The Media Pundit

Megan Fox is so toast

2009-10-15T16:51:00Z

Michael Bay may kill off Megan Fox's career (SciFi Squad)

FOX is dumping its reality channel (The Wrap)

Mel Gibson is back where he belongs -- in front of the camera (AICN)

Jenni Miller runs down Roland Emmerich's latest assault on Earth, 2012 (Cinematical)

Expert says producer probably committed accounting fraud in the Crash lawsuit (LAT)

Joss Whedon's Cabin in the Woods is taking a year off to covert to useless 3D (Shock Till You Drop)

Ralph Lauren fired a size-4 model for being too fat, after photoshopping her so badly that her head was wider than her waist (MSNBC)

Is Leno helping or harming NBC? (Studio Briefing) [you have to ask? -- ed.]

Paramount shows signs of intelligence, cuts theater-to-DVD window for G. I. Joe to 88 days (THR)

Toy Story 3 gets a trailer (SCI FI Wire)

Lance Henriksen may do a Millennium feature film as an indy prod without Chris Carter (SCI FI Wire)

California's actor-governor is passing unconstitutional laws that only benefit actors (Studio Briefing)

MGM seems very pleased with the premier ratings of Stargate Universe; Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich still want to do sequels to the original movie (Futon Critic, SCI FI Wire)

Wanted fugitive Roman Polanski is still making movies..from jail (Reuters)

Megan Fox has found her true calling

2009-10-15T07:17:00Z

You may think this is a little sexist and maybe it is, but when I saw this story this morning about Megan Fox modeling underwear for Emporia Armani, my first thought was that she had found something more her speed.

If you replaced Fox in Transformers with a sock puppet you wouldn't notice much of a difference. And based on the performance of her first venture outside the free ride zone of a franchise block buster, or rather the lack of performance of Jennifer's Body, it appears that she's been advancing on something other than acting talent.

Written by Oscar Winner Diablo Cody and lead by Fox - who everyone wants in one way or another - Jennifer's Body should have been an automatic win for what it cost, carrying just a $16 million production budget. But after theater's take, it made back barely half that when it opened in #5th place, what most people would call an Epic Fail. Reviews were up and down but ultimately they didn't matter because nobody went to see the damned thing anyway.

If neither Fox's looks nor her talent can draw people to the theater, perhaps she's found her true calling.

Stargate Universe, Dollhouse gain viewers

2009-10-13T15:48:00Z

It's rare for any show to build viewers from pilot to second episode, cable or otherwise. SyFy struck gold when it launched Warehouse 13, which has been building nearly every episode to become one of the cable net's highest rated shows, if not the highest for original non-reality programming.

But like I said, that's rare, which makes it even more amazing -- at least to me -- that Stargate Universe has done the same thing, at least across its first two episodes.
That's not a knock on SGU, I loved the pilot and I already feel like this is the best stuff that franchise has ever produced, though the pilot did have issues which I hope to write about this week now that all three parts have finally aired. It's just acknowledging reality. Stargate didn't really do as well as Battlestar Galactica did on SyFy and SGU certainly hasn't seen Warehouse 13 territory -- yet -- but improving from week-to-week is not a trivial accomplishment.

To the contrary, the biggest gain came in the most valuable demographic, 18-49, up 22% on a 4% gain overall -- just short of 2.5 million.

This was good enough to beat Dollhouse again on Friday, but that's not necessarily bad news. Dollhouse too found something to be happy about, a substantial increase in viewers with the "live + 7 day" numbers. This is how many people watched the show live plus how many watched it over the next seven days off their DVR. (I'll write more about that when I can get more info on exactly how that works.)

Even though what happened with Stargate Universe is very rare, what happened for Dollhouse was actually more impressive: it gained 50%, making it one of the most DVRed shows on television anywhere. There were other shows that gained more viewers overall, but didn't gain that large a percentage. What's better is that with just the live numbers, Dollhouse picked up a tick from the previous week as well. It may have to keep climbing for a long time to get off the bubble, but there's no arguing that at least for a week, both these series are clearly going in the right direction.

FOX also told the press that they plan to air all 13 episodes of Dollhouse that have been ordered this year, but stopped short of talking about pickup.

Also worth noting is that Fringe, which is struggling but possibly stabilizing in its new time slot, gained 39% from live+7, and Heroes got a badly needed boost of 32% (good for 8th best in the demo.)

Polanski went back on his settlement with rape victim

2009-10-06T11:52:00Z

This Polanski mess brings together two things that I try to keep clear of this blog: politics and celeb crap. But when a large chunk of the upper class of Hollywood decided to step in a big pile of celeb crap, I guess it became a valid topic to (very briefly) write about.

I don't much care about Roman Polanski beyond the fact that it burns me up that he plead guilty to a rather heinous crime and then ran away to hide in France. I don't care that people love his movies, and I very much doubt it made a difference to the 13-year-old girl that he drugged and raped. He did that, and then he got caught a couple of weeks ago which makes me happy and I would like to leave it at that.

But then a disturbing number of big names in Hollywood decided that the town needed an even worse reputation for moral ambiguity than it already had.

Here is a list of people supposedly asking Switzerland to set Polanski free.

That's a lot of people I used to respect and now am reminded that what we know of these people's professional accomplishments is a fraction of who they are. I'm not going to sit in judgment over them but I will say this, I wouldn't leave a child alone with any of them from now on.

And as if this would make any difference, Polanski was sued by the women he raped as a child and supposedly settled with her for an undisclosed sum of money. Turns out that Polanski, who undoubtedly can afford it, never even paid up. Classy.

Arrested Development script doesn't mean much

2009-10-06T11:03:00Z

I'm no expert on the film business, but I know enough about this stuff to burst some bubbles for Arrested Development fans if the reaction I saw in a few places to news that a script was in the works is indicative to general sentiment.

So what the hell does that even mean? Put simply, just because a script is "in development" with actors "committed" doesn't mean a movie is imminent.

Not even close.

Hundreds of movies reach this stage per year, maybe a thousand for all I know, because it's relatively cheap to pay someone to write a script and consequence free for actors to "commit" themselves to a movie they want to be in, in spirit, but that's entirely different than signing a contract. If this movie were imminent these people would be locked up by contract so that they'd be available for production and the script would already be done by that point.

Depending on who owns the intellectual property of the show, this could be nothing more than a spec script being written with the hopes of enticing the the studio to bite. But even if that's not the case, people are paid to write scripts to flesh out concepts all the time.

I've never seen Arrested Development but I'm sure it was a great show and I appreciate that a lot of fans are hoping for a movie to follow. That's great, and I hope they get what they want. Just don't get your hopes of because of this. The only stage at which you should get excited is when you read that a date for principal photography has been set. 99% of all movies die in between now and when the money has been committed to sign talent, and that's where this project is sitting today.

This is how the networks can win the ratings war

2009-10-04T23:50:00Z

James Hibberd just did something on his blog that I've been meaning to do for a while now, which is look at comparative ratings (what X show did last week compared to this week, across an entire night) to illustrate how most shows are losing viewers, not just the unpopular ones.

Meaning, I hope, that a show is not implicitly unpopular just because fewer and fewer people are watching it. (h/t AICN).

