Thursday, March 31, 2011

Thank you, Charlie Sheen or Why CBS Must Be Destroyed Part II: Comedy


Charlie Sheen is on a mission to destroy trolls and anyone who is not winning. At first glance this may seem like an entertaining diversion with little effect on our lives, but it is, in reality, one of the great struggles of our time. If he is successful Charlie Eightball might just bring down one of the most oppressive and insidious forces in the current cultural zeitgeist, CBS.
In the first part of this article I went over a very brief history of the relationship between movies and television. It's a relationship that drives the creativity of both media and when either medium is doing well financially creativity suffers for it. Right now television is coming off of a twenty year run of creative boundary pushing and experimentation that brought us Seinfeld, The Office (British and American), Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Lost, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Terriers, The Sopranos, The Simpsons, The Shield, The West Wing, Sports Night, Justified, Rescue Me, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Chappelle's Show, Mr. Show With Bob and David, The Daily Show, The Drew Carey Show, Archer, The Ricky Gervais Show, An Idiot Abroad, Weeds, Community and more.  CBS has acted as if none of these shows ever existed.  It's as if the network is stuck in state of arrested development (Oh! Arrested Development! There's another one).
In comedy the advent of the single camera format and the removal of the laugh track has been a huge leap forward in the way comedians can present their visions.  For most of its history the sitcom has been shot in the multiple camera format. You have a set with three walls (the fourth wall being your TV screen) and there are three or four cameras set up left, right, and center. The two side cameras shoot reaction shots and close ups of the characters while the center camera is used for establishing shots or bits of wild physical comedy. This system is incredibly static and constricting. Go back and watch some of your favorite sitcoms (or any show on CBS right now) and you'll see that it acts like a stage show ignoring the myriad of possibilites that film and camera work can offer.
One of the first shows to change the format was M*A*S*H. It would have been difficult for the show to portray the gritty pathos of war without giving the camera free reign to explore the character's faces and the larger world they inhabited. Interestingly this show, one of the most popular of all time, was on CBS as were many other excellent pre-nineties shows. This doesn't exonerate the network, but condemns it all the more, like the once great actor who starts phoning it in after the big paychecks start rolling (I'm looking at you, Bobby DeNiro).  Not to mention that the network insisted that the show use a laugh track which is both lame and insulting.  We do not need to be told when to laugh, but what can we expect from the network that brought us Big Brother.  You have to feel sorry for actors trying to stay in character while they wait for the laughter to die down.
The single camera format, which shoots in a fashion like filming a movie, became popular around the turn of the century (I like saying that).  Seinfeld began to intersperse single camera shoots around the usual multiple camera shots in the Jerry's apartment.  Cheers also dabbled with single camera in the later seasons when the ventured out of the bar more often. Seinfeld, however, was the show fully realized its comedic potential and gave us some of the shows greatest moments as the camera was free to move and make more interesting and dynamic shots.

Aaron Sorkin's wonderful, but short lived comedy Sports Night attempted to shoot entirely in single camera and sans laugh track. It failed because TV watchers are inherently adverse to anything different and had a hard time figuring out what it was. At the same time HBO's The Larry Sanders Show had been doing quite well using the same format. Of course, those of us who didn't have HBO had no idea of the nirvana that was going on between those squiggly lines. It's no surprise that Seinfeld alums Larry David and Larry Charles created a single camera show that blurred the line between fiction and reality. David followed in the Larry Sanders model of having celebrities play themselves, but took in one step further by showing them living their lives warts and all.
In order to make the single camera format palatable to the masses Ricky Gervais was clever enough to dress it up in the mockumentary format for his brilliant British version of The Office.  It was also successful in the states on NBC's Must See TV Thursday night and now the entire night is made up of single camera shows and all of them (except for the very racist Outsourced) have created fully realized rich three dimensional worlds. Single camera formatting has allowed show runners to move beyond the simple set-up/punchline idiom and move on to complex situations and character moments.
All of CBS's sitcoms, however, are still shot in the multiple camera format. Take a look at this promo from NBC's Community and imagine what it would look like if it were shot on a three walled static set.

