Glen-Larson: A verb meaning to combine and stoke up established TV formats so they become something more exciting without truly being new. (Today’s #PeoplesPilotTip)
For example:
How TV queen Shonda Rhimes combined classic formats, amped them up and changed the face of prime-time
by David Berry
Shonda Rhimes is quite possibly the hardest-working person in show business. Since 2007, she has never not had at least two full-length network television series for which she was both executive producer and show runner (i.e. the person responsible for not just the overall scope of a show, but also the one actually writing most of it, too). For a brief period, she had three: Grey’s Anatomy, now in its 12th season, Scandal, in its fifth, and Private Practice, which ended in 2013.read article
Are television executives really trying to give women and minorities more opportunities in TV’s promised land? The stats say, “Yes!” But does that mean it’s time for us to shout, “Hooray!”?
by Scott Collins
Shonda Rhimes, an African American writer-producer, is one of the most powerful people in the TV business. Last week, Disney’s ABC TV network made history by naming Channing Dungey to head its entertainment division, the first African American to fill that role.
In fact, even as the big screen industry is under fire for a lack of diversity, some of the most celebrated shows on TV showcase diversity, whether it is the African American family of ABC’s “black-ish,” the multiracial inmates on Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black” or the transgender dad on Amazon’s “Transparent.”read article
The statistics are unequivocal: Women and minorities are vastly underrepresented in front of and behind the camera. Here, 27 industry players reveal the stories behind the numbers — their personal experiences of not feeling seen, heard or accepted, and how they pushed forward. In Hollywood, exclusion goes far beyond #OscarsSoWhite. (Interviews have been edited and condensed.)
SAM ESMAIL Creator, “Mr. Robot”Growing up, I [thought] white male was the norm, the default character in every story. I never thought other possibilities could exist. And I remember thinking, when I would watch Woody Allen films or films that felt personal, I wonder what I’m going to do when I write my personal films, because I can’t cast an Egyptian-American; that would be weird. In film school, there was this need to talk about your ethnicity and to make essentially social-message films. But I resisted, because I felt that it changed the conversation of what the movie was about.read article
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
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
Around TVWriter™ French television has pretty much meant only one thing: “Hey, didn’t Larry Brody have a series on a French network at the beginning of the century?”
The answer to that question, of course, was “Yeppers! It was called DIABOLIK and was on the M6 Network.” (You probably thought M6 was another Brit Intelligence Agency, right?)
Now, however, there’s more to French TV than ever before. OMG! They’re going international?!read article
Shonda Rhimes is quite possibly the hardest-working person in show business. Since 2007, she has never not had at least two full-length network television series for which she was both executive producer and show runner (i.e. the person responsible for not just the overall scope of a show, but also the one actually writing most of it, too). For a brief period, she had three: Grey’s Anatomy, now in its 12th season, Scandal, in its fifth, and Private Practice, which ended in 2013.
by Scott Collins
by Melena Ryzik