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kottke.org posts about TV
Sixteen-part PBS travel/food show with David Chang
How had I not heard about this before now? The Mind of a Chef is a PBS consisting of sixteen half-hour shows that follows David Chang through his world of food. As far as I can tell, this series is basically the TV version of Lucky Peach. Episode one is about ramen:
In the series premiere, David dissects the roots of his passion for ramen dishes and tsukemen on a trip to Japan. Learn the history of this famous noodle as David visits a ramen factory, has a bowl of the original tsukemen, and examines how alkalinity makes noodles chewier and less prone to dissolving in broth.
Check out an excerpt here, in which Chang reveals how he used to eat instant ramen noodles right out of the bag with the pork flavor powder sprinkled on top. The series starts this weekend…check your local listings, as they say. (via ny times)
Stay small or go big?
Emeril Lagasse made an appearance on Treme on Sunday. I watched a clip of his scene a few days ago and have been thinking about it on and off ever since. In the scene written by Anthony Bourdain, Emeril takes a fellow chef to the building that used to house Uglesich’s, a small-but-beloved New Orleans restaurant that closed back in 2005. The chef is having misgivings about expanding her business, particularly about all the non-cooking things you have to do, and Emeril explains that the way the owners of Uglesich’s did it was one way forward:
You see, they kept it small, just one spot, just a few tables. There’d be a line around the corner by 10 am. You see, they made a choice. Anthony and Gail made a choice to stay on Baronne Street and keep their hands on what they were serving. They cooked, everyday they cooked, until they could cook no more.
But there’s also another way to approach your business:
The other choice is that you can build something big but keep it the way that you wanna keep it. Take those ideas and try to execute them to the highest level. You got a lotta people around you, right? You’re the captain of the ship. Or what I should say is that you’re the ship. And all these people that look up to you and wanna be around you, they’re living in the ship. And they’re saying, “Oh, the ship is doing good. Oh, the ship is going to some interesting places. Oh, this ship isn’t going down just like all the other fucking ships I’ve been on.” […] You’ve got a chance to do your restaurant and to take care of these people. Just do it.
kottke.org has always been a one-person thing. Sure, Aaron posts here regularly now and I have guest editors on occasion, but for the most part, I keep my ass in the chair and my hands on what I am serving. I’ve always resisted attempts at expanding the site because, I have reasoned, that would mean that the site wouldn’t be exactly what I wanted it to be. And people come here for exactly what I want it to be. Doing the site with other people involved has always seemed unnatural. It would be selling out…that’s how I’ve thought about it, as opposed to blowing up.
But Emeril’s “until they could cook no more” and “you’re the ship”…that got to me. I am a ship. I don’t have employees but I have a family that relies on the income from my business and someday, when I am unable to do this work or people stop reading blogs or all online advertising moves to Facebook or Twitter, what happens then? Don’t I owe it to myself and to them to build something that’s going to last beyond my interest and ability to sit in a chair finding interesting things for people to look at? Or is it enough to just work by yourself and produce the best work you can?
Or can you do both? John Gruber’s Daring Fireball remains a one-man operation…as far as I know, he’s never even had an intern. I don’t have any inside knowledge of DF’s finances, but from the RSS sponsorship rate and the rate for sponsoring Gruber’s podcast, my conservative estimate is that DF grosses around $650,000 per year. And with a single employee/owner and relatively low expenses, a large amount of that is profit. So maybe that route is possible?
I don’t have any answers to these questions, but man, it’s got me thinking. Emeril got me thinking…who saw that coming? Bam!
Louis C.K. and the Rise of the Laptop Loners
Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Adam Wilson has a thoughtful take on Louis C.K., his TV show, and his comedy style in general.
The format of the American sitcom held steady for almost 40 years. The most noteworthy innovation was a negation; in the early nineties, HBO comedies like the short-lived Dream On ditched the pervasive canned laugh track, paving the way for the so-called cringe comedy of shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm. On Curb, the absence of a laugh track makes it difficult for viewers to know when to laugh. We cringe because we’re holding in laughter, waiting for a cue that it’s okay to release. But there is always a breaking point, an explosion into an absurdity so deep — Larry rushing into the water to “save” a baptismal candidate from drowning, for example — that the tension is relieved, and the laughter is released.
Louie both reacts to the failure of Lucky Louie and advances on Curb’s cringe comedy by creating something tenser, more tonally ambiguous. Louie’s singularity lies in its ability to further confound viewers by setting up jokes, and then providing pathos instead of punch lines. Not only does Louie’s audience not know when to laugh, they don’t even know if what they’re watching is supposed to be funny. For the Laptop Loner, this ambiguity is made all the more palpable by the absence of viewing partners; we use other people’s reactions to gauge the correctness of our own. But it also makes the ambiguity less assaulting. Alone, we can be comfortable in our discomfort.
Arrested Westeros
Last week Aaron linked to Kanye Wes. Turns out there is also Arrested Westeros (Arrested Development quotes + Game of Thrones scenes):
Man, I wish Kanye Westeros were better. (via @JoshMorrison)
What is it like to be on Jeopardy?
Technology journalist Glenn Fleishman appeared on Jeopardy on Thursday and wrote up a piece for Boing Boing on his experience.