In comparison watch this dynamic clip from Two and A Half Men
Oh that's hilarious!
The problem is that even though CBS has decided not to move past the set-up/punchline idiom, the multiple camera format, and the laugh track it is still the number one watched network.  This is mostly because it is the preferred network of old people, but also because most people are like my father who, in his words, "doesn't like to think when watching TV." These people turn on the tube and expect it to wash over them as they check out for the evening. These are the same people who see trailers for movies like Grown-ups and think "Thank God, now I won't have to watch Inception on Netflix. That movie makes my brain hurt." These are the majority of TV watchers because we have been told forever that people with selective tastes do not watch television and so these people go elsewhere for entertainment. So what is left is the people who want to curl up with a nice cup of same ole same ole. CBS is more than happy to provide that.
But why should we care? Because there are only so many shows that can be on the air at one time and the competition for ratings is fierce. CBS is lowering the bar and pandering to the lowest common denominator while other networks are trying to create shows with some sort of artistic integrity. Television is a business and so when good shows can not compete with the dreck on CBS then the other networks will compete by cutting the good shows and putting on more dreck. The visually stunning and narratively complex show Pushing Daisies was replaced by the nut-shot laden Wipeout because Daisies couldn't compete with the eighteenth iteration of CSI. I'm not going to go into the visual assault that is the CSI series, but I will say that CBS has allowed the same man who gave Michael Bay a career, Jerry Bruckheimer, to get his hooks into television. That is enough to make me hate them forever.
The point is that CBS is dumbing down the television world.  Television is an incredible medium that is capable of doing so much more than movies.  You can develop characters and worlds over a number of years rather than just two hours.  CBS chooses not to do this.  They opt for boring, safe, and crappy.  The play clock was added to football so that a team can't go up a score and then run out the clock without running a play.  There is no metaphorical play clock in television programming so while the rest of the networks are trying to score touchdowns CBS is sitting in the huddle with an eye on the clock waiting for the ratings to come in.
Those of us who enjoy thoughtful interesting television have watched in horror as our favorite shows are cancelled and replaced with CSI clones and terrible reality television. CBS has been assaulting the cultural landscape and turning it into a bland two dimensional shitgeist.
And that is just an inkling of why we must support Charlie Sheen and his cocaine fueled jihad against the network that paid him millions of dollars to spout one-liners in a show that is essentially the hell-spawn of an unholy three-way between The Odd Couple, My Two Dads, and the white version of the sarcastic maid from The Jeffersons.  We must help him because anything that might cause people to flip the channel to a different, better show is a good thing.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Even if he is a incoherent porn freak, he's a incoherent porn freak on a mission to save our pop culture souls...and to find more cocaine.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Thank you, Charlie Sheen or Why CBS Must Be Destroyed Part I: A Brief History

Lost in the deluge of tiger blood and the wailing wake of his F-18 ordinance is Charlie Sheen's real mission. It can be hard to miss because of all the side trips for porn stars and cocaine, but his primary mission is one we should all get behind. He is trying to destroy CBS.
Many of you may think CBS is harmless; harmless like an escaped Cobra! (Actually Bronx zoo officials say that it is unlikely the escaped cobra will attack humans and they are certain it is still in the reptile house). CBS, meanwhile, is a monolithic ratings machine hell bent on turning the TV landscape into a beige hackneyed nightmare. If left unchecked CBS will turn TV into the very idiot box so many snooty intellectuals have said it is. Which is a shame because we may be in the greatest era of television since its inception. Never before has television offered such a great outlet for creative minds. The film industry is broken and many writers, actors, and directors are looking to the Tube to get their visions out to the people. Flip through the channels and you'll find Mad Men, The Walking Dead, 30 Rock, Community, Justified, Breaking Bad, and many more shows that rival anything on the silver screen. Television, which is the truest American artform, has finally broken free of its adolescent roots. The only thing standing in the way is CBS and the people who watch it.
What does this have to do with Charlie Sheen?  What does it have to do with anything?  First, a history lesson.
In the 1960's television became so popular that it almost destroyed the movie business. The studios decided to fight back with technicolor, 3D, and other dopey spectacles (sound familiar). This worked briefly, but when the economic malaise of the seventies hit people weren't willing to shell out money to see a movie when they could just flip a switch in their homes. It didn't help that television technology would continue to evolve (remote control, vcr, surround sound, HDTV, 3D tv) at a much faster rate than movie theaters (although thank God for stadium seating, amirite?) So in the early and mid-seventies the studios did the unthinkable and let filmakers make their own films how they wanted to make them. The idea was that people would go to the theater to get what they couldn't get on television, namely sex, violence, pathos, adult conversations, artistry, etc. That is to say it became financially necessary for movies to not just be entertaining, but actually good. It was the era of the so-called film school brats that included Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, and others. It was the golden age of American cinema.
It was not meant to last. In a twist right out of Greek tragedy two of these film brats would innocently bring about the downfall of the entire movement. Steven Spielberg started the trend by creating the first summer blockbuster, Jaws (1975). Two years later his buddy George Lucas would prove it could happen more than once with Star Wars (1977). These two remarkable films set the gold standard for crowd pleasing movies with an emphasis on the craft of filmmaking. Unfortunately studios realized that the formula for the summer blockbuster could be achieved without any concern for aesthetics or even storytelling. This focus on bringing crowds in rather than what they were being brought to see would eventually lead to the cinematic abortions of Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer and, again, George Lucas. Mark Harris (no relation) wrote a great piece about how this effected the movie business in last month's GQ. Check it out after your done here.  http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201102/the-day-the-movies-died-mark-harris
While all of this was going on in Hollywood the people in television were happy to churn out middling dreck with the occasional masterpiece, Lonesome Dove (1989), or push towards the unusual with shows like Cheers or Moonlighting. But for the most part they put out crowd pleasing schmaltz and zippy one liner factories because there wasn't any competition at the box office. There was no impetus to be anything other than a dim moving light in a darkened living room. A decade of studios using the Star Wars model changed that. Young people weren't staying home to watch tv anymore. They were going to the mall or to the movies. The problem was compounded in the nineties when an increasingly ironic youth culture known as Generation X found the lameness on the boob tube to be downright offensive. It was no longer okay to rely on old tv tropes like two people trapped in an attic or a slovenly bachelor suddenly having to take care of a baby. Interestingly Generation X loved to watch re-runs of old seventies tv shows, but they hated new shows that were just like them.
Viewers were becoming savvier and more demanding. Quentin Tarantino and his ilk came along to give them another reason to go to the movies, and again offered the adult themes that could not be found on television. Slowly over the next decade tv execs would greenlight increasingly innovative projects such as a show about nothing and a show about a mafioso in therapy. What happened in the film industry in the seventies began to happen in television in the late 90's and early '00's. It became profitable to be good. At the same time Hollywood stopped making R-rated movies except in the horror genre. Mature themes and subject matter were now more likely to be found on the Home Box Office than the real one. Networks began to embrace these changes especially after the show Lost showed that creativity could bring huge commercial windfalls. Every network began to experiment with new formats and explore new ways of using the medium. Every network except one. Wanna guess which one?

