Via United Hollywood, your viral video/writer’s strike mention of the day.

I really kind of suspect that the studios had no idea what they were getting into when they forced a strike.

Found in a Pyjamas Media column’s comments:

I’m not sure you do. Hollywood has made utter garbage at least 90% of the time for at least 10 years, if not more. I will provide just one factoid. In the last two decades, more actresses have won the academy award for portraying a prostitute than for portraying any other profession. Why do current Hollywood writers have such a obsession with prostitution?

First off, I went and checked, because I was pretty sure that “factoid” was not actually, like, true. And of course it isn’t. Only one woman has won an Academy Award in the last twenty years for portraying a prostitute, and it’s kind of a stretch to say that because the woman in question was Charlize Theron for her work as Aileen Wuornos in Monster, and the most distinguishing aspect of the character was not that she was a prostitute but that she was a serial killer.

In comparison: two cops (Helen McDormand in Fargo and Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs) and three rich British ladies (Helen Mirren in The Queen, Emma Thompson in Howard’s End, and Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love). WHY does Hollywood continue to glamourize cops and rich British ladies? WHY?

Secondly, though, I wanted to just make my general disgust with this line of argument known. You can argue against the strike in good faith (and Brad Fox has done so, both here in the comments and at his own joint), even though I won’t agree with you. But the line of argument advanced above – and it’s easily the majority opinion among those (mostly conservative) commenters is “I don’t like it so they don’t deserve anything.”

And that’s just abhorrent. It doesn’t matter if you think Hollywood makes a lot of crap; they also make about a trillion dollars a year in revenue, so the question of whether you personally are invested in the product is moot. It’s both stupid and insulting to think that you have to like a business to determine whether or not its practices are sound.

The question is simple: do writers, having helped to produce a product that is financially successful, deserve a share of that financial success? Answer that question. Jesus, how is this hard?

Let me be plain as possible before I start giving you links:

The WGA writers’ strike is practically the definition of a just strike. This is a battle over corporations earning billions of dollars and unfairly refusing to give those most responsible for the creation of the content which mandates their profits their proper due.

Most screenwriters aren’t rich. Yes, the average salary of a Hollywood screenwriter is $200,000. However, that figure is overinflated by the high end of rich screenwriters, the tiny minority who make millions per picture, the Tina Feys and the Steve Carells. (Both of whom, I might add, are striking.) The median salary for a screenwriter is about twenty thousand dollars. So this isn’t a battle between “billionaires and millionaires,” much like the last actors’ strike, where everybody focused on Leonardo DiCaprio’s salary and ignored the fact that most actors, stunningly enough, are not Leonardo DiCaprio.

So, links:

– John August explains the basics.
– John Rogers lays out some excellent metaphor (“that tiger went tiger“) and some mild prediction.
– Ken Levine provides some perspective.
– Rick Schimpf quotes Micah Wright’s now-infamous “Screwed Over For Spongebob” post and adds some commentary. Also, he provides a link to this informative Youtube.
– An account of what happened at the eleventh-hour negotiations.
– Chris Kelly explains residuals.
– Related to the previous item: Mark Evanier explains why residuals aren’t just fair but also encourage writers to perform better.
– Brian K. Vaughn weighs in.
– And finally, Craig Newmark asks the pressing question on everybody’s minds.

Uh, my weekly television column at Torontoist has been up for two days…. just pretend I posted this on Monday, will you?

The Amazing Race is, as everybody who reads my blog knows, the best goddamned show on television, and it is no small wonder that CBS was planning to hold off on it for midseason because of the impending writer’s strike. Unfortunately, Viva Laughlin was exactly the farce that everybody predicted it would be and got cancelled after two lousy episodes, so lucky us, we get the Race sooner than expected.

And, once again, it is instantly the best show on teevee, but initial signs point to a step up from previous seasons. There’s much less stunt casting, for one (yes, okay, the team of Goths and the team of married lesbian ministers, but two out of eleven is pretty forgivable). More notable from a casting point of view is the devout lack of the traditional Team Of Two Athletic Twentyish-Or-Thirtyish Men Who Win The Whole Damn Thing, not one but three all-female teams (the show’s producers pretty obviously want an all-female winning team, if you couldn’t tell), and the first ever grandparent/grandchild team who are the only all-male team on the race. (And, let’s be honest – not likely to win, because Donald the grampa, while definitely possessed of sand, seems to lack the shrewd racing instincts to make up for his lack of youth.)

