Month: May 2015

Is Marvel’s ‘Daredevil’ TV Show Overrated?

Some people think so. (This TVWriter™ minion admits to being one of them.) Mostly we keep our traps shut to avoid conflict. Forbes’ Benjamin Moore, OTH, has no trouble saying what he thinks:

Daredevil_wallpaper_colored_by_sethfrailby Benjamin Moore

Every once in a while, a movie or a TV show will debut to stellar reviews – from critics and the ravenous Internet hive mind – and I’m left feeling like I’m taking crazy pills.

By now, you’ve probably seen the new Daredevil series on Netflix NFLX +1.96%, or at least heard about how amazing it is from your brother-in-law. He loves everything Marvel has ever made, except for Iron Man 3 because how dare that Shane Black fellow make a joke of supervillain/racist caricature The Mandarin. And this new Daredevil series? Well, it’s the best Marvel thing yet, in his opinion – it’s like The Wire of superhero TV shows, only even better than that might imply. read article

Herbie J Pilato: When reconstructing the “Bionic” world….

jamie sommers

by Herbie J Pilato

Back in 2007, NBC debuted and cancelled its new Bionic Woman, a reboot of the classic 1970’s female sci-fi sequel to that same decades’ Six Million Dollar Man series, starring Lee Majors as Steve Austin, the bionic man (both of which were originally on ABC).

David Eick was the executive producer of the new Woman, but he failed to work the same magic he had performed with the then- recent re-do of another small-screen sci-fi classic: Battlestar: Galactica.  As Eick told the Syfy Channel’s Battlestar upfront presentation to advertisers in New York on March 18, 2008, “I just felt that the process [of reinventing TBW] was so frustrating, and the conditions under which we were making that show never really came to fruition in such a way that I felt like we could make the show well.  The actress [Michelle Ryan] we found was wonderful.  Some of the writing was good.”

Yet, Eick added, “We just didn’t ever bring it all together like we did with Battlestar.  At a certain point, when it becomes that frustrating, I think you’re better off to say, ‘Let’s try again another time, and let it go.’” read article

Cartoon: “A Reader’s Manifesto”

Incidental Comics’ Grant Snider hits another bullseye:

AReadersManifesto-Blog

Six Characteristics of Great Storymaking

In case you wondered how advertisers and marketing mayvens view the story creation process:

storyby David Berkowitz

It’s easy to call storytelling a cliché, but how exactly can one move beyond it when storytelling is entrenched as the epitome of what defines great marketing?

In previous Ad Age columns and during the Ad Age Digital Conference this April, storymaking has kept coming up as a way to describe the shift away from the broadcast-era mentality of storytelling to a new approach where marketers build on stories that people share with each other. Yet storymaking needs to be dissected so that anyone can identify it, learn from it, and engage in it themselves. read article

Peggy Bechko Tells Writers: “Keep Writing!”

Keep-Going

by Peggy Bechko

TV Writer? Screenwriter? Novelist?

I won’t mention writers of shorter pieces because that’s not what I’m going to focus on in this post.

The crux of the matter here is do you have a couple of half-finished novels on your hard drive? Screenplays maybe? You get going with lots of steam and a great idea that’s exciting and motivating, but somewhere along the line something happens. Maybe it feels like the original premise hits a dead end or the writer gets confused about where the original destination was or it just isn’t coming together the way it was hoped. read article