 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
November 2007 Archives
November 30, 2007 - Strike Movement, and Late-Night Strike Moves
November 30, 2007 12:50 AM
The newest round of strike talks completed its fourth day yesterday, and finally there was some news. The studios proposed what they termed a "New Economic Partnership" with the Writers Guild of America, with a new media package supposedly inceasing current compensation packages by 10 percent. The WGA is taking time to analyze the proposal, and talks now are scheduled to resume on Tuesday, December 4.
This seems to be progress, and definitely is movement. Even that postponement of talks, though, all but guarantees that the strike, which began on November 5, will carry into its second month.
And while prime time shows, awaiting reaction from the WGA faction, are in a wait-and-see mode - soon to be a wait-and-don't-see mode - the late-night picture is a little different. Moves are being made, on and off the air, that say a lot about the programs and the talents at the center of them.
David Letterman, whose Worldwide Pants company controls both his Late Show and Craig Ferguson's Late Late Show, announced early on that the staffs of both CBS shows would continue to be paid, out of his pocket, during the strike. That's a really classy act, coming from a really classy guy.
Now comes word that Conan O'Brien, who spent time as a writer on The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live before inheriting Letterman's old Late Night NBC series, has made a similar pledge to his staff. NBC is scheduled to lay off the staffs at both Late Night and The Tonight Show today - but O'Brien recently has promised to keep his people's paychecks coming, even though NBC owns the show.
Another class act. Another classy guy.
Leno hasn't reacted the same way, which means after tonight, the Tonight staffers could not only be laid off, but no longer playing the going-through-the-motions booking wars that still are going on, almost perversely, behind the scenes.
It's a case of TV talks shows at their most existential: If guests are booked on Ferguson or O'Brien, but the show isn't produced because of the strike, did they ever appear at all? The answer is no. But the booking game continues, for now, with two glaring exceptions, both of them from NBC.
All this week, NBC has scheduled a "theme week" of Tonight Show reruns, presenting shows in which Leno first interviewed now-superstar celebrities. Wednesday, for example, was a seven-year-old show in which Matt Damon showed up to publicize The Talented Mr. Ripley. But the rest of the show, aging poorly and keyed to such now-dull topics as the 2000 Super Bowl, hardly made a strong case for The Talented Mr. Leno.
The biggest late-night move, though, is NBC's announcement that Last Call with Carson Daly, the late-late show starting at 1:35 a.m. ET, will defy the strike and begin televising first-run installments beginning Monday. (Daly is not a member of the Writers Guild of America.)
This is news for two reasons. One, it means that Carson Daly's show is still on the air, which some may find shocking. Two, it means the first TV host to break the solidarity in the late-night arena is a guy named Carson.
Somehow, that just doesn't seem right.
Nor does Daly's reported email to friends, family and acquaintances, asking them to submit freebie jokes for possible use in next week's monologues, since he won't have writers. But, in the spirit of harmony and helpfulness, here's one anyway.
Q: "How does a strike-busting TV host get around town?"
A: "Easy. He raises his arm and catches a scab."
November 29, 2007 - One Less Strike, One More Debate
November 29, 2007 10:06 AM
"The strike is over!"
That happy announcement was made last night by actor Roger Bart, and was met with lots of cheers and applause from those in attendance. They had just seen Bart and company complete a performance of "Young Frankenstein," one of the few Broadway shows not shuttered by a stagehands strike.
That's great news for theater fans - and means, starting today, the shows that have been on strike can begin operating, or working towards that goal. It also means, sooner or later, Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention, his play about the invention of television, finally will get to enjoy an official opening night.
As for television itself, the strike by the Writers Guild of America continues. If it continues a mere eight more days, to December 7, it may as well be considered the fail-safe point for the rest of the TV season as we know it. The clock is ticking - and while both sides are talking at the negotiating table, others in Hollywood are saying that a stalemate that continues past that date will, in effect, gum up the works irreparably for the rest of the 2007-08 season. So stay tuned.
Meanwhile, last night, eight Republican candidates for President of the United States took the stage in CNN-YouTube's nationally televised debate. Some questions posed and recorded by YouTube uploaders, on such topics as belief in the Bible and opinions on gays in the military, were strong and pointed. Others were simple, silly time-wasters.
As with the Democratic debate months before, the YouTube questions from average citizens seemed alternately effective and gimmicky, the candidates ran roughshod over time constraints, and moderator Anderson Cooper seemed slightly frazzled throughout.
The one major difference between the two debates, other than ideological? The sad fact that, because of the writers' strike, Jon Stewart won't be able to rip apart the Republican debate on Comedy Central's The Daily Show tonight, as he did the day after the Democrats held their CNN-YouTube debate in July. His show, unlike Young Frankenstein, remains closed due to a strike.
In that respect, the Republicans got off easy.
So much for equal time.
November 28, 2007 - Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You-Tube...
November 28, 2007 1:59 AM
CNN and You-Tube team up tonight at 8 ET in St. Petersburg, FL, to hold the second debate among potential candidates for President of the United States. The Democrats did it in July, fielding digitally recorded questions from average American citizens, and now the Republicans gets their chance. Most likely, they'll learn the same thing.
Namely, that democracy is a fabulous concept, if not for all those... people.
The best thing about the Internet revolution is the way anything and everything can be recorded and distributed from the bottom up. In the political arena, this means George Allen can lose a senatorial election because footage of him calling someone "Macaca" becomes a viral video, then makes the news, then derails Allen's career.
Allen might have been one of the Republican candidates vying for president on tonight's CNN/YouTube debate - if not for what YouTube has done to him already.
The worst thing about the Internet revolution, though, is that just because every voice can be heard, that doesn't mean every voice is worth listening to. The more people speak at the same time, the more it becomes an electronic tower of Babel, or at least babble - and the harder it is for worthwhile voices to be heard above the din.
When the Democrats had their shot at this CNN/YouTube debate experiment, CNN's Anderson Cooper was there mostly to moderate, ask follow-up questions and shuffle through the selected, recorded questions by YouTube users. Getting a question abut health care or insurance is more potent when it comes from a dying patient - and demands a different, less general and evasive type of answer.
But in July, when "regular people" were selected from the audience attending the debate, and asked not only to pose questions, but to offer their opinions of the answers, the results were deadly time-wasters. Tonight's debate may do a lot for YouTube - in one sense, it's a two-hour infomercial luring new viewers to the site - but it's not yet clear, by any means, what YouTube is doing to, or for, our country.
November 27, 2007 - Great Grief! "Charlie Brown Christmas" Still the Best
November 27, 2007 12:28 AM
Charlie Brown and Linus would look at tonight's ABC presentation of A Charlie Brown Christmas (8 p.m. ET), a Peanuts holiday special first broadcast 42 years ago, somewhat differently. In this case, they'd both be correct.
Linus, the faithful optimist, would see the true meaning of this TV special. He'd say that it's one of the few places left, other than the Super Bowl and American Idol, where entire families can and will gather annually to enjoy a television show together. But A Charlie Brown Christmas isn't a competition. It's a celebration.
Charlie Brown, the perpetual frowner whose most common exclamation is "Good grief!," would say it's one more example of a TV network not recognizing, much less treasuring, its own heritage.
