Alexa Chung, I kinda like you

Yesterday I was home from work and had a chance to catch up on my day-time tv watching. After finishing up a re-run of The Gilmore Girls on ABC Family, I accidentally found myself switching to MTV, surprised to discover that a new talk show had hit the air waves called, It's On with Alexa Chung. Initially I had my doubts. MTV hasn't hired a good "VJ" in years. I don't think they're even calling them VJs anymore. It only took a matter of minutes for Alexa to sweep me off her feet with her charming British wit and boyish mannerisms.

MTV, as off late, is only interested in airing the exploits of the hopelessly dumb and the stupidly beautiful. They must have at least five different reality "game" shows involving dating, or dating your friend's mom, or breaking into someone's house to find out if you want to date them. All of these shows employ hidden cameras and they're all transparently cheap to produce. TRL, the last video-hosting show standing on the once music saturated network, was cancelled last year and I couldn't even name one VJ in Post-Carson Daly era if I tried. Not that Carson Daly is much of a host.

Alexa Chung is a throwback to the old style of MTV VJ: smart, sassy, commendable personal style. She's no Kennedy but she's closer to an Ananda Lewis or a Martha Quinn than anyone else I've seen on MTV in the past ten years. On the show I watched yesterday, she interviewed some Hills' cast member (I can't tell any of them apart) and Margaret Cho. At one point, Margaret Cho went off the script. I think the topic was "things that you wish were ok to do" and Margaret starts talking about using a digital video camera to look at one's "hole." A lesser interviewer might have stumbled over that but Chung blushed and laughed and kindly reminded Cho that "they did not rehearse that."

Alexa's show is also smart about the way it incorporates Internet/social networking platforms. Usually talk shows are more passive about integrating internet technologies. A typical host may casually mention at the end of the program to follow the show on Facebook or Twitter. It's On With Alexa Chung takes a more active approach: twitter, youtubing and other internet activities are a integral part of show segments. I caught a segment in which Alexa asks the audience for two random words and performs a you tube search, selecting the most unlikely video result that the search may yield. For example, I think it was something like "pitbull" and "central park" produced a video featuring a pitbull in a tutu pushing a baby carriage. I don't think those were the words but you get the picture. The whole concept of playing Youtube videos on the show fits in well with the show's setting: a New York loft apartment. We're made to feel as if we're sitting in Alexa's living room as she facebooks and youtubes and chats with celebrities.

The show has only been on for less than a month and I don't think it has generated a lot of buzz yet. But there's still time. I think the show has the potential to be the best program on MTV, which isn't saying much but still...

Middlesex the TV series?

HBO announced today plans to develop Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex, into an hour-long drama series. I don't know much about Donald Marguiles, the writer attached to the project, but I have serious doubts about whether this novel can be adapted serially. Middlesex is dense: a sweeping family history enmeshed with personal narrative,a novel that calls upon the arbiters of history to address the mysteries of the self. My concern is that a TV series will feel too reductive, given the scope of the novel. Wouldn't want Middlesex to be "a quirky, new drama series about a suburban Detroit hermaphrodite just trying to fit in..."

Buffy vs. Edward- Would Buffy Slay Edward?

By now, most of you have seen the Edward vs. Buffy fan vid making the rounds.



Edward vs. Buffy, which premiered at the Open Video Conference at NYU Law school, straightforwardly asks and answers the question: is the world of Buffy compatible with the world of Twilight? As we can see from watching the vid, Edward, with his antiquated notions of gender roles, does not survive in the progressive Buffy-verse. For video's author, 'Jonathan McIntosh,' the choice to kill Edward was "only reasonable":

In the end the only reasonable response was to have Buffy stake Edward – not because she didn’t find him sexy, not because he was too sensitive or too eager to share his feelings – but simply because he was possessive, manipulative, and stalkery.

See, I think Twilight's Edward could easily be a character in Buffy. The video in many ways, shows how seamlessly Twilight and Buffy could be integrated into one narrative. As I was watching, Edward reminded me a lot of Angel. Both are handsome, aloof and as McIntosh puts it, "possessive,manipulative and stalkery." Angel never took classes at Sunnydale High but he was always lurking in the shadows, offering Buffy protection from afar. Although in the vid, Buffy seems fairly indifferent to Edward's advances we can remember Buffy's affection for Angel is kind of her Achilles' heel, how Buffy would sacrifice anything for Angel, even her own slayer blood! Not to mention that for both Edward and Angel, sex is essentially the trigger that makes them dangerous and violent. Both Twilight and Buffy romanticize the non-sexual relationship between human girl and vampire man so why are we supposed to believe that Buffy would reject Edward, given that Edward has not crossed any of the boundaries (ie. sex) that made Angel a sizable enemy that needed slaying?