This is actually something that I assume people have been aware of for a while now, but I'm beginning to question the cause. There was evidence showing that cable networks were bleeding off viewers from the broadcast networks with their new-found interest in original dramas, but those shows don't seem to be gaining enough viewers to account for the people deserting network television.
Mad Men on AMC -- which has won the Outstanding Drama Emmy for two years in a row -- has shown steady growth across season premiers with less than one million people watching the series debut, but 2.8 million tuning in for the third season premier this past August. Warehouse 13 on SyFy has shown growth like that but on a much shorter scale, from 3.5 million watching the pilot up to 4.4 million seeing the sixth episode.

But shifting channels doesn't come close to accounting for the falloff on Friday night.

According to Hibberd's numbers, which I haven't verified, every single show lost viewers in the 18-49 demographic between September 25th and October 2nd except Dateline. Some of that can be explained by cable, certainly. The series premier of Stagate Universe drew 2.35 million viewers and a 1.12 in the demo -- good enough for 8th on the Friday list just under Law & Order. But there wasn't a genre franchise premier on other cable channels that night and whatever SGU may have drawn from Dollhouse (13th) certainly wasn't enough to account for every other show except Dateline taking a hit.

And it's unlikely that a show like SGU would draw people who regularly watch Dateline, 20/20, Jay Leno (who is hemorrhaging viewers) and the spook shows that topped the night in the demo (Medium, Ghost Whisperer.)

But you can't fault people losing interest in television entirely, either. The Emmys were up this year and football is doing some of its best numbers ever on NBC and ESPN. CSI has fallen off but that's mostly due to William Peterson leaving. NCIS and Criminal Minds are riding sky high right now and reality shows don't seem to be hurting much.

More and more people are watching television online, but again, like cable, that medium isn't gaining people at the same rate that the networks are losing them. Most shows are getting stale faster than before and simply aren't being replaced with new hits, because nobody is creating new hits. This results in a giant mass of people flipping from channel to channel, temporarily boosting one show before moving to another, hoping to find a home somewhere.

Heroes was a big hit for NBC, but what came after? The whole rest of that season was pretty dead for drama, as was last year, and this year doesn't exactly look any better. Virtuality from Ron Moore sounded good, and was decently reviewed, but FOX didn't have the balls to order it to series. Dollhouse is a good new drama but FOX premetively murdered it by putting it in a Friday night timeslot that has killed a dozen different shows this decade.

Terminator: SCC started big (17m viewers) but flamed out fast (dead at ~5 million) and Fringe, which I thought was medicore at best but it has its fanbase (now shrinking substantially), is also struggling all of the sudden, now in the 5 million range which is down from the ~9 million it was enjoying last season.

There are lessons to be learned from all of this, and clear paths to innovation.

Get off the ground and get back in the game
The broadcast networks need to start competing with cable by going to a year around schedule. Allowing someone to drift to AMC during the summer and fall in love with a new drama like Mad Men increases the chances that they'll look for something else to watch on AMC when they get bored or when that show goes on hiatus, instead of hitting a network.

Dominant, killer schedules are history
The days of multiple hit shows like CSI and NCIS running on a single night, on a single network, are gone. Everyone wants to build the next Must See Thursday or whatever NBC had like 15 years ago, but that's simply not possible.

If you get a show with 20 million viewers, you didn't accomplish the job that is expected of you, you won the damn lottery. Five million people watching Dollhouse is enough to keep that show on the air so long as the budget remains reasonable and the network accepts reality, and if it hadn't been aborted prematurely on Friday nights, there's no way it'd be fighting against a cable show like Stargate Universe for viewers.

If that show gets canceled, it'll be because FOX falsely believes it can replace it with a 9+ million viewer show like Fringe, or a hit like House, only that's a pipe dream. That's not going to happen. The networks are still living in 90s when they could kill a Dollhouse and expect to get an X-Files in return, but you can forget it.

Those days are gone.

Reality is crushing opportunities
The networks need to start shoving some reality shows overboard to make room for more pilots -- or move reality to the summer to unfairly crush cable -- and then they need to start ordering more pilots and at least airing them in good faith. If you like a pilot script enough to give someone a million bucks to shoot it, then have the courage to order it to series and give it a chance to work.

All the second guessing that networks do by ordering pilots that they just end up throwing out is a self destructive waste of time and money. Every pilot shot but aired as a movie burns up a chance to find the next Lost or even Cheers. Both shows started slow, in fact Cheers was the lowest rated show of the year when it debuted, but both grew substantially after.

Weekend warriors
The networks need to reclaim the weekend. There's nothing but junk other than one football game on Sunday night, during which the networks could be making lots of money if they really wanted to. Saturday and Sunday nights used to be TV movie night, a defining attribute for some networks, but for whatever reason they've completely abandoned two days out of seven to other mediums.

That's 44 days when the networks might as well be broadcasting static during a 22-week run, over a month worth of days they could be making at least a token attempt to sit people down in front of the TV so that they can make some money.

It's time to catch people lazing around on the couch and hit them hard with edgy, quality original entertainment instead of ceding that ground to Netflix and the Internet.

So the problem isn't people leaving the networks for cable, although that is a problem, nor is it people going online or people turning off the TV altogether. It's people turning on the TV, looking for something good, finding nothing or unwilling to watch something that is good that they know is about to be dumped -- something like Dollhouse -- and then turning off the TV, repeating that behavior night after night.

Correction: I mistakenly put Mad Men on A&E instead of AMC. All instances of A&E have been replaced. Thank you for the correction Michael.

Stargate Universe does good numbers, but not great

2009-10-03T22:54:00Z

I can't speak for the money guys since I don't know what Stargate Universe costs to make, but I can't help but think that they must be somewhat disappointed with 2.35 million viewers on a 1.7 rating. The media blitz, the new style, it didn't add up to very much compared to previous Stargate shows.

That's the bad news.

The good news may come over the next 3-5 episodes when we'll find out if this is a show that's going to grow, like Warehouse 13 did, or if it'll slowly sink, like **Stargate Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica did. Warehouse 13 started at 3.5 million and grew to 4.4 after just six episodes. But I think it's also important to remember that Warehouse 13 to SyFy is probably like Lost was to ABC.
Not many shows start off better than you expected and then grow, and Lost started falling in its second season and has been falling ever since, anyway. Those are generally considered the network tentpoles so it should go without saying that these shows tend to be rare.

Something that should worry fans, though, is that MGM -- owner and producer of the franchise -- is basically bankrupt in denial. They can't even pay the interest on their outstanding debt right now. Stargate is practically their only active television property these days, so they need the show to succeed more than anyone.

Supposedly you can get the first two parts of air for free on iTunes here for free. I've also embedded the combo Hulu below.

**Atlantis tended to start high at the beginning of a new season, and then fade for a while, and then that process would repeat each year. Except its final year, which I think held some of its best numbers for the entire series.

NBC absolutely needs new series to work

2009-10-03T11:05:00Z

There are few people more hot right now than J. J. Abrams, and NBC figures that he could be their best bet to provide a hit that can compete against the other networks. And boy do they need it. Heroes, as great of a show as it is, is still losing viewers and probably won't see a fifth season.

There's no way they can keep paying what they are paying for that show with five million viewers. And when Heroes goes, so does the only show that people really like on that entire network that isn't "reality".

Ironically, Abrams most recent show -- Fringe on FOX -- is having delayed ratings problems of its own. It seemed to have settled around 8-9 million viewers last season which isn't all that bad if they could have sustained it, but FOX for whatever reason shuffled their schedule around like they do every single year, and Fringe is paying the price for that.