The network presenting this delightful special in 1965 was CBS, which repeated it, proudly and popularly, each year for decades. By the mid-'90s, though, CBS was treating it shabbily, trimming it and speeding it up slightly to squeeze more advertising time into its half-hour time slot.
Eventually, the special was rescued and restored, expanded to a one-hour time slot to accommodate more commercials without harming the flow of the cartoon itself. CBS let the rights for the show slip to ABC, which has presented it ever since.
Shame on CBS for thinking little enough of A Charlie Brown Christmas to let it go. Shame on ABC, too, for broadcasting this quintessential Christmas special just five days after Thanksgiving, far earlier in the season than it deserves.
Just because the networks take this show for granted, though, don't make the same mistake. The simplicity of the animation, all these years later, is charming, not quaint. The music, by the Vince Guaraldi trio, is as infectious as ever: "Christmas Time is Here," sung by children, is angelic, and "Linus and Lucy" is about as happy as musical notes can sound.
Most important, there's the message of the special itself, written by cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. Where Super Bowls and American Idol finals are hyped massively, A Charlie Brown Christmas actually bemoans, and lectures against, the juggernaut of commercialization. And when Charlie Brown, at rehearsal for the school holiday pageant, asks discouragingly if anyone knows the true meaning of Christmas, Linus explains it to him - by walking to center stage of the auditorium, waiting for the spotlight, and quoting from scripture.
No TV special made today would get away with that. But Schulz held firm, and when A Charlie Brown Christmas was unveiled - back when both James Bond and the Beatles were young - his first Peanuts special was seen in half the TV homes using television that night. And deserved to be.
Two score and two years later, it deserves just as large an audience. Gather the family - and enjoy.
November 26, 2007 - If Video Killed the Radio Star, Who Killed the Video Star?
November 26, 2007 2:05 AM
The music channel Fuse presents a new 10-part series tonight at 10 p.m. ET, called Videos That Rocked the World. The opener, on Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," makes the point about how influential music videos could be - back in 1991.
But could any video rock the world of 2007? And if not, why not?
Or, to pose the question another way: If video killed the radio star, who killed the video star?
Music videos - the concept of capturing musical performances, usually with a narrative visual story complementing the music and lyrics - began, quite literally, with the very first motion picture with sound, 1927's The Jazz Singer. Before Greta Garbo talked on film, Al Jolson sang, ushering in a long, happy marriage of songs and images.
Watch "Remember My Forgotten Man," the brilliant, lengthy musical evocation of the Depression in the Busby Berkeley musical Gold Diggers of 1933, and you'll see a 74-year-old video that not only rocked the world, but reflected it.
In 1940, you had Fantasia, Walt Disney's movie-length collection of animated classical music video. Also in the '40s, you had "Soundies," energetic short performance films played in bars via a coin-operated video jukebox (called a Panoram). For a dime, you could see Fats Waller at the piano, and Liberace, too, and watch Cab Calloway or Doris Day sing.
In 1955, you had Blackboard Jungle, the movie that caused a sensation, and gave rock 'n' roll its first certified #1 hit, by opening the film with the sound of Bill Haley & the Comets singing "Rock Around the Clock." That decade also gave us Elvis Presley, gyrating and electrifying on TV and in the movies.
In the 1960s, you had The Beatles. On their first, phenomenally popular and influential appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, they rocked the world in every sense of the phrase. And with their 1964 film A Hard Day's Night, they provided the modern template for the modern video era. The Monkees, and NBC's The Monkees, followed almost immediately. Next came a decade of experimental videos, most coming from Europe, imported by such fledgling late-night TV showcases as USA Network's Night Flight at the end of the 1970s.
And then, on August 1, 1981, came MTV.
The first video played on the channel was a two-year-old clip by The Buggles, chosen for its prophetic boast: "Video Killed the Radio Star." For a generation, MTV launched or intensified the careers of one visually charismatic performer after another, including Madonna and Michael Jackson. (How Jackson's "Billie Jean," "Beat It" or "Thriller" failed to make Fuse's initial batch of Videos that Rocked the World is a baffling mystery.)
But the M in MTV has long since changed from Music to Mediocre. Instead of championing the newest in music, MTV is devoting its energies to the flashiest and most self-obsessed elements of pop culture. Tonight on MTV: an episode of Shot of Love with Tila Tequila, and three episodes of The Hills.
Who's killing the video star? By preferring a prime-time shot of Tequila to any similarly high-profile showcase of new music and videos, MTV is.
November 25, 2007 - Strike Talks Resuming, Scripted Shows Evaporating
November 25, 2007 2:41 AM
Representatives on both sides of the Writers Guild of America strike are scheduled to meet tomorrow, for the first time in weeks, and talk. They're supposed to be negotiating a settlement - and both sides better talk fast. All around them - and all around us - the TV season is starting to evaporate.
ABC's Desperate Housewives has been back on its game this season, but the game's about to be called on account of strike. After tonight's episode, the network has only two completed hours left - and after next week's show, plans to hold the last one in reserve until 2008.
Tomorrow night, Two and a Half Men shows its last completed original episode. Also tomorrow night, NBC's Heroes (which, like Housewives, is completely reinvigorated), presents the penultimate episode of its "Volume II" story line. One week later, with the mini-season finale, we'll see the last of the show until long after the strike is over. That means no more Kristen Bell as the literally electrifying Elle, who has embodied one of the most intriguing new TV characters of the season.
Just as the representatives meet to debate download royalties and other topics vital to their future, television is beginning to experience more major sea changes in the present. This week, we have the first official postponed-premiere casualty of the strike: ABC's Cashmere Mafia, originally scheduled to be unveiled Tuesday. The network is holding it back until after the strike.
I've seen the pilot of Cashmere Mafia, and that's no great loss. But every week that the strike goes on, eating up original episodes of quality prime-time series while no more are being made, the more we lose - if I may be allowed to use the phrase in context - TV Worth Watching.
November 24, 2007 - Supporting the Strike, One Frame at a Time
November 24, 2007 2:27 AM
Ordinarily, the biggest weapon in a TV writer's arsenal, when a point needs to be made, is the national soapbox of his or her television show. But when you're a writer on strike, you can't even pick up your mightier-than-a-sword pen. So what's a writer-producer to do?
The creative forces behind two prime-time sitcoms, Two and a Half Men on CBS and 30 Rock on NBC, have found ways to express their voices sneakily. Quickly. Almost subliminally.
For a decade now, writer-producer Chuck Lorre has been using the production-company logo space at the end of his shows to present weekly printed messages to his viewers. To read them, you have to hit pause, at just the right moment, on your VCRs or DVRs - but it's worth it.
Usually, these two-second missives fill the entire screen - but the one in this week's Two and a Half Men, the 195th such vanity card since Lorre introduced first tacked one onto the end of Dharma & Greg, was a mere three words long.
Its brief, defiant message: "United we stand."
And in the most recent episode of 30 Rock, a strike joke was inserted into the show, clearly and cleverly written and produced before the Writers Guild of America declared a work stoppage November 5.
Michael Schneider of Variety caught this one, and even provided photographic evidence. It occurred during a TV-show-within-a-TV-show scene in which Edie Falco, guest starring as a Democratic politician dating Alec Baldwin's 30 Rock NBC executive Jack Donaghy, appeared on MSNBC. As Jack watched her on his TV set, the MSNBC news crawl at the bottom of the screen spelled out the following fast-moving joke:
"NEWS CRAWL AFFECTED BY WRITERS STRIKE - USING REPEAT TEXT FROM PREVIOUS SEASON."
