What have you been up to?

In the last 177 days?

Things I've done:


1. Got promoted to the lofty rank of Development Coordinator.

That's right, monkey's got some say now.


2. Participated in some TV writing workshops. Met some cool people. Learned a lot.

If you get a chance to do a workshop with Chuck Lazer or Esta Spalding, I highly recommend it!


3. Started a writing group with said cool people. So far we're meeting once a week, and everyone submits about every other week.

It is glorious!


4. Finished polishing a new pilot and a spec episode of Dexter.

Not sure they're glorious, but don't think they're steaming piles of donkey shit either.


5. Applied to the Canadian Film Centre's Prime Time Television Writing Program.

Hopefully I'll be in Toronto come September.


6. Attended the CFTPA Prime Time Conference, crashed the VIP reception.

Never seen so many suits in my life. Drank myself stupid with some other creatives.


7. Registered myself for the Banff World Television Festival.

Drunken debauchery, here I come!


8. Came up with three solid ideas (two pilots, one spec) that I'm planning on writing in the near future.

Not sure which I'll be focusing on yet, but we'll see how the beat sheets go...


9. Was approached to Produce a doc about exotic dancers in Vancouver.

Very tempting (for reasons I'd think were obvious), but ultimately had to pass due to scheduling problems...

10. Got a TiVo! And it has changed my life!

Seriously, if you have yet to experience the wonderfulness that is a PVR, you're missing out...


That, in a nutshell, sums up how I've spent the last 177 days. Had a bit of burn out on the blog, but am jumping back on the bandwagon now. Guess we'll see where it leads!

The Future...

"...24p and Final Cut are the car bombs of television."

Strike!

Sorry for the lack of updates...chalk it up to doing lots of other writerly things...

I'm sure everyone knows that the WGA's out on strike at the moment. I'm not going to rehash it other than to say that they're fighting the good fight. If you're curious or want to know why they're striking (or are just hungry for news) I've added some great links on the sidebar...

This one's for the whole shebang kids...

Sophomore Slump

So things aren't going all that well in TeeVee land this season. There haven't been any break out hits. Gossip Girl's been picked up despite mediocre numbers, but a lot of the supposedly flagship new shows (Bionic Woman, Private Practice, I'm looking at you) have failed to impress.

Even more disturbing is the fact that a few of the returning series are also struggling. Heroes may never have been a great show, but at least it was entertaining. This year? Not so much.

Even worse than Heroes has been the disastrous opening to the new season of Friday Night Lights. Now, the first season of FNL came as close to perfection as a season of television can. The characters, storylines and the feel of Dillon, Texas were all so real that you'd swear you could hop in your car and drive there. It felt more like Hoop Dreams than a scripted series.

But boy have things ever gone off the rails.

Now I don't think it's as bad as some people (take Alex for instance), but it's pretty bad. Of course I'm talking about the Landry / Tyra murder plot.

Now I'm not completely opposed to the murder (unlike Alan), but getting rid of the body? Oy vey! Killing someone in the heat of the moment (even if he did it while the guy was walking away) I can understand. But Landry and Tyra are smart kids, after whacking a guy in the head with a pipe they'd call the damn ambulance or at least drop him off at the hospital.

This plotline is frustrating as all hell because it fractures the reality of Dillon, Texas with unnecessary melodrama. And it's a real shame too, because even in the midst of this misbegoten excuse of a story there are moments where Tyra and Landry (probably my two favorite actors on the show) really shine (specifically I'm talking about episode two, "Real Man" scene and the last scene in the episode).

There's still a lot to like in FNL. The Julie / Matt storyline is still strong (though I'm a little worried about this new live in caregiver at the Saracen's). Mrs. Coach is still riveting. Buddy's meltdown is amazing to watch. But compared to last year, the new season's been wildly inconsistent.

Rum and Spies, Dust Busters and Samurais

Wow. The pace is definitely picking up around here. Canadian funding deadlines are looming, VIFF is shifting into high gear, my online UCLA extension class starts today and TeeVee continues its deluge of new shows.

