You come at the Lion King, you best not miss
The Lion King movie recut into a five-minute summary of all five seasons of The Wire.
I almost didn’t post this because it dogs on the underrated season 2. (via ★vuokko)
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
kottke.org posts about TV
Revisiting 1984
After yesterday’s post on Ghostbusters (“Don’t cross the streams”), I got hit with a few follow-ups worth following up:
- When I said 1984 was arguably “the biggest/most important year in modern cinematic comedy,” I meant mostly because of the ridiculous amount of money comedies made that year and how those surprise blockbusters affected how comedies were made afterwards.
- Still when you add This Is Spinal Tap, which also came out in 1984 but didn’t make very much money, you really could make a case that it really could be the best/most influential year for movie comedies.
- I didn’t know this, but Aaron Cohen tipped me off: Jason actually already preemptively backed me up: “1984, a fine year for movies.” As Jason says, “My God, the pop culture references.”
- Also via Aaron, his own “1984 Was a Good Year for a Lot of Things” and Bill Simmons’s 2004 post “1984, it was a very good year.” Both mine the same pop culture vein, adding books, TV, and sports into the mix too.
I particularly like Simmons’s note about college basketball (maybe even more relevant today):
College hoops meant something in ‘84. You stayed home on Monday nights to watch the Big East. You knew the players because they had been around for years. And since guys stuck around, you could follow Ewing and Georgetown, Hakeem and Phi Slamma Jamma, Mullin and St. John’s, Pearl and Syracuse, MJ at UNC … these were like pro teams on a smaller scale. I’m telling you, a Georgetown-St. John’s game in the middle of February was an event. These moments aren’t even possibilities anymore. They’re gone.
My favorite document of 1984 (sports or otherwise) is undoubtedly Sparky Anderson’s Bless You Boys, his running diary/memoir of the Detroit Tigers’ amazing season that year. It’s about baseball, but so many other things — life, death, perspective. I wrote about it last year for The Idler when Sparky Anderson passed away.
One last “what if?” note from Simmons:
Rolling Stone was offered the chance to buy MTV, and Sports Illustrated was offered the chance to buy ESPN. Both magazines decided against it.
Talk about crossing the streams.
Magnetic Attitude, Community’s teenage prodigy
NBC’s Community has a minor character (nick)named Magnitude, who overwhelmingly speaks in just a single catchphrase — “Pop Pop!” Both the character and the phrase have unexpectedly taken off. Here’s their first appearance:
The Wrap’s John Sellers has written an oral history of Magnitude where show creator Dan Harmon (along with actor Luke Youngblood and staff writer/character creator Adam Countee) fills in the character’s surprisingly rich backstory. Highlights:
Harmon: In the end, I really liked Magnitude because I realized that the reason he calls himself Magnitude is because it stands for Magnetic Attitude.
Countee: This guy has a nickname within a nickname. The layering of the character, I thought, was so funny and so brilliant. That little nuance spoke volumes about who this kid is and who this kid is trying to be.
Harmon: At some point, we had to give Magnitude a birthdate. And someone decided that he was 16 years old. We were like, “That’s hilarious.” He’s, like, some kind of weird prodigy. There is also a deleted couplet from the election episode. Magnitude is up there talking, and the dean applauds his bold urban flavor. And in response to that, Shirley, in the audience, says, “Bold urban flavor? Please. That boy’s from Barbados. His father’s a cardiologist.” So, there’s some biographical information to add to the canon.
Weirdly, when I lived in Chicago, my roommate Bob:
- looked surprisingly like Magnitude (same haircut, same glasses, same attitude)
- BOTH his parents were cardiologists
- the family wasn’t from Barbados — they were from Nigeria.
He disappointed the entire family by getting an MA in psychology, then dropping out and spending all day listening to Gang Starr, drinking brandy, and reading books about conspiracy theories and the paranormal. He was easily the best roommate I ever had.
A/B testing comedy the Judd Apatow way
Freaks and Geeks creator and Bridesmaids director Paul Feig talks about his collaborator Judd Apatow’s audience-driven approach to editing movies:
Judd actually has this whole thing they do with side-by-side screenings at two theaters right next door to each other and do a “P” version, which is a polished version, which is the one we think is close to what we want to have be our final cut. And then another one called the “E” version, the extended version, which is the dumping ground for everything we think might work, or we wanted to try, or we’re just curious if it’s gonna work. And out of all of those screenings, you’ll always get about five or 10 new things that you didn’t think were ever gonna work that go through the roof and you plug ‘em into the polished one…
We’ll always keep in a couple of jokes, just for ourselves. Then you go, “Okay, if it doesn’t work, whatever. This is kinda for us.” But none of us are brave enough to wait that long to see if it works because you want to have something that you know is clicking with an audience.
A lot of filmmakers will hate hearing that. To them, that feels very hacky, But the audience are the ones that are going to come and pay the money and they’re the ones who are going tell their friends if it’s good or not. I didn’t get in the business, and Judd didn’t get in the business, to make stuff that nobody sees. I’ve made a career making stuff that nobody sees, so anything that I can do to help make something that people are going to enjoy and want to see over and over again, then I’m there.