Good catch, Michael. Click here to read his original article, and here for access to all 195, and counting, of Chuck Lorre's vanity cards. Among my favorites: Vanity cards #25, 99, 148, 169, 187.
In one of them, he admits to scrambling for ideas to fill the endless, unstoppable vanity platform he created without knowing how time-consuming and challenging it would become. I get it, Chuck. And for me, this is only Blog #20.
November 23, 2007 - One-Word Advice, from Plastics to Quarterlife
November 23, 2007 1:37 AM
Remember that classic scene in The Graduate, when Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock was corralled at his college graduation party by an older-generation businessman friend of his father's? He uttered one word of advice, a word which was supposed to unlock the future, and future fortunes: "Plastics."
That was 40 years ago. Today, if a clued-in corporate type was about to utter a modern twentysomething the equivalent one-word piece of advice, it would be this: "Internet."
And here we are. Here's how those two worlds connect, today in particular:
Today on Fresh Air, I'm guest hosting a special show devoted to the 40th anniversary of The Graduate, replaying portions of archived interviews conducted by Terry Gross. The people interviewed: director Mike Nichols, star Dustin Hoffman, screenwriter Buck Henry and singer-composer Paul Simon. It's a wonderful show, so tune in if you can.
I saw The Graduate when it was released, and it was one of the movies that changed my outlook on things. A few years ago, one of the students in my TV History and Appreciation class at New Jersey's Rowan University spoke up in class about The Graduate, and I never forgot what she said.
She said that times were different, and that she saw that film differently than people in my generation. Where I saw a determined romantic - a young man willing to follow the girl he loved to her college just to be near her, and to crash her wedding in one last attempt to win her love - she said she saw something completely different.
She saw a stalker.
Wow.
So I wondered. If the Internet indeed is the new "Plastics," am I seeing things the same way as the new generation? When I raved about Quarterlife, the new Internet series of eight-minute dramas about a 25-year-old video blogger named Dylan, was I truly responding to the future? And if I liked this new show by thirtysomething creators Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, did that mean its younger primary target audience would not?
For the answer, I turned to one of my own graduates - my daughter Kristin, 25, a third-year-law student. I asked her to watch the first eight-minute episode of Quarterlife and write me what she thought about it. Here is her report, in full:
"Perfect! A show that finally gets it right!
"The opening scene where Dylan poses questions to her then unknown audience - asking, 'Why do we blog? We blog to exist, and, therefore, we're idiots' - was reminiscent of Claire Danes' Angela asking, 'Why do people chew, like, in front of other people?' in the pilot episode of My So-Called Life.
"In both shows, it's the rhetorical questions asked by the heroine that grab your attention, draw you in, and having you smiling just 30 seconds after the opening credits.
"The producers of this show captivated me and had me hooked back in 1994 by the way they pegged the angst-ridden, self-absorbed 15-year-old (myself included) and personified her in Angela when they created My So-Called Life. Fast-forward a decade, and the writers have hit the nail on the head again, creating yet another perfect female character for other mid-twenty (a.k.a. "Quarterlife") women to relate to.
"Once again, the writers have captivated me and have me hooked! Somehow, they've managed to pick up where My So-Called Life left off without missing a beat . . . and doing it 10 years later - quite an accomplishment. Can't wait to watch the second episode!"
Thanks, Kris. I feel better now.
November 22, 2007 - Happy Thanksgiving - Pass the TV Turkey
November 22, 2007 11:13 AM
Happy Thanksgiving.
We who care about quality TV have a lot about which to be thankful on this particular Thanksgiving. And no, I'm not talking about tonight's ABC season premiere of the sappy October Road.
I'm talking about how, at this moment in time, viewers seem to be embracing the really good stuff more and more. It's heartening, for example, to learn that Dexter has just become that network's most popular series in its history, and that FX has ordered not one, but two, additional seasons of Damages.
On broadcast TV, ABC's Pushing Daisies, the best new show of the season, is doing well enough to inspire optimism about its future. Really good stuff isn't just being made - it's being embraced.
The sad part of this, though, is the strike, which is killing momentum just as broadcast TV, especially, needs it most. Monday's episode was the best installment of NBC's Heroes all season - complete with a shocking death and an even more shocking cliffhanger - but now, after two more episodes, it's gone. That Heroes: Origins miniseries? Not going to happen, because of the strike.
I side with the writers in this dispute (big surprise there, huh?), but that doesn't mean the writers aren't due their servings of Thanksgiving sarcasm. After all, what better day than Thanksgiving to survey the TV landscape and carve up the biggest, most bloated turkey of the year?
In 2007, it's no contest. The worst new show of the season, the most unwatchable series of all of 2077, is - envelope, please? - ABC's Cavemen.
The Geico commercials on which Cavemen is based? Just right. The series version? Just wrong, in every respect. Casting, directing and especially writing, just horrible.
ABC would have been much better off by shooting on location using the Lost crew, and doing a drama series about a caveman detective in Hawaii. Not only would it have been funnier than Cavemen (even a drama would be funnier than Cavemen), but it could have featured a much better title:
Cro-Magnon, P.I.
November 21, 2007 - Final Body Count for "The War"
November 21, 2007 2:55 AM
Final audience numbers for the 15-hour PBS documentary series "The War" were released yesterday - and for quality TV lovers, they're reason for celebration. Sort of.
PBS is boasting that the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick production is "the most watched series in the last 10 years on PBS." That's arrived at by being very loose and generous with the figures, and stressing a measurement called the "national audience cume" - amassing the number of people who tuned in to sample the series for at least six minutes over its run of original and repeat broadcasts.
That means that if I watched all 15 hours of "The War," I counted as one person in the national audience cume. If you were flipping channels and watched one episode for six minutes, or two episodes for three minutes each, you counted just as much. By that very inclusive mathematical formula, PBS credits The War with 37.8 million people as part of the final national cume.
Even playing by those rules, The War has to settle for "the most watched series in the last 10 years on PBS" because two previous Burns series have scored higher. Thirteen years ago, his Baseball series drew a cume of 43.1 million, and his reputation-making The Civil War, way back in 1990, had a cume of 38.9.
A much more honest number is the national household average audience rating. For The War, that's a 4.7, which works out to be an estimated 7 million people watching, on average, each minute. That's more than almost any cable series, but only about as much as last week's repeat episode of "House" on Fox.
For PBS, the numbers for The War, however they're parsed, are big. But when it comes to PBS, I'm old-fashioned, and almost hopelessly altruistic. When it comes to public broadcasting, I don't care if the numbers are good. I just care if the programs are good.
The War, by any qualitative yardstick, was great. PBS should be boasting about that - and looking more closely at its offerings than its numbers.
November 20, 2007 - Quarterlife's Next Life...and Other Good News
November 20, 2007 3:11 AM
A week ago Monday in this blog, I raved about a new dramatic series by Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick called Quarterlife - available, at the time, only on the Internet (on MySpace and its own brand-new website, Quarterlife.com), presented twice weekly in eight-minute chunks. The next day, I reviewed Quarterlife on Fresh Air.
