TeeVee

7 November 20077 August 2012

Box Watch Epilogue

Some of you may have been wondering if you’ve stumbled onto a wannabe-homegrown-Teevee site rather than the wannabe-homegrown-johnaugust.com I aspire to. Well, I could say that sing –

It’s my party
And I’ll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to
Cry if I want to

– but I’m in one of my rare moments of adult-ness so I’ll say this: someone wrote those shows, and a large part of our enjoyment derives from the stories they tell and the characters within. And if the show turns me on, I like to share the love.

(Some of you more sharp-eyed surfers may be confused about my relationship with Medium. That show’s lack of character consistency and surfeit of expository dialogue may set my teeth on edge but I watch it because it tells some wicked cool stories, sometimes with style aplenty.)

23 October 20077 August 2012

A Late Letter to Aaron Sorkin

Dear Mr Sorkin

I’ve been a big fan, Mr Sorkin, for a looong time.

I first noticed your work when Jack and Tom chewed the scenery (and each other) in A Few Good Men. Even though Det. Steve Keller Michael Douglas played The American President, I still enjoyed how you mixed in the love and politics.

And then there was Sports Night. A comedy with no laugh track? A drama that played for just half-an-hour? A show which wasn’t really about sports but about relationships? That used sports as a metaphor for what it meant to be a decent human being in this world? You sly dog, you: I was hooked. You showed me that not only was it possible to be funny and enlightening, you made me a believer in intelligent television – sometimes less was more.

The West Wing did not disappoint. Only you could create a drama about politics without regularly resorting to situations in which the world was saved at the last second. I only got to Season Three unfortunately – life had plans for me and I drifted away. I hear that around Season Four, life had its own plans for you, too.

I’m not afraid to say that I had a flutter when I heard you were returning with Studio 60 on Sunset Strip. So what if Teevee quickly tired of the numerous rants soliloquoys. And you have to admit Ken Levine was pretty funny with his if Aaron Sorkin wrote a show about baseball. I knew without question that I was going to tune in whenever it reached our shores.

The first half-dozen eps were classic Sorkin. I lapped it up. Whatever industry japes and spikes were there went straight over my head. So you wanted to vent – I was cool with that. And maybe your signature back-and-forth dialogue wasn’t so fresh a third time around – I didn’t mind; it was nice to have you back on the box. But then there was the The Harriet Dinner two-parter. Then the 4am Miracle ep. Then The Disaster Show.

Mr Sorkin – all due respect but… WTF?

I’m sorry, Mr Sorkin, but I just… I can’t take any more. I’ve stopped watching. I may never know how Danny and Jordan go with the baby, or if Matt and Harriett’s rollercoaster love will straighten up and fly right, or even if the New Black Guy will get his first sketch aired. I don’t care. I feel insulted. If I wanted will-they-or-won’t-they relationship arcs or idiot-plots-A through to -Z, I’d be watching CSI or Medium. I wanted to enjoy your last outing but it didn’t work out. It wasn’t me, it was you.

Please don’t take this to be a beatdown. I’m a big fan of your work – even if Studio 60 plumbed some depths, it was still superior television. Whatever your next show is, you can count me in, no questions asked.

Yours sincerely

d f mamea

17 March 200727 July 2012

Point and Click

Between searching for bill-paying work, and drafting pitches for writing work, all I’s gots for ya this week is more linkages.

John Rogers has a great post on credits arbitration – it’s interesting in an “as you pass a flaming wreck” kind of way. (See also Josh Friedman‘s experience, Being A Play in Two Parts.) For myself, I swear by the excellent New Zealand Writers Guild model contracts, though none of them mention residuals.

John August has an interesting post on publicity. I admit to being Kiwi-bloke-ish in my self-promotion: essentially a “build it and they will come” approach. (This blog and the attendant dfmamea.com site was a tentative step in the self-promotion direction. It’s provided a fantastic avenue for procrasturbation.)

Whilst clearing up my massive RSS backlog (and inadvertently deleting a mass of ‘Important’-flagged ones), I found a wealth of left-field ideas and approaches to film distribution from Tim Clague‘s Projector Films blog. The ideas are a bit scary and newfangled for a conventional and blissful ignoramus like myself, but they’re exciting and exhilarating, and any day now, I’ll understand it all.

And finally, courtesy of this from TeeVee, there’s the Brilliant but Cancelled site which seems to have some neat feeds on a range of shows that didn’t survive transmission on American t.v. It doesn’t have UnSub, Game, Set and Match or Now and Again, but. Hope springs eternal.

12 March 200727 July 2012

Buffy Returns

Thanks to this from the kids at TeeVee, Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans – and that includes the Webmistresse – now have Season 8 to look forward to. Yes – or to the ‘mistresse, sorry – it’s a comic. But Buffy creator Joss Whedon hisself will be deeply involved and here‘s a Q&A with Mr Whedon that’ll whet some appetites.