Current Affairs

Channel Surfing

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Lots of interesting TV news in Variety today…

Steven Bochco replaced COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF creator/exec producer Rod Lurie…and has wasted no time making the show his own. Five of the original eight writer/producers have been booted.  Staying on are Dee Johnson, Scoop Cohen and Stuart
Stevens who will be joined by Bochco veterans Alison Cross and Joel Fields. Variety says Bochco wanted a smaller staff and doesn’t plan to hire any more writers. Reportedly, big staff changes are also in the works at GHOST WHISPERER on CBS. It’s ironic that the two highest rated new series of the season are undergoing such internal turmoil.

Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water, NBC has picked up SURFACE for the full season.

Cartoon Network has ordered 26 episodes of  a new animated revival of the 60s cult classic GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE.  They haven’t said whether it will be "re-imagined" or not.

And ABC has ordered a pilot called COLE TRACER PI, about the star of a cancelled TV detective series who teams up with the show’s technical advisor to solve crimes. It’s being directed by Joe & Anthony Russo, who are three-for-three when it comes to directing pilots that get series orders (ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, LUCKY, and LAX).

What I’m Listening to Today While My Daughter Has Soccer Practice

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There are a couple shows I enjoy listening to sporadically on the weekends when I’m ferrying my ten-year-old daughter around to all her soccer games, tae kwon do classes and play dates.

Michael Feldman is, in my view, the radio equivalent of David Letterman or Conan O’Brien. His exuberant NPR program WHAT DO YOU KNOW?  is a talkshow/game show but it’s really just a forum for him to make jokes about the news and, when the show travels, whatever city or state he happens to be visiting that week. It’s a very funny, often hilarious  show.  It’s apparently been on the air for over a decade, but seems to generate absolutely no buzz.

I also like to catch Peter Sagal’s  WAIT WAIT DON’T TELL ME, another NPR game show, which is  just an excuse to make jokes about current events.  The show is uneven, depending a great deal on how sharp the panelists are as they make jokes during a variety of simple news quizzes, during which phone-in listeners vie for the chance to have NPR announcer Carl Kasell record a message on their telephone answering machines. Most weeks you can find  Paula Poundstone among the group (thus answering the trivia question "whatever happened to Paula Poundstone?"), and she seems to bring out the best in the panel, which usually includes  Roy Blount Jr, PJ O’Rourke, Adam Felber, and Sue Ellicott. Like WHAT DO YOU KNOW, this show also seems to exist below the pop culture radar.

Then again, they’re both on the radio…and who listens to radio any more?

An Idiosyncratic View of My Book

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Many thanks to Sarah Weinman at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind for making my new book  THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE a "pick of the week".

This book is getting a ton of
review attention and it’s easy to see why: on the surface, it’s a classic
wish-fulfillment tale, but the substance that lies beneath is what elevates
Goldberg’s novel into a thoughtful, sometimes sweet and always engaging look at
what it takes to grow from a boy to a man. In a way, I see why it took so long
to reach readers: many other writers would need another 100 pages to tell the
same story, but credit to the author for putting it across without a wasted
word.

Take Me To The Pilot

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Paul Guyot talks about why he never leaves behind a "leave behind" when pitching a pilot. I’ve heard both sides of the argument.

LEAVE THEM NOTHING. No treatment, no "Leave behind." I firmly
believe that you greatly reduce your chances of a sale when you leave
them something that they can pick apart and overanalyze.

The idea of leaving them with something is archaic.  That was the
way things were twenty years ago, but not now. And the reason so many
[Aspring Writers] think they should do this is because they’re reading books and
taking classes from writers who haven’t worked in TV in ten or twenty
years. 

Frankly, I’ve always left a leave-behind. I guess that makes me a dinosaur — or it explains why I haven’t sold a pilot yet this season. I’ve got another pitch coming up, maybe I’ll try it Paul’s way this time…

What Sunk SeaQuest?

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Seaquest2032_a_1Media critic Herbie J. Pilato, author of books about the TV series KUNG FU and BEWITCHED,  does a very good job dissecting what went wrong with SEAQUEST. In short, just about everything:

The changes were manic. Too much to swallow. SeaQuest suffocated in a sea of too
many ideas. Too many DeLouises from one Dom. It reached for whatever might keep
it above water. It’s like someone unplugged the cork at the center of the sub.
It sunk. No one paid attention to the simplest, yet most essential answer: they
should have bailed out, as soon as possible.

"SeaQuest will not be remembered as a television classic," Goldberg concludes
" It will be
remembered technically as a ground-breaking show for computer animation, and
creatively as a hugely expensive mistake."

Another Bond Movie

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Variety reports that Warner Brothers is making another Bond movie…only this one will be about 007 creator Ian Fleming.

"Fleming," meanwhile, tells the story of how the author’s own experiences
with womanizing and spying shaped his signature secret agent creation.

Born into a privileged English family, Fleming began as a comparative
underachiever until a stint as a journalist covering the Soviet Union led him to
begin spying on that country for the Foreign Office. Fleming was the mastermind
of numerous clever spying schemes, some deemed too outlandish to use. He dreamed
of becoming a daring secret agent and adapted his own womanizing feats and the
stories he heard to craft the Bond novels.

Becoming a TV Writer

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Paul Guyot has an excellent post today about becoming a TV writer and what it takes to stay in the game. Here’s a taste from his very long, very informative post:

Starting out you must have skin like a Rhino. You could get lucky and land on
a show with a very smart, very secure showrunner like I did – one who encouraged
the writer’s original voice, one who liked to teach, one who wanted to get as
much of the writer’s words into the show.

Or you could land where I’ve also been – on a show where you’re seen as a
threat, an outsider, someone who hasn’t proved themselves – and in their eyes
that means someone who didn’t go through the same shit they went through. It can
be like fraternity hell week… only lasting a whole season. You can be writing
your ass off, knowing you’re doing good work – better than others – and still
have your work slammed. Still be completely rewritten. To the point where, when
the show airs, you’re almost embarrassed to have your name on it. Not because
it’s so awful, but because there’s not a single word of yours left.

But you shut up and take it. You do your job.

My friend Paul moans all the time about shutting down his blog, but it’s because of fantastic essays about the biz like this one that I hope he never does. Keep’em coming, Paul!

 

WhyDo So Many Movies Suck Lately?

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…Jim Warren had lunch with a couple of film-makers and left with the answer:

How can these guys expect to make great movies if they’re basically unfamiliar
with what has come before? And it’s not really their fault, either; they’re both
bright and talented young men. They’re victims of a society that does not reward
substance. We’re immersed in a culture that puts a premium on novelty rather
than on creativity, one that places a higher value on the breadth of trivia than
it does on the depth of knowledge, one that prefers spectacle over vision, and
videogame hand-eye coordination over book-perusing eye-brain comprehension.