I agree with McIntosh: it is only logical for Buffy to kill Edward because Buffy has to kill all of her vamp-boyfriends whether they are evil or not. Both Angel and Spike died in their most non-threatening Edward-like incarnations. Buffy slays Angel after his soul is restored. Buffy has many opportunities to kill Spike but he actually dies after he has a soul, in an act that saves Buffy, and the world, but mostly Buffy.

Buffy,as a post-feminist icon, has a duty to serve and protect the world from evil that comes before any desire she might have to settle down and get married to Edward. It is interesting though how Buffy vs. Edward highlights how Buffy embraces antiquated notions of masculinity, even if the heroine rejects her prince in the end.

Thoughts on 'Hung'

Haven't had a chance to comment on the new HBO series, "Hung," that premiered last week. Since HBO CEO Chris Albrecht's departure in 2007, I've been interested to see what the new execs would come up with. "Hung" so far seems promising, better than a show centered around a man's big penis might sound.

I think it would be too easy to group "Hung" with other shows about white suburbanites side-stepping the law in pursuit of alternate income sources. "Hung" is about a middle class guy Ray Drecker (Thomas Jane) who is trying to get by after losing nearly everything in the pilot episode: his wife remarries, house burns down, kids jump ship. He can't find the money to repair his house so he decides to pitch a tent in his backyard and call it home. And oh yeah, he's a high school gym teacher coaching a basketball team on a losing streak. 

"Hung" isn't just about the plight of Drecker but is also about the post-industrial landscape of Detroit. Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways, About Schmidt) makes some interesting directorial choices in the pilot episode. The show begins and ends with shots of Detroit: from a bulldozed stadium to a homeless man plodding along a street wide enough to be a highway. These shots avoid being annoyingly heavy-handed because of their length and their attention to silence. I can remember a still shot of a gutted warehouse that carries on long enough to capture the small movement of a wind-blown scrap of paper. The same meditative camera movement extends to the scenes containing characters and dialogue. During a post-coital moment between Ray and Tanya (Jane Adams), the camera lingers on the black cursive lettering of her tattoo spelling out "Proust" as she reads him the poetry of Rumi, and in that momentary "Proust" pause we know exactly everything we need to know about what kind of "artist" Tanya is. 

"Hung" might seem to be covering old terrain but it does so with a fresh eye for detail, that will keep me watching in the weeks to come. 

today is the day

finally time to throw out those rabbit ears! the big switch from analog to digital is happening today. The only person I know who is personally affected by the transition is my mother, who still watches "The Today Show" on her 10" black and white rotary dial-tune tv set. She's sad to let it go, but I think it's for the best.

TV Auteurs: Showrunners and what we might call "Indie TV"

Just read Michael Newman's latest article, "Indie Culture: In Pursuit of the Authentic Autonomous Alternative.

Overall, I thought this article did an excellent job of explaining the contradictions at the heart of the Indie brand.

Newman's basic argument is that "Indie" no longer describes a mode of production but instead, has come to describe a counter-hegemonic "style" or "cultural category" of film or music, produced by mainstream media outlets. In the film world, the shift in definition occurred in the early nineties, when major Hollywood studios began distributing and marketing Indie films. Before this point, independent film was more strictly an industrial category: films produced outside of the studio system, usually small scale, low-budget affairs that offered creators more artistic autonomy as a result of being free from the meddling hands of corporate influence.

The mainstreaming of independent film became problematic for the status of the indie film aesthetic that is so entrenched in the economics of independent filmmaking. Films that look low-budget and "offbeat" but that are actually produced by big studios stand to lose a certain amount of authenticity or indie cred. Indie films produced by Disney (aka Miramax) must therefore, assume an oppositional posture or maintain what he calls a "rhetoric of distinction," in order to remain a viable cultural catagory within dominant media structures.

Newman maps out this idea of Indie as rhetoric of distinction through a couple of key examples: the critical reception to Todd Solondz's Happiness and the success of VW's "Driver's Wanted" campaign. With Happiness, we can see how the Indie taste is cultivated through a perceived rejection of mainstream culture; the VW ads demonstrate how this rhetoric of distinction creates an Indie aesthetic that is more portable than the proponents of "authentic" Indie culture might want to believe.

As always, my thoughts about indie culture gravitate towards television: is there such a thing as Indie TV? Newman has already written an excellent post on his blog that addresses the question of Indie TV. As he establishes, the binaries that exist in the film industry of Hollywood vs. Indie don't really exist in the TV world. With the emergence of the cable channels like HBO and Showtime that seek to offer an alternative to traditional network TV, there is now a space for indie shows
to thrive. As Newman notes, HBO shows give their creators the kind of artistic freedom that the indie culture is all about. He mentions David Simon of The Wire but I can of a couple of others: David Milch (Deadwood, John From Cincinnati), Alan Ball (Six Feet Under, True Blood), David Chase (The Sopranos).