In fact, Fringe is getting pretty close to Heroes and recently canceled Terminator: SCC territory; about 5.7 million overall viewers is losing almost 37% of its lead-in audience from Bones, which is still doing very well. Fringe averaged 9.9 million viewers last season, while Heroes averaged 9.2. Ouch.

THR says that a new series spec (a series pilot script written on the speculation that it might be bought) sparked a bidding war between three of the big four networks, and that NBC came out on top. The series premise is a drama about a husband and wife team of spies. I don't personally like some of Abrams stuff and I think he's probably somewhat overrated (but still very talented), but it doesn't take a genius to know that NBC needs this badly, and it'll be a big step up for them in quality from some of the crap they've been putting on the air this decade.

Diablo Cody/Megan Fox horror flick crashes, burns.

2009-09-20T03:39:00Z

If Diablo Cody and Megan Fox were hoping to prove that they weren't one-hit wonders, and didn't want their horror flick to crash into and incinerate a small children's school for the blind, well, mission failed. Although I'm sure that Fox will probably be set for life in Hollywood because of her looks (and sparkling on-set personality), Cody is probably going to have to earn her way out of movie jail after what happened this weekend.

Jennifer's Body -- Cody's second big screen project after writing and winning an Academy Award for Juno, and Fox's first attempt to carry a movie -- opened in fifth place on Friday with a weak $2.7 million in receipts. The film got mediocre-to-bad ratings from Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes.

It was beaten by Love Happens, a Jennifer Aniston/Aaron Eckhart romantic comedy that also fell on its face, a week old Tyler Perry flick, THE INFORMANT!, whatever the hell that was -- does anyone remember seeing trailers for that? -- and get this, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs.

I'm not kidding.
Megan Fox must have pissed off the movie gods after all the crap she's been saying about Michael Bay, whom apparently the many gods have blessed when you look at all the money he's made over the last few years. She compared Bay to Hitler -- which I've heard people say is actually the sign of a competent director -- and quickly got trashed by some below-the-line crew.

Let me be clear on this, I don't care what problem they had with Fox, those three people were pathetic cowards for trashing her anonymously. I don't care if she's a Katherine Heigl clone, have the guts to put your name to your trash talk or crawl back inside the womb like the coward you were born to be. There's a pretty good reason that opening your mouth and puking on somebody like that will get you fired.

It's because you deserve it.

That said, it's hard not to enjoy it just a little bit when a pampered star gets dropped on their ass. Fox didn't have to do very much in either Transformers flick because these movies were basically giant CGI demo reels -- acting didn't matter. She'll be rich, famous, and somewhat powerful -- far more powerful that Diablo Cody ever will be, which is messed up when you think about the Oscar she has sitting on her desk -- for the rest of her life no matter what she does, because of a movie she didn't really have to participate in on any meaningful level for it to be successful.

She just had to show up, and boy, it sure was hard to predict failure for that kind of rare talent.

Talent was practically the only thing that mattered In Jennifer's Body, and she couldn't carry the film even a little bit. If half the crew criticism about her is accurate, and it may very well be since we've also seen Bay take shots at her before, then perhaps this will do her career some good by making her just a little more humble, and a little more appreciative of the work that goes into real movies.

As for Cody, her Oscar earned her a number of free stinkers, at least for a while. The sad part is she'll have to work like she's breaking in all over again after this, though, while Fox just has to smile to get in ten movies next year.

Variety's pay-wall will create opportunity for bloggers

2009-09-18T01:10:00Z

If DHD's report that Variety is going behind a pay wall next year are accurate, then both Nikki and Hollywood Reporter should be very happy with this news, and frankly every blog that spends even a moderate amount of time posting links to Variety should also be pretty upbeat about this.

Variety is the largest of the three online properties, reaching about 500k people per month on average in the U.S., and probably a lot more globally. THR, being Variety's natural online and offline competitor, stands to gain the most in audience shifts with Variety essentially throwing in the towel. But blogs like DHD may have a easier time of it and in the end may gain more from it relative to what they are doing right now, because they can actually do something about all of this.

The main reason this will hurt Variety is that there's nothing to stop bloggers from subscribing to their site so they can write posts containing a condensed form of the factual news, which is essentially what they've been doing all along. Only now for people aren't interested in paying for it, they'll have one less place to get the news they want, increasing the value of the free alternatives. If VAR takes a day to write a 600 word story on studio X hiring director Y for project Z, while paying someone a real salary to do it, a blog like this one can write a post containing those facts in 200 words, and do it faster and cheaper.

Only now there wont be any links driving traffic back to Variety anymore, and that's their own fault. That's failure by design.

THR can't quite do that because they aren't a blog, they are an industry competitor with all the trappings that come with being a physical business playing in the online world. But real blogs wont have that problem, because they don't even have that problem now.

Whatever news Variety tries to lock behind a pay wall will get out in minutes on Twitter and then within an hour on the blogs. That's just the reality of the connected world we live in. Shortly after VAR jumps off that cliff, THR will easily surpass them in traffic, the new recipient to links from blogs at first, but then the blogs will try to fill that void themselves. Whatever increased revenue VAR finds in subscriptions online will probably not offset new losses from telling the Internet to go screw itself.

This isn't the Wall Street Journal we're talking about, this isn't a paper that people can benefit from financially by subscribing to it like an information service. Variety is an entertainment venue more than anything.

There has never been a better time to be an entertainment blog right now that's looking to do news, to fill the voids being created by dying print media organizations like Variety. This is going to be really fun to watch.

Stargate Universe review (Part 2); "This is not a game."

2009-09-11T18:38:00Z

"You only think you know what it says on this screen because I embedded a rudimentary version of the Ancient language into the game. This is not a game."

Since I'm not 100% aware of what you know and don't know, anyone averse to spoilers should proceed with caution. You have been warned.

The series premise is simple enough. The Ancients of Stargate mythos built a rather large ship that travels the unknown universe trailing a series of other ships which find habitable planets to put Stargates on. The main series cast, along with a lot of guest stars and extras, get stuck on this ship out of sheer desperation. Unlike with SG-1 and SGA, a lot of these people were not a part of the planned expedition, and hardly anyone actually wants to be stuck where they end up. The level of trust you're used to seeing simply doesn't exist here. Confidence in the abilities of your friends to have your back and get done what needs to be done is inherent to a team, but not being a team, and most certainly not being friends, that dynamic simply isn't the same with this group of people.
If anything, that could be said to be the biggest difference between SGU and the others. A lot of what they say, do, and how the stories play out are a direct result of how these people interact, which is true of any show.

The pilot begins with these people arriving on the Destiny, it then stays with them for a short time, and spends the next 43 minutes or so bouncing back and forth between "now", on the Destiny, and the last few weeks/days that lead up to their arrival. Most of the flashbacks are informative and some are required to understand some preexisting relationships between characters, but not everything is explained. I think the ratio of flashback-to-real time is appropriate and not at all distracting once you get used to it.

It's not like Lost, though, in that most flashbacks explain situation, rather than purely existing to establish character back story. They aren't boring, in other words.

And it doesn't last forever. The further into part 1 you get, the fewer flashbacks you have to deal with, until part 3, when there are only two I think, and they deal specifically with one character's motivation. Those flashbacks and their ramifications, I think, were perhaps the weakest part of the pilot. They were so blunt that you can't help but feel like you were being hit over the head, they were just short of having somebody wad up the script and stuff it into your mouth. Subtlety is in short supply at this point, but it's a small complaint overall.

I have no idea if the entire series will have flashbacks or not, but it should play well either way.

