TV
And since I’m at it, I might as well link to this hawesome post by Wil Wheaton regarding his recent voice record for an episode of Family Guy (that won’t air for about a year, it seems). Quoth the Wheaton:
Seth MacFarlane directed my session, and when I met him, I said, “Okay, I’m not even going to try to pretend to keep it cool. I am a huge fan, and this is more exciting for me than I can quantify.”
Yeah, I said quantify. I say stupid shit like that when I’m giddy and excited.
“Well, if you’re going to do that,” he said, “then I’ll have to tell you that Next Generation is my favorite of all the Star Treks, and I’ve seen every episode about a thousand times. The First Duty is just great, man.”
I did my best not to faint.
If you’ve never read this blog, you really should. Wil inhabits this strange world between Hollywood and geek life that is just too surreal to believe sometimes. And he writes it all in ways that the average geek can connect to, so you always feel like you’re going along for a ride that you’d never (never in a gazillion years) get a chance to experience otherwise.
I think the pairing of TNG and Family Guy may be one of the best things on TV in many years. Set your PVRs now. Somehow. Predictive scheduling and whatnot.
Continuing my random insights into making a TV show, which started last week with Outlines.
As a show creator, you are given great freedoms to invent elaborate plot lines, character arcs and other devious things to make the audience wet themselves with glee. It’s what you’re hired to do. And once you get into it, it’s actually a lot of fun trying to blow the minds of the other people on the production. It’s a wonderful world to be in, except for…
Script Clearances.
Script Clearances are there to protect you in the same way that root canals are there to make your mouth happy. The logic behind them is a bit convoluted, but bears some examination:
You’ve completed your outline, done your first and second drafts, and now the script is in good enough shape that the Line Producer thinks it’s ready to be reviewed for legal concerns. Since you’re writing fiction (and thus have no facts to check), the only thing to worry about are lawsuits regarding creative turf-treading. To avoid this, the script is sent off for clearance.
In the Script Clearance dungeon, a thousand little elves are chained to desks and whipped regularly until they Google every single person, place, or thing in your script. What are they looking for? They’re trying to figure out if anyone ever used your ideas before you did. If you write “hey turnip-face!” they will search for “turnip-face”, and discover that it’s the name of a little animated GIF on deviantART. And the elves will then try and decide if there’s a good chance that anybody is going to sue you over the use of the word. They will weigh all the evidence, and usually decide you’re screwed.
But the elves are also helpful. Rather than just telling you “95% of your ideas aren’t going to fly”, they send you recommendations for “safe” alternatives, which they dutifully check ahead of time. So rather than “turnip-face”, you are told to use “penny-ear”. Or instead of “chromotron”, you get “fairyhop”. “Excalibur” becomes “twinklestick”.
How do they come up with these wonderful suggestions that obviously keep the tone and theme of your original work intact against all odds? Well, nobody knows for sure, but it’s assumed that the elves are semi-literate inbreds whose constant exposure to unshielded magnetic radiation has distorted their appreciation of reality and made them incapable of assembling any thoughts more complex than a search query.
So the Clearance Report comes back to you after much nail-biting and anxiety, and you discover your cool show about metal and action and mind-blowing tension has been reduced to something that reads like Cinderella enacting Care Bears after being kicked in the head repeatedly with a steel-framed boot. And a little part of you dies.
And you say to the Line Producer, you say: “Please, please let us ignore all these changes. Let’s just leave it the way it was and pretend we never asked the elves at all. Can’t we do that?”
And the Line Producer, who has just finished his lunch of Kitten McNuggets and virgin blood, sadly informs you that there is no way to ignore the Script Clearance. The Script Clearance is the Word of God.
This is why: let us suppose you wrote a script with a character named Indiana Jones. Let’s assume that there’s a good reason you’re doing this, because otherwise you seem kinda dumb. But this character name somehow slips in, and it survives to second draft, and you’ve grown attached to it etc etc. Let us suppose that THERE ARE NO ELVES to tell you that Indiana Jones is a bad choice for a character name, and so the show goes into production, airs on TV, and is watched by half the world.
You get sued. You not only get sued, you get sued so badly that a collection agency invents a time machine to go back in time to steal pennies from your piggy bank, to be sure that they leave no stone unturned. You will never work in this town again (whichever town it is) and furthermore, the Line Producer is unemployed and suddenly free to prowl the nighttime streets in search for fresh victims. It’s like Old Marty seeing Young Marty wearing inside-out jeans, and Christopher Lloyd crying out in a quavering voice. Those elves are damn important.
