Category: By Guests

“Television used to suck.”—Frank Darabont

A reminder of things past…and how much like the present they really are…courtesy of Screenwriting from Iowa:

  

“I was reminded of how badly television used to suck. And you will be reminded if you go buy like a DVD set of any show that was popular prior to, I don’t know 1990-something. And you take your favorite show from the 80s—I promise you it sucks. They’re simpleminded, they’re stupid, television used to be a wasteland. It started to change in some measure with Hill Street Blues, and then suddenly television started getting smarter and movies started getting dumber. And suddenly there were these men who drive Maseratis, and wear Gucci loafers to their offices who realized they could spend 200 million dollars making one movie that has not one thought in it, and nothing for an actor to do, but lots of special effects, and they can make a billion dollars. Interesting thing that’s happened in our business is that the middle class has disappeared. It’s like the middle class in society has disappeared. The middle-class of movies have disappeared. read article

Invisible Mikey: She’s OK, He’s Kinda Weird

Oliver and Lisa Douglas, and their neighbor’s son Arnold Ziffel.

In transitioning from a big town to a small town, I’ve been thinking back on the rich history of television comedies about this topic.  Comedy emerges from contrasts and conflicts. You can have stories where the main characters bring rural values to the city, like in The Beverly Hillbillies or Gomer Pyle, USMC, but it’s usually funnier the other way around.  Better comedy comes from having city folks move to the country.  The big-towners think they have life figured out, and they endure misadventures while being forced to readjust.  Viewers can delight as the artificial assuredness of the new residents is upset, their pomposity is punctured, their snobbishness skewered.

The first show of this kind that I liked was Green Acres.  In that show, which ran from 1965 to 1971, a couple from NYC buy a rundown farm in Hooterville.  Jay Sommers, the main writer, re-tooled it from an earlier radio show he did called Granby’s Green Acres.  At first it’s the husband’s idea to give up city life, and his wife doesn’t want to.  Once they arrive in the country, she decides she will do whatever she can to bring grace and culture to their new surroundings.  Eva Gabor played the wife as a glamorous ditz, sort of an upper-class, Hungarian version of Gracie Allen.  Eddie Albert farms in three-piece suits and makes patriotic speeches that cause “Yankee Doodle” to be played as underscore.  Other characters hear the music, but he can’t.

The show shared some aspects and characters from the world of Petticoat Junction, also set in the same fictional rural locales, but it was more absurd.  The main joke around which variants were created is that the residents of the Hooterville Valley live lives that follow no logical rules, yet they are happily, comfortably bound by the bizarre traditions they’ve decided to follow.  This irritates the lawyer from New York endlessly.  He’s the only character who can’t live without logic or gamely accept this off-kilter alternate world.  His daffy wife goes right along with it. read article

Peggy Bechko Gives Us Our Writerly Marching Orders

But she says it so nicely, with such…OMG!…class:

Three Helpful (I Hope) Writer’s Decrees Readers May Find Interesting – by Peggy Bechko (Peggy’s Blog)

Your Space, Research and Revision

There are a whole lot more than three of them, but well, I don’t have the time to go into all of them right now, or the space on my blog, or the typing finger (I just sliced it open while prepping food for Thanksgiving and the finger really  hurts when I hit a key). So, at great sacrifice I’m typing this up for your reading pleasure, edification, education, whatever you choose to consider it read article

A Whole Lot of the Universal Lot

TVWriter™’s longstanding friend, Angelo Bell, has been having some meetings lately and wants us all to know what they’re like:

  by Angelo

Monday I returned home after a visit to the NBC-Universal Lot. Building 1230 to be exact.

That makes 2 visits to the building in 4 months, to be really exact.  read article

What People Mean When They Say “Bad Writing”

There’s a difference between “good writing” and a “good book” or “good script.” Nathan Bransford gets it:

by Nathan Bransford

One thing about my Fifty Shades of Grey  post that inspired some mild controversy was my insistence that it’s not that badly written. read article