Of course, we still have the usual healthy array of dating heterosexual couples, with initial signs pointing to at least one representative of each of the three traditional types of Amazing Race dating couples: Eerily Complimentary And Perfect For Each Other (TK and Rachel), Slightly Dysfunctional But Generally Healthy (Lorena and Jason), and What The Hell Are These People Doing Together (Jennifer and Nathan).

Plus, there are the Goths, Kynt and Vyxsin, who really seem like very nice people once you get past the fact that they thought to bring a lot of pancake makeup with them on the Race, that their names are Kynt and Vyxsin, that they wear matching outfits, that their names are Kynt and Vyxsin, that one of them actually used the phrase “oh my Goth,” and that their names are Kynt and Vyxsin. Luckily, Kant and Victoria seem like strong, intelligent racers and thus I will probably get over the name thing in maybe two or three years.

(Kynt and Vyxsin. What the hell.)

First episode features: the gorgeous countryside of Ireland, the highwire bicycle, the proof of the old advice to never, ever try to force a donkey to move (seriously, Racers – I’m a city boy born and bred, but even I know not to yell at a donkey), the elimination of a team who clearly thought they were hilarious and entertaining and were in fact just really painfully annoying, Ronald and Christina exploding with father-daughter pride for one another, Azaria and Hendekea showing off serious race smarts (now I want to go and check to see if a brother-sister team has ever won the Race before), and finally and most importantly this wonderfully insightful line from one of the married lesbian ministers (who are instantly one of my favorite teams) which sums up the entire appeal of the Race, an appeal that no other competitive reality show has:

“The Amazing Race is a love letter to the planet. The beauty of this Earth comes from God, and we get a chance to sort of hopscotch around it, and love it, you know? What a gift.”

That nails the appeal of the Race so precisely. The one truth about the Amazing Race is that to win it, you have to throw yourself with abandon headlong into other cultures and experience them, first-hand and up close (where their breath might not be pleasant). You have to be willing to partake of what is given to you. In other reality shows, you have to scheme and plot and brown-nose your way to success. In The Amazing Race, you just have to be faster and smarter and wiser and stronger and, on occasion, as in life, just plain luckier – and you have to reach for the human experience with both hands. That’s how you win the Race, and that’s why it’s the best show on television. Here’s to the new season.

After a skip week due to dental pain issues (like “being high on codeine for most of a week”), my TV column at Torontoist is once again up and running.

Which means that this week’s edition of my TV column is up at Torontoist. This week: a very special savaging of Jon Dore.

The fine individuals over at Pajiba! recently posted an excellent essay on Friday Night Lights with which I concur wholeheartedly. However, in the course of the essay, they spoiled the major plot twist of the second season premiere episode. Since I firmly believe that A) everybody should watch this fine program, and B) to fully appreciate it you have to watch it from the very beginning, I present to you the portion of their essay pre-spoiler. You’re welcome. And hopefully this leads you to jump to firm belief C, which is “everybody should go out and buy the DVD set of the first season, especially considering how cheap it is.”

Regular readers know that I’ve plugged NBC’s “Friday Night Lights” pretty incessantly over the last year. And I know from your comments that I’ve successfully gotten some of you on-board. Fantastic — welcome to the club. The first half of this column isn’t for you. Instead, this is for the folks who still haven’t watched the show. A commentor once noted that I always tell you to watch “FNL” without ever saying why you should watch. Fair point, although my word should simply be good enough at this point, no? But if it’s not here’s why you should be watching.

Of course, the show isn’t 100% flawless. For instance, some of the actors don’t quite perform up to snuff (I’m thinking of Minka Kelly — while she’s an absolutely pleasure to look at, she kinda sucks as an actress). But the writing and other performances around these weaker actors generally keep things moving so well that you hardly notice. Similarly, not every plotline on the show is a slam dunk. One from last season that leaps to mind is the plot thread focusing on running back Smash’s girlfriend having some sort of mental illness. Terrible storyline. But the writers smartly moved it along and eventually got it out of the way, so it wound up not being a major detriment to the show.

…and another edition of my TV column at Torontoist.