Again, I have to warn you about spoilers. I can't continue without telling you at least something about what happens in Air. I've gotten as far as I can with this SGA/SG-1 vs SGU differences meta-discussion. If you want to go into SGU fresh, you should stop right here.

The Destiny has very serious, long-term problems. Some people grasp the gravity of the situation, but not all of them are on the same page on what to do. If this were SGA, McKay would be allowed to do virtually anything he wanted without question - to the contrary of SGU, he'd naturally and simply be ordered to fix it all and make it snappy. That works if you trust that someone like McKay would do the right thing for the right reason, but what if this were someone that didn't care about you, or seemingly anyone else?

What if they seemed to only be out to save their own butt?

Would you let them do something that might have drastically negative consequences? Would you even leave them alone? Would you pull together for group moral, or constantly watch your back and question motives?

Fixing a broken ship suddenly doesn't seem so simple anymore.

If the characters in this series are more real and true to the life we know and understand, then so is everything else. It always struck me as silly that Atlantis, being thousands of years old, for all practical purposes still functioned reasonably well. This, despite living in our world where a modern computer hard drive wont last five years in most cases, seemed absurd -- Ancient technology or not -- nothing lasts forever.

How far the producers have gone with this concept isn't entirely clear, but in the pilot, you've got serious problems that don't have simple McKay/Carter style solutions. Reroute a little power here, turn a Puddle Jumper's cloak into a shield there, use a little Asgard ingenuity, go on a mission and discover the magical Ancient weapon that will save the day and bam, problem solved!

Well, not so much.

Since this show is character driven, I wouldn't say that every episode will be a the ship-is-broken-again-of-the-week deal, but it's hardly similar to SGA where you're stepping into a 10,000 year old city/ship that looks and functions like it could have been fabricated a couple of years ago.

The Destiny is rather like a car that has been rusting away in a junkyard for the better part of the last half century. That it still functions at all is a testament to the technological prowess of the Ancients, but as is true in real life, that only goes so far. The perception that SGU was going to be 90210 in space is strongly misguided at best and this is a big reason why. Different people, different setting, different goals, and certainly different obstacles.

In 90210, people were just kind of living there, doing their thing, and the series chronicled their interactions. None of them were suddenly thrown inconceivably far from their friends and family, stuck in a place that could kill them in minutes.

Air deals with one of these ship-based problems and the entire third part is spent off-ship searching for a solution that will keep them all alive, but not even for a known length of time. I'm pretty sure they never had to do that on 90210, but I could be mistaken.

Despite being three parts long, there isn't a lot of time to introduce everyone properly in the pilot. Ming-Na's character is seen a few times, but generally has little to say or do. That is largely the result of the story, not the series. You have a finite amount of time to set things up in a pilot and even less time to form a coherent story that sets the pace for everything that comes after.

Doing this successfully is a huge accomplishment that shouldn't be taken for granted.

So don't be disappointed if not everyone gets a lot of screen time right away, that'll come eventually. I wanted to see a lot more of Lou Diamond Phillips, but I didn't really get what I wanted either.

The first two parts of Air which you'll see on October 2nd will leave you at a cliff hanger. The third part, which airs the following week, will resolve the pilot but not immediately give you a clue about what will come next. Not entirely, and you'll see what I mean by that when it airs.

"We're here. That happened."
The music for Stargate Universe is not quite what you're used to, although it is still composed by Joel Goldsmith, and is still a very moving, high quality score. But that's not all there is to SGU. Like a lot of contemporary dramas - at least at the end of Air - there is a song that plays over a multi-location scene; a montage if you will. While it might have seemed out of place for Atlantis and SG-1, it fits perfectly with Universe. With the song they chose and the moment it plays, it all fits very nicely.

If you're not a fan of that sort of thing, then it probably won't seem any worse than any other show, and like the sex scene, it's certainly not worth boycotting a 1.5 hour pilot over 20-30 seconds of something you don't like. Chances are even if you love this show, there will be a scene or two that amounts to more than 22 seconds that you don't care for anyway. But if you dig it, then you'll really dig it here.

There's nothing I can say to someone who has already made up their mind in the end. I would hope though, that most people are open to trying something new, because contrary to Internet myth, this is still Stargate. Even I said that this isn't your daddy's Stargate a few days ago, but like Ron Moore with BSG, I was overreaching. I was trying to sell the difference a little too hard - to give people realistic expectations of what they were getting - without being fair to the similarities.

And to be perfectly fair to the hundreds of people pouring their lives into creating this show, they've hardly had a chance to even decide what this show will be. The first season hasn't even finished shooting yet. How can fans and critics declare what a show is or isn't, when a very significant part of that show still doesn't even exist yet?

This critic loved SG-1, loved SGA, and even loved the original Dean Devlin film. If Devlin made the sequel that he's been wanting to make for years, I'd go see that, too. But I'm hardly a fanboy. I've been very critical of Atlantis before and I wont hesitate to be critical of Stargate Universe, either.

That said, I really like this show, and I'm pretty sure that given a chance, you'll like it too.

Regardless of personal taste, the visual quality of Air is amazing, and it's a pretty darn good story to boot. As far as these things go, the SGU people on all levels have a lot to be proud of. They've done some amazing work that should be acknowledged even if this show isn't your cup of tea. Hard work pays off, and in SGU, pays off in a spectacular way.

Please give it a chance.

You can read part 1 of this special feature here.

Update - Supposedly Apple is going to make parts 1 & 2 of "Air" available for free on iTunes at this link, but the link won't work until sometime on the morning of October 3rd. Info from this tweet, that's all I know.

Stargate Universe review (Part 1); "We're here. That happened."

2009-09-11T18:35:00Z

Stargate Universe brings a fresh look to a relatively young television genre: dark sci-fi. Battlestar Galactica went there but overreached, being a little too dark for a lot of people -- this writer included to a degree -- but SGU seems to have found the sweet spot somewhere in the middle.

Pain borne of great loss and sacrifice, confusion, fear, questioning who the people around you really are when it matters most, and finally achieving that moment we can all identify with just after the storm, when you're supremely grateful that everything is finally going to be okay, if only for a little while.

That is Stargate Universe in a nutshell, and this is my review.As I understood it, Ron Moore once said that Star Trek: Voyager never really took itself seriously. The characters weren't true to their situation and the situation wasn't honest to the viewers. I think he was right, but he went a little bit too far in the other direction when re-imagining BSG, placing too much emphasis on the gritty reality while seeming to forget the amazing capacity of people not to be overcome and then consumed by it.

In that respect, SGU gets something right that's difficult to do well. Real people, even people we like, eventually do things or say things we disagree with. Happens all the time. On television it can make some characters hard to identify with, especially on a series where there are no hero archetypes. And with SGU, there really aren't any. There aren't characters that automatically try to do the "right thing" because in their world, not so unlike our own, it's not that obvious what the "right thing" is.

In previous franchise series, there were always points of disagreement on what to do in any given situation, but they were usually resolved with a short and convincing speech. If the decision turned out to be a bad one, there were rarely any lasting repercussions for that person (just as rare were decisions that turned out badly to begin with.) Part of that was due to those shows being episodic+ (meaning each episode was self contained, but did contribute to a large ongoing story without relying on it entirely). Part of it was just having somewhat cliched characters that hardly ever screwed up.

Remember when McKay destroyed an entire solar system after Sheppard staked his credibility on that not happening? Did anyone stop trusting him after that? Did he lose any responsibilities, were there any real repercussions beyond those we saw at the end of the episode in exposition?

