Bracketology

My goal for this year's March Madness bracket was to finish above #1,000,000 in the Facebook bracket. Sadly, Facebook discontinued their global ranking, so I could only compare myself to my other friends, and I only knew where I stood if I ended up in the top 5. It was a shame.

Still, at the end of it, I did pretty well. In my first bracket I carefully thought out each matchup, went with coaches and programs I felt strongly about, and chose UNC as my title pick. Unfortunately, you can't import brackets across Facebook, so every time you join someone else's pool, you have to fill out another bracket (it's like we're back in the Stone Age, filling out our brackets with pencils). Three or four times of filling out the same bracket, I finally got bored and said "Screw it, I'm doing a new one," and made a new bracket that went against all my instincts. Naturally, that bracket dominated, as my more offhand decisions ("Davidson for two rounds? Why not?") all panned out, plus I chose Kansas as the national champion (against Duke, unfortunately). The bracket ended up racking up 1350 points on Facebook scoring, as opposed to 870 points for my normal bracket, and good for second overall among all my friends.

In other news, my cat is undergoing a combination neutering/hernia surgery today, a procedure that is supposed to cost me $550, bring the total cost of the cat up to $1100. I'll remind you, until we brought this thing in for a checkup, this was a free cat. Now he's a bigger investment than 75% of all the cars I've ever bought.

I don't actually send these letters, in case you're confused.

An open letter to the writers of “Greek,” currently embarking on your second season.

Greetings. As I am sure you are in no way aware, upon viewing your pilot last year, I wrote a short paragraph saying, in short, that the show was a knockoff of “Undeclared” and John Hughes movies, but I found the two leads quite charming. Your series launched, my attentions went elsewhere, and I didn’t think about it again.

With “Greek” launching a new season last week, I thought I’d pick up the first season and see if you let it live up to its potential - or delved into the inviting world of trite, idiotic dialogue that ABC Family originals seem to adore so much (I’m talking to you, “Searching For David’s Heart”). You didn’t, though, your show is engaging, fun, and addictive, I appreciate shows like that. Television is splitting itself into two serious camps – the pointless nothings of most of reality television (I’ll shamelessly reference “Dance War: Bruno Vs. Carrie-Ann” one more time to back up my point) versus the polarizing extremism of cable-based shows like “Dirt” or “The Tudors;” most television in the future will be swinging in one of those directions. I’m glad to see that there are shows that are still willing to be frothy and fun without thinking that occasionally being clever is something that might drag down your ratings.

Of course, being who I am, I have some notes on how to improve the show. And these are the sort of bon mots I assume you aren’t getting from the network, since your network is ABC Family, a channel that once made “Everything You Want,” a movie about a young woman who couldn’t chose between her imaginary boyfriend and the possibility of a real boyfriend, and thought we’d buy the concept of an imaginary boyfriend on which a girl goes out on dates as a cute quirk and not a sign of severe mental instability.

1. Your show is about a geeky guy who comes to college and wants to learn to become cool (the exact plot of “Undeclared,” but never mind). When you have a character like this, there are two storylines you are not allowed to flub – the guy finally landing a girlfriend story, and the guy losing his virginity story. You flubbed both. The geeky guy-awkward girl storyline is a cute one, and both actors are well cast, but it was kind of a disaster for a few episodes (ironically, things finally straightened up in the season finale, and then they broke up. Nice). They never made eye contact at the right moment, they never seemed comfortable around each other, and most importantly, you didn’t allow them enough time to be awkward and uneasy around each other early on so that everyone gets to say “oh, I totally bet they get together!” It all happened in one episode: they have a very small hijink together, during which they display no chemistry, she confesses her longtime crush (though they seem to have met for the first time at the beginning of the episode, so this seems bogus) and they kiss, but at that point I don’t even think they’d made eye contact yet. Strange and awkward. Two episodes later, he confesses his love to her, and not only is it a little early, it seems unlikely that he’s even learned her last name yet. Not only don’t they have any chemistry – they don’t even seem to talk about anything; they should have a couple moments of witty, fun banter with each other about their childhood pet or their love of classic movies or embarrassing camp experiences that makes everyone say “aw, they’re perfect for each other.” That’s a softball pitch in television writing and you missed it.

And don’t get me started on the losing-virginity story – you never spent any time on it, so why should I? I don’t even like losing-virginity stories, and yet there I was, lying on my couch saying “I wish I coulda had a crack at that.”

2. There’s dropping pop culture references and then there’s placing pop culture references, the latter’s no good and you guys are decidedly the latter. I’m going to pay to send you all to a weeklong power session with Amy Sherman-Palladino until you learn your lesson.

