Okay, I’m not one of those weirdos who thinks that everything from when I was a kid was brilliant and everything today is shit, but holy shit I just watched an episode of Yu-Gi-Oh and I think I forgot how to poo.

A Brief Comparision, 1991 Saturday Morning Cartoons versus 2007 4kids.tv Saturday Morning

1991: Superheroes we’ve all heard of blow shit up and fight each other in outer space.

2007: A bunch of people with crazy haircuts spend upwards of 15 minutes discussing how to operate new accessories for a card game. They then spend the remaining 7 minutes of the episode sitting at a table playing said card game.

1991: Fox Kids has to have the occasional educational message. So, for instance, Spiderman will swing onto the screen and tell kids to "Eat Apples!" or "Eat cereal that contains apples but does not taste like apples!" It was always Spiderman because his mouth is covered so you don’t have to reanimate anything.

2007: A Ninja Turtle (who is extreme and from the 27th century) tells kids how to make winky faces on their mobile phones. I’m not kidding. This was a real educational commercial. "You can just type a semicolon, a hyphen, and a parenthesis!" Then "Tune in later for more Text Messaging Made E-Z!"

Sigh, the future is a bleak wasteland where children spend all day text messaging each other on their mobile phones about card games, all the while refusing to eat apples.

As someone who hopes to go off into the wild blue yonder and be a writer, I pay some attention to the Writers Guild.

For those not in the know, Hollywood has a writers guild, an actors guild, a directors guild, and then the 3 or so huge media conglomerates who own everything. And all these folks need to sign agreements and decide how money gets worked out.

I think a lot of people’s default reactions now a days is to sort of instinctively hate unions, and so I’m sure the concept of a bunch of wealthy writers in a union sounds pretty stupid. But it makes a lot of sense when you realize how insanely far the studios are willing to go to cheat movie makers out of, what is to the studio, tiny amounts of money.

Anyway, the next time there’s a writers guild strike, you can be sure it’ll be over exactly this. This is as crystal clear an example of what’s gonna happen as you can find. Basically it’s all about the internet and other forms of digital transmission.

Essentially the studios are supposed to pay writers residuals for their work (when it appears on TV and in DVDs and whatnot), but the current contracts don’t cover the internet at all, so studios have taken the stance that writers shouldn’t get money for things like having their movie sold on iTunes.

The example I’ve linked to is especially interesting because you’ve got a TV show (Battlestar Galactica) which released miniature episodes of the show on the internet, and the studio has not only refused to pay residuals, but in fact claims that the mini-episodes do not count as writing because they were only made for "promotional purposes." 

Hopefully these sort of things get worked out fairly, but I think the studios are probably going to be willing to put all the writers out of work for a year just to money grub for as long as they can (perhaps hoping to fill time with reality TV or god knows what else, which would be awful since reality TV is pretty terrible right now).

Maybe if I’m lucky they’ll have all this stuff worked out by the time I don’t suck anymore and can sell stuff (though it’s worth noting that my first ever sale of anything was, in fact, web content that falls exactly under this sort of trouble). 

Short Reviews:

Simpsons. The new season is thoroughly meh, but it’s about the same level as last year and still much better than the couple of truly awful years we had a few years back. Biggest problem right now seems to be the failure to stick to one decent plotline for an entire episode.

Family Guy. Ugggg. You know, when people told me they hated the show or that it wouldn’t hold up, I agreed in principle, but I had no idea it would fall apart so quickly. Almost every ounce of charm seems to have been sucked dry. The fundamental flaws in the show that were apparent but easy to forgive in seasons 1 through 3 have gotten worse and worse. The biggest is that Peter is not an actual character. He’s just an idiot. He’s all the worst parts of Homer Simpson (the pointless idiocy and selfishness that characterizes late seasons of the simpsons) without any of the redeeming values or personality structure. In fact, almost no character on the show has any depth, and most will do or say whatever is appropriate for the particular scene.

American Dad. You know, I actually have been really enjoying this show. It’s way above Family Guy at this point. Sure, there’s still a lack of heart, a few awful characters, and some repetitive joke structures, but it’s doing a lot of things Family Guy never tried. It doesn’t cut away constantly, and more importantly, its plots are actually pretty impressive. Episodes have solid themes and ideas and in the recent season, even fun plot twists. Probably the show I most look forward to on Sunday night.

Studio 60. I like it, but not as much as the West Wing, and the comedy sketches are awful. Every fake sketch is pretty clearly a smart person’s out of touch conception of middle-brow/low-brow humor. Also one of the main characters doesn’t work well and blah blah blah. Still, it’s fun to watch, though I’m absolutely convinced it will be cancelled because the cast must be obscenely expensive and no one except people who watched Aaron Sorkin’s other shows will ever watch it. In fact, thanks to google I now know the ratings are already bad.

Venture Brothers. After a really strong start to the season, this has tapered off into sort of disconnected zaniness. It’s still got enough laughs to justify watching, but many of them are dependent on little moments and the big payoffs are getting smaller and smaller. Still, based on the first season, it’s still possible this season could finish strong.