The secret of Jeopardy, what defuses the reality-show aspect, is that we all universally wanted each other to win even though we knew that only one person took home the big money and would return to fight again.
Here’s Glenn’s Final Jeopardy from that night:
I wouldn’t have gotten that question in a millions years. Maybe in high school…
Final trailer for the Arrested Development documentary
In production for the past twenty-four years, it looks as though the documentary about Arrested Development might be nearing its release. Here’s the final trailer:
Update: You can watch the documentary on Amazon. (via @mcnees)
The most powerful TV shows of the past 25 years
This is a really interesting and eclectic list of 25 TV shows that have had an impact on society beyond the water cooler. There are a few obvious choices, but most of these I hadn’t heard of.
In 2003, 24-year-old machinist Juan Catalan faced the death penalty for allegedly shooting a key witness in a murder case. Catalan told police that he couldn’t have committed the crime — he was at a Los Angeles Dodgers game at the time. He had the ticket stubs and everything!
When police didn’t buy his alibi, Catalan contacted the Dodgers, who pointed him to an unlikely hero: misanthropic comedian Larry David. On the day in question, David had been filming an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in Dodger Stadium. It was a long shot, but maybe Catalan could be seen in the background. When his attorney watched the outtakes, it took just 20 minutes to find shots of Catalan and his daughter chowing down on ballpark dogs while watching from the stands.
Thanks to the footage, Catalan walked free after five months behind bars. And Larry David found one more thing to be self-deprecating about. “I tell people that I’ve done one decent thing in my life, albeit inadvertently,” joked David.
(via @fimoculous)
Six TV networks that started out as something else
There was a time when American Movie Classics used to show classic American movies, when The Learning Channel could teach you something, and when ABC Family broadcast family programming. Wired’s Ruth Suehle has a look at six TV networks that have significantly changed their programming since their founding. The story of ABC Family, which used to be known as The Family Channel, is especially interesting:
Plan A was to use it for ABC re-runs. Too bad [ABC] didn’t own the syndication rights to the stuff they wanted to show.
Plan B was an image makeover. They’d rename it XYZ (as in the opposite of ABC) and sell it to a younger, edgier audience. Too bad nobody read the contract that said the word “family” had to stay in the name forever.
Why? For that, we rewind to its beginning as Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network Satellite Service in 1979. That religious beginning followed the network through multiple sales, each of which has been required to continue broadcasting Robertson’s The 700 Club, hence the reason that show is now bookended by the disclaimer, “The following/preceding CBN telecast does not reflect the views of ABC Family”as well as the network’s slogan of the last few years, “A New Kind of Family.”
(via @moth)
An oral history of Cheers
Amy Poehler says it’s the best show on television and GQ has a long oral history of Cheers.
On The Jeffersons, you would give your notes to the director, and he’d go, “Right, right,” and then turn around and go to the actors and say, “Oh, those fucking writers. They want to change this.” And then the director would come back [to the writers] and go, “Oh, those actors. They won’t do a thing I ask them.” You get this weird us-against-them [mentality].
And when we got to Cheers, everybody could talk to everybody. Now, granted, if you were smart you had a sense of where you were on the totem pole, you watched your comments and obviously deferred to the bosses. But if I saw something that Shelley had done that I thought was particularly good, or if a writer had a suggestion for a way she might be able to do it better, you got to tell her that. The only rule was you had to do it so everybody could hear; there were no private conversations. It had to be open with everybody. It really fostered this feeling that we were all in it together.
I watched Cheers all the time when I was a kid…I’ve seen each episode at least twice. For me, it was the best show until Seinfeld came along. Haven’t seen an episode for probably 15 years though. I wonder if it holds up as well as Poehler claims.
Oh cripes, Fargo to be a TV series
FX is developing a TV show “loosely based” on the Coen brothers’ Fargo.
Joel and Ethan Coen are bringing one of their signatures movies to television. FX has closed a deal to develop Fargo, an hourlong project loosely based on the Coen brothers’ 1996 comedic crime drama. The Coens will serve as executive producers on the project, which will be written/executive produced by The Unusuals and My Generation creator Noah Hawley.
(via @fimoculous)
All I really want is Girls
The second season of Girls is set to run in January 2013 on HBO. Here’s a short teaser for the new season:
Mindy Kaling is amazing
Other potential headlines about the Mindy Kaling profile in NY Magazine: ‘I hope Mindy Kaling’s new show is as awesome as Mindy Kaling’ and ‘I wish television executives would take chances like this more often.’
Her character on the show also seems to represent a version of singledom not being explored on TV, one that is very different from Zooey Deschanel’s Jess on New Girl, who is so presexual in her girlishness that she spends an entire episode getting over her discomfort with saying the word penis. And unlike Girls’ Hannah, played by Lena Dunham, she’s found her life path, and she has had sex with more than a couple of people. “I just wanted to do a show that is kind of about dating, about someone who thinks about love all the time,” Kaling says. “One thing that is different than other shows is that my character is weirdly, extremely confident. She feels like she should be dating Chris Evans. That’s something I learned from writing for Michael Scott. He thought he was going to marry Teri Hatcher, even though he was constantly being told that was not the case.”
NFL TV maps 2012
Once again, here’s the link to the maps that show which NFL games will be shown in which parts of the country.
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