Over at Dead Things on Sticks, they wanna know why everybody hates Cavemen. They rather liked the “new” version of the pilot, apparently, which changed a whole lot from the unaired pilot (it was a complete reshoot), and think it to be much better than most of the season’s other new sitcom offerings. (This is fair, because Back To You is bad and Carpoolers is one of the worst shows to be introduced in living memory. The Big Bang Theory, on the other hand, is pretty sharply written at times.)

Here’s the thing. I saw the unaired pilot and it was terrible. No, really. It was terrible. Completely horrible in every way imaginable. Completely unfunny, in that if you simply imagined the cavemen as black people – which was the show’s big conceit – it wasn’t daring or clever or insightful, and it didn’t even have good gags to make up for that.

I’ll give the revamped Cavemen one more try, because I hate to condemn anything sight unseen – but it has to really knock it out of the park, because here is the simple truth: the concept is stupid. Not impressively, enjoyably stupid either. It’s just kind of dumb in a sort of third-grade “and then a dinosaur shows up” sort of way.

Good writing has to be really, really good to overcome that innate sense of “why the hell am I watching this’ that Cavemen generates all by itself. It’s a hell of a hurdle. Buffy The Vampire Slayer managed it, for example, because the Buffy concept is kind of ludicrous (albeit more acceptable than Cavemen, because it’s just a new take on your classic superhero story), but Buffy had the writing chops to suspend your disbelief – and remember all the shows that tried to jump into the Buffy mold and failed miserably (Dark Angel, Tru Calling, probably soon we can add Bionic Woman…).

But regardless, I am nothing if not a fairminded individual, so here’s one more chance for Cavemen. Into the Bittorrent queue it goes.

I’ve been trying to find myself a copy of the three volumes of Japanarama by Too Far East Productions for quite some time now. They have a site, of course, but it’s been more or less incommunicado for a couple of years. This is a shame, because sitting around with Baldguy and Jon and Toby and others drinking beer and watching Japanarama is a favorite memory of mine – and if you haven’t seen Japanarama then you simply must, because ninety percent of the crazy Japanese TV what makes it onto Youtube – the cute things like the Matrix ping-pong sketch and the human game of Tetris and the like – pales in pure insane weirdness to what you find on Japanarama.

After some searching through Youtube, I found this. This is one of the mildest shows excerpted for the Japanarama collection:

That’s right – a game show where the contestants fight professional wrestlers at sea in a floating ring surrounded by whale sharks. Does it get any better than that? Well, of course it does, but you actually have to sit down and watch Japanarama to see it.

Once again: my weekly TV column at Torontoist is up.

Variety is reporting that Eli Roth, director of such fine films as Hostel and Cabin Fever and Kill Killy McKillerson, has signed on to direct an episode of Heroes. Luckily, due to my massively awesome connections (don’t you wish you had connections?), I have already managed to read the script for his episode, and as a tidbit for my readership, I pass on this excerpt:

—

A darkened room, somewhere in the depths of the abandoned factory. CLAIRE is strapped, spread-eagled, to an operating table. MATT is tied up in a chair facing away from her. The mutilated, torn-apart body of ANDO lies piled up on a rusty cart nearby, next to a chainsaw.

CLAIRE: Matt, I… I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
MATT: Don’t worry, Claire. I “heard” Hiro earlier. He’s going for help. At least I think he is. He was thinking half in Japanese, half in English. He might’ve been stressed.
CLAIRE: I just want it to be over.

Suddenly, the door swings open, and A MAN IN A BUTCHER’S APRON WIELDING A RUSTY HOOK enters. He is wearing a mask made from the skin of unwanted babies.

MATT: No, you monster! Stop it!

RUSTY HOOK MAN stalks deliberately over to Claire.

CLAIRE: No! No! Stop cutting out my kidneeeeeeeees!

RUSTY HOOK MAN jams his RUSTY HOOK into Claire’s belly. She SCREAMS. Matt ALSO screams, because he can telepathically feel her pain and it hurts, oh it hurts so much.

More SCREAMING, and finally RUSTY HOOK MAN puts his FILTHY HAND into the hole in Claire’s belly and RIPS OUT HER KIDNEYS. She starts healing almost immediately as she cries.