When you have a joke or reference that you aren’t sure people will get, you either set it up differently or you eliminate the reference. You can have someone look around a hotel room and say “It looks like Hostel in here,” or “this place looks like an Eli Roth movie,” but you can’t say “this place looks like that movie Hostel,” because then the line reading becomes “I am reading aloud a joke by referencing this film. It’s funny, because that film was very grungy and scary.” When you place jokes on silver platters, they don’t become jokes anymore. If people don’t know that “Jagged Little Pill” is an Alanis Morissette album, then don’t explain it to them in the next line. The people who got the joke the first time are going to feel patronized; the people who didn’t aren’t going to laugh when they have it explained to them.

And the self-referencing has got to be watched. It was a little funny when Spencer Grammer said “hey, “Frasier” is on” because, ha, yes, her real-life dad is Kelsey Grammer. It wasn’t funny the second time. It was a more funny when someone asked Jessica Rose if she had an accent, because, ha ha, she used to play LonelyGirl15. It wasn’t at all funny when Jessica Rose said “it’s like living with LonelyGirl15!” because, yes, seriously, we know she used to play LonelyGirl15. I adore self-reference because it’s usually a joke that plays on two levels – it’s clever to the detached viewer while still being funny within the confines of the show. These jokes are always aimed at the detached viewer, they never work within the construct of the show. They’re winks at the audience, and they’re very broad winks. Careful.

3. If you have essentially the same show every week, it’s easy to lose interest. This one’s Writing 101 – if you write a show mostly centered around two main characters who happen to be brother and sister, it helps for you to have them interact from time to time. Having them run into each other 11 minutes into each episode, say something judgmental, continue on separate storylines, and then get together and apologize at the very end of the show and walk off into the sunset together, well, that works. Once or twice. But out of the 10 episodes from your first season, that structure happened exactly 10 times. There’s a difference between comfort food and lacking the ability to structure your show in a creative way, and you’re toeing the line.

4. Finally, keep a closer eye on your characters. You wrote broad sketches of characters, then let the actors who took the roles define them, just as you should. But sometimes you don’t seem to really know what all those characters are for. If Scott Foster’s through line is that he’s not-so-secretly still in love with Grammer, when he decides to go for the suddenly-no-longer-manipulative (what happened there, by the way?) Dilshad Vadsaria, why don’t we get to see it from his perspective? Instead, we see it from the viewpoint of our geeky main character, who seems betrayed by it for no particular reason. And why does Foster decide to apologize to him, anyway? For what?

Also, if you’re going to have a redneck, racist, Southern Baptist snobbish geeky vengeful fetishist roommate, why cast someone as accessible as Clark Duke? Or more importantly, if you have someone as accessible as Duke, why make him a racist geeky fetishist? Why give him so many strange, unlikable quirks if you want to play up the friendship between him and the main character? Why have a character like that in the first place? The Christian jokes are fun – I especially enjoy his “Darwin Lied” band – and Duke’s great regardless of what content you give him. Why give him so many handicaps to make him unlikable when we’re supposed to like him?

And why give Jake McDorman so few if we’re supposed to dislike him? In a romantic triangle, you’re supposed to root for two of them to be together. Instead, we spend half the season focusing on getting McDorman and Grammer back together. The viewer’s not supposed to like McDorman – why spend so much time trying to get us to root for him? It just makes things more complicated when the inevitable Grammer-Foster romance finally starts up?

In the span of only ten episodes, you’ve managed to raise a great deal of unnecessary questions. These are basic building blocks of TV writing – the romantic triangle with the stuck-up rich boy and the fun, loose slacker competing for the heart of the perfect girl, the geeky boy finding love and acceptance, two people who are completely unlike each other finding friendship.

Mess up the small stuff sometimes, but don’t miss the big picture. That’s why people keep coming back.

Best of luck with the new season. I have great hopes for you guys.

Regards,

A TV viewer with too much time on his hands

What's Really Wrong With Oscar Night

Last month, the Oscars were watched by 32 million people, an all-time low. This is remarkable for a number of reasons, but here are the two main ones:

1. One of the major reasons the writer’s strike ended when it did was that everyone wanted the Oscars to still take place. What better way to welcome entertainment-starved viewers back than a big, flashy telecast?
2. Even considering cable, there was nothing else on. The Oscars was the most-watched broadcast that night, but Fox snagged the second spot with a "Simpsons" re-run. NBC was just running "Law & Order" re-runs all night. Everyone gave up on the night, surrendering to the Oscars outright.

Journalists of all shades have given all sorts of theories for the struggles of the show, from the low-brow (“It’s so boooooring!”) to the over-thought (“We already saw Jon Stewart host once, so there’s no curiosity factor for Middle America”), without ever really giving thought to the accusations. Consider: the Oscars have always been this boring, and the highest rated Oscars of all time was Billy Crystal’s sixth time hosting. He won an Emmy for the performance.