Not really.

If characters don't screw up, you're cheating yourself of the opportunity to document their redemption. In his book The Complete Book of Scriptwriting, J. Michael Straczynski discussed how important redemption is to good drama. If you can do redemption well, he wrote, you'll work forever.

And Stargate fans ought to keenly aware of how important that concept is. Teal'c in SG-1, and G'Kar in Babylon 5, are two characters that are much loved by fans precisely because of who they were, and who they would eventually become.

But you can't experience that journey if your characters don't make mistakes and have flaws to begin with. With respect to people who seem to shy away from this kind of storytelling, you're missing out. Universe is a hugely fertile ground overflowing with people in desperate need of redemption. Some may find it, others probably wont.

Not every story has a happy ending and that's not always a bad thing, either.

"That was extremely unsatisfying."
Before I begin trying to explain what you're going to see, without ruining it for you, I want to address a couple of issues that cropped up from my "first impression" post. Some people have decided that my first impression was a literal interpretation that supported and vindicated their worst fears, and they will not watch SGU because of it. I'd like to think that anyone who would make up their mind about a TV show - or a book, movie, game, or fantastic new salad recipe - before having seen it, is not going to be open to having their mind changed by me or anyone else.

So no harm, no foul, right?

But it doesn't feel that way, so please allow me to clarify two things.

First impressions are important but hardly ever give you the full picture. The things that resonate with you the most are what you tend to remember the strongest. I'm a drama wonk, and there's a lot in this show that resonates with me on that wavelength, so that's what I remembered the strongest, and so that's what made it into my first post. But contrary to what I said earlier this week, there actually are some funny moments in the SGU pilot. Not as many as you might like, and maybe not as many as you might see later on, but that actually tracks because of the rather serious events happening in this pilot.

As one master of drama wrote a few years ago, there's not a lot of comedy to be found in drug addiction or drunk driving. I'm sure you understand what he meant and how it applies to this pilot.

That said, I laughed far more on my second viewing than I did the first time.. I figured something like that would happen, which is why I wanted to watch "Air" again before writing this review. You always miss stuff no matter how closely you pay attention. In fact, sometimes you what you miss is a direct result of that. If you look at a painting closely enough, you can see actually see the texture of the canvas beneath the paint, which is informative and perhaps interesting to some, but you can't see the beauty and the meaning until you stand back and look at the whole thing from a distance.

The funny comes when you're just along for the ride, and in defense of myself, I wasn't juts along for the ride. I'm in this game to review TV shows like this so I can't just sit back and enjoy it the first time.

David Blue has several funny moments throughout most of the pilot and I suspect that this will continue into the regular season. He's a wonderfully talented actor with a very keen understanding of how mannerisms can take acting to a whole new level. While it's true that SGU is darker than previous series, it's not accurate to say - as I did based on my first impression - that the humor is simply gone.

It's not.

It's just that going on a first impression, you may very well overlook it the way that I did. Maybe not, since everybody is different. I'm not walking back my original statement and no, I haven't been influenced by SyFy, MGM, or anyone else. They did bring the funny, I promise.

Anyone "fearing the worst" should be pleasantly surprised. Although they aren't quite up to his level - that's not an insult, hardly anyone is, truthfully -- Joss Whedon is one of the masters of mixing drama, humor, and in recent times, science fiction. Firefly is the best example of hitting the right balance between all three with a running start to boot. SGU is a little less funny and a lot darker than Firefly, but no where near what BSG did. I'd call it closer to Firefly than BSG when it comes to content, and that's a huge compliment.

It plays well for what it is, it really does.

And for the second issue, yes, there is a sex scene in Air. It takes place in a storage closet and lasts approximately 22 seconds. You can't see anything and it's not all that big of a deal. It's the only scene like it in the entire hour-and-a-half pilot, and in context, it makes far more sense to acknowledge reality than it does to hide it. In my mind, not showing young adults doing their thing is like refusing to show a toilet or bathroom in a sci-fi show.

Everybody does it, it's time to grow up a little bit here.

You can read part 2 of this special feature here.

Update - Supposedly Apple is going to make parts 1 & 2 of "Air" available for free on iTunes at this link, but the link won't work until sometime on the morning of October 3rd. Info from this tweet, that's all I know.

Rape ain't what it used to be

2009-09-08T23:59:00Z

I'll probably have my full, long-winded review of the Stargate Universe pilot up sometime tomorrow, but until then, I've had a few interesting experiences over the past few days that I'd like to share, along with a few thoughts.

I've seen a few people in different places complain about nonchalant treatment of "rape and genocide", which I found utterly confusing. I don't remember any rape in SG-1 or SGA and it seems like that would be something I'd remember. I'll let the genocide thing go for now because I still don't know any that's referring to, as for rape, I just found out how ridiculously sensationalist that entire manufactured controversy really is.

This began when information was leaked out about a guest star character the producers were still looking to cast for a future episode. You may have heard about this, and I know people have written about it. I can't really get into this without spoiling a big part of the show, so if don't like spoilers, stop reading right now.
Here is the character description, which you're about to find out is used for casting, not for writing:

[ELEANOR PERRY] (35-40) and quite attractive. A brilliant scientist who happens to be a quadriplegic. Affected since childhood, her disability has rendered her body physically useless. However, after being brought on board the Destiny as the only person who may be able to save the ship and her crew from certain annihilation, she is given temporary powers that enable her to walk again and to finally experience intimacy. Strong guest lead. NAMES PREFERRED. ACTRESS MUST BE PHYSICALLY THIN. (THINK CALISTA FLOCKHART).

It wasn't revealed here how this person was brought on the Destiny or allowed to walk again because that was a big secret for the show, but since you're still reading this, you either already know the secret or are willing to find out right now.

The gag is that the people on the Destiny -- can't really call them "the team" like you could with SG-1 or SGA, because believe me, these people do not at all resemble a "team" -- have some of the Ancient communication stones with them. They can swap minds with people back on Earth and through this gag they just go ahead and film a full body switch. The disabled woman above will switch bodies (minds really, but you know how it works) with somebody already on the ship, and then do things.

The rub is the "finally experience intimacy" part. A number of people were upset at the intimation that someone who is disabled can't experience intimacy. SGU Consulting Producer (and SGA co-showrunner) Joe Mallozzi addressed this on his blog, and I've seen at least one other person strongly agree with everything he said (I think it may have been SGA co-exec Martin Gero).

In fewer words, these things are drafted externally, not written by the producers or by the writing staff, and don't always reflect the reality of the show or a given episode. Leaks about what happen in the episode were from an early draft of the script that doesn't reflect what will air. And finally, Dr. Rush knows the disabled woman in question.

That really changes things a bit, it doesn't erase all concerns about the morality of what will happen, but again, that's probably the point of what they are doing.

Here we get to the sensationalist part where things are taken to a whole new level of WTF:

Unfortunately not all men on the expedition have a conscience and morals. That's the cue for the group's leader Dr. Nicholas Rush (played by Robert Carlyle), who jumps at the chance to have non-consensual sex with a lesbian's body. But read the scene for yourself (Eleanor is in Camille's body):

Before I get into this, let me point out that -- having seen the pilot -- this should in retrospect be somewhat obvious already. A lot of what we know about the show before it airs is that the people who inhabit it are flawed, imperfect people. It should go without saying that "not all men on the expedition have a conscience and morals" -- though it may be more accurate to say that some people on this show have questionable morals, which is not the same thing as having none at all.

