Ephemera 2009 (8) - The Mostly TV Edition

-- Castle has steadily improved since the somewhat cloying pilot. The characters are unfolding in interesting ways -- I totally buy Fillion as a good Dad. The clue paths are smarter than most of the crime shows on air (the elevator video and the Bluetooth for example). Just smart, smart series choices. A little heavy on the pop music openers, but that's me. Special shout-out to the costume designer.

-- No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency: man, I could watch Jill Scott do that allll day long. I have a particular weakness for localized procedurals, and the fact it's shot in Botswana is amazing. Particularly like Anika Noni Rose.

-- Kings: Dead show walking. Well, shit. It's wildly uneven, but when it's good it's filthily good. One is tempted to blame the folks at NBC, who have literally decided that they will never be the number one network again, so "hey, instead let's become a glorified AM radio station". However, I'm willing to be irresponsible and generalize this fiasco out to indict Hollywood marketing's general cultural cluelessness.

If you watched the promos for Kings, what you saw was either a cryptic "butterfly" campaign, or more recently a series of ads focusing on the soap opera around a king's family -- very Dirty Sexy Money, with red-tinged shots of sexy beautiful people dancing in a club. What you have not seen is Ian McShane and Brian Cox acting a smoking hole through your television. What you have not seen promoted is the fact that this show is based on the biblical story of King David. God and faith are discusses reverently and seriously in every epsiode. And the "sexy" clips taken from the eps for promos are relentlessly cherry-picked. This thing is more sexless than almost every other drama on TV.

After years of the cultural Right bitching and moaning about how Hollywood doesn't provide for them, NBC could have gone to every evangelical church in America and said "We're serializing the story of King David in a modern, very relatable way. Here you go, a multi-million dollar series, in prime time, based on a Bible story. You're frikkin' welcome." But that sort of cultural outreach, guerilla marketing would never have occurred to most of us here in LA. Mock Fireproof all you want, they got the job done.

No, the guys who were probably two doors down from the "SyFy" geniuses came up with a campaign that brilliantly made sure no one who might like the show would even know what it was about. They took the most unique show premise on network television and did their damndest to make it look like every other show on television. Rock on.

-- " ... a bigger gun." Whew. Despite a dip in mid-second season, it now looks like Life becomes my American equivalent of the British Life on Mars. The meta-plot is unfolding beautifully, and you can't watch the last five minutes of the latest episode and tell me that isn't some of the finest TV directing (and DP-ing) being done right now. I mean, don't get me wrong -- the British LoM is 16 eps of perfect TV, as far as I'm concerned. But I'll go back and rewatch Life again, for its own sake.

-- Better Off Ted made a really subversive choice last week. The two female leads are Portia del Rossi's Dick Cheney-like Ice Queen and Andrea Anders as the free-spirited dreamer trapped in the soul-crushing corporate world. Using Ted's daughter as the lens, the show (I assume intentionally) implied that given the choice, an Ice Queen with a belief that a little girl should be empowered is a better role-model than a weak character who feels so trapped in her world that she rebels through childish misbehaviour and fantasies of escape. They took the Butterflies Are Free paradigm out into the alley and double-tapped it. Aces.

-- This poster is currently up on the board in the Leverage writers' room, and in my office at home. (grab it here, h/t Smarterware)


-- Skype is proving to be invaluable in coordinating with the Portland production office, but Google Voice makes me weak in the knees.

-- In the Comments, the book or series of books you think would make a great transition to TV. Miniseries/Brit format (6-8 hours) allowed.

Leverage 2: Welcome to the Future

First week of prep for Ep. 201 -- we laugh at the need for a hiatus. And a writing staff. Once I get the blue pages in on the season premiere, we should be back to regular postings.

But in the meantime, this is cool.



I was on Skype so I could give notes on a production meeting in Portland, thru Dean's computer. I had to change offices, so I yanked my Macbook Air off its power cord -- pain in the ass to unplug it under the desk -- and wandered down to the conference room, still talking while I did so.

Using a computer thinner than a deck of playing cards, unplugged and on wifi, I was looking at and participating real time on video with a roomful of people in a different city. While going down a set of stairs.

Hey Warren, where's my goddam jetpack?

Waid Wednesdays #17: Wait, What?

Wherever you were yesterday at about 10:00 a.m. PST, if you heard the distant sound of a scream, that was me. I'd gone to bed the previous night having finished the most recent script for IRREDEEMABLE and feeling very good about it--

--and then I sat down the next morning to polish it and realized that it was crap, because I'd forgotten to deliver on one of my fundamental rules of storytelling. Structurally, the script was fine, and the dialogue was good. Everyone served the plot quite well, thank you, everyone acted consistent with his or her established personalities, and there were little moments of shock peppered throughout the story and at least one moment in there that feels like I turned over a rock to show you some squiggly things, so, yeah, check, check, check, but it still felt hollow...

...because, upon re-reading the script with a fresh eye, I found that no one in the story had surprised me.

It was easy to overlook in its absence. I mean, the plot moved, and people were doing interesting things. But overall, the story felt very binary, if you will; in every scene, the characters could have gone in one of two directions, but really only two--and the most arresting moments in stories, the ones that make them unforgettable, are the moments where someone makes an outrageous third choice that you never in a million years could have seen coming.

My all-time favorite example is from the excellent movie Se7en: up until the final few scenes, the plot's pretty much a straight-up police procedural. Yes, there are enough twists and turns throughout to maintain the suspense, but as with all procedurals, the only real question in the back of the audience's mind is "How will they catch the criminal?" because everyone's doing what they're supposed to be doing--the detectives are detecting, the murder is murdering, etc. And that's fine. Thousands of compelling, suspenseful stories have been woven around the simple question "How will they catch him?"

And then, near the end of Se7en, the murderer the detectives have been chasing all this time makes an amazing choice that seems to come out of absolutely nowhere. He simply walks into the station, confesses, and surrenders...and tells the cops he can take them to two final bodies if they'll just get in the car and let him navigate. And they just start driving.

Up to that moment, we in the audience kind of knew where the story was ultimately headed. We didn't know how it would happen, but we knew the cops would eventually catch and punish the criminal, the end, because that's what happens in a procedural. And, suddenly, boom, one character kicks the game board over, and now, for the first time since the opening credits, no one in the audience has the slightest clue where this story is going.

That's what you want as a writer. At least once in your story, maybe more, just when you think the readers might be getting a little too comfortable, you want a character to zig where they were expected to zag--to make a surprising, unexpected choice, the more out-of-the-blue the better. (See also The Frighteners, the most criminally underrated screenplay of all time, for a thousand other examples.) As long as it's a choice that's ultimately in character, then the more shocking, the more it works. I can think of no better way to maintain suspense and keep the story energized, and it's one of my favorite tricks. Try it at least once per script. Make a point of having either your protagonist or your antagonist make a hard, hard left at some juncture where convention and tradition would dictate they turn right, and see where that takes you; you can always undo it. But in my experience, you probably won't want to.

Next: the sister post--the trap of False Suspense and how to avoid it.