My Blog

Worse Ratings Are Worst Enemy’s Worst Enemy

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Variety reports that NBC has canceled MY OWN WORST ENEMY after the series notched its worst ratings yet this week. The Christian Slater spy drama will halt production after wrapping their ninth episode, which they are shooting now. 

Meanwhile, ABC is mulling whether or not to pick up PUSHING DAISIES, though showrunner Bryan Fuller vows to continue the show as a comic book if the ax falls.

“The idea would be to finish out the season’s story arcs in comic
books,” Fuller said during a “Inside the Writers Room” night at the
Paley Center for Media Tuesday evening.  The comic would likely be
publshed by DC because “Daisies” is produced by DC’s corporate sibling,
Warner Brothers.  

The purpose of the comic book series would be “to satisfy the fans
and ourselves, to finish up the stories we’d love to tell” and to
“clear the slate for a movie” Fuller said.

Book Worming

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My brother Tod does an amazing impersonation of KCRW's Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt. His impersonati0n is SO good, it's even amazing in print:

Silverblatt: Tod, I am struck by the power in
your prose, the way words tumble from the page like mercury, like
Jupiter, like Pluto, once a planet, but no more a planet, now just a
bit of stardust, like your words, floating, inexorably, through, time.
And yet, I find that your words are also like play-dough, in that when
I eat them I find them at first…salty…yet…plain…and I found
myself yearning for…bite…verve…only found in the works of people
like Rilke, like Rick Springfield, whose girl, while Jessie's, was, in
fact, no longer, like Pluto. Yes?

Me: I'm just happy to be on the show, Mike.

His account of his trip to the Vegas Valley Book Festival is pretty funny, too.

Reusable Man-Tits

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EmpathStorm
The Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books bloggers have caught Harlequin using the same cover image over and over again:

"In a failing economy, it becomes essential to any business to recycle
and to seek alternative means to cut costs. Such as? Stock imagery!
Hey, when you find a hot image with expansive man-titty, you work that
for all it is worth. "

Or you just change the heads.Souls

My First Time

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You can watch the SPENSER: FOR HIRE episode "If You Knew Sammy," the first produced teleplay by me & William Rabkin, here. It's absolutely free and features future movie star William H. Macy in a supporting role, which he would reprise in our sequel episode, "Play it Again, Sammy" (which was a back-door pilot).

Vanity Press Trickery

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The wonderful Writers Beware blog led me to this excellent list of tricks vanity presses use to con desperate, and gullible aspiring writers into believing that they are "real" publishers…which also double as rationalizations the suckers use to convince themselves that they haven't been swindled. Among them, the myth that if a publisher doesn't accept all submissions (eg. Tate), and pays a token advance (eg. PublishAmerica), they aren't a scam.

2. Misconception: Vanity presses don’t pay advances.

While
vanity presses are supported primarily by the money that writers pay
them, the less-than-honest vanities try to pass themselves off as real
publishers. One way to do so is to pay advances (or claim to do so).

Now,
how to be an advance-paying publisher and still make a profit from
writers? Well, the advances could be very low. For instance, $1 per
author, non-negotiable. The publisher could also pay – or claim to pay
– advances to some authors but not others. Maybe you’ll get it, maybe you won’t.

They can afford to pay you the $1 or the $100 because they know they will make it all back in the money they make off of you and your family buying copies of your own book…which, in fact, is their actual business. They make are in the "selling books to authors" business.

Rebooting the Reboot

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The rebooted KNIGHTRIDER is getting a reboot. Half the cast — Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Yancey Arias and
Bruce Davison — has been let go and the concept is being tweaked to make it closer to the original series. Showunner Gary Scott Thompson says:

 "We're moving away from the
terrorist-of-the-week formula and closer to the original,
making it a show about a man and his car going out and helping
more regular people, everymen."

The Writing on the Wall

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The once-hot HEROES has cooled considerably. The ratings are declining, producers are getting fired, and now Bit-Tech reports that Ubisoft has abruptly canceled plans for a HEROES game.

Though no official information was ever given out on the game or why
exactly it has been cancelled, speculation is that Ubisoft is
responding to declining interest in the show, which is now in the third
series. Though the show proved phenomenally popular in the first
series, the second series came to an abrupt end thanks to the writers
strike and the third season has struggled to get positive reviews.

I wonder how much longer NBC will stick with the show, which reportedly costs well over $4 million an episode.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports on NBC's attempts to save HEROES from sliding any further.

The impetus for the firings came from the top, according to two people
close to the production who spoke on the condition of anonymity. (These
and others close to the show were not authorized to speak on the
record.) They said that Jeff Zucker, president and chief executive of NBC Universal
and Mr. Silverman’s boss, was greatly upset by an Entertainment Weekly
cover story two weeks ago that said some of this season’s developments
were “jump-the-shark preposterous” and concluded that the series “may
no longer be a pop-culture phenomenon.”

[…]Yet on Friday, Entertainment Weekly also reported that Bryan Fuller,
one of the lead writers in the first season of “Heroes” who left to
create “Pushing Daisies” for ABC, is considering a return to “Heroes”
if ABC fails to extend “Pushing Daisies” beyond the 13 episodes it has
ordered for this season.

Memory Lane

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Tonight I went to a cocktail party and screening at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences to celebrate the Archive of American Television's DVD release of the classic series STUDIO ONE. The boxed set contains 17 episodes, including the original, TV production of "Twelve Angry Men," which was long thought to be lost until a rare kinescope turned up recently in the estate of a deceased trial lawyer who collected books, movies and ephemera about the law. So much our priceless TV history has been lost through carelessness and stupidity, but that's another story…

You never know who you are going to bump into at these events and, for me, this one became an unexpected opportunity to revisit the start of my career in television. I ran into Bruce Bilson, who directed the first script Bill Rabkin & I ever had produced, an episode of SPENSER FOR HIRE. We chatted for a bit, and then I spotted Leonard Stern walking across the room. He was one of the executive producers of MURPHY'S LAW, a short-lived series starring George Segal that was our first staff job. I was pleased and flattered that Stern not only remembered me and Bill, but also my book "Unsold Television Pilots" (Stern, in addition to being a legendary writer/producer, is also a publisher, one of the partners behind Price Stern Sloan and now Tallfellow Press).

Jack Klugman, a veteran of many live TV productions, was also at the cocktail party (he was there to speak on a panel after the screening). I said hello, reminded him who I was, and thanked him again for guest-starring in one of our best DIAGNOSIS MURDER episodes, "Voices Carry." I liked the episode and his performance in it so much, that I ended up writing a prequel — the novel "Diagnosis Murder: The Past Tense," which became the most widely acclaimed of the eight novels in the series.  I told him that, too.  He seemed flattered, or maybe he was just being polite.

For a TV nut like me, being able to go to events like this is one of the great things about living in Los Angeles.

Barnes & Trouble

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Borders is teetering on the edge of financial collapse and now the Wall Street Journal reports that Barnes & Noble, while not as bad off as its main competitor, is feeling some pain…and expecting more. B&N chairman Leonard Riggio wrote an internal memo that says, in part:

Never in all of the years I've been in business have I seen a worse outlook for the economy. And never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in. Nothing even close. […] Barnes & Noble, too, has suffered from this crisis, albeit not as severely as most retailers, and certainly not as much as other booksellers. As you know, our comparable store sales have declined for the first time in our history. As a result, we are bracing for a terrible holiday season, and expect the trend to continue well into 2009, and perhaps beyond.