Category: Opinion

Why Serialized TV is Bad for TV

Has TV really become too ambitious for its own good? There’s an argument to be made, and Sam Adams makes it well:

Visit Eat Your Serial. You'll like it!
Visit Eat Your Serial. You’ll like it!

by Sam Adams

The current era of Peak TV owes much of its existence to the increasing sway of serialized storytelling. The availability of TV seasons on DVD and then streaming allowed TV creators to think in seasons rather than seasons rather than episodes, putting their characters through genuine changes rather than hitting the reset button every time the end credits rolled.

But treating TV seasons as unified wholes has its drawbacks, too. As I wrote over the summer, the canard that TV has become more like novels allows writers and showrunners to gloss over a multitude of flaws on the episodic level, with the justification that it will all make sense in the end. Sure, it was manipulative to lead viewers of “The Walking Dead” on for an entire month with a phony death, but maybe the deception won’t seem so egregious when Glenn is stuck under that Dumpster for hours instead of weeks. For shows designed to be binge-watched, episodic divisions become almost irrelevant, mere mile-markers on the journey to the finish line. (I’d argue that binge-watch shows still need those mile-markers to give viewers the periodic dopamine hits of incremental progress, but that’s an essay for another time.) read article

The Difference Between a Great Story and a Shitty Story

…Is often very, very small. And yet it could be the absolutely biggest thing you need to know:

mindthegapby Charlie Jane Anders

Hollywood people often say that it’s a miracle there are any good movies at all. Because so much can go wrong, and so many random things have to go right, for a movie to avoid being a hopeless disaster. I can believe this, because in general the difference between the good and bad versions of the same story is often razor-thin.

This is kind of a depressing thing to realize, because you would kind of hope that it would be easy to tell if a story is going to work or not. Like, either your soufflé rose or it didn’t, right? And you ought to be able to tell if a story is “clicking” or if it’s just kind of a mess, because the pieces either fit together neatly or they don’t. read article

John Ostrander revisits NERO WOLFE

Nero-Wolfe

by John Ostrander

My mother once told me that an odd pleasure she had in growing older was that she could go back to favorite books, particularly mysteries, and enjoy them all over again because she didn’t remember the ending. She knew she liked it but she could discover it anew.

That’s happening a bit to me these days. I’ve recently started re-reading Rex Stout’s mysteries featuring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin (not to be confused with the late, great comics writer and editor with the same name, although that would have been an interesting pairing as well). I read quite a few of them a few decades back but not all of them; that would be a monumental task since Stout wrote 33 novels and about 40 novellas about Wolfe and Goodwin. read article

SHIT MY DAD SAYS writer wants credit for killing Hollywood’s love affair with Twitter

And know what? he deserves it. TVWriter™ doffs its collective cap to Justin Halpern. Well played, sir. Very well done.

tvs_twitter_gold_rushby Justin Halpern

In 2009, When I sold my Shit My Dad Says Twitter feed to CBS, the most common response was, “They bought a Twitter feed? Hollywood is completely out of anything resembling an original idea.” (The second most common was, “Fuck you.” There was a random guy who just tweeted me “fuck you” every day for a year, the longest relationship I’ve had aside from my wife.) If I’m being honest, I would have agreed with all of the above if it hadn’t been my Twitter feed.

Now that I’ve worked as a TV writer for six years, I’ve come to realize why networks were eager to buy my feed. Writers and broadcast networks have a specific relationship. Think of them as a middle-aged married couple who has sex once a week, mostly in the missionary position, then rolls over and cruises on their iPads. Both parties might like to try something new, but nobody wants to make a move that ends up going so badly that you can’t look at each other in the morning. read article

Current TV Shows LB is Now Giving Up

whiteflag

by Larry Brody

The latest list of series I’ve recorded the latest episodes of but know damn well I’m never going to watch:

  • DOCTOR WHO
    When Russell T. Davies brought back DOCTOR WHO 10 years ago the Doctor was a hero who took as much delight in being in danger as he did in extricating himself and others from it. Under Steven the Imposter Moffat the Doctor became, first, a self-doubting human-like fool, and now, a true villain who destroys everyone with whom he comes into contact. I love Peter Capaldi as an actor but won’t watch the show again till the Moff’s been replaced by a real showrunner who knows what the gig’s all about.
  • BONES
    This cute romantic buddy show has aged into one in which star David Boneanaz has aged into a new personification of the role that made him famous. No, I don’t mean Angel from the show of the same name, I mean Angelous, Angel’s dark side. This is what happens to formerly nice people who become producers, whether they start out as actors, writers, or lovers.
  • THE LIBRARIANS
    I tried, really I did, but if I wanted insipid pseudo-science adventures about ancient, magical artifacts, I would have watched WAREHOUSE 13. And THE LIBRARIANS, unfortunately, is an even weaker version of the same premise, proving that TNT makes even worse sci-fi than SyFy.
  •  SCORPION
    The stupidity of this series’ action-packed yet purely technological MacGuffins and the absurdity of its premise that high I.Q.s are what define genius and all geniuses have the most obnoxious forms of Asperger’s Syndrome have combined over the past year and a half to create genius-level boredom. The show has been pure self-parody since halfway through the pilot, and although I wanted to believe that was deliberate, I’m sad to say that I can’t fool myself anymore.
  • NCIS
    I discovered NCIS while recovering from a heart attack and accompanying surgery. Now, after seeing almost 13 full seasons I finally have healed enough to realize that as much fun as this series’ ’70s TV-like presentation can be, its gung-ho chauvinism and repetition of the same 2 plots week after week have severed its spine…which ain’t easy considering that it was made of jello.

And here’s a special bonus disappointment currently on Netflix:

  • LAST TANGO IN HALIFAX
    This BBC loser started off as a serious drama about something to which I totally related: Romance and the rediscovery of what’s important in life at an age when most people are just sitting around and waiting to die. I identified with Derek Jocobi as the male lead, Alan (even though both the actor and the character are substantially older than I am), and my wife felt the same about Anne Reid’s female lead, Celia. But at this moment, with 3 episodes left to watch in the third series, I’ve had it with the weak, self-pitying men and strong but catastrophically rigid women. All the characters keep on making the same mistakes, over and over and over, and I’ve written – and maybe lived – enough soap opera to never be able to put myself in a place where I can enjoy it.

That’s it for now, kids. Off I go to spend a few pleasant moments of pushing, “Delete, delete, delete….” read article