Yesterday, NBC snatched up the rights to Quarterlife, and plans to present it as a one-hour dramatic series in January.
Don't thank me. Thank the writers' strike.
And, in this case, do thank the strike, because Quarterlife most likely would not have gotten on television without it. It's the first example of the networks thinking outside the box to fill the box - and from the standpoint of the quality TV fan, anything that isn't another thrown-together reality show is cause for celebration.
The shows that are fun to watch right now are winding down, spinning out their final two or three (or, in some rare cases, seven or eight) episodes before there are no more scripts to film. The good shows that were supposed to come next, like 24 and Lost, are shelved or in jeopardy.
So we ought to be thankful for any good new stuff coming around the bend during these strike months, which are increasingly likely to be months.
Next month, for example, CBS launches the Larry McMurtry Lonesome Dove prequel Comanche Moon, Sci-Fi Channel presents its major Tin Man project, and HBO provides one of the biggest treats of the entire year: a movie-length special wrapping up the Ricky Gervais-Stephen Merchant comedy series Extras, just like the brilliant Christmas special that closed the book on their original, British version of The Office.
When those are over, Quarterlife will be next. And then what?
Eventually, new shows - written by writers, acted by actors, directed by directors, none of the on strike.
The sooner the better. And if you want better sooner, hope that next week's strike talks go somewhere fast.
November 19, 2007 - Day 14: Viewers Held Hostage
November 19, 2007 1:57 AM
This is the start of the third week of the Writers Guild of America strike - and no news, in this instance, is the closest we'll get to good news for quite a while.
That's because both the writers and producers have agreed to resume talks one week from today, after Thanksgiving weekend, and, in the meantime, to issue no official press releases.
There's no reason, given the wide gulf between the two sides, to be overly optimistic of a quick resolution. But it's a start. And until that announcement, we haven't even had that.
The writers, being creative types, have tried to direct some of their energies in ways that are both fruitful and fun.
On Saturday, a benefit performance at New York's Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre featured almost the entire cast of Saturday Night Live, with SNL creator Lorne Michaels, whose show is old enough to have weathered the 1988 strike, in attendance as a show of support.
(To read the Associated Press story: click here:)
And taking a cue from the Jericho peanuts campaign, some WGA loyalists have begun a campaign asking for donations to send pencils to the media bigwigs. Here's the link to that one:
Though a pencil-sending campaign is imaginative, it should be considered, at best, a No. 2 plan (for pencils, that's appropriate anyway). The No. 1 plan is simply to be patient, and let viewers feel the increasing absence of their favorite programs. Late-night shows already have been hit hard - but already, at Day 14 of the strike, any prime-time series aren't far behind.
Viewers watching NBC the past seven days have been hit with a chilling promo for tonight's Heroes. It's chilling not because of the content, but because it gives notice of a countdown of first-run episodes normally seen only in May at the end of the season: "3 EPISODES LEFT," it says.
It sounds like a boast. To fans of quality TV, it's more like a threat.
At the start of the season, NBC executives were talking about ways to minimize the damage of interrupting the flow of sequential Heroes story lines. One solution was to divide the season into three multi-episode, self-contained story arcs. Another solution was to occupy the time slot, during a break, with a separate, self-contained six-episode Heroes miniseries built around the introduction of an entirely new character.
Now what do we have? After tonight, two more episodes of Heroes, then... something completely different.
So much for momentum.
November 18, 2007 - Mission: Impasse-able
November 18, 2007 2:37 AM
Mission: Impossible, the 1996 Brian De Palma movie that launched the Tom Cruise M:I franchise, is televised tonight at 8 p.m. ET by American Movie Classics. I recommend you don't watch it.
But I do recommend you think about it - for reasons I'm about to explain.
De Palma's film has some stunning sequences, including the famous drop-from-the-ceiling scene. But the movie so betrayed the spirit of the original TV series, by betraying the spirit and integrity of a formerly unimpeachable character, that the entire project smelled of cynicism. Eleven years and two sequels later, it still carries that stink.
(Go to the MORGUE section, and you can read my original review of the movie as it ran in the New York Daily News).
But Mission: Impossible is worth thinking about, at this point in time, for another reason. Twenty years ago, the last time the Writers Guild of America went on strike, ABC planned to use the series as a means to produce and present scripted prime-time dramas - without using any writers.
The plan was to take old scripts from the original 1966-73 CBS series and recycle them, filming word-for-word, scene-by-scene remakes filmed in Australia with an all-new cast. Plans were altered, though, when the strike ended in August 1988.
ABC kept the updated series on its schedule, but quickly employed writers to beef up old scripts and generate new ones. The new Mission: Impossible, bringing back Peter Graves as Jim Phelps and presenting Jane Badler (the rodent-eating alien hottie from the sci-fi miniseries V) as a female agent, premiered two months later. It wasn't very good, and it didn't last long.
One other desperate strike-driven idea from 1988, though, was much more successful. The Fox network, which had unveiled its inaugural prime-time lineup only the year before, added to its schedule a show that didn't need writers - because it wasn't scripted. It was more of a documentary, following around people and capturing whatever they did, editing the raw footage later into some sort of narrative.
It was called COPS. Twenty years later, it's still here.
And if reality TV took hold then, what do you think will happen when, in another lengthy strike, it dominates TV in the coming months?
Brace yourself for TV: Unwatchable.
November 17, 2007 - Live, But Only in New York, It's Saturday Night!
November 17, 2007 12:34 AM
At 11:30 ET tonight, for the first time in two weeks, the show Saturday Night Live will go on. But only in New York, as a staged Writers Guild of America benefit at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. Michael Cera, of Superbad and formerly of Arrested Development, is scheduled to be the guest host of this sold-out event - and though nothing's confirmed, it's rumored that most, if not all, of the SNL cast will be there.
At the same small theater on Monday night, another NBC series with SNL roots, Tina Fey's 30 Rock, will present a "live" episode of that series as another WGA benefit show. Fey, Alec Baldwin, Tracy Morgan and Jane Krakowski all are expected to perform, but only for the lucky audience members who get through the door.
This concept, of course, takes the idea of a mass medium and flips it to the other extreme, making it among the most exclusive of entertainments. Krakowski, a Tony winner for Nine and a Broadway baby even before her appearance in the Roundabout revival of Company, is no stranger to performing live on New York stages. For the others, it harkens back to standup comedy or improv groups - but this idea of performing television series as a live stage show, it's an uncommon occurrence.
Maybe it shouldn't be.
I'm not talking about the type of camp comedy as typified by The Real Live Brady Bunch stage show. I'm talking about thinking of TV as a true theatrical resource.
Once, when interviewing Peter Falk, I suggested to him that he and, say, Patrick McGoohan should get together and do a limited-run Broadway show based on one of their classic Columbo episodes. Falk's eyes lit up - well, one of them did, anyway - and he broke into a wicked smile.
"Boy," he growled appreciatively. "We could make a lot of money."
Nothing came of it - but Falk was right.
Think of the shows, new and old, that could follow the SNL and 30 Rock lead and generate big crowds - and lots of money for the striking writers' fund. Take over some Broadway houses on Monday night for bare-bones performances, or even Encores!-style readings, using old TV scripts (by writers!) and featuring stars of those shows (who aren't working because of the strike!). Find other venues on the West Coast, and connect with your TV audience a few hundred people at a time.