Now there’s this stuff called Insurance which protects a production against space-time paradoxes, but the Insurance Masters have rules that suggest they won’t insure a production that has not had Script Clearance done. But they’re nice about it: you can defy the elves and use a term like “turnip-face”, and the Insurance Masters will cover you on all names EXCEPT that one, thereby maintaining your creative freedom.
Not that you can really do it, because everyone else on the production is staring at you with wide, fearful eyes, pleading silently for you to just tow the line and help them keep their jobs and houses. So “penny-ear” it is.
There are some other side-issues such as appealing to the Lawyers for permission to ignore the Elves, but as most of you know, the Lawyers charge nearly $9 million per hour, and as such every single question you ask them reduces the number of episodes in the season by 4. It becomes a question of: “Do we want these five principal characters to have these names, or do we want to have any screen time for them to appear in?”
When you experience Script Clearances, you start to realize how amazing it is that anything ever gets made for TV. And yet, it also helps explain what appears to be the creative retardation of the entertainment industry. It’s not that they don’t have good ideas, it’s that they can’t get the good ones past the damn Elves.
For a while now, I’ve been wanting to share what it’s like to be the creator/writer of a series. I’ve read a lot of screenwriter blogs, and I always enjoy finding out the ins and outs of a particular niche of the industry… so many things you’d never guess from the outside. As I do my day-to-day work, I think to myself: somebody’s gotta find this as interesting as I do. If only I had enough time to write about it (instead of, say, working on the show, or eating, or sleeping). So for the next while, I’m going to try and give tiny insights into what my job entails. In case anybody cares. Y’know.
For set-up, I should say this: I’m not giving away any production details, nor am I naming anyone by name here. This is about a 3D animated series done in 26 episodes in Canada… I realize things are probably different when you swap out individual variables. This is just my own personal experience.
So: Outlines.
An outline is a short version of your script. Whereas your script is about 30 pages, your outline is only 9. In it, you set out the major scenes, the action, and whatever dialogue you think is really really important. It gives the Story Editor (praise be unto him) an idea where you want to go with the episode. The reason the outline is 9 pages is so that the Story Editor can read your script and say “holy Mary mother of God, no!” and not feel too bad at making you re-do it all.
I’ve never had to re-do one, but I think that’s the reason.
I also think I may have just jinxed myself.
The other thing about outlines is that it gives the production folks an idea where you’re going with the story. It’s amazing how things get broken down, analyzed, cross-referenced and re-assembled in the blink of an eye. When you write about an incidental background character named “Doctor B” in a story, the immediate question is: “Is this the same Doctor B as in episodes 104, 109, 116 and 121?” To which your answer should always be: “Uhhhhh sure.”
So when you pass your outline by the production folk, they are looking at it to see how completely insane you are. You may think that inventing a fantastic new set piece with elaborate action and wonderful potential for drama is what screenwriting is all about. You poor, silly creature. That’s only true if “the set” is an existing asset. Otherwise, your outline will be hit with a gnarled hammer, you will be told you’re horrible pond scum, and you will drink yourself to sleep. Or so I hear.
Now after writing a few outlines, you start to understand how the production limitations work, and you try and accommodate them up front. New character? Nah, we’ll stick to the base cast. New location? I think we can make it work if we stay in the principal location. Special effects? We can do without this time. Why, when you’re done with this episode, you’ll will be a celebrated hero of the production! Victoire!
And yet, as you write your super-efficient episode, you realize that you’re second-guessing all your good ideas. Your action sequences become stationary wordplays, your comedy becomes insightful prose… you find that your story is starting to resemble a stage play, or worse yet, a one-man play. Your characters sit around being philosophical and very, VERY occasionally threatening to go out and… and… wait, OUT?! Ha ha ha, no! It’s just a ruse, of course. Wasn’t that a clever twist? I can smell an Emmy in the making!
And when you’re done, you’ve got a 3-page outline which makes Dorothy Parker look like Ronald McDonald. You send it off to your friend in the UK for a critique, and you never hear from him again. The suicide rate in your town doubles after you lose a copy at a bus stop. The dark cloud of Misery follows you around until you finally decide that you have to re-do it, and this time forget how your creative flamboyancy will cause the Line Producer to have his third aneurism in a month.
You write the second version in easily half the time it takes to write the first version, and the few remaining birds in the trees start to sing with joy. The Story Editor compliments you kindly on such a quick turnaround, though you suspect you’re missing the sarcasm in the email.
Sometimes you want to show the Story Editor your original outline, but you’re sure it contravenes the Geneva Convention.
From there, the outline runs the gauntlet through producers and broadcasters until it is cleared to become a First Draft, at which point you have to figure out how the hell you’re going to pad 9 pages into 30. In the process, you will inevitably invent 900 new props and characters, each of which will cause the Line Producer’s lifespan to decrease by 10%.