MATT: Goddamn you! You son of a – I’ll kill you if I –

RUSTY HOOK MAN turns sharply and stares dead-eyed at Matt, then strides over towards him and pulls Matt’s head back sharply and raises the hook –

– and then he stops, and we pan down, and his HEART is in D.L.’s hands, still beating its horrible beats! D.L. is horribly wounded and missing one eye and one ear and one nipple.

D.L.: Chew on that, you bastard!

—

I, for one, cannot wait.

This week’s edition of Televisualist, written by me don’t you know, is available for all and sundry to peruse, so peruse away.

Yes, I will be doing this every week, now that you ask.

Now, the networks are horribly pissed off that all their pre-air premiere episodes are leaking onto the intersphere via Bittorrent. (Unofficial motto of mightygodking.com: “it’s not my fault if somebody in your organization leaks shit.”) But their loss is your gain, because now you can figure out if you want to watch these shows before you ever have to check a TV Guide (no longer published, apparently) to figure out when to couch-potate and when to just sleep the blissful sleep of the tele-ignorant.

SHOW: Flash Gordon
CONCEPT: “Let’s take a classic property and remake it on next to no budget!”
STARRING: The boring guy who got fired from Smallville as Flash Gordon, which tells you all you really need to know
WELL?: I gave it about forty minutes before completely giving up on it; this is a show that aggressively underestimates its audience (to the point where they actually explain what the word “portage” means) – but then again, considering this show is the brainchild of Robert Halmi Sr. and Jr. (behind such shitfests as Merlin, The 10th Kingdom and Dinotopia), we should not be surprised. The show is charmless, stupid and uninteresting in just about every way it’s possible for a show to be; it’s not even entertainingly bad, just boring, boring, boring
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You didn’t know what the word “portage” meant

SHOW: Pushing Daisies
CONCEPT: Guy can touch dead people, and bring them back to life – but A) if he touches them again, they die for good; B) if he doesn’t touch them again within sixty seconds, somebody else dies to “take their place”; C) he solves murders for reward money with a private detective buddy by touching dead people and asking them how they died; D) he has brought back his dog to life, so he can’t pet his dog; and E) he’s also brought back his childhood crush and intended soul mate from the dead and can’t touch her either
STARRING: Lee Pace as touching-dead-people guy, Anna Friel as dead (not-dead) soulmate, the always awesome Chi McBride as private detective buddy, Kristin Chenoweth as waitress at the pie shop guy runs
WELL?: There are so many reasons this show should not work: the incredibly contrived backstory and storytelling engine for the show, the fey British narrator pointedly interjecting commentary throughout, the continued use of repetition as a thematic device, the presence of dedicated show-killer Swoosie Kurtz, the generally cutesy tone – but despite all of that, the show works absolutely perfectly. It’s funny, intelligent, charming, and occasionally profound, and I have no idea if they can keep it up for an entire season much less future seasons, and I think it will likely get steamrollered by the network audiences opting to watch CSI or something else that isn’t for all intents and purposes a hour-length weekly fairytale, but for now it’s goddamn good TV
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You enjoy jokes about pie and necrophilia within the same five-minute span

SHOW: Cavemen
CONCEPT: It’s that show based on the Geico commercials where there are cavemen. Also, the cavemen are metaphors for black people. Let me put it this way: they call each other “magger” (and then the uptight caveman says “I hate that word” and the rebellious caveman says “it’s okay when we use it”). This is how clever the writing is
STARRING: A bunch of people you have never heard of and who will fade back into obscurity once this is over
WELL?: I’m not sure which is worse – the fact that racial sensitivity in American entertainment has grown so sharp that in order to talk about even the most basic race issues you have to use cavemen as a metaphor, or the fact that if this was a show about black people it would be tediously dull at the best of times, or the fact that they developed a sitcom from a fucking insurance commercial, or… jeez I could go on
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You really feel there’s a need for a television show where they make jokes about people saying “nigger” without actually using the word “nigger”

SHOW: Aliens In America
CONCEPT: Normal whitebread family’s life disrupted when they take on Pakistani Muslim high school exchange student
STARRING: A few character actors you’ll recognize and a lot of younger actors you won’t
WELL?: For a comedy, the pilot episode isn’t that outright funny, but the acting is good and the characters fully realized in a single episode; it may not be the laugh out loud spectacle one might hope for, but it’s entertaining enough already
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You are willing to consider Muslims not the de facto enemies of America

