Archive for November, 2009

Is Reality TV destroying America?

Monday, November 30th, 2009

“The influence of Reality TV has been insidious, pervasive. It has ruined television, and by ruining television it has ruined America.”

The above is a quote from December’s VANITY FAIR article, written by James Wolcott. I feel like I’ve been saying it for years, but it’s nice to hear someone else shouting about it. He actually makes a great argument in this article and I encourage you all to read it.

But, if you are feeling exceptionally lazy, I am going to cut and paste some choice points. Feel free to throw them into holiday party conversations:

– “Reality TV wages class warfare and promotes proletarian exploitation… In an eye-opener published in The New York Times of August 2, reporter Edward Wyatt revealed the sweatshop secrets of Reality TV’s mini-stockades, where economic exploitation and psychological manipulation put the vise squeeze on contestants. ‘With no union representation, participants on reality series are not covered by Hollywood workplace rules governing meal breaks, minimum time off between shoots or even minimum wages,”
Wyatt wrote. “Most of them, in fact, receive little to no pay for their work.’”

- “Emotionally, Reality TV is emaciated, envy and spite being the alternating currents…Nearly everyone conforms to crude, cartoon stereotype (bitch, gold digger, flamboyant gay, recovering addict, sofa spud, anal perfectionist, rageaholic)…”

- “Reality TV encourages and rewards vulgar, selfish, antisocial, pissy-pants behavior.”

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Read TV Scripts! It’s fun. Promise.

Friday, November 20th, 2009

For those of you thinking of getting involved in storyboard TV, once we’re up and running in February, here’s a great resource:

http://tvwriting.googlepages.com/pilotschool

Lots of scripts of television pilots! Very fun to see where your favorite shows started… Plus, it’s a great education in scripting for tv.

Happy Friday!

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What watching THE PRISONER taught me

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Yes, I did it. I watched the whole thing. There were times I didn’t think I’d make it. But yes, I did, I made it through the entire remake of The Prisoner on AMC. An unlimited supply of popcorn and chocolate chips helped, as did the knowledge that at some point this show would end and I would leave the experience with some new found knowledge. And here it is:

1. Cast Sir Ian McKellan in everything always.

Ian McKellan is like Kryptonite to channel changers. There is no way a person can change the channel on this man. In the original series, Number Two was played by a different person each week. A smart device if you want to explore issues of expendability, but thankfully not one used in the remake. Because let me tell you, if they replaced McKellan, I would have turned off my tv.

2. Don’t steal aspects of the OLD show and put them in the NEW show if the new show has an entirely different premise.

Case in point: the numbering system. If the new village is supposed to be some sort of Utopian existence, (unlike the old village which was a prison), then taking away people’s names and numbering them all makes absolutely no sense. It’s nice to have an homage and all, but stick to showing us lava lamps and referencing costumes…

3. If you make 6 episodes, air 6 episodes.

Don’t air three mega-episodes as two hour “events” instead. The thing that makes episodic television great is just that: the episodes. It let’s us follow a distinct aspect of the story, muse on it, discuss it with others. If you present two episodes back to back, without any sense of divide between the two, we begin to wonder why we watched the first hour of the show when the second goes in another direction.

4. Just because we love a mystery, doesn’t mean we like getting yanked around.

You may think that because we watch LOST and revel in the random polar bear sitings and black clouds, that we’re OK without explanations of why these things exist. Not so. We continue to watch so that eventually we will understand WHY JJ Abrams imported a polar bear to Hawaii. And JJ Abrams knows that, which is why he asked for an end date to the series so that he could start explaining things without veering too far off course. But this was a six hour show. It had an end. So tell why, by the end of these six hours, do I still not know what the hell that bouncing white ball is supposed to be?

5. Don’t call me stupid (ahem… Subaru).

Did anyone else notice that during the commercial breaks, Subaru “presented” hints to what was going on? Hints like: “the pills and the holes are connected.” Wow, really Subaru? Thanks for thinking I’m an idiot. Much appreciated.

Posted in Television Shows | 2 Comments »

TV and Parables of Our Time

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

“I think we underestimate the power of entertainment narratives to influence the way we look at the world. And storytelling, when it’s good storytelling… orients us to possibilities and helps us structure the way we look at things.”
- Diane Winston, journalist and scholar of media and religion at USC

This summer, I listened to an episode of the NPR show Speaking of Faith called “TV and Parables of Our Time”. Diane Winston (quoted above) was the guest and if you have an hour to spend listening to someone speak thoughtfully about how television feeds the collective soul, I suggest you listen show. You can find it here: http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/tv/

In a nutshell, Diane Winston discusses the importance of storytelling in our culture and rightfully puts TV at the center of this storytelling. She speaks of TV as a ritualistic, or religious act – it is individualistic in one sense (watching tv alone in your house) but also community building as well (we discuss what we’ve seen, join fan sites, make up our own stories and share them with eachother). Good TV grapples with everyday topics as diverse as medical ethics (House), religious fundamentalism (Battlestar), and race inequity (The Wire) in order to show us not only where we as a society are right now, but also where we are going. An interesting point she brings up is that television helps “normalize” what may once have been unimaginable – allowing a community to make a slow, paradigm shift. Example: black president on TV, black president in real life…

Anyway, I highly recommend that you listen to the show.

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Web TV may be here sooner than you think.

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

I keep telling anyone who will listen that the network model is dead and soon we’ll be using our television sets to call up programming on the internet. Meaning, people will be following SHOWS rather than niche network programming. And perhaps, then, there will be a revolution in story creation, new fiction television will flood the marketplace, and world peace will finally be achieved. Right? Of course right.