First off that's kind of the point of this show and the direction it's taking. Second, this isn't an expedition. This is not a trained, tight team from the SGC made up of ideal personalities. And in no way do I think it's fair to single out the men, because based on what I've seen, I find it entirely reasonable to expect that the women in this show are going to have issues of conscience and morality as well.

But with that out of the way, I think that to a degree, you could make an argument that using these communications stones on someone who is not willing is a form of rape all by itself. It's an argument, maybe a bit thin, but an argument regardless. But when the transfer is willing? I think you have to accept the fact that your body may not be used exactly the way you want it to when you trade it in for someone else's.

How far is too far is a very legitimate point of debate, and I think that this episode, in part or maybe in whole, is meant to foster exactly that debate.

The point may very well be to demonstrate a moral dilemma that will make the fans think about what they are seeing. And while some fans are doing that now -- before even seeing it -- they don't really seem to get it. It may be reasonable to criticize the actions of the Rush character and I might very well agree with that criticism once I've seen the episode (it's very near the end of the first season so don't expect to see this for a while), because that's the point. And not just the point of this story, but perhaps a microcosm of the series itself. But to take that literally and criticize the writers for writing characters that do dubious things -- essentially blaming the writers for what the charters are doing -- at least to me, is taking things a bit too far.

You don't see people accusing the writing staff of House of being misanthropes just because they write for a character that happens to be one, in a show that revolves around that character who regularly does things that none of us would do.

You don't see anyone accusing the writers of Dexter of being secret homicidal maniacs that think murder is sometimes -- many times in the case of Dexter -- justified and acceptable.

The original problem about the "finally experiences intamicy" thing is an understandable reaction from people who didn't have all the facts, and I think that has mostly been settled by now. But this crap about rape, I'm sorry to say, looks like little more than trolling by people who are looking to pick fights over something they already don't like, even though they don't know much more than what you can get from a book dustcover.

And I think that's a real shame.

* * *

On to the other issues now. It strikes me as interesting, the response to my "first impression" story on the SGU pilot. Most of the people who commented on my story and on the forums where that story has been linked seem to be from the "I knew I wouldn't like it and this confirms my worst fears" crowd.

Not all, but most.

That's really quite surprising to me. I always try to be fair when I'm doing semi-professional criticism -- I've both lauded and bashed Atlantis more than once -- and it's gratifying to see that acknowledgment both here and on the forums. But it was never my intention to confirm anyone's worst fears or to sell the show, and if anything, it feels like a lot of people got the wrong impression from...well, mine.

What I did was list some of the things that stood out to me, and then commented on them a little bit, in preparing myself to see the pilot again so that I can write a proper review. When I said there was no humor in the pilot, that wasn't entirely accurate, and first impressions rarely are. There are a few funny moments, especially when David Blue's character is introduced. And I've been told that there are humorous moments in later episodes.

I find that easy to believe because the pilot is a rather dramatic piece of work that doesn't have a ton of room for humor. There's not a lot of funny to be found in what happens to people in Air, but things will undoubtedly change because we're talking about different stories as time goes on. I don't particularly remember a ton of humor the SGA or SG-1 pilots, either.

If my statement that the humor is gone put you off, please don't take it so absolutely. The humor is mostly gone from the pilot, not from the series. I don't know what is gone from the series because I haven't seen all of it, and neither have you. And even then, my opinion of humor is probably not the same as yours.

Those kinds of misconceptions have been somewhat rampant these past few days, and as much as I enjoyed writing that story, and seeing it bounce around the Internet (GateWorld, SyFy.com forums, televisionwithoutpitty.com, Twitter via the official SyFy account, and from Mark Savela and John Lenic, amongst others, and poor Joe Mallozzi who has been asked no less than three times to read it on his blog), I do regret not making a number of things more clear.

The problem is that had I made the more clear, it would have been a review, not my first impression.

So if you read that, please stick around another couple of days for the full review. I'd appreciate if you did.

And don't go near the official SyFy forums. I almost died there. True story.

Update - My full Stargate Universe review is now online and available.

WGA lets Leno off the hook for strike breaking

2009-09-08T16:49:00Z

Jay Leno may be out of the woods when it comes to discipline from the Writers Guild for violating the 2007-2008 strike, but somehow I doubt anyone is going to forget what he did.

More so than writing for a company being struck, he threatened to quit the WGA if he had to, in order to write for NBC during the strike. And now his vanity show at 10pm is responsible for putting a number of potential writers out of work by eliminating five hours of scripted programming per week.

I understand the point that Leno is making about how well his writers are paid and how many his show will carry, but ultimately that's not really persuasive. Those are comedy writers he's talking about, they are not drop-in replacements for scripted programming writers and regardless of how big Leno's staff is, it's not going to be bigger than the combined writing staff you'd need to feed five different shows.

The truth is that Leno violated the spirit of the strike by going back to work while real writers were talking picket lines and losing their homes, and he doesn't even care. It doesn't matter if he got a permission slip from the WGA, that only covers violating the "letter of the law".

What matters more -- perhaps not to Leno, but to everyone else -- was paying token lip service to the strike when it was easy to do so, and then going back to work and collecting a fat paycheck once NBC wanted it's money maker back on the air.

And then being a willing participant in the evaporation of five hours of programming and five shows worth of people -- hundreds of people across the entire production of each show -- that he had stabbed in the back in 2008. First he turned his back on them when they struck for a fair contract, and now he's outright taken their jobs. I imagine a lot of people are going to be rooting against Leno's vanity show.

Stargate Universe is a promising show worth seeing

2009-09-06T22:23:00Z

I'll have a lot more to say about Stargate Universe in the coming days now that I've seen the first three episodes, but before I spend a great deal of time putting everything into focus -- honestly I'd like to sit down and watch the entire thing again before I write my story -- I'd like to share a couple of immediate thoughts on what I remember, what my first impression was.

People who will not like this show are people who do not like this style of show. It almost doesn't matter what your personal relationship is to Stargate in general, it's not the Stargate factor that will put you off or suck you in forever, it's that this is not a family action show pretending to be science fiction like its predecessors were.

Stargate Atlantis tended to try to cram a lot of action into a small amount of time, and sometimes that breakneck pacing would hurt the show, making it feel very rushed. The series finale exemplified this problem, where a it felt like the writers crammed two hours worth of story into a single hour.
That is not happening with SGU. If anything, the first three episodes are a little too slow, but that's fine -- if you can enjoy a show that takes its time. Something to keep in mind is that the first three episodes are a single story, and will not be representative of the pacing of everything that comes after, not by a long shot. And that's not even addressing the comedy moments we've all come to love and expect from Stargate.

Forget it, they are gone. This is a real drama now, if you don't like real dramas, that's what's going to seal it for you.

And if one can imagine a formula where none exists, then SGU's formula is wildly distinct from SGA in other areas. There isn't a real big or immediate focus on existential problems like malfunctioning technology so much as is a focus on how people deal with problems under stress, in less than ideal circumstances, set in the Stargate Universe. Once you see the premier, you may disagree, but consider where the focus is the whole time. Is it on the ship, or is the ship just a catalyst for interactions amongst the people?

Do not expect repeated scenarios where the the military lead character leans on the cliched genius scientist while everyone else throws in words of encouragement until a brilliant solution is discovered to save the day at the last minute. Don't get me wrong, that worked great for a lot of years and lead to some really entertaining times, but there's a place and a time for that, and it ain't here.

