Here we go with TVWriter™’s latest look at our 5 most popular blog posts of the week ending yesterday. They are, in order:
Tag: online TV writing workshop
John Ostrander: TV ‘Flash’
by John Ostrander
My favorite superhero TV show these days is The Flash. Heck, it may be my favorite TV show period. Grant Gustin is doing a great job as Barry Allen/The Flash and the stories have wonderful “Easter eggs” for those who know DC continuity. One of the best is casting John Wesley Shipp, who played Barry/Flash in the earlier TV incarnation of The Flash, is in this version first as Barry’s dad and now as Jay Garrick, the Flash of Earth-2.
What also is great is the supporting cast on the show. On The Flash, they’ve even increased by one to include Tom Fenton (perhaps best known as Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films) as Barry’s “frenemy”. He’s also joined “Team Flash” as it’s called, even on the show.
Cartoon: ‘Containing My Emotions’
Grant Snider sums up the creative personality – yet again!
More Grant Snider wit, wisdom and posters at Incidental Comics
Dennis O’Neil: Teen Angst
by Dennis O’Neil
I must have encountered Archie Comics while I was still young and innocent before the brassy hell we knew as high school — and military high school at that – before I began my ten-year abstinence from reading comic books. I can’t remember a time when Archie and his pals and gals weren’t on my radar somewhere (though the blip was probably dim and small. One of those deals where I knew something but didn’t know I knew it.)
The Archie posse was one of a bunch of similar groups that were sprinkled throughout the media in the years immediately before and after the Second World War. But the genre was born decades earlier, in the 1920s when the younger set began to be identified as a consumer group with few bucks in their pockets. The fictional teens got a boost from a series of movies starring Mickey Rooney as the lovable Andy Hardy, and then came the comics featuring guys and gals with names like Candy, Binky, Corliss Archer, Henry Aldrich, Patsy Walker. True confession: I once, briefly contributed to the Patsy scene. Way more fun than high school.
How to fix network television
We here at TVWriter™ are huge fans of comedy writing great Ken Levine, who in addition to being one of the masterminds behind Cheers, Frasier M*A*S*H and many other great shows, is also a Blogger (and podcaster) Supreme.
It’s with great joy that we discovered this column he wrote last year. We think he’s hit the nail on the head. What say y’all?
How to fix network television… not that anyone asked me
by Ken Levine
As the old saying sort of goes: Imitation is the sincerest form of Network Television. The minute one comes up with a hit show, the rest scramble to develop copy-cats. Watch for seventeen kid talent shows next year – all hosted by Steve Harvey.