The cast of Frasier, certainly, could do a Broadway mounting proud, picking a couple of old scripts and performing them as a two-act play. And a few years ago, when I saw the cast of The Simpsons do a script reading at the Aspen Comedy Festival, the crowd went absolutely nuts. In addition to staging a strike, these TV writers, and the actors sympathetic to their cause, should be hitting the stage.
They should be filming their performances on digital video, too. That way, when the strike is settled and the writers get a share of profits from DVD sales, they can add the live performance clips as bonus material on their boxed sets - and actually benefit from it.
That way, it's a benefit in more ways than one.
November 16, 2007 - Icon Believe TV Land's "50 Greatest TV Icons" List
November 16, 2007 1:14 AM
Tonight at 8 p.m. ET, the cable network TV Land, in collaboration with Entertainment Weekly, presents what it calls "a definitive list" of The 50 Greatest TV Icons. Not even close - and some of the omissions and inclusions are nothing short of maddening.
Of the top 50 all-time TV icons on this list, 30 of them first established their iconic status in the 1970s or later. Only seven are from the formative decade of the 1950s, and only two, Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan, began on TV in the 1950s.
Berle, who earned the nickname Mr. Television because so many families bought their first TV set to watch him on Tuesday nights, is ranked #22 on this list. Sullivan, who brought The Beatles to live American TV, is ranked #14.
I won't spoil the exact countdown, for those who might want to watch tonight's special, except to note approvingly that Johnny Carson, Lucille Ball, Walter Cronkite and Mary Tyler Moore all make the Top 10. My disapproval - well, that's all over the place.
I disapprove, for example, in clumping the entire 1975-80 cast of Saturday Night Live into one slot (#15). That's cheating. And when such alleged icons as Simon Cowell, Ellen Degeneres, Jimmy Smits and George Clooney make the Top 50 list, you have to ask yourself - in place of whom?
Ready to be outraged?
Jack Benny, one of the biggest and most talented TV icons ever, doesn't make this list. Neither Rod Serling nor Alfred Hitchcock, two unforgettably charismatic TV anthology hosts, is here. Cronkite, yes, but Edward R. Murrow, David Brinkley and Dan Rather, no. Carson and David Letterman get the nod, but talk-show pioneers Steve Allen and Jack Paar get ignored.
No Peter Falk and Columbo. No James Arness and Gunsmoke. No James Garner or Kelsey Grammer, no Sid Caesar or Ernie Kovacs, no Bob Keeshan as Captain Kangaroo or Ed Asner as Lou Grant. Sidekicks get shafted: William Shatner joins the club, but Star Trek partner Leonard Nimoy is excluded. Similarly, Jackie Gleason and Andy Griffith are allowed in, but Art Carney and Don Knotts are left outside the Top 50 velvet ropes.
And - shame on you, TV Land and Entertainment Weekly - no Fred Rogers. Can you say "No sense of history," boys and girls?
George Santayana said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I say, if we don't remember our TV history, we're doomed to devalue our repeats.
November 15, 2007 - Happy Birthday to Me
November 15, 2007 3:07 AM
Today is my birthday. Yesterday, I spent most of the day answering the last of the letters wishing me farewell from the New York Daily News, and good luck on whatever I was doing next.
Well, one of the things I'm doing next is right here, so thanks for reading this. I appreciate not only your presence, but your patience. It'll still be a few more days before we get the comments and emails and everything else sorted out - and, most likely, a few days after that before the final pages of the site, including the TV JUKEBOX and FEEDBACK areas, are ready for launch. But it's not for lack of effort, believe me, that we're still tinkering.
Besides, as I celebrate my birthday today, this website is only 10 days old. What can you expect from a 10-day-old, really? (Don't answer that. Now that I think about it, the logical answer to that question doesn't exactly lead to a flattering comparison.)
In addition to the website, another thing I'm doing next, courtesy of Lance Gould, editor of the Boston Phoenix and a very smart and nice guy, is to write the cover story of their issue that hits newsstands today - a story on Stephen Colbert and his brief but significant run for the presidency. It's the first of what I hope to be many TV stories I write for the Phoenix, as part of my own proverbial rising from the ashes.
And earlier this week, my Fresh Air producer, Phyllis Myers, was so intrigued by my recent blog review of the Marshall Herskovitz-Ed Zwick Quarterlife online TV series that she encouraged me to craft a piece for Fresh Air. Which I did, and which you can find by going to the READ ME HEAR ME page and working your way to my Tuesday report on the Fresh Air site.
So as this birthday arrives, I'm busy, happy and, when I'm working on this site (which seems to be almost all the time, right now), rejuvenated. It's hard to feel a year older when, all of a sudden, I can write whatever I want, any way I want, about whatever subject I want. My birthday present to myself, it seems, is an unfiltered voice.
A filtered voice, after all, might not ask this next question, which is: So what can you give me for my birthday?
But I have an easy, yet totally serious, answer. Here's what I would love as a birthday gift from you: Tell or email two, or two more, friends about this website and ask them to check it out and see if they like it.
Presto: If they're good and loyal friends, and do what you ask, traffic on my site will triple overnight. You don't even have to wrap anything. And when your birthday comes up... well, I'm open to suggestions. If our comments system is up by then, that is.
But I know, based on my emails and subscription lists, that someone has followed me here into cyberspace. And that, honestly, is the most wonderful gift of all.
November 14, 2007 - Even on Broadway, The Show Mustn't Go On
November 14, 2007 12:02 AM
The day I launched this website, the Writers Guild of America went on strike. Less than a week later, the Local One union of stagehands went on strike in New York. Both strikes are still going on strong - which means, among other things, that Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention, scheduled to have its opening night tonight on Broadway, isn't.
His drama about TV has, in effect, been turned off.
Presumably, this particular strike won't last too long. TV studios are stupid enough to let audiences erode for six months or more, but the folks financing Broadway aren't about to sacrifice the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday seasons. The smart bet, therefore, is that Sorkin's play will indeed enjoy an opening night soon.
Still, I feel for that cast, and for Sorkin, because when I saw The Farnsworth Invention in previews last week, it was running smoothly and impressively. Hank Azaria should have been able to grab the early editions of tomorrow's papers and enjoy glowing reviews for conquering a tricky, and an essentially serious, role as RCA founder David Sarnoff. Jimmi Simpson, as television inventor Philo Farnsworth, should have basked in just as much glory.
And Sorkin, returning to Broadway for the first time since his debut with A Few Good Men, should have been able to enjoyed high praise for his new play's utterly unusual and successful dramatic structure: in the play, each leading character, Sarnoff and Farnsworth, narrates the story of the other.
Yet instead of reading reviews on opening night, they, like everyone else who might have migrated to Farnworth last evening, got to read flyers handed out in front of the Music Box Theatre by Local One stagehands.
"Cuts in our jobs and wages," read the flyer that was handed to me outside the theatre last night, "will never result in a cut in ticket prices to benefit the public, but only an increase in the profits for producers."
For audiences, it's not the same sensation as sitting in the Music Box, flipping through a Playbill, and reading the "At This Theatre" page while waiting for the lights to dim. This particular Broadway house is dark already. For audiences, the feeling is more like standing outside the picket line reading a "Not at This Theatre" notice.