Reality never works out that way and if episodes one through three are any indication, for the most part, neither will Stargate Universe. Believe me when I tell you that the trailer soundbites, "these are the wrong people, in the wrong place" were not a joke.

And just because those things are gone doesn't mean that this is less of a show. There are other ways of telling stories that bring other positives to forefront.

In the SGA/SG-1 world, you've got enjoyable but mostly unrealistic character relationships. Everybody is friends, nobody acts like an asshole, nobody cowers from something without finding undiscovered courage for a small amount of redemption at the last second, and you generally don't have people looking out only for themselves that are inside the main cast. It wasn't uncommon to see guest characters portrayed as less than savory people in SG-1, but that kind of realism -- everyone is flawed in some way -- has been brought closer to home in ways that make McKay's arrogance like downright positive by comparison.

That's fine, that's what you've come to expect from SG-1 and SGA and it makes for a remarkably upbeat environment.

Stargate Universe is a lot of things, but upbeat is not one of them.

Think of your typical medical drama, and then think of House. Characters with flaws is what real drama is all about, and this show is full of people with flaws.

In a way, it's very refreshing. And looking back, at least for this brief moment, whatever comparisons might be had between Ron Moore's BSG, and SGU, the only fair analogy is in visual styles. The CGI sequences have a familiar BSG feel (BSG did not invent that style, by the way), but otherwise SGU doesn't take drama to such an extreme that you're watching a soap opera in space, and it's certainly not 90210 in space, either.

There are shows like BSG and E.R. than went too far, that became so dark that you kind of wanted to blow your brains out at the end of every episode. SGU, thankfully, isn't that bad.

I'll be back at some point with more on this, but for now, I might suggest one thing if you don't read my site again before settling in for the SGU premier.

Don't sit down expecting a Stargate show like the ones that have come before. If you do, you'll be setting yourself up for disappointment -- and not because SGU isn't good, but because you'll be getting something other than what you thought you'd get, and there is no way this show can win in that scenario. That's not the direction Brad Wright and Rob Cooper and the crew have gone with this show. They wanted to do something different, and they have, and it's not fair to demand that this show be something other than what it is.

At least not until after you've actually seen it.

Try not to expect or anticipate anything, just watch the damn thing and see if it's something you think you might enjoy. And remember that even if it doesn't strike you as interesting or entertaining -- frankly I think interesting will come before entertaining with this series, at least at first, because this is so different from the others -- it may take some time to find its voice on top of all of this. Compare SG-1's first season to it's fifth and you'll understand my meaning.

Oh, and by the way, there's going to be music in this show. Real music. Not just scored stuff, but actual songs. It's a game changer when it comes to setting just the right tone at just the right moment. And the musical score is simply amazing.

More later.

(P.S.: If you're interested in SGU, you may also be interested in these scans I did of all the pages of the Stargate Universe press kit. Lots of nice cast photos in there.)

Update - My full Stargate Universe review is now online and available.

Writers' earnings plummet 18% in 2008

2009-09-05T20:39:06Z

There's a story running on Media Decoder (NY Times blog) quoting the Writers Guild as saying that earnings were way down for 2008, nearly an 18% drop year-to-year.

Obviously the three month strike was going to be a huge factor, but they also say that this was similar to a drop in television earnings in 2007 as well, so maybe this is just part of a new trend where TV writers are the first to be forced to tighten their belts when the $20 million per year actors and studio chiefs want a new jet, or the latest experiment in $300 million dollar movies falls flat on its face and ends up making an entire vertically aligned corporation conglom suffer.

I'd be interested to see if pay for actors followed a similar downturn, because I have a hunch that it hasn't. Just look at the disparity in numbers. Writers across the entire film industry made just $361 million in 2008.

How often do we read about actors who haven't really earned it that reach astronomical pay grades in the realm of $20 million per picture? That's one actor making 5.5% of what all writers made the entire year, just for a single movie. If you figure that such earnings are rarefied air -- maybe they are, maybe they aren't -- and that only three or four actors made that much for a single picture in 2008, that's 22% of what all writers made.

A top tier director with good connections can do just as well -- Michael Bay claims to have made over $80 million from his Transformers -- and that's not including the sequel.

Writers make very good money (when they can get work) compared to most Americans, and yet they still feel like the same underclass, the lowest on the food chain that is always the first to be asked to sacrifice and the last to get rewards or acknowledgment for success.

Photos from inside the Stargate Universe press kit

2009-09-05T14:15:00Z

After seeing the reaction to my post on the SGU press kit from GateWorld, I can't believe that I didn't think to do this before. The book that SyFy sent out as a press kit has a lot of wonderful photos of the cast, really pretty semi-glossy photos and bios of the cast and characters, as well as the producers.

SyFy/MGM may want these kept private, but if they do, I really can't understand why.

I did my best to scan the entire book (it's not that kind of book) and then created a photo gallery for them. I've been meaning to do this for a while for Media Pundit, and now I've actually got something to put in it.

The photo in this post is a really small version of a profile of Robert Carlyle. The version in the gallery is huge, I scanned most of the cast portraits at 2552x3508, weighing in at around 1MB each. The other pages are lower resolution because they contain mostly text. Most of the producer profile pages have photos from the series that can't be seen in the thumbnails, so look at everything.

Hope you you like them, and please share this post why anyone you think might like to see photos from the book.

Update - My first impression of the series premier can be read here. This is not a review, that is coming later.

Update 2 - My full Stargate Universe review is now online and available.

SyFy really knows how to promote a show (SGU)

2009-09-04T17:43:00Z

(Update below -- a link to a gallery of pics from the book/kit, and my first impression of the series premier!)

Last fall I got screeners (season premiers and pilots on DVD for the press) from NBC in thick plastic cases, the kind you'd get with a store-bought DVD. Screeners from CBS -- which are plentiful (I love you guys) -- come in translucent "slim" jewel cases.

Nothing fancy required, nothing fancy provided.

Fox never sends me anything, and this year has ignored me entirely, although I did get a DVD from them once in a paper sleeve.

The SyFy Channel, on the other hand, just sent me a book with glossy pages on the characters for Stargate Universe that lights up like a Stargate when you press a button on the front.

Oh yeah, they also included a two-DVD set featuring the three hour series premier.

The disparity here is stunning.
While I'd tend to agree that the press kit for Stargate Universe was excessive and by no means necessary for me to be happy with SyFy, I'm not going to complain, because it's so obviously awesome. And more importantly I didn't have to beg for it, which is always a plus. I'm sure demand for SyFy press kits is far less than what you'd see for House, or CSI, but even SyFy is putting CBS to shame these days if this is how they are going about their business.

Every network should learn from what SyFy is doing, and not just with their press kits. Whenever I need something from SyFy, they are happy to oblige. CBS is very responsive and the people at NBC are as well, although they are still proving difficult to get screeners from. SyFy genuinely wants to treat bloggers as part of the press, and that means a lot, least of which because we actually are a part of the press.

But SyFy puts them all to shame in comparison.

Fox especially is getting on my nerves. I asked the press contact for Dollhouse if I could get a screener for it last year and was told they'd try, but I never got anything. I asked again at the top of August a full two months before the season premier was scheduled to air, just to be sure that I'd be first in line, or close, and was given a date to check back.

I did so earlier this week, and again yesterday, and haven't heard anything from them at all.

I try not to blame individuals for the failures of their employers, but at some point the blame has to land somewhere, and the press people at Fox aren't giving me much choice here. This is truly disgraceful behavior.