Feig also has an interesting take on the continued love for Freaks and Geeks: in 2000, when the show was cancelled, cancellation for a single show was pretty much total death. If there weren’t enough episodes for syndication, it would only linger on through word of mouth and the occasional samizdat VHS tape.
[Feig:] The British model, which I’ve always thought was great, is that you do a TV show and then they sell it. Then you can buy it at the video stores forever, so it never went away. But American TV used to be if you had a show and it got cancelled, then it never existed.
DVDs changed the culture. It’s not really a “cult hit” in the same way if you can just Netflix the entire run. Now, single-season shows like Freaks and Geeks can be sold and rewatched and lent out, and play out for their fans over and over again like long, favorite movies. And they don’t need their A/V teacher to have a copy of the film reel to do it.
Reality on television
Kelefa Sanneh offers a little history of reality television’s transformation from public documentary to commercial game show:
On January 6, 1973, the anthropologist Margaret Mead published a startling little essay in TV Guide. Her contribution, which wasn’t mentioned on the cover, appeared in the back of the magazine, after the listings, tucked between an advertisement for Virginia Slims and a profile of Shelley Winters. Mead’s subject was a new Public Broadcasting System series called “An American Family,” about the Louds, a middle-class California household. “Bill and Pat Loud and their five children are neither actors nor public figures,” Mead wrote; rather, they were the people they portrayed on television, “members of a real family.” Producers compressed seven months of tedium and turmoil (including the corrosion of Bill and Pat’s marriage) into twelve one-hour episodes, which constituted, in Mead’s view, “a new kind of art form”—an innovation “as significant as the invention of drama or the novel.”
“An American Family” was a hit, and Lance Loud, the oldest son, became a celebrity, perhaps the world’s first openly gay TV star. But for decades “An American Family” looked like an anomaly; by 1983, when HBO broadcast a follow-up documentary on the Louds, Mead’s “new kind of art form” seemed more like an artifact of an older America. Worthy heirs to the Louds arrived in 1992, with the debut of the MTV series “The Real World,” which updated the formula by adding a dash of artifice: each season, a handful of young adults were thrown together in a house, and viewers got to know them as they got to know one another. It wasn’t until 2000, though, that Mead’s grand claim started to look prescient. That year, a pair of high-profile, high-concept summer series nudged the format into American prime time: “Big Brother,” a Dutch import, was built around surveillance-style footage of competitors locked in a house; “Survivor,” a Swedish import, isolated its stars by shipping them somewhere warm and distant, where they participated in faux tribal competitions. Both of these were essentially game shows, but they doubled as earthy anthropological experiments, and they convinced viewers and executives alike that television could provide action without actors.
The essay includes this tidy and maybe prescient quote from Mark Andrejevic’s 2004 book Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched:
The Illinois housewife who agrees to move into a house where her every move can be watched by millions of strangers to compete for a cash prize exhibits more than an incidental similarity (albeit on a different scale) to the computer user who allows Yahoo to monitor her web-browsing habits in exchange for access to a free e-mail account.
Here’s another thought. Traditional game shows are spectacles of consumption, plus luck. Think “The Price is Right” or “Supermarket Sweep,” where you try to win household and luxury goods based on your knowlege about household and luxury goods.
Now, game shows/reality TV are overwhelmingly about work — “American Idol,” “Survivor,” “The Apprentice,” “America’s Next Top Model.” The incentive at the end, if you win, is that you’ll get enough fame and exposure that you’ll win the right to continue to work.
The aspiring model/singer/washed-up celebrity who agrees to go on stage and engage in cutthroat competition with other aspirants to satisfy the whims of mercurial judges exhibits more than an accidental similarity to unpaid interns and at-will employees who can likewise be cut loose at a moment’s notice.
We’re all in the prize economy now.
PS: I still think Chappelle/Puffy’s rant starting around 4:20 is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
The original pitch for Doctor Who
The Between the Pages blog tracked down the original set of five pitch documents for Doctor Who. It wasn’t until the fourth document, the Tom Baker of the group, that Doctor Who was explicitly mentioned by name.
The Secret of Dr. Who: In his own day, somewhere in our future, he decided to search for a time or for a society or for a physical condition which is ideal, and having found it, to stay there. He stole the machine and set forth on his quest. He is thus an extension of the scientist who has opted out, but he has opted farther than ours can do, at tne moment. And having opted out, he is disintegrating.
[Handwritten note from Sydney Newman: “Don’t like this at all. Dr Who will become a kind of father figure — I don’t want him to be a reactionary.”]
One symptom of this is his hatred of scientist, inventors, improvers. He can get into a rare paddy when faced witn a cave man trying to invent a wheel. He malignantly tries to stop progress (the future) wherever he finds it, while searching for his ideal (the past). This seems to me to involve slap up-to-date moral problems, and old ones too.