That’s all for now because I haven’t watched Heroes yet and the new season of Lost hasn’t started yet. 

One of my favorite Slate.com features is Ad Report. It’s basically just a guy reviewing TV ads. Anyway, the latest one is really, really weird (there’s a link to the video on the page).

The article covers it pretty well, so I’ll just summarize the ad for you so you can see if you want to watch it: It’s a typical Ford car commercial. A family on a lovely road trip. Two little girls having fun with their dad and mom, buying trinkets and driving the free and easy roads while an announcer intones about how the car’s great gas mileage lets them make the trip on one tank. Then at the end, the music cuts as the dad takes his overnight bag out of the car. He kisses the girls goodbye and thanks his ex-wife for letting him come along and tells them he’ll see them next weekend. The commercial then awkwardly ends with the husband’s quiet, sad stare at the car as it drives off and a voice intones about how "Bold changes happen everyday."

Very, very strange.

"Forwards, not backward! Backward, not forwards! And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!"

Well the Scifi channel cancelled Stargate.

Stargate is not a good TV show, but it was once a good TV show. Logically this could mean that cancellation is the right move, but since this is the scifi channel we’re talking about and the ratings are still okay, the question becomes, what exactly is the scifi channel’s plan for itself?

They produce 500 god awful movies a week and will run almost any piece of crap, but for MST3K, Farscape, and Stargate, each produced steady but not spectacular ratings and each was been cancelled with the basic explanation of "Well ratings are okay but not improving."

Not improving? You’re the scifi channel! Having something that briefly peaks then has steady ratings for 10 years is the best you can do!

It’s already a niche channel, but it’s definitely never going to grow into whatever they think it will if everytime they have a dependable success, they cancel it for not growing more and more successful. It’s just demented network executive logic (in fact, Bonnie Hammer the network execuive seems to have made a career of this). "We’ve gotta grow baby! Grow! Grow Grow!"

They have maybe one successful new series every two years (several of which have been shows bought from other networks and not home-grown), then they inevitably sabotage their own shows in the hopes of breaking into the big time. They’re like that pathetic schemer who has plenty of little successes, but is always going after that next big score. What’s their next big venture? Showing ECW wrestling matches.

Look, if they want to be Spike TV so bad, why don’t you just change their name and get it done with?

I’ve started watching Monk again. For those not in the know, Monk is one of the USA Channel’s 5 or 7 mystery series about a gifted Columbo-esque main character.

Monk has always been an inconsistent show. Like many mystery series, each episode is generally only as good as its mystery. The show started out with mediocre mysteries but a very entertaining main character, and over time, it sort of went downhill. This last year, however, has seen the show oddly rejuvenated. The key, in my mind, is that the show has become funnier. They’ve upped the ante; they now give Tony Shaloub’s character at least one big comic scene an episode, and along with a few truly goofy premises and mysteries, they’ve ensured that even if the mystery is stupid, it’s still entertaining to watch.

Anyway, back to my main topic. The character of Monk, it has many times been said, went to college at UC Berkeley. The show itself, in fact, is set in San Francisco. So when I saw that an episode was going to be completely about Monk’s college reunion and take place in Berkeley, I was quite interested.

Unfortunately, thanks to Hollywood magic, the episode takes place, umm, I have no idea where, but definitely not Berkeley. Still though, it’s worth noting that this ficticious version of Berkeley may in fact superior to the real thing.

The campus in the episode was really quite nice, with many old Ivy-esque buildings and fresh, perfect grass. Parking was clearly ample according to one scene, and the dorms were spacious and amazing. Beautiful oak wood doors with two people to a room, long spacious hallways, nothing more than one story high, and rec rooms that looked to be 50 years old. The cafeterias had lovely wood tables and extensive salad bars, not to mention nice plates and a very large staff. What’s more, the library had amazing marble floors that shone with the brilliance of diamonds. Also, despite the fact that the real Berkeley is a huge university with thousands of freshmen each year, the reunion easily fit in a small dining hall and everyone knew everyone else’s name. Every picture that appeared on the screen for the reunion slideshow was met with sounds of recognition and happiness. Also apparently no one at this fictional university has health problems because the fictional version of the Tang center had only one small window and one friendly doctor working at it.

Clearly this fictional Berkeley is a paradise and much better than the original. One odd note, apparently the Berkeley police do not exist and the school is policed by the SFPD and Berkeley is also apparently part of San Francisco, but honestly, I think that’s a small price to pay for a school this nice.

Warning: Not everything I post is about ASUC politics… 

So I downloaded a random Lost script from last season. I spend a lot of time reading scripts because I figure it’s a good way to understand the basic structure and flow of stories.