As for Sorkin, Azaria and Simpson, if they're going to get to read a review on their original opening night, it has to be this one, based on a week-old performance. It's not the same, but hey: Aaron, Hank, and Jimmi, you did yourselves, Broadway and television proud. And that joke at the end, about the moon walk, is a killer.
Unfortunately, for now, there's no longer any laughter to be heard inside the Music Box. And what's going on outside, and all over Broadway, and all across New York and Hollywood at the moment - that's no laughing matter, either.
November 13, 2007 - Gather Ye TV Shows While Ye May
November 12, 2007 11:58 PM
You know that feeling, in the middle of May, when you're watching the last few first-run installments of your favorite shows - and feel a little sad because you know you're going to have to wait four months to see them again?
Just into the second week of the strike, I feel the same way. Actually, I feel worse.
I feel the same because, after a few more episodes of the scripted series I'm watching faithfully right now, I know those shows are going into hiberation, replaced by reality shows and reruns. Just like summer TV. I feel worse, because this may drag on a lot longer than the equivalent of summertime.
Already, we know that 24 is lost for the season, Heroes may call it quits after the current story cycle, and Lost might be... well, lost. There's such a thing as bad timing. If Fox decides to hold the next season of 24 until the following midseason, to benefit from proximity to American Idol, do you know how long it will be since we last saw Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer, and will next see him?
I do. I just did the math.
Jack Bauer's last very bad day ended in May 2007, six months ago. 24 was supposed to return in January 2008, after an eight-month absence. Now, because of the Writers Guild of America strike, 24 won't be seen until next season. If the series occupies the same midseason slot, and resurfaces in January 2009, that'll be 20 months between first-run episodes.
The Sopranos made us wait that long, on occasion, but almost two years between shows? Viewers should be watching the Olympics every two years - not their favorite dramas.
The damage to TV is becoming so apparent so quickly, that if this strike isn't settled fast, as in the next few weeks, then we're in for a long hot summer. And by summer, I also mean winter and spring. If Hiro from Heroes wanted to save the world of TV, he'd go back in time and avert the strike.
And while he was back there, he could make sure that Cavemen never happened.
I can dream, can't I?
November 12, 2007 - Is There Quarterlife After Television? Yes.
November 12, 2007 2:03 AM
Today, on its own website called www.quarterlife.com, a new TV series, also called Quarterlife, is scheduled to be unveiled. Actually, it was unveiled yesterday as a sneak preview on MySpace -- where, as I watched on my laptop that afternoon, a MySpace counter announced that "Quarterlife has 856 friends."
I don't have a MySpace page. In my opinion, no one with firsthand memories of The Mickey Mouse Club TV show should have a MySpace page. (There's a point at which youthful crosses over into creepy.) But if Quarterlife wants an older viewer to call friend, count me as number 857.
Quarterlife is a bold new concept for a TV series, with an even bolder way of delivering it. It comes from Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, who, throughout their careers as writer-producers, have done amazing work on network television in an increasingly endangered genre: realistic drama about everyday family life.
Their TV resume as creators and/or executive producers includes thirtysomething, My So-Called Life and Once and Again. (To read about the new My So-Called Life DVD set, see the TV ON DVD page of this site.) And yet their newest series, about artistic twentysomethings trying to make it as budding writers, actors or producer-directors, is being presented only on the Internet.
Serialized episodes are only eight minutes long, and will unfold twice weekly. (Yesterday, to launch Quarterlife, MySpace showed the first two.) But their location and brevity do not minimize how good these shows are, how instantly they pull you in, or how much better they are than most full-length TV shows on this season's standard network schedules.
So here it is: a review of Quarterlife, written by someone who's closer to threequarterlife. If he's lucky.
But since the mission statement of TV WORTH WATCHING is to find, embrace and support quality TV wherever it exists, there's no reason not to write a blog about a web-based show about a young blogger.
Quarterlife, the title, refers not only to the youthfulness of the characters (the central protagonist, a winning young wannabe writer named Dylan Krieger, is 25), but to a social website, in its Beta test phase, to which she provides confessional video blogs about herself and her friends.
In other words, where Dobie Gillis once spoke directly to viewers in the 1950s about his hopes, dreams, fears and activities, and where Doogie Howser wrote the same sorts of things into his computer diary in the 1980s, Dylan Krieger photographs herself on and with her laptop in the brave new cyberworld of 2007. She and her generation have a new set of problems - but the anxieties, of the scary life ahead and the unpredictable people and opportunities around her, are universal.
"My name is Dylan," she says, opening the show and her first video blog. She stops, coughs, starts again, asks "What is a blog?," then mocks her own rambling monologue, saying, "Blog, blog, blog, blog, blog." She wants to be heard, and wants to connect - but doesn't yet know what she wants to say.
She finds her voice, very quickly, by telling the honest truth. She has a job at a magazine called Women's Attitude - but no sooner says that than adds the self-deprecating admission, "I spend most of the day fetching coffee, but what are you gonna do?"
Her boss doesn't seem to take her seriously, which leads to the kind of offhand observation that makes her, and Quarterlife, so charming.
"A sad truth about my generation," she says on her blog, "is that we were all geniuses in elementary school, but apparently the people who deal with us never got our transcripts, because they don't seem to be aware of it."
Eventually, other characters in the show become aware of the Quarterlife website, and Dylan's blogs on it. Actually, elsewhere on the Internet, such video reports are called "Vlogs," and people like Dylan are called "Vloggers." But to me, that sounds Vidiculous.
Dylan, as played by Bitsie Tulloch, is the perfect voice for this show: part Angela Chase from My So-Called Life, part Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye, only a few years older than both.
Dylan has two female roommates: Debra (Michelle Lombardo), an earnest young woman, and Lisa (Maite Schwartz), a struggling actress whose sex appeal is noted wryly by Dylan.
"When Lisa walks into the room," Dylan says in her blog, "it's like the gravitational field changes. Boys become stupid. Or stupider."
As for the boys on the show, there's Danny (David Walton), who's Debra's boyfriend, and Jed (Scott Michael Foster), who wishes he were Debra's boyriend. Danny and Jed, in the opener, are pitching an idea for their very first commercial ad campaign, with some input from mutual friend Andy (Kevin Christy), who's very tech-savvy. They're like the best friends from thirtysomething, at the very start of their ad-agency careers - only Quarterlife isn't a flashback.
What it is is this: an instantly engrossing drama about six young people, acted credibly and crafted to wholly professional standards and aspirations. Herskovitz and Zwick are the producers and crafted the story, Herskovitz is the director and wrote the screenplay, and the music is by longtime collaborator, the always classy W.G. Snuffy Walden.
I haven't seen everything produced specifically for the web - no one has, or can. But of everything I've seen, Quarterlife is miles ahead of, and above, the rest. I've seen two episodes, and can't wait for episode three. By any yardstick, no matter what the manner of delivery, that's the definition of a success - and a probable hit.
November 11, 2007 - Aaron the Strike Out King
November 11, 2007 12:33 AM
The Aaron in the title doesn't refer to baseball legend Hank Aaron - but to stage, screen and TV writer Aaron Sorkin. His Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip series folded after its freshman season, but on other fronts, the prolific and gifted writer seemed set, with a new Broadway play opening this Wednesday.