To add onto to Newman's point, I think the emergence of the"showrunner" is important in defining what we might call "Indie TV". From what I can tell, "showrunner" is a relatively new term used to describe the person who acts as both head writer and head producer. Ten years ago showrunners might have been called an exec producers, but I would like to do some more in-depth research about the history of the position and how it is understood in popular media.


What I have discovered from my cursory findings is that showrunners are often described as the cinema auteurs of the medium.

From the LA Times in 2007 (during the writer's strike):

Show runners are "hyphenates," a curious hybrid of starry-eyed artists and tough-as-nails operational managers. They're not just writers; they're not just producers. They hire and fire writers and crew members, develop story lines, write scripts, cast actors, mind budgets and run interference with studio and network bosses. It's one of the most unusual and demanding, right-brain/left-brain job descriptions in the entertainment world.

This article that appeared in the NYTimes last year is about Mad Men's showrunner Matthew Weiner (my italics):

Weiner (pronounced WHY-ner) is the creator and show-runner of “Mad Men,” which means the original idea was his: he wrote the pilot; he writes every episode of every show (along with four other people); he’s the executive producer who haggles for money (he says that his budget is $2.3 million per episode and that the average budget for a one-hour drama is $2.8 million); and he approves every actor, costume, hairstyle and prop. Though he has directed episodes, most of the time he holds a “tone meeting” with the director at which he essentially performs the entire show himself so it’s perfectly clear how he wants it done. He is both ultimate authority and divine messenger, some peculiar hybrid of God and Edith Head. “I do not feel any guilt about saying that the show comes from my mind and that I’m a control freak,” he told me. “I love to be surrounded by perfectionists, and part of the problem with perfectionism is that by nature, you’re always failing.”

The notion that showrunners are "starry-eyed artists" or an "ultimate authority and divine messenger" suggests that TV showrunners share in the kind of artistic autonomy usually exclusive to indie film directors. And the celestial descriptions of these showrunners certainly play into the rhetoric of Indie "distinction" that Newman speaks of: these are not just directors or writers or writer/directors. Showrunners are Gods.

And wouldn't it be interesting if these showrunners were able to pave the way for the Indie TV movement in the post-network era, where shows could actually be produced and distributed outside of networks? Say on the internets? I think one famous showrunner has already jumped on the new wave. 

As of now, internet TV hasn't taken off in a significant way. We've got internet TV networks like VBS.tv but no one yet has able to translate web TV into something BIG. During the WGA strike however, when network television was at a stand-still, a major showrunner like Joss Whedon was able to use to the web to circumvent the networks, by putting up his own money to produce Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Through DVD and iTunes distribution sales, Whedon was actually able to make a profit from an Internet TV venture. 

It will take a major showrunner like Joss Whedon, who may be able to raise the necessary funds to produce a popular web series, to pave the way for some kind of authentic independent TV movement. 

the internet is my time machine

Do you remember this?

The old Tootsie Pop commercial was one of my favorites from the after-school nicktunes days. It's been on the air since 1970, which would make it the longest running commercial in American television history. There seems to be some controversy over this fact actually. According to Guinness, the "Thank You" commercial for Discount Tire Company, is the longest running commercial in tv history, first broadcast in 1975. Maybe the Tootsie pop commercial doesn't qualify because it no longer airs in its original format (the original is 60-seconds long but we are most familiar with the 30-second and 15-second versions).

Record setting or not, the tootsie pop commercial is great because it challenges our childhood paradigms of knowledge. The boy wants an objective answer to the question, "how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?" And the owl, in a brilliant retort, responds by seizing the tootsie pop and biting it on the the third "lick," showing all of us kids that adults make their own rules and that there are no answers out there, although I would not have explained it this way at the time. On another level, the commercial masterfully achieves its advertising objective, to sell tootsie pops, because in our blind and furious quest to defeat the owl, we will buy many many tootsie pops and count the number of licks and we will find an answer goddamnit. People in the cybersphere seem to think the number is something like 9000?

Also, you gotta love the hand-drawn animation!

Origins

hello friends, fans and media elite:

So, I've decided to start a blog. I'm not sure exactly what this is going to be yet, but I go into this with the understanding that nothing I write is set in stone. I hope that through this blog, I can map out a space where media junkies like myself can engage in meaningful dialogue about tv, sequential art, movies, fan culture, melodrama, narratology, whatever seems exciting and relevant. This will also be a space for me to work out my own ideas, so please don't hesitate to comment!

A friend of Pauline Kael's once said, at least according to her, that what he learned from her writing is that, "content grows from language, not the other way around." I'm going to try to adopt that as my blogging philosophy- letting it fly and hoping something good comes out of that process.

Alright, enough philosophizin- let's begin!