We’re big fans of the work being done at the Media Design School in Auckland, New Zealand. Here’s one of their latest projects, an animated short about two robots reacting to…well, watch and you’ll see:
Tag: TVWriter™
Invisible Mikey: She’s OK, He’s Kinda Weird
In transitioning from a big town to a small town, I’ve been thinking back on the rich history of television comedies about this topic. Comedy emerges from contrasts and conflicts. You can have stories where the main characters bring rural values to the city, like in The Beverly Hillbillies or Gomer Pyle, USMC, but it’s usually funnier the other way around. Better comedy comes from having city folks move to the country. The big-towners think they have life figured out, and they endure misadventures while being forced to readjust. Viewers can delight as the artificial assuredness of the new residents is upset, their pomposity is punctured, their snobbishness skewered.
The first show of this kind that I liked was Green Acres. In that show, which ran from 1965 to 1971, a couple from NYC buy a rundown farm in Hooterville. Jay Sommers, the main writer, re-tooled it from an earlier radio show he did called Granby’s Green Acres. At first it’s the husband’s idea to give up city life, and his wife doesn’t want to. Once they arrive in the country, she decides she will do whatever she can to bring grace and culture to their new surroundings. Eva Gabor played the wife as a glamorous ditz, sort of an upper-class, Hungarian version of Gracie Allen. Eddie Albert farms in three-piece suits and makes patriotic speeches that cause “Yankee Doodle” to be played as underscore. Other characters hear the music, but he can’t.
The show shared some aspects and characters from the world of Petticoat Junction, also set in the same fictional rural locales, but it was more absurd. The main joke around which variants were created is that the residents of the Hooterville Valley live lives that follow no logical rules, yet they are happily, comfortably bound by the bizarre traditions they’ve decided to follow. This irritates the lawyer from New York endlessly. He’s the only character who can’t live without logic or gamely accept this off-kilter alternate world. His daffy wife goes right along with it.
Filmography: Matching Cinematic Stills with Real Life
We know this guy! Yay, Christopher Moloney!
Erm, sorry. We know we’re being uncool. But still, he’s in fucking Vanity Fair!
Here’s how Vanity Fair puts it:
How To Create an Anti-Hero
Ooh, writing tips! We loves us our writing tips:
by Maryann Yin (MediaBistroCom)
Is your National Novel Writing Month plot stuck? Maybe you need to add an anti-hero.
Love & Money Dept – TV Writing Deals for 12/2/12
Latest News About Writers Doing Better Than We Are
- Chad St. John (RONIN) is writing the pilot for Cinemax’s KINGPIN, a drama about a drug dealer being manipulated by a dirty DEA agent who’s really a dirty CIA agent who…but you get the idea.
- Lisa Loomer (GIRL, INTERRUPTED) is writing the English language pilot adaptation of the telenovela RUBI for Fox. It’s about a beautiful but poor woman who will do anything to become rich, even give up the man she loves…but you get that idea too, right?
- Dave Holstein (WEEDS) is writing the pilot SLATY FORK for 20th TV, a comedy about a young woman cop and her father the former police chief plus other police and firefighters and…yeah, right, you’ve got that idea too now, eh?
- Neal Baer (A GIFTED MAN) is developing/writing/producing UNDER THE DOME, based on a book by some dood named Stephen King for CBS, which already has ordered 13 episodes produced. The book is about a small New England town that’s suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an enormous transparent dome and how its inhabitants survive without the internets…or something like that.