What's been on lately?

Chuck

I quite liked Chuck. Josh Schwartz is channeling the funny, pop-hipster bits from the OC. The action sequences were good, and there's some great comedy (the western showdown at the end may have been a joke we've seen/heard before, but it was well executed).

There are some problems inherent with the premise though. It feels overly familiar, hard to escape when every second show at the moment is an "ordinary man develops special abilities" show, but Chuck also reminds me a bit too much Jake 2.0.

Also, as others have noted, wouldn't all the super secret information in Chuck's head be obsolete after a couple of weeks? Last I heard intelligence was...ahem...time sensitive...

Journeyman

I'm a sucker for time travel stories, so I really, really wanted to like Journeyman, but it just left me feeling "meh."

The love triangle is interesting and offers some fun dynamics to play with. The scenes of Dan in the past, interacting with friends and family, were by far the best parts of the show. The modern drama (trouble with his wife, intervention, etc) fell flat because the audience is out ahead of the characters. We know that Dan's not doing drugs. We know he's not cheating on his wife (does time travel cheating count?). So all the speculation by his wife / brother / boss lacks drama because we know they're wrong.

I loved the murky morality of the time travel plot (he's going back in time to save a guy, only to kill him in the end), but it lacked cohesion in my eyes. I kept wondering what he was doing, how the pieces fit together, and even once it had all played out (turns out he was meant to save the guys unborn child) I couldn't help but think "what's the point of all that?"

Reaper

Reaper and Chuck are the same show. I found the sidekick in Reaper to be more obnoxious than the sidekick in Chuck. The comedy in Reaper was broader, more slapstick. It had some nice moments (love the dogs and the DMV), and the I think that the premise is better than Chuck (at least there were less logic gaps in Reaper than in Chuck). And there's nothing cooler than sucking up souls in a Dirt Devil.

Safe to say I'm a fan.

Cane

I love Jimmy Smits. He's almost enough to make Cane watchable, but in the end he can't save it. At the end of the day this show was flat out boring. I'm falling asleep writing this...

Heroes

Heroes is starting to piss me off. As I watched the first season on DVD all my old niggles (poor payoffs, annoying characters, muddled storylines) really started to come to the fore. The second season premiere didn't do much to alleviate my concerns.

The biggest problem with Heroes is the number of characters and plot lines they're trying to juggle. There are already too many, and the premiere introduced two more!

So the premiere had: Claire and HRG adjusting to their new life (which was good), Suresh infiltrating the company (Suresh irks me to no end), Parkman kicking ass and taking names (detective? nice!), Hiro in feudal Japan (and with a gaijin Kensei? WTF?), Ando and Hiro's dad sitting around drinking coffee and getting death threats, Nathan as an alcoholic with a beard, Peter tied up naked in a cargo container, oh and the two new people on the run in Honduras (if they were heading south they could guest star on Prison Break!).

Anyone else confused by all that?

Scary thing is it's only going to get worse if they follow through with their plan to incorporate a character introduced on Origins into the main show.

Anyways, so much was going on that the episode really just served to reintroduce everyone (with some heroes not even mentioned...Sylar? Nikki / Jessica?). I can't help but feel that they're just throwing bucket loads of stuff at the audience in the hopes that some of it's going to stick.

I think Heroes would be better off if they just focused down onto some of their core stories (Claire/HRG, Hiro, maybe the Petrellis) and get rid of the rest.

All in all there are a lot of shows I want to like this season, but most of them just aren't there yet.

VIFF

The Vancouver International Film Festival (and Forum!) is starting up this week. Exciting, exciting!

So far I've got tickets to see Young People Fucking, Persepolis, The Walker and Relative Humidity (a friends short is screening). Anyone have any recommendations for stuff I'm missing?

As far as the forum goes I've got day passes to TV Day (writing panels with Peter Blake of House and Paul Lieberstein of The Office? Yes please!) and New Filmmakers Day. I'll probably slip into a couple of other panels as well (Viral Marketing and Creative Producing look really good).