In story terms, our characters see the symptoms and guess at the nature of his trouble, without knowing details; and always try to help him find a home in time and space. wherever he goes he tends to make ad hoc enemies; but also there is a mysterious enemy pursuing him implacably every when: someone from his own original time, probably. So, even if the secret is out by the 52nd episode, it is not the whole truth. Shall we say:
The Second Secret of Dr. Who: The authorities of his own (or some other future) time are not concerned merely with the theft of an obsolete machine; they are seriously concerned to prevent his monkeying with time, because his secret intention, when he finds his ideal past, is to destroy or nullify the future.
[Handwritten note from Sydney Newman: “Nuts”]
Mad Men season four on Blu-ray/DVD
With the next new season of Mad Men delayed, you’ll have to make do with the recently released season four Blu-ray and DVD to get your fix.
Hilarious fake TLC promo
Turns out there’s not so much learning on The Learning Channel anymore.
Fake shows from the video: 12 Wives, 12 Problems; Dwarf Hoarders; Uterus Cannon; and Hasty Home Surgery.
Real TLC shows: 19 Kids and Counting; Strange Sex; Extreme Couponing; and I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. (via ★dansays)
Television death portraits
Stephan Tillmans’ Luminant Point Arrays project is a collection of photographs of tube television screens as they’re switched off.
(via ★buzz)
Mad Men season five delayed
There’s currently no deal in place for the show, which probably means we won’t get to see the next season until late 2011 or early 2012 (instead of this summer).
People involved in the talks suggested this week that one or both deals may be imminent, but that may not be enough to ensure a summer start. Todd Gold, the editor in chief of XfinityTV.com, Comcast’s television news site, said it was becoming clear that the show was “right on the cusp of going one way or the other.”
“By now, the writing staff should be humming along, maybe about a month or more into work for a summer premiere,” he said. “Unless Weiner is secretly manufacturing outlines in preparation of some crazy all-night writing sessions with his staff, it might be time for fans to grow concerned.”
Watch Downton Abbey for free online
The first season of Downton Abbey, which I highly recommend, is available to watch online for free in two places: on Amazon (for Amazon Prime subscribers) and at Netflix Watch Instantly (for subscribers).
kottke.org on Jeopardy
On Jeopardy today, a contestant named Ethan responded incorrectly to a $1000 clue with “What is kottke.org?”
The best part is how disgusted the viewer is…”Are you freaking kidding me? Oh jeeezz…” Ethan, if you’re out there and if there was actually such an item, I would totally send you a kottke.org tote bag for working in a reference to kottke.org on a show that has such a storied past on the site. What a lovely 13th birthday present. (thx, justin)
Hollywood career advice from Alec Baldwin
Apologies in advance for the Charlie Sheen mention, but Alec Baldwin’s advice to Sheen (and, belatedly, Conan) is golden.
Conan has moved on and his great talent is undiminished by his difficult experiences. I had wanted to say to him back then what I will now offer to Charlie. You can’t win. Really. You can’t. When executives at studios and networks move up to the highest ranks, they are given a book. The book is called How to Handle Actors. And one principle held dear in that book is that no actor is greater than the show itself when the show is a hit. And, in that regard, they are often right. Add to that the fact that the actor who is torturing their diseased egos is a drug addled, porn star-squiring, near Joycean Internet ranter, and they really want you to go.
Reminds me of Frank Sinatra’s letter to George Michael.
Come on George, Loosen up. Swing, man, Dust off those gossamer wings and fly yourself to the moon of your choice and be grateful to carry the baggage we’ve all had to carry since those lean nights of sleeping on buses and helping the driver unload the instruments.
(via stellar)
Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the Japanese earthquake
If you haven’t already heard, Al-Jazeera had (and continues to have) some of the best coverage of earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Here’s a clip from earlier showing the tsunami rushing through a populated area.
Contrast with CNN, which was apparently home to giggles and Godzilla jokes as the quake was being reported. In the last three or four big events in the world, Al-Jazeera has had the best coverage…is this a changing of the guard?
Update: Mediaite investigates and finds no evidence that a Godzilla reference or giggling occurred on CNN last night.
We did find an example of an American in Japan that made a reference that it was like a “monster movie” (which is included below) but Church handles herself completely appropriately.
Update: Mediaite found a video of the CNN broadcast in question where the anchor chuckles at something her interviewee says. And her whole tone sounds a bit more chipper than it ought to. The sing-song anchor voice might suffice when reporting non-news filler but fails when watching video of dozens of homes (possibly with people in them!) being swept along by a massive wave of water. (via @somebadideas)
Snoop from The Wire arrested in drug raid
Felicia Pearson, who played Snoop on The Wire, was arrested today on drug charges.
Felicia “Snoop” Pearson had served a prison sentence for murder and returned to drug dealing on the streets of East Baltimore, before a visit to the set of “The Wire” led to a star turn on the show and offered a new chance to change her life.
But her past kept creeping back - she was a witness to a murder and was arrested after she refused to testify — and subsequent film and television offers were hard to come by.
Now, Pearson, 30, has been accused of playing a part in a large-scale drug organization, whose members were arrested in raids Thursday throughout Baltimore and surrounding counties, as well as in three other states.
(via df)
Socials & More