Um. The violin music is a nice touch. It may, in fact, be the most appealing element of Elementary, a title which seems to refer mostly to the level of skill displayed on the show.
One episode in, I have a predictive formula for future episodes of Elementary: take one small part Sherlock, add a healthy helping of Law and Order (mixing different iterations liberally), and add just a pinch of Criminal Minds. Elementary, my dear…(never mind. Just. Never mind).
Hey! It’s that time of the year again!
You know what time I’m talking about! The week to two weeks that every major organization tracking gender diversity in theatre/television/film creation releases their terrible statistics on how few women and people of color are making their way to the top of their profession so we can write angry blog posts about it for a week and then go back to business as usual!
There is theatre, and then there are cliches and assumptions about theatre.
Certianly the single biggest achievement of Smash’s first season (and perhaps the thing we should applaud it for) has been cataloguing an astonishingly thorough collection of the latter.
As a New Yorker and a theatre artist, I thought it might be fun to debunk a few of the bigger myths Smash throws our way about theatre and it’s business:
As creators become ever more connected to the people responsible to bringing that work to light – from producers to fans – we must deal head on with the process of collaboration. Every software interface seems designed to put us in communication with our peers and our idols. Even celebrities are jumping on the crowdfunding bandwagon to fund passion projects. There has never been a better time to get a team of people working on your ideas.
Many of us writer-folk tend to shudder away from the idea of collaboration because we want to protect our ideas until the “right person” comes along to lift us from obscurity and place us on the Oscar podium where we belong. And yet there is little evidence to support the notion that great work is made a vacuum. Reading the autobiographies of those who have succeeded in the biz, it’s impossible not to notice the formula:
Meet Someone + Work Together = Meet More People + Work Together + (repeat until sickeningly wealthy and famous).
It’s not that I just discovered Breaking Bad. It’s really not that. After all, there is really no way to escape hearing about it, especially when one is in the entertainment industry. But I have to confess it, now, at the beginning: I just finished season one.
We all have our reasons for putting off watching TV shows we want to eventually get to someday, when we have All The Time Ever To Just Watch TV (read: never). There are plenty of excuses – I’m sure you have your own version of the “I’m too busy to watch every show I want to watch, it’s already the second season, and anyway I hate cliffhangers because when I was a child the monstrous suspense of The X-Files scarred me for life, so I don’t think I can handle it.” Whatever your less-nerdy version of that is, substitute here.
For those of us who really love television, before watching even an episode of a show there must be careful consideration of the future. After all, picking up a show is a bit like a new relationship: you think about it constantly, speculate almost non-stop about what might happen next to anyone who will listen, and you hope it will never end.