Um, we were going to write about this. Honest! We swear! But Gizmodo beat us to it. So we bow to the amazingly perceptive Big Dogs:
This year’s batch of brand new pilots from Amazon Studios just went live, and there are surprising number of stars in the mix. From a drug-laced drama about classical music with Gael Garcia-Bernal to a dysfunctional family comedy with Jeffrey Tambor (wait that sounds familiar), there’s something for everybody.
Brace yourselves for a stunning 2-part article on who really decides what all of us see and hear in the media. Well, the Old Media anyway, because TVWriter™ still holds out one Acme Ton O’Hope for New Media’s independence.
Hope being the operative word. Anyway:
It Was Good While It Lasted
by Marc Alan Fishman
Last year I wrote an article about the wave of amazing comic-book related cartooning that was going on. Well, here we are now and I’m sitting on the stoop with an Old English tipped towards the curb. Ounce after putrid smelling ounce of malt liquor spatters on the pavement. The yeasty brew gurgles and slushes into an adjacent drain.
…Not because they necessarily will be sympathetic to newbies, but because they’re in trouble, Young Jedi, so, hey, it couldn’t hurt:
‘Hell on Wheels’ on Hold as AMC Searches for New Showrunner – by Lesley Goldberg (Hollywood Reporter)
AMC’s third-season renewal for Hell on Wheels is on hold.
…But it isn’t any kind of gender bias that keeps them from getting it, it’s just that, well, let’s face it…if there’s one thing the networks have proved over the last 50 years it’s that they pretty much don’t get anything.
Network TV Attempts To Figure Out Modern Feminism, Might Just Be on to Something – by Alyssa RosenbergTelevision is a trend-driven business:Bridesmaids does well and suddenly, everyone’s looking for funny women, Modern Family is a hit, and suddenly, multicamera comedies are in and single-camera comedies are out. Most of the time, these trends are big, broad attempts to chase increasingly rare success stories. But this year, network TV, in its own halting way, is going after something a little more unusual: network TV is trying to figure out modern feminism.
The first attempt was Next Caller, a sitcom starring Dane Cook that NBC put into production to start airing in the midseason. On the surface, the show’s premise is disastrous: Cook was set to play Cam, the host of a shock-jock satellite radio show called Booty Calls, who’s paired with a feminist co-host, Stella (Collette Wolfe), promoted from a local NPR station to the big time because, as his boss (Jeffrey Tambor) puts it “Your show sucks and your ratings are garbage.” But apparently NBC lost faith in the concept, which many of my fellow critics hated in the first place—the network canceled Next Caller before it even assigned the sitcom a time slot for January.