especially the first one, Homecoming (though I really like the title of the second one, The Things They Say About Her).

Normally I don't comment on films. It's not where my head is at. Why am I commenting on this? Because Black Widow should be a TV show. This is where female heroines do work. Buffy ran for seven years, Alias was popular for the first few seasons. Starbuck's more front and canter than Apollo in the hero role on Battlestar Galactica. Let's throw in Veronica Mars while we're at it. I think it's because there's less wasted on being sexy and flashy in pursuit of nine bucks American at the box office and/or twenty for the DVD.

There's a whole treatment in my head.

It's #8,691 on my list of things that aren't fucking likely.

MFE: MILLENNIUM: "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me"

MFE. Mutha' Fuckin' Episcopalians?

No. My Favorite Episodes. A new feature here in the lair. Occasionally I'll go into the vaults and highlight a really good episode of something. There are no rankings or limitations. Just whatever I dig. And in honor of this auspicious date, I have made a thematic choice for the inaugural MFE.

"Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me," (from Millennium) was written by the brilliant Darin Morgan. Easily one of the best writers ever to put hand to word processor in the entirety of the Ten-Thirteen family of programs. His first X-Files, "Humbug," is where the show started casting a skewed eye on itself and began the shows tradition of occasionally favoring more humor and taking the piss out of itself. Some of these are some of the show's best episodes, and in a future MFE, I'm sure I'll hit one or two of them.

Morgan is, in fact, the only X-Files writer to win an Emmy for writing on the series. And he only wrote four. This Millennium is one of only two. The real shame here is that these six fantastic hours of television are the only one's he's written (and a story credit on "Blood").

Like his other works, this episode breaks many of the conventions of the series as well as of television in general. For one thing, star Lance Henriksen's character Frank Black, while central, appears very little. Instead this episode follows the tales of four old demons sitting around in a coffee shop complaining about work (work being corrupting human souls and what-not). Each demon's tale involves a certain roving forensic profiler crossing through the path of their story.

Usually a very dark and even somber series, this episode was a comedy and the "angels & demons" aspect that colored the second season (after the serial killer laden first season and before the conspiracy-laden third) got right in your face.

The stories are both very human and absurd at the same time. Each vignette is has a bit of Twilight Zone to it and in looking at Morgan's work, Serling is clearly an influence.

In one demon's tale (Blurk, Bill Macy), he facilitates a serial killer who idolozes Johnnie Mack potter, the most prolific serial killer of all, only to seem him caught and jailed at a tie. He's then imprisoned with Potter, who kills him, getting one up.

The next demon (Abum, Richard Bakalyan)tells of an everyman leading a desperate life who only needs one minor tweak to send him spiraling into suicide.

The third (Greb, Alex Diakun) tells a ridiculous tale of a network TV censor who flips out postal style in a spree of violence as a result of being too...censory.



The last demon speaks of his encounter with a young man who (getting a little spoilery here) saw his old man human façade in a strip club and reacted in horror, not because he saw a demon, but because he saw his own future. This inspired the demon (Toby, Wally Dalton) to chuck his demoning and he took up with an over-the-hill exotic dancer, who saw through that façade and accepted Toby nonetheless. Toby, however, could not break his old ways of breaking people and instead of proposing marriage, breaks it off with her in an ugly. She commits suicide and Toby at the scene, has a bit of a break-down. It is here that he crosses paths with Frank, who can see that he is a demon and reacts only by saying "You must be so lonely."

The episode was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award.

In the realm of spec writing, this is a horrible example to look at in that all of what makes it great is exactly the opposite of what makes a good spec. What I think is important here is that sometimes a good story will force you out of the box and it's not a bad thing to go there one there once in a while. Can this be applied to spec writing? Yes. In a careful measure. the trick is taking that wild idea, and making fit into the box without losing it's uniqueness. In a spec, it has to fit in the box. You are demonstrating that you can play in someone else's sandbox.

Is there a show that could get away with such extreme format-breaking story-telling today? Buffy and Angel used to do go off and do weird stuff, but they had a broad format to do these things.

Now, though? Lost could almost do it, but I think they're too buried in their ongoing arcs and continuity. I'm not sure how the mainstream Lost audience would take it. Even if they did, it would probably all stay in the flashbacks.

The trick is not getting so far outside the box, you can't see it anymore. Case in point, The West Wing (here we go again) episode "The Long Goodbye." It was well written, to be sure. I'm not about to argue John Patrick Shanley. Guy knows his shit...mostly. It was, however, barely, if even, a West Wing episode. It was C.J. and her Alzheimer's ridden father and an old boyfriend in Dayton, Ohio. I really didn't get what I want, and despite it being good, I frequently skip over it on the DVD.

House will break its own format from time to time (and with amazing effect). How far are they willing to go? Can we see an episode in which House doesn't in fact treat anyone, or go to the hospital?

Maybe he's having one hell of a weird day. House wins the lottery. Something medical in there somewhere maybe. Talks to a lawyer, draws out aspects in the supporting cast. All this with a skewed eye toward the series itself, playing with it's own connventions. Everyone lies, maybe House lied about the ticket. It's not a winner. "April fool's, but now I know what everyone would do. " There really is money and he did give it away , and how much like House would it be if he actually gave away the money to the least likely suspect...some random bum. What does it say about him? /SPITBALL

Smallville not only could do it, they should do it. That shows takes itself way too seriously sometimes.

Veronica Mars? Yeah, but I think it would really divide the fans on that show. There's an unhealthy amount of fan-ownership of the characters on that one, I think. I'm still amazed to learn that there are a lot of VM fans out there that didn't care for the second season.

Bones could totally do it. The X-mas episode is the closest I've seen to it, but it wasn;t that far removed and I haven't seen them all.

Next on MFE...whatever I damn well feel like.