(Incidentally, Line Producers stay alive by sucking the life force out of small kittens. Never let a Line Producer babysit your cat.)
By the time you’re finally getting the hang of outlines, all the episodes in the season are done, and you really want to do one more, just so you can show off a little. This is where professional scriptwriters come from. Series creators don’t get to do this, because they’ve got too many other things to do to write for another show. Or so I’m told. Also, we don’t get to go to the bathroom more than twice a day.
So that’s outlines. Just like colonoscopies, they’re an important part of your life. And that’s all I can think to say.
A fantastic post on DeadThingsOnSticks describes how the Canadian TV Industry misses its own point. I am constantly perplexed about how to deal with issues such as these, because I’m at least partly involved in such an industry, and I don’t want to close any doors on myself by insulting the people I may or may not work with one day. But hey, I didn’t write it, so…
A lot of Canadian TV creative types are snobs. They are out of touch with the Canadian viewing audience. And that’s why they make bad shows.
I can’t say that’s necessarily the truth all across the spectrum, but it feels damn close. The shows you see pushed aren’t the ones that are soulless marketing fodder, they’re the ones with so much substance you actually feel burdened watching them. That’s not to say there isn’t a value to feeling tormented after watching a drama (I personally like to feel messed up at the end of an hour of entertainment), but there’s only so many times you can watch El Maquinista in a row before you have to take happy pills to survive.
The stupid part about this is that Canadians have a great track record at silly irreverent entertainment… we have Air Farce, 22 Minutes, Corner Gas, Trailer Park Boys and some of the better minds of SNL on our national credit list, and yet we seem to look down on that kind of light fluff. Light fluff is something we CAN excel at. Grey’s Anatomy isn’t art, and if you tried to MAKE it art you’d be missing the point. The goal isn’t to broaden horizons, it’s to re-tread the old horizon in entertaining ways.
Of course the big problem is that the broadcasters don’t care to fix the problem, so the producers won’t feel pressure to fix their outlook, so any of the great Fluffers in Canada will ultimately go south where they can be silly without restraint. Hopefully the vidcasting movement will help that somewhat, and it won’t be nearly as hard to convince artists to bypass the networks as I initially thought.
Mwahaha?
The Street.com has a piece this morning about Microsoft’s quality victory over Apple, which I was hoping someone would cover to some degree. It answers some of the questions I have about the service, but there are still others I think will better-decide the victor in this living room war.
First, price. Microsoft having lotsa shows and lotsa movies will only turn into lotsa users if the price is reasonable. Call me crazy, but I already think $1.99 for an episode of Lost is a bit much… I can’t imagine the studios are going to sell HD quality episodes months before the DVDs for anything close to $1.99. They don’t seem to be the types to willingly create a good value proposition for their customers. And if an episode (HD or not) of Lost sells for $2.99 or $3.99, would YOU buy it? I could go to the video store and rent a brand-new two hour movie for that. And since Apple’s now selling standard low-def TV resolutions for the same $1.99, I don’t know that the quality difference will seem big enough to convert users, if the price is too high.
Second, DRM. This one is pure speculation, but I’d say there’s a decent chance that Microsoft will wrap their content with special license terms to make it harder to watch what you download. The Apple model has (thus far) been a short leash that keeps your music and video tied to your computer and your iPod. Logic suggests it’d extend to the iTV as well, which means you can continue to buy movies on the iTunes Store and watch half on your iPod and half on your TV. Microsoft has a bad reputation of bowing too much to the studios’ demands in this space, which could mean you will be able to watch your $1.99 version of Lost only 3 times, and then have to pay more to keep it. Or watch it on your XBox and nothing else. Having the studios onboard for movies makes me think they’ve got some DRM ace up their sleeves which will make the suits happy, but make the end-user cringe.
All this is not to say that Microsoft will sputter and die in this battle, and it’s not to say Apple will win. But I think basing the outcome on XBox penetration or quality-of-video is missing a big part of the puzzle… the user experience. But where Apple can’t afford to ship these iTVs with a flimsy service, Microsoft can afford to bomb with theirs, because people won’t really be buying XBoxes to watch downloaded TV anyway.
If anyone has any info on pricing or DRM on this Microsoft idea, please let me know.
Update: From MacNN, about the Zune. See, Microsoft makes deals with labels and studios that I would suggest don’t always make good strategic sense, especially insofar as their customers are concerned. Universal doesn’t deserve a chunk of Zune sales unless they stick something on the Zune. It’s like saying Yamaha deserves profit participation in album sales because the artists use their keyboards. Anyone who willingly makes this kind of deal is probably not going to make a good video download service.