Except, apparently, it's not. Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention is one of the more than two dozens Broadway plays shut down yesterday by striking stagehands - the first strike by that union's Local One in its century-plus history. I saw Farnsworth Wednesday in previews. Who knows when, or if, anyone will get to see it next?
With his completed movie Charlie Wilson's War opening next month, and with a three-picture development deal for DreamWorks, Sorkin looked to have bounced back from the Studio 60 cancellation just fine: a new Broadway play, a new film, and more projects with which to busy himself just around the corner.
Except the Music Box, the theater where Farnsworth was days away from opening night, is dark now. Moving from one coast to another has meant, for Sorkin, moving from one strike to another. And technically, he's not supposed to be working on future movie projects during the Writers Guild of America strike, either. By a coincidence so far-fetched that Sorkin would never dare write it, he's been stricken from both sides. The triple-threat writer - stage, screen, TV - has become a triple-threatened one.
Sorkin hasn't expressed himself publicly yet, but Jon Robin Baitz, another playwright and TV writer (for ABC's Brothers and Sisters, which airs an original episode tonight at 10 ET), has vented his frustration - and demonstrated his craft - by producing a pair of superbly written blogs on the Huffington Post. Links:
An Open Letter to Governor Schwarzenegger on the Writers' Strike
The executives and bean counters on the other side of the writers' strike haven't expressed their thoughts that entertainingly. And sorry, but isn't that the big-picture point here? Shouldn't writers be writing, and be compensated fairly for that writing?
All I can say is: Let Sorkin be Sorkin. Like Hank, that other Aaron in his prime, Sorkin should be swinging for the fences, not sitting on the bench.
November 10, 2007- Those were the (Satur)days
November 10, 2007 2:46 PM
The writers' strike is going to make it trickier to find six outstanding TV recommendations each night, especially as the networks begin stockpiling scripted series like nuts for the winter. (If the producers don't settle the strike soon, they're the nuts - but I digress.) Except for Saturday Night Live being relegated to reruns, though, tonight's TV lineup pretty much is the same as it would have been pre-strike.
And that's a shame, because installments of two unscripted series - COPS on Fox and 48 Hours Mystery on CBS - are the only first-run offerings by the commercial broadcast networks all night. No wonder tonight's BEST BETS are dominated by cable, and by movies at that.
Boys and girls, it wasn't always this way. There was a time when Saturday was a night when the broadcast networks not only programmed first-run series, but hit series. As recently as the 1990-91 TV season, NBC's The Golden Girls was a Top 10 hit, broadcast on Saturdays.
And there was a time, before that, when a lineup of original, non-repeat Saturday night TV shows boasted the most outstanding wall-to-wall lineup in TV history, all on a single network. Granted, it was 34 years ago - but if you tuned to CBS on a Saturday night in the fall of 1973, this is what you could see without changing the channel:
All in the Family. M*A*S*H. The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The Bob Newhart Show. The Carol Burnett Show.
Tonight, the same network's Saturday lineup includes reruns of drama series, and NBC presents a similar program of recycled programs. The networks insist it isn't worth televising original series on Saturdays, by and large, because viewers aren't around to watch on Saturdays. Clearly, it wasn't always that way. Saturday's All in the Family was the most popular show in America that season, M*A*S*H was fourth, and the Moore and Newhart shows were 9th and 11th for the season, respectively.
So which came first: The network chickens, or the eggs they've chosen to lay?
Don't laugh. The way the networks are losing audiences, and are about to lose more as the strike continues, this chicken-and-egg question is no yolk. When the network built good shows, we did come. Now that they're not, why shouldn't we go?
November 9, 2007 - The Play's the Thing
November 9, 2007 6:40 PM
The new Broadway play by Aaron Sorkin, The Farnsworth Invention, opens next week. When it does open, I'll be reviewing it for NPR's Fresh Air, because it's got TV written all over it, and couldn't be more in my wheelhouse. The play's about Philo Farnsworth, generally credited as the inventor of television, and RCA President David R. Sarnoff, who fought Farnsworth for patent claims on the new invention - and who, eventually, established NBC, the TV network on which Sorkin eventually would present his most successful series, The West Wing.
I'll honor opening-night conventions and wait until then to render a verdict, on Fresh Air or here, except to say that Sorkin's gifts for dialogue and story structure come through loud and clear, and that Hank Azaria and Jimmi Simpson, as Sarnoff and Farnsworth, do delectable double duty as both characters and narrators.
What I want to talk about now, though, is the irony of seeing Sorkin's new Broadway play midway through the first week of the writers' strike. For one thing, most unionized TV and film writing is at a standstill. Broadway's a different union, a different game entirely, so Sorkin is free to ply his craft, and hone his dialogue, right up to opening night.
But the bigger coincidence is that The Farnsworth Invention is all about artistic vision, and corporate ownership, and what happens when one collides with the other. According to the play, both Farnsworth and Sarnoff saw the new medium's potential, at a time when most people couldn't envision it making a dent in the marketplace.
"Think of a person's home," one skeptic says in The Farnsworth Invention talking about the potential for television. "Where in the hell are they gonna put it?" The simple, culture-shifting answer: "Where they used to put their radio."
The world changed then, as TV supplanted radio as the dominant mass medium, and the world is changing again now. Fifteen years ago, in Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously (you can still buy it by clicking on the cover at right, hint, hint), I suggested TV was our last mass medium, and that whatever replaced it would rob us of some of our shared national experiences.
It's happening already. Take away the Super Bowl, the Oscars and American Idol, and you've stripped TV of most of the reasons people still gather around the tube in massive numbers. Hit TV with a six-month strike, and viewers will either accept the replacement glut of unscripted reality series, or reject broadcast and cable TV in significant numbers and get out of the TV habit entirely. Either scenario, or lovers of quality, scripted television shows, is very bad news.
If viewers do leave, what are they going to do instead? A lot of things, starting with the Internet - and they're going to do it at very critical times.
Times, to paraphrase a line from Sorkin's play, where they used to watch their television.
November 8, 2007 - Strike One! Strike Two
November 8, 2007 6:36 PM
The last time there was a writers' strike in Hollywood - meaning show biz rather than geography, since it hits New York as well - it was in 1988, it lasted just over 22 weeks, and it was writers vs. producers, while the networks sat by as concerned bystanders. The net result was that about 10 percent of the broadcast TV networks' audience defected to cable and never looked back.
Two decades later, industry deregulation and audience fragmentation have made it a very different ball game. This time, the same companies that own the broadcast networks own the cable networks, so don't care as much where the audience watches its TV. Except that in 2007, the choice isn't limited to broadcast or cable. It is, in the most basic sense, to TV or not TV. That is the question.
And the answer may well be, if you're not giving viewers what they want to watch on TV - and for younger viewers, especially, this means if you're not giving them Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and Conan O'Brien, which, as of this week, TV isn't - then the audience is likely to go elsewhere. To DVDs, where the shows aren't interrupted by ads and cluttered with bugs and promos. To video games. To YouTube and the Internet, more and more, and thinking about the networks less and less.
If the strike lasts six months or more this time, and TV loses another 10 percent of its viewers, it's not likely to lose them to the same medium. And once they're lost, they'll never, ever come back in the same numbers.
Already, in its first week, the strike is having one serious side effect. It's robbing certain shows of momentum, and of invaluable opportunities to react to current events.