No, allow me to explain, once and for all why the Oscars are sliding so dramatically these last few years: it’s the movies that are nominated. They don’t interest the viewers.

Ha! You almost clicked away there, didn’t you? That’s not a very interesting point. The idea that the films nominated are not in line with what America in general is watching is not particularly new. The solution is not that the wrong movies are being nominated, after all what popular movies would you nominate? Spiderman 3? Pirates of the Caribbean 3? Shrek 3? I thought not.

The problem is that the wrong movies are being made. Hollywood isn’t making the sort of movies that interest most viewers.

Ha! You almost clicked away again, didn’t you? That’s still not an interesting point. But this one is:

It’s the fault of independent movies. Independent movies are ruining everything.

Didn’t expect that one, did you?

Has anyone been a bigger proponent of independent movies than me? Yes, lots and lots of people have. But you know that I adore independent film, I adore showing a disregard for convention, I dig low budgets and good acting and bizarre camera angles and narratives all out of order and weird, unsatisfying endings. Love it. But it’s ruing everything.

Keep in mind that when I talk about “independent movies,” I’m not talking about, y’know, independent movies. I’m not talking about the sales rep from Columbus who writes a script on his laptop in his spare time after he sold the Miata and shoots it on a borrowed 16mm camera with his friends and a girl they hired from the local modeling agency downtown. I’m not talking about independent movies made by people independent of the film industry. I’m talking about “indie movies,” movies with $25 million budgets made by Warner Bros and Fox starring George Clooney and Rachel McAdams. I’m talking about the new wave of filmmaking. I’m talking about all my favorite movies from the last four years. I think we’ve opened Pandora’s box, and I don’t think we’re getting it shut again.

Look at the five films nominated for Best Picture this year, keeping in mind the studios that released them: No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Juno, Michael Clayton, and Atonement. Every single one of those movies was released by an “independent” studio, like Focus Features, Warner Independent, or Fox Searchlight. Indie cred and studio money. All (except Juno) had low box offices, yet between DVD sales and rentals and cable sales, all of them will end up making the studios a ton of money when it’s all over, without even having to be a success. It’s a good world to live in.

Now, let’s look at ten years ago, we had Best Picture nominees like Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love, huge movies that cleaned up in the box office. What changed?

The most popular movies in 1998 had to be popular in order to make money, they had to be popular in order to be successful. So there was a different process to making them – if a big-name director wanted to make a film, the film they made had to be palatable to the public. The film had to be meet certain criteria – it had to make sense, it had to have a strong ending, it usually had to have likeable characters. It had to be a movie that the average adult would want to see.

This is painting Hollywood with a broad brush, I will admit – David Lynch has never made a movie anyone close to average would want to see, and there is a long history of hundreds of directors forging their own path. So I’m not saying that filmmakers getting to make whatever the hell they want is all new. I’m saying it’s easier.

Given the option, good filmmakers will always chose the more unique, the more creative way to do things. That’s how they got to where they are. And if someone’s going to give them eighteen million dollars with very few questions asked, it becomes a lot easier to tune out the studio exec going “maybe the guy and the girl should get back together at the end.” When art beats commerce, filmmakers will denounce commerce for all they’re worth.

Once a film gets over a certain price to produce, things start changing. Tony Gilroy, who wrote and direct Michael Clayton, noted “Once a film costs a certain amount of money, the bad guys have to wear black hats.” George Clooney slashed his asking price in order to preserve the $20 million dollar budget, which gave Girloy final cut, a privilege he wouldn’t have had if the studio had invested more money in the picture.

I love this about movies, because suddenly we have dozens of creative, original movies that never would have seen the light of day otherwise. There Will Be Blood would never have gotten the backing it did. Same with Garden State, or Lost In Translation. Little Miss Sunshine and Juno were both Best Picture nominees, would they even have gotten made?

But just a decade ago, we had Forrest Gump, Good Will Hunting, Silence of the Lambs, and Schindler’s List, big movies that weren’t just popcorn – they were good, and they were popular. Everybody watched them and everybody loved them .

We don’t have movies like that anymore. The best movies we have now are small and divisive, and nobody goes to see them. The most popular movies we have are loud and obnoxious, and everyone walks out saying how disappointed they were. There’s no common ground in movies anymore – no one watches or likes the same things, we all just find our own taste. If we ever find something in common to talk about, it’s almost a miracle.

And that’s why, as long as indie movies control Hollywood, no one is going to watch the Oscars. No one went to see the movies in the first place, so why should anyone care?