This script is from episode 212, Fire and Water, a really bad episode in my opinion. I only mention reading it because there’s something very strange about it. I’ve read "conversational" scripts before. I don’t know what they’re really called, but that’s a script where the writer peppers his action descriptions with little asides to the reader. Things like "He opens the briefcase revealing more money than I’ll make when I sell this screenplay." Sometimes it’s a good descriptive technique. Traditionally you only stick to adjectives you can film, but sometimes a clever description that references outside the script can be useful to paint the proper image for the reader. Other times though, it reads as really cloying and annoying.

Here’s what’s so weird about this script. The word fuck appears 54 times in a 56 page script. And that’s all in the action text. Lost has no swearing in its dialogue. It’s bizarre. I can’t get through the script. Every piece of action invariably goes like "Liam stands — something in the music fucking activates a part of him." or "Locke spins around and PUNCHES CHARLIE in the FUCKING FACE."

Being a shitty wannabe writer, I don’t think it’s my place to criticize a sold script so, hmm, yeah nowhere to go with that. Take a look. It’s pretty distracting. If you’re interested in more Lost scripts go here.

I’ve been very excited to watch USA’s new show Psych. Why, you ask?

Well this is the first time since I decided to pursue a career in writing that I’ve had a "Holy crap I had that idea moment!" I really want to see how this works out. Please note, I’m not saying I had this idea first. Clearly because the TV show is out now and I had the idea last summer, someone else beat me to the punch.

The concept of the show is a man who is a fantastic, brilliant detective along the likes of Columbo and Monk, but who for silly reasons, uses his powers of perception to pretend to be a psychic. My own premise was pretty different, but the central idea of a brilliant detective pretending to be a psychic is the same, plus they put it in a much more commercial format (weekly detective show) than my own nonsense (hard-boiled scifi). Commence Stream of Consciousness Review:

Starts out fine, but for a pilot episode with a very simple concept (the police think he committed the crimes he keeps solving), they don’t do a very good job of it. Especially since the information he provides is along the lines of "That guy did it!" It just doesn’t make great sense why they think he did the crimes right away. All he ever does is say "That guy on TV did it!" He doesn’t provide any actual evidence. Anyway, he pretends to be a psychic to get them off his back, but they end up asking him to help them out on a tough case.

The show gets rolling very fast, but the set-up is clumsy and awkward. Having said that, it’s a pilot and I’m totally willing to accept rough steps at the start. Things I won’t accept: Creating an idiot police detective whose sole job is to always be wrong and to be humiliated by the lead. This guy is the Major Frank Burns of police detectives. In fact, he even has the uptight hot female co-worker ala Hot Lips Houlihan.

Though Monk is most certainly not a perfect show, they learned long ago that having the main character always be right and then having people disagree with him over and over again reads false and stupid. Confusion, sure. Disbelief, okay. But constant outright hostility to the lead is dumb.

Other problems. Completely ignoring the mystery at some points and claiming major parts of it were revealed during commercial break. [gets out rolled up newspaper] No. Bad detective show! You don’t ever claim the mystery was solved during commercial break. God that’s lazy. And if you’re gonna do something like that, it better be because the mystery is not the real plot and we’re actually interested in the characters. But these characters aren’t sharp enough yet. Especially the sidekick played by Dule Hill who basically has no character at this point.

They’re good enough for a pilot. They could definitely be elaborated on, but again, if we look at USA’s other detective shows (Monk and to a certain extent The Dead Zone) the lead characters had a lot more depth to them from the very start. This guy is just kind of wacky and annoyed with his police detective dad. The dad angle is decent, but most of the conflict comes from people’s irrational hatred of the main character (read: Super Nintendo Syndrome).

Super Nintendo syndrome is when, without explanation, everything in the world is out to get you. It’s a term I came up with based on the way old 16 bit videogames involved fighting literally everything that appeared on screen, including fish, bumbleebees, birds, flowers, and caterpillars. This isn’t that bad, but 90% of the characters on screen are out to get him for almost no reason.

Okay, enough bitching. To sum up, this was an okay pilot but the characters could use a lot of polish. The mystery plot was weak but not disastrously so. It ignored that simple forensics could’ve solved the case (which involved a faked suicide that an easy ballistics test would’ve disproved). I’ll keep watching because I know plenty of shows started out with the characters on the wrong note and then gradually course-corrected over the first season.

So the new season of Venture Brothers started. It’s very much the same as before. I still enjoy it. It’s still boring sometimes. For those not in the know, Venture Brothers is basically an elaborate Johnny Quest spoof. The show is at its best during scenes of extreme cartoon violence, which are frequently done in clever ways like pole-vaulting using a man’s esophagus.

The show has a bad habit of being intolerably slow and obsessed with its own plot. However, that’s not such a bad thing when you consider that most other Adult Swim shows are completely devoid of plot. I enjoy Aqua Teen as much as the next guy, but eventually shows like Brak and Sealab and Aqua Teen all start to seem too lazy. As an aspiring writer, watching those shows periodically hits me with a moment of "God, I can’t believe the writers don’t care enough to construct even a loose plot for their 12 minute long show."

Venture Brothers is quite the opposite, usually trying to cram a movie-length plot into a 22 minute episode.