It hardly seems fair that Pat Robertson endorses Rudy Giuliani, without Stewart, Colbert, O'Brien or David Letterman getting to have fun with it.
It seems less than fair that Bill Maher, on what would have been his live season finale tomorrow night on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher (and with Ben Affleck among the scheduled guests), has to settle for a rerun instead.
And after last week's season-best edition of Saturday Night Live, with Brian Williams proving to be one of the funniest "sleeper" guest hosts ever, it's a shame that this week's scheduled live edition, with The Rock as host, has been scrapped. NBC, finding itself between a Rock and a hard place, had to settle for the hard place.
And for a while, so shall we all. Fox announced yesterday it is postponing the January premiere of 24, rather than interrupt its sequential weekly broadcast because of a protracted strike. If ABC follows suit, and postpones the midseason relaunch of Lost, then TV's second season will be a lot less enjoyable - and a lot more infected with reality series.
Say it ain't so, J-Lo.
November 7, 2007 - Up and Cyber-Running
November 7, 2007 6:34 PM
This is the third day of TV WORTH WATCHING. After all those decades of being a TV critic, I can't help but think of the launch of the website in terms of the launch of a new TV series. You plan for months to craft a "pilot," then have to turn right around and churn out additional episodes - all while having no idea whether your project will attract enough viewers to survive.
But here we are. And if you're still here, checking things out, on day three, then maybe I have a chance. In TV, second-week ratings are more important than the first, so we'll see, slowly but surely. If you like the site, and want to be deputized as a Johnny TV-WORTH-WATCHING-Seed, by all means tell your friends. If you don't like the site, tell your enemies.
Here's what's supposed to happen here as TV WORTH WATCHING takes shape.
Every day, there will be newly refreshed BEST BETS, to help you plan your viewing and recording evenings. When there's something really special for kids, that will be noted, too, as an aid for parents. Also every day, whenever possible, there will be a new BLOG entry, a freeform place to find almost anything.
Each Tuesday, when there's a newly released TV SHOW ON DVD or BOOK ABOUT TV to note, it'll be reviewed in that section. CLASSICS TO CONSIDER will be added less regularly, but often enough to build up a library of recommendations pretty quickly.
Lengthy interviews, vintage and new, will be added monthly, and other materials will be added - well, when they can. The plan, fort the next two weeks, is to get the final missing pages up and running, streamline everything and establish a user-friendly feedback and contact system. Come back daily for the BEST BETS, and see how quickly the site grows. Or doesn't.
One of my favorite compliments received so far said the site looked like it had been up for years instead of hours, and asked if I had a website designer. Actually, I have two. They're credited elsewhere, but deserve all the credit I can give them: Eric Gould turned my ideas into actual designed pages, and added brilliant ideas and jokes of his own as well, then Chris Spurgeon made it all work with his mixture of programming genius and infinite patience.
As for me, I'm off today for a TV-and-Broadway field trip, checking out a preview matinee performance of The Farnsworth Invention by Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and the movie and Broadway versions of A Few Good Men. It's his first Broadway play since A Few Good Men, it's in the same New York theater - and it's all about the creation of television.
Can't wait. And I should get back home in time to catch one of tonight's BEST BETS, Ace in the Hole.
November 6, 2007 - Day One, of Both the Website and the Writers' Strike
November 6, 2007 6:29 PM
I worked so hard, along with website co-conspirators Chris Spurgeon and Eric Gould, to launch this website on schedule - the day my farewell column would run in the New York Daily News - that I never thought about how I would feel when the day finally arrived.
Thanks to a rare (for me, anyway) day where almost everything went right, it felt just fine, thanks.
The day started at 6:10 a.m., when I checked the Daily News website to see if my farewell column had run as scheduled, and with the paragraph about my moving on to this website still included. Yes, and yes. (Here's where I'll pause to thank, one last time, Richard Huff, who joined the Daily News the same day I did The last few years, he was my immediate boss - a great one.) The Daily News website even included a hyperlink to this site, as well as one last mention of my e-mail address. And Chris got the site up and running, an amazing magic feat, with, oh, an hour to spare, easy.
Within minutes of the farewell column's publication and posting, e-mails from readers started coming - the nicest, most encouraging and flattering letters you'd ever want to read. Certainly, on my first day without a full-time job, they were the most wonderful letters I'd ever want to read. They started coming in so quickly that I had to start deleting dusty old e-mails so my account wouldn't overload. Every one will get a personal thank-you from me in the coming days - and to all those who said they'd already added TV WORTH WATCHING to their bookmarked favorites, an extra special thanks.
You made me feel pretty terrific. So did Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa, who surprised me by holding up my farewell column, and saying goodbye and good luck to me, on their Monday show. (On the day the writers' strike started, they surprised me just by holding court, without writers as usual.) And the farewell column, and/or mention of the website, began popping up elsewhere, noted by journalism sites, other bloggers, and even fellow TV critics, like Hal Boedeker of the Orlando Sentinel and Roger Catlin of the Hartford Courant.
One really nice piece came from a blogger of a TV-savvy website, Toobworld, and a guy whose name, Toby O'Brien, I recognized as the most prolific and impressive contributor of the "Extras" in-jokes I used to solicit from Daily News readers. Just to give a sense of how warm this all made me feel, I'm providing links for just a few of them here.
blogs.orlandosentinel.com
blogs.courant.com
toobworld.blogspot.com
www.contentbridges.com
I got wonderful calls and e-mails from friends and colleagues who knew what was happening to me, and from friends, contacts and readers who had no idea. The whole day got to be like Tom Sawyer eavesdropping on his own funeral. Even if the things being said were too generous because of the circumstances, they still were encouraging to hear and read.
More than ever, I feel there may be something to this "Interweb" (as Tracy Jordan called it on 30 Rock). I could have been depressed today. Instead, I'm elated. And tomorrow is another day... which I'll spend writing everybody back.
Oh, and for the record: neatest thing I saw on all of TV yesterday? That time-lapse photography of a glacier advancing, and retreating, on NBC's Today show. How cool. Literally.
November 5, 2007 - Out to Launch
November 5, 2007 6:27 PM
Welcome to the official launch of TV WORTH WATCHING, a website devoted to the discovery, discussion and dissemination of quality television. The fact that it comes into existence at midnight on November 5 - the very moment the writers in Hollywood threatened to strike - is pure, goofy coincidence. TV, it is the firm position of this website, is better when it's written.
Please take a minute or two to press some navigation bar buttons and roam around the site. If you care about good television - watching it, collecting it, reading or hearing about it, even discussing it - chances are you'll find something useful, entertaining, maybe even surprising.
Theodore Sturgeon once posited what he called Sturgeon's Law, which says that "90 percent of everything is crap." (In some citations, the wording is even stronger.) Certainly, that's true of television - but that remaining 10 percent still leaves a lot of room for enjoyment, education and inspiration. That's the focus of this website: Instead of TV's 90 percent problem, we'll be devoting our attentions and energies to the 10 percent solution.
Except, on occasion, in this blog, where the fight for quality TV may require attacking some of TV's most irritating practices and programs - the lack of theme songs, the encroachment of ads superimposed over the shows themselves. All will be done, though, with a sense of fairness as well as fun. Thanks for being here from the start.