SHOW: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
CONCEPT: It’s the intervening time in between Terminator movies, or possibly an alternate history – man, time travel screws everything up
STARRING: Lena Headey as Sarah Connor, Thomas Dekker as John Connor, and Summer Glau as cute girl Terminator sent to protect them
WELL?: The pilot’s certainly not bad, but it’s not much more than a B-minus; there’s room for improvement on all fronts. Still, if you loved Serenity because you loved watching River kick ass, then you’ll probably think highly of it, and certainly the action is very solid in that regard
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: I think I just said that part

SHOW: The Big Bang Theory
CONCEPT: There are these nerds, and… that’s pretty much it
STARRING: The guy who played Darlene’s boyfriend on Roseanne and a bunch of other people
WELL?: The writing is occasionally pretty sharp, but the show’s poorly thought through (like, the show opens cold with a brilliant bit about selling sperm to afford high-speed internet – then they go back to their enormous beautiful apartment and are revealed to work at a nearby university as researchers). Still, the performances are pretty solid and there’s potential for a really good sitcom if they dial down the nerd stereotypes to, say, a solid 8 rather than the 22 they’re at now
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You often say things like “Revenge of the Nerds had a great concept, but man, it didn’t push the envelope enough”

SHOW: Chuck
CONCEPT: Friendly, well-meaning dork gets entire contents of government classified intelligence database downloaded into his brain; becomes secret agent as result
STARRING: Zachary Levi as Chuck, Yvonne Strzechowski as hot sexy secret agent girl with a past who handles Chuck, Adam Baldwin as scary stone-cold-killer secret agent guy who also handles Chuck, Joshua Gomez as Chuck’s even-bigger-loser best friend
WELL?: It’s an amusing premise and the cast is whip-smart. The dialogue is very, very funny indeed, the action sequences are exciting, the storyline has room to grow and evolve; the entire tone suggests something in between Alias and Freaks and Geeks, and if that doesn’t sell you I don’t know what would
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: The idea of Adam Baldwin as Jayne-but-smarter going undercover as a salesman at Best Buy is something you find genuinely intriguing

SHOW: Lipstick Jungle
CONCEPT: Powerful businesswomen? Cry and need cupcake days too! I know! Who would have thought?
STARRING: Brooke Shields as mother of three/movie production company CEO/”the nice one,” Kim Raver as unsatisfied married woman/magazine editor/”the bitch,” Lindsay Price as single woman/fashion designer/”the crier”
WELL?: Retreads the same subversively misogynist ground all these shows tread, because there’s nothing quite so satisfying to certain individuals as seeing powerful women shown to be inept, weak, childish, or just in need of a good strong man
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You simply don’t have enough time to watch both Designing Women and Sex In The City, and require a show that combines the two into one horrible living mass

SHOW: Bionic Woman
CONCEPT: “Hey, resurrecting Battlestar Galactica turned out to be great. Let’s try another old corny 70s sci-fi show and see what we can do with it”
STARRING: Michelle Ryan as bionic woman, Katee Sackhoff as insane first-model bionic woman, Matt Shepherd as sexy male scientist boyfriend, and Miguel Ferrer as awesome old-school shadowy military guy
WELL?: It’s not bad, but it’s very, very uneven; performances are erratic, the effects vary from awesome to cheesy, and the dialogue goes from crackling to flat with depressing regularity. If the good parts dominate the show post-pilot it will be decent; if the bad, it will be dogshit. I doubt there’s a middle ground with this one
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You really, really need to satisfy your Starbuck fix

SHOW: Cane
CONCEPT: Dallas, but in Florida, and with sugar instead of oil, and with Latinos instead of white people
STARRING: Hector Elizondo as family patriarch, Jimmy Smits as adopted heir apparent, Nestor Carbonell as jealous firstborn son, Jonathan Trent as playboy youngest son, Rita Moreno as fierce matriarch and Paola Turbay as sexy wife of Smits
WELL?: Reasonably solid dramatic entry, not very soapish at all, and you can do worse for a gameplan then “let’s get all the best Latino actors we can find and put them in a show together”
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You love it when people pronounce Cuba “Koo-bah”