Tune in for Thank You, Charlie Sheen Part II where I reveal CBS's dastardly plan to destroy us all!!!!!!

Monday, March 21, 2011

You Call Yourself A Writer?

This past weekend my wife and I attended a spectacular wedding in Chicago.  I got to hang with my Chicago crowd, but I also got to meet a slew of new people.  Before we got there my wife asked me if I was "a teacher or a writer tonight?"
You see I used to be a high school history teacher before I quit to become a novelist and stay-at-home-dad-to-be.  So when someone asks me what I do for a living this causes some strife.  I like to tell people I'm a writer.  The inevitable next question is "What have you written?" followed by "When is it coming out?" to "Huh, ok, good luck.  I think my wife is calling me."  Sometimes to avoid the whole thing I just tell people I'm an out of work teacher.  It's just easier.
The blessing and curse of the writing profession is that you don't need any credentials.  So while you can wake up one day and call yourself a writer that doesn't necessarily make you one.  Someone with a medical license is called doctor whether they practice or not, but people at parties want some sort of proof from someone claiming to be an author.  So at what point can you legitimately call yourself a writer?  I tried to work this out with a flow chart, but it ended up being a pedantic rube goldberg device to nowhere.  Then I tried to write a list of you-know-you're-a-writer-when jokes, but they were more depressing than funny.
But there is a moment, concrete and utterly markable, that you become a professional writer.  The moment that sets you apart from the hobbyists and ditherers.  It's called submission and the term is apt.  It is the moment you drop to your knees at the altar of publishing and offer up your sacrifice for favor or disapproval.  If you have ever written and sent a query letter, proposal, or portfolio then you are a writer regardless of the consequence.  You've put yourself and your baby out there.  That takes guts.  It means stepping over the threshold and picking up the gauntlet.  So all you submitters out there, the next time someone asks what you do, I don't care what your day job is, you tell 'em you're an inkslinger.  When they ask you what the hell that is you say, "It means I'm a writer, bitch!"
You might not want to say it exactly that way at a wedding.  At least not to the bride.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

The Content Monkey

I'm opening this blog with a picture of my dog, Fletch, because everyone likes him more than me.  I don't begrudge him this.  He's got the 'it' factor.
This blog will mostly be a record of my authorian quest (see what I did there) to publish my novel The Hemingway Thief.  It is the story of a writer and a low-rent thief who go looking for Ernest Hemingway's lost suitcase in the Sierra Madres.  How did it get there all the way from Paris? You'll have to read the book (so add getting it published to your birthday wish list).  I will say that it is much more plausible than the idea of a pregant woman traveling alone through the first century Roman Empire from Jerusalem to the south of France.  I'm looking at you, Dan Brown.
But my quest, as epic as it may be, will not be enough to feed the Content Monkey and so I will also be writing about my three obsessions; books, movies, and Notre Dame Football.  My wife is also pregnant with our first child (we've nicknamed it Little Whoosh-whoosh because of the sound of its heartbeat, awwwwww).  So you can expect a little bit of that craziness as well.  And of course more pictures of Fletch.