The Big Man of sitcom and baseball announcing strikes again!
Let’s say I’m given a pilot to write. And for whatever reason, this has to be my first scene: Young guy brings the girl he’s recently dated back to her place. She invites him in the for the first time. He’s excited because he figures he’s going to get laid. But when they step inside he learns that her ex-fiancé is on the couch. He still lives there.
Okay. That could be funny.
Want to read a fascinating investigation into how the very existence of advertising on television affects TV viewing? We at TVWriter™ think of the following article as the Quantum Theory of Creative Quality (but we could have it all wrong):
Ever since the finale of “Mad Men,” I’ve been meditating on its audacious last image. Don Draper, sitting cross-legged and purring “Ommmm,” is achieving inner peace at an Esalen-like retreat. He’s as handsome as ever, in khakis and a crisp white shirt. A bell rings, and a grin widens across his face. Then, as if cutting to a sponsor, we move to the iconic Coke ad from 1971—a green hillside covered with a racially diverse chorus of young people, trilling, in harmony, “I’d like to teach the world to sing.” Don Draper, recently suicidal, has invented the world’s greatest ad. He’s back, baby.
The scene triggered a debate online. From one perspective, the image looked cynical: the viewer is tricked into thinking that Draper has achieved Nirvana, only to be slapped with the source of his smile. It’s the grin of an adman who has figured out how to use enlightenment to peddle sugar water, co-opting the counterculture as a brand. Yet, from another angle, the scene looked idealistic. Draper has indeed had a spiritual revelation, one that he’s expressing in a beautiful way—through advertising, his great gift. The night the episode aired, it struck me as a dark joke. But, at a discussion a couple of days later, at the New York Public Library, Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, told the novelist A. M. Homes that viewers should see the hilltop ad as “very pure,” the product of “an enlightened state.” To regard it otherwise, he warned, was itself the symptom of a poisonous mind-set.
It’s all over the recent Bionic press:
Mark Wahlberg will take the lead in The Six Billion Dollar Man, a theatrical motion picture based on the original 1973-1978 ABC-TV series, The Six Million Dollar Man, which featured Lee Majors as the super-human cyborg Col. Steve Austin.
In recent years, television remakes appeared on the big and small screens. Reimaginings of Knight Rider, The Bionic Woman, The Munsters, and Ironside, among others, have failed to win-over home-viewers, while a new Wonder Woman did not make it past event the pilot stage. At the movies, classic-TV-to-feature-film adaptations have done hit (Mission: Impossible, Charlie’s Angels, The Fugitive), and miss (The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Lone Ranger, Dark Shadows, the latter two featuring Johnny Depp in heavy white-face make-up).
The new showbiz P.R. paradigm kicks butt:
As yet another way of engaging viewers, networks are enlisting writers’ rooms to create their own Twitter accounts. Cable and broadcast channels alike are participating, with handles from MTV, ABC, Netflix, Disney Channel, Fox, CBS and others.
Take ABC, which has several accounts for its shows, including “Blackish,” “Castle,” “How to Get Away with Murder,” “Nashville,” and “Scandal.” While the net encourages writers to activate these accounts, the content is completely up to them, according to Ben Blatt, executive director of digital strategy for ABC Television Network. “When we launch new series, we meet with the showrunners to explain our social media strategy and the ecosystem we look to create. If they are interested, we encourage and support writers’ room accounts for them to provide an authentic view of their writing process to the audience,” he said. There’s no input or oversight from ABC. “We look to support simply by retweeting or making the larger audiences aware of them so they can get as much information as possible on their favorite shows.”
UK TV viewers have been getting more crime series then ever before, but the usual TV and social critics are smiling about it because “all feature great storylines fuelled by emotion and moral dilemmas,” and they “also feature adult women playing mature and complex characters.”
Adult women? Really? Does anyone in the U.S. TV biz even know what an adult woman looks like any more?
For great British drama today, it’s a case of dialling 999. For the most riveting shows on television all feature sleuths and detectives in storylines fuelled by emotion that confront complex moral dilemmas. Crime TV has grown up from the early days of Dixon Of Dock Green and Z Cars.