Category: Opinion

Netflix, FULLER HOUSE & BOJACK HORSEMAN – WTF?

FULLER HOUSE and BOJACK HORSEMAN brought to us by the same pioneering and innovative interweb video? How did it happen? Netflix, we hardly knew ye…know what we mean?
collage2by Alyson Herman

You know what they say: if you can’t beat ’em, throw up your hands at their inexplicable popularity and turn ’em into your personal rhetorical punching bag.

Or at least that’s been the case with Fuller House, a revival so pointless, cynical, and predictably awful that many critics, including ours, have opted to make their precious viewing hours somewhat worthwhile by taking off the gloves and going all in. The show is “a porn parody without the porn.” It’s“painstakingly re-creating and celebrating a program that was, in its heyday, a compilation of some of pre-millennial TV’s loudest and most contrived tendencies.” It’s “a dopey sitcom, but you can watch it with your entire family without offending anything but your intelligence.” It is, in short, god-awful. read article

The TV-Novel Complex

Time now for a fascinating look at that most insidious of cabals – the television-classic novel connection. Does TV still need to adapt already published toast-of-the-town type books? Or have we finally moved beyond the need for outside validation of television’s value?

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by Jonathon Sturgeon

Throughout its history, television has often relied on literature for a shot of self-esteem. In the 1950s, when TV lost its luster as a luxury item, when it became a mass product, it looked to literature for a boost – especially in Europe, where broadcasters in Germany and England adapted thousands of plays and novels for their “high cultural value.” Later, in the 1970s, American broadcasters needing to hook viewers over long stretches of time copied a hyper-literary “British” model that relied on adaptations of novels, old and new. Thus was born the television “miniseries,” or “novel for television,” the most noteworthy example of which was Alex Haley’s Roots, adapted by ABC in 1977. read article

“Unsolicited Flashbacks – The Sequel”

More of what it’s really like to be a successful TV writer, from someone who definitely knows:

by Earl Pomerantz

pomerantzphotoSo I’m working on my latest blog post one morning and I get a call from my daughter Anna:

“Dad!  My coworker just listened to a podcast where they interviewed Lorne Michaels.  And he mentioned your name!” read article

Dennis O’Neil: Deadpool and the Fat Fury

by Dennis O’Neil

HerbiePopneckerDeadpool? Who the heck is Deadpool? What the heck is a Deadpool?

That’s Deadpool? Looks like he’s wearing a costume that Spider-Man gave to the Salvation Army. Superhero, huh? With his own movie. It made how much? A hundred and thirty-five million dollars opening weekend? American money?

Yeah, I didn’t see Deadpool coming either. Oh sure, I caught some of the television commercials, but nothing on the screen made me want to plunk down the price of admission. I thought that maybe I’d watch it on cable, maybe some night after Marifran’s crashed. Or maybe we’d watch it together. Some time. Maybe. read article

Is TV Better Because More Playwrights are Writing It Now?

A fair question, all things considered. Let’s see what a top writer at one of the most prestigious and respected of U.S. theater organizations has to say on the subject, yeah?

1 of the top productions in TV's real 'Golden Age,' REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT
1 of the top productions in TV’s real ‘Golden Age,’ REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT

by Rob Weinert-Kendt

Television was supposed to kill films and print journalism and radio, right? Just as the movies once purportedly threatened to make theatre and the novel obsolete, or photography to obviate the art of painting, or recorded music to replace the concert…well, you see where I’m going with this. All of these media have changed irrevocably, some beyond recognition, and there has unquestionably been a lot of attrition—what economists rather coldly call “churn” (a moment of silence, please, for vaudeville, drive-in movies, LPs, well-stocked newsstands and bookstores).

But while I’ve read my share of Walter Benjamin and Neil Postman, I’m not inclined to declinism—at least no more than I am to utopianism—in regards to culture. To those who would deplore fragmentation and narrowcasting and niche-ification, I would reply with questions about hegemony, homogeneity, and monopoly: Were American arts and entertainment really better off with just three networks, Hollywood’s cartelized studio system, and a national theatre dominated by Broadway and tours? In the area I know the most about, I’d argue that the regional/resident theatre movement that sprang up in the 1960s and thereafter, for all its problems and shortcomings, offers a far richer and more variegated American theatre culture and literature than we would have had without it. read article