Anyway, an interesting article in last week’s USA TODAY talks about what’s going on in the web tv world, so if you’re interested in what the future holds, you might want to check it out.

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Dollhouse Cancelled. World Mourns.

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Yeah, you heard me. We’re on the last 13 episodes.

It’s not that Dollhouse wasn’t a flawed show. It had issues – the biggest being Eliza Dukshu (sorry, Dukshu fans). And, of course, the implausibility behind there being a dollhouse that remains hidden despite the fact that whenever a doll is sent out on a mission, something inevitably backfires.

That said, Joss Whedon’s writing, dialogue, and character development are pretty much the best you’re going to see on television. (Don’t believe me? Rent Buffy Seasons 1-7. And then read all the books written about the series, because other people are more literate than I am and can tell you why Buffy might have been the most important show on television)  And when Whedon concentrated on the far superior, supporting cast’s backstories, what came out was absolutely heartwrenching television.

The worst part of Dollhouse’s cancellation, though, is that this story’s not going to have an ending. The 13 episodes have already been shot, and we’re all going to be left wondering what comes next. In an ideal world, Fox would let Joss write a response to last season’s unaired episode, Epitaph One (but released on DVD and itunes), if only to give us a sense of hope after the apocalypse (another Whedon signature).

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if TV creators (besides J J Abrams) were given a realistic sense of their show’s lifespan, so that they could plan their story accordingly. Of course, this would need to happen in a world without as much dependence on advertising dollars, ratings, and bottom lines.

Storyboard TV, anyone?

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What did Sesame Street really teach us?

Monday, November 16th, 2009

So, in case your head is in a hole somewhere, you’ve probably realized that it’s the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street. There’s a lot of blogging dedicated to this fact today, so I thought I’d throw in my two cents.

I loved Sesame Street. I mean, come on, who didn’t?  My favorite character was Snuffleupagus because nobody could see him and I liked watching Big Bird get frustrated about it. Oh, and of course the grouch. Because he lived in a trash can.

But I’ve also always had a bone to pick with this show. I’m pretty sure it helped create an ADD generation of people who are unable to be interested in anything for more than three minutes. With it’s short sketches and songs, it trained generations of children to expect a lesson in a short amount of time. There was no plot arc, no character development, no slowly working towards a larger goal. I don’t know – maybe this makes me seem crotchety – but I wonder if the reason we all like you tube clips and cliffhangers before every commercial break is because we never learned patience as children.

That said, it was also groundbreaking in the way it introduced the very concept of watching television to children. Fellow blogger, James Poniewozik, puts it best:

“I like to think that, in some small way, Sesame also taught kids to be smarter media consumers, and that this was as valuable a service as teaching the alphabet. By spoofing TV, the show didn’t just captivate kids; it also taught by example that a news show or an entertainment show has its own rules and conventions—it taught kids that shows are shows, performed by people for cameras, and not reality. It deflated the pomposity of news anchors for kids, and showed them by referencing the traditions of commercial TV (“brought to you by the number 8,” etc.) that TV is in the business of selling you things.” (Read the whole article at: http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2009/11/10/sesame-street-raising-little-media-critics-for-40-years/)

It’s a nice idea to think that watching Sesame Street helped fortify me for my future life of watching too much TV. Maybe it made me a more critical watcher. Hey – and maybe it prepared me for the shorter acts between longer commercial breaks.

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Is the network model really dead?

Monday, November 16th, 2009

I was reading an article in NY Magazine, posted on November 8th, called “Will Somebody Please Save NBC?” (http://nymag.com/news/media/61857/) and have been wondering since then whether NBC, or any other network, is really worth saving.

As has been well illustrated by the folks over at NBC, running a network is a costly business and when you have a large company of mouths to feed, it all really does come down to the bottom line. Sadly, Jay Leno and reality tv are both much, much cheaper to make than one hour television dramas.

And now, with the proliferation of DVRs and websites dedicated to streaming television shows, people really aren’t watching any particular network anyway. They’re watching SHOWS, regardless of channel placement.

Case in point: “Mad Men” – Does it even matter what else is on AMC?

I think the death of the network might be a good thing for fiction television. 5 million viewers will no longer be something to scoff at – because those 5 million viewers will not be responsible for subsidizing shows with even less viewers on any given channel.

They’ll just stand alone as 5 million people who like watching a show. That’s a lot of people.

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What is Storyboard TV?

Monday, November 16th, 2009

We’re glad you asked -

Storyboard TV is an online community of writers, readers, and television watchers that believes in the power of episodic, fictional television to document, enhance, and transform people’s lives for the better.

Storyboard TV is a place where writers of new shows can meet their potential audiences, garner feedback, and develop a supportive following for their work.

Storyboard TV is also a place where television watchers/lovers can go to read, help develop, and campaign to get the next “must see” television series produced.

If you’re tired of seeing great fiction lose air time to reality tv, or of watching the same old story line get played out on every crime procedural, or have found that it’s getting harder to justify to all of your friends just WHY you watch television, then Storyboard TV is for you.

To get things started on the right foot, the Storyboard TV website will launch in February with a scriptwriting competition offering a $5,000 reward to a writer with the best one-hour television pilot. The winning script will be read, voted on, and ultimately decided by members of the storyboard community.

From there, Storyboard TV will help develop the winning script for possible production.  Who knows – if we get lucky, we might even get to see the thing made into a series.

In the meantime, here’s our blog. In the coming months, we’ll be examining why we watch, what we’re watching, and why we think it’s important. We’ll also be updating you about the site, the competition, and anything else we can think of.

Storyboard TV: Making Shows We’d Watch.

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