There are also going to be come good parties around town. I'm still in the process of wrangling invitations for myself, but it's looking like I'll be going to the BC Film 20th Anniversary party and the NSI party.

If any of you fine folks from the scribosphere find yourselves in Vancouver for the festivities drop me a line and I'll buy you a beer...

K-Ville and Gossip Girl

The new TeeVee season is here. Huzzah!

So far I've caught K-Ville and Gossip Girl, and now let me tell you what I think (you're all dying to know, right?).

K-Ville

K-Ville's a cop procedural set in post Katrina New Orleans. It's a premise with huge potential, though I didn't feel the pilot quite lived up to it.

My main problem was one of inconsistency. There were some absolutely fabulous bits, and then there were ones that left me groaning and scratching my head. Boulet (Anthony Andersen) and Cobb (Cole Hauser) have good chemistry. Boulet is an interesting character, a cop dedicated to saving his hometown, but not all that concerned how he goes about it (drinking on duty, torture, pulling a gun on his partner). In a lot of ways he reminds me of Vic Mackey (of The Shield). Cobb's character reveal at the end of the pilot was nicely done, and made for an interesting twist. The rest of the shows characters get little but lip service (tough but lovable captain? Check!), but you can't develop EVERY character in a pilot.

The city of New Orleans made for a nice backdrop. It's cool to see a city that's not LA or New York up on the screen. I also thought that the show made good use of its premise, namely that it's about cops in a city recovering from tragedy. Just like Rescue Me is about firefighters dealing with the aftermath of 9/11, K-Ville plumbs the same depths in New Orleans. All of its characters were damaged by the storm. Some of the best sequences of the show were the ones that dealt directly with this issue. The opening sequence where Boulet's partner Charlie abandons him. The super creepy firehose through the window bit and the Boulet's family reaction to it. Cobb's revelation of his past. These are the sequences that set this show apart from the rest.

There were a couple of things that really didn't work for me. The action sequences were so over the top as to be ridiculous (I haven't seen a cop fire so many bullets since Live Free or Die Hard), the procedural mystery of the week was, well, weak, and the preachiness started to get to me after a while (yes, we know New Orleans got hit hard by Katrina. Yes we know you're fighting to get it back to where it was. We can SEE that on screen, do you really have to keep telling us the same thing?).

Tone down the action melodrama, get rid of the preachiness (we really don't need it), beef up the mystery (in all fairness I think a lot of this problem can be attributed to the fact it's a pilot. Tough to set everything up and still have a compelling, complex mystery) and we'll have a winner. Until then K-Ville's average. I'll give it a couple more episodes to see if it finds its feet. If it doesn't then it probably won't make it into my TV schedule.

Gossip Girl

Now this might cost me my RMC (that's Real Man Card for the uninitiated), but I actually quite enjoyed Gossip Girl. Sure it's full of sturm und drang, and populated by some thoroughly unlikable caricatures...erm...characters, but for all that it's pretty fun.

Like everything else, it all comes down to execution. Say what you will about Josh Schwartz, but the guy can do some pretty darn good teenage soaps. Gossip Girl feels like you're watching The OC: New York (and we're talking first season OC here). There's some nice banter and verbal fencing (especially between B & S), the plot moves along at a nice clip (though some early strands were seemingly forgotten...little suicidal brother I'm looking at you), and (for once) the use of a voice over narrator didn't piss me off to high heaven (a lot of which I attribute to Kristen Bell). It also helps that none of the actors are as bad as Mischa Barton (ugh).

On the down side Gossip Girl's missing the humor that made The OC enjoyable (it's hard to see them celebrating Chrismukah on Gossip Girl). Like The OC they seem to burn through plot at a prodigious rate (now is this endemic to all things Schwartz? or is it merely a blip in the pilot?). Also the characters really aren't all that interesting (not sure how much depth they have to plumb).

All in all I'd say that Gossip Girl's one of the new shows to watch, I think it'll find an audience.

Oh, and boys, my RMC's in the mail...