Meanwhile, in between begging emails, I have to see crap like this on Twitter:

The press all got their new DOLLHOUSE 2.1 screeners (wrapped in a lovely burgundy t-shirt and a note from The Whedon) today. Brace.

I understand that Fox hates bloggers. They explained to me already that I couldn't get on their network-wide list for screeners (NBC and CBS had absolutely no problem doing this) because my traffic didn't meet their requirements (at that time I was pulling about 10,000 page views per month, about 120,000 per year) and that with tight budgets, I'd have to ask each show individually and hope for the best.

Sure, I guess that makes sense. When you're the big boy in the sandbox you get to make up all sorts of stupid rules that end up hurting you more than they will anyone else. And I'm not asking for a book here, either.

But obviously that hasn't worked out so well, the only screener I've ever gotten from Fox was the Terminator pilot, and they sent it to me twice (they must have gotten a good laugh out of that.) That show is now off the air and I'm still getting static from Fox on everything else. I can't review what I can't see so Fox hasn't gotten but a single pilot review out of me in two years now, and it's not like I don't want to do it. I'd be happy to give their shows more press, but I can't review a brick wall.

It's pretty amazing that a little cable network like SyFy can make a broadcast giant like Fox look like bumbling amateurs, but they've done it.

Fox corporate really ought to be ashamed and embarrassed by this mess because instead of getting good reviews for their new shows from the small corners of the blogosphere -- which is usually where the big things get their start -- all they are getting is bad press about how horrible their press department is.

*sigh*

I'll hit the Stargate Universe pilot this weekend and publish a review on Monday. I've been given permission to review a stack of stuff from CBS that I've had stuck in my desk for a month now, so that'll be coming too, along with a thing or two from NBC (so far just one thing: Trauma.)

Stay tuned, or if you've seen any of this stuff, feel free to share your thoughts on the comments (spoiler free, if you can.)

Update - Fox actually is going to send me a screener for Dollhouse after all, but I think that's all I'm getting this fall. I scanned every picture in the SGU press book and put them up in a gallery, check it out.

Update 2 - And here is my first impression of the series premier. Review to come later.

Update 3 - My full Stargate Universe review is now online and available.

What will Disney do when Marvel runs out of gas?

2009-09-04T12:55:00Z

So Disney plunked down $4 billion for Marvel within the past week. Most people have covered most of the bases already. Patrick Goldstein in the L.A. Times painted a rather ugly picture of Disney facing an uncertain future it has to buy content producers when it used to be one itself, which is a great read if you're interested.

I'm sure that people have written about whether or not this will work out well for Disney and Marvel, but not for any reasons that interest me.

You see, I'm still not convinced that the comic-to-movie craze is anything more than a really extended fad.

There have been some really great films made from comics over the last few years, X-Men and the newer Batman films come to mind, along with some not-so-great flicks like The Punisher, and I'm not going to argue that there's more success to be found by strip mining fifty or sixty years worth of source material (or that there's more fail to be had, on the flip side.) The best may still be yet to come, in fact.

But for how long?

That question applies to every studio and rights holder, not just Marvel. There may be hundreds if not thousands more characters to exploit, but at some point you're going to face some diminishing returns here. Not every comic character is going to catch on with the public and you just know that a certain level of obscurity is going to stop a studio from working their way down to the bottom of the barrel.

I've never been a fan of comics so it's not a surprise that I had never heard of Iron Man before. My best guess had it bombing at the box office, given what it cost, and who was producing it (I use that word liberally to cover all of the key players, not just the actual producers), it didn't seem worth it to me. I was wrong then and I'm sure I'll be wrong again, but I won't be wrong forever.

The Watchmen is legendary in its original medium but it did terrible business at the box office. The Hulk is a cultural icon in America and two tries in five years have both failed to catch on (Ang Lee's version in 2003 made a profit, but not much of one, while the 2008 version lost money.) More projects are racing into production with even more obscure names - obscure to me - that seem even more risky.

So I suppose my analytic contribution to the debate over Disney buying Marvel is whether or not $4 billion is too much to pay for the hottest source of comic book characters when that source is finite. The top tier characters will be depleted sooner rather than later and that will make Marvel two things: an average supply of comic material and an average content producer generally.

Disney needs more than that which is why they bought Marvel in the first place, but like anyone, Marvel wont be young forever.

I think a long-term exclusive contract would have made more sense for Disney, since they could simply decide not to re-up it once the good characters from Marvel had been exhausted.

As big as they are, hell, maybe it wont make any difference. Maybe Disney understands that this is a short term boost that they'll need to convert into a long-term gain. Some characters, settings and stories may not be worth a feature film, but is the next big thing a gold rush of television series based on comics?

Ultimately I think this was a mistake.

Update (11:54am)
After a short but interesting conversation on Twitter, I've decided to come back to this issue tonight or tomorrow. I still think this is a good deal short term, bad deal long term, but I'll go into more detail about why I think that, focusing on financials, and potential pitfalls of creative strife. Remember that Mirimax and Disney were best friends for a while, too, but look how that turned out.

Accusations of lying between John Wells and John Bowman

2009-09-03T19:23:00Z

As a "media pundit", which to me is a media critic-blogger-opinionist hybrid, I suppose it should be in my wheelhouse to write about matters just like this more often. Personally, I think this kind of isolated industry drama isn't worth writing about if you don't understand it, and to understand it, you kind of need to know the people involved and the deep background, which in this case dates back nearly a decade.

That's not me, so I don't normally go there, but this case is a little different.
I didn't write much about what happened with SAG this year. Their dispute with the AMPTP dragged on far longer than my attention span would allow for, and most of the fighting was going on inside SAG itself. Long story made short, SAG "moderates" took control after a months long stalemate and quickly capitulated to what amounts to little more than the DGA/WGA deal.

Now we've got another round of elections with two rather unhappy groups of people. In the case of the WGA, current President Patric Verrone is apparently forbidden from seeking a third term. Verrone and John Bowman (former negotiating committee chair) have their guy on one side, and John Wells on the other. Bowman accused Wells of undermining the WGA's negotiations with the AMPTP during the strike by working with the Directors Guild to sign an inferior deal, according to an email sent by Verrone and Bowman as part of the campaign.

Wells has denied it and other people have weighed in in various places. [Most of this can be had from the L.A. Times.] Craig Mazin is vocal about guild politics and has been active as a board member before, and I read his blog every now and again as a primary source. Mazin wrote three posts from August 28th through the 31st and then deleted them sometime yesterday.

His stated reason is that "there's been a very good development", one which only WGA members will ever get to hear about.

Problem is it wasn't only guild members that heard people like Mazin call Verrone and Bowman liars.

That rubs me the wrong way for a number of reasons. The media critic side of me thinks it's dishonest to write something and then not have the courage either to stand behind it, or to retract. The opinionist side of me understands the regret of saying something and wishing you could take it back. And the blogger side doesn't care about anything other than preserving people's access to all the information so that they can always see the big picture.

I've heard accusations similar to what Verrone and Bowman said about John Wells before. That he leans more towards the producer/management side than the writers' side, which is fundamentally incompatible with the responsibilities of managing a talent union. This may be nothing more than a continuation of that, but it certainly feels like there may be something to it. Wells supposedly supported the strike, but it's really very easy to say that and not mean it. Everyone knows he liked the DGA deal and that his support for it would place him in direct opposition to the ruling factions that didn't.

To say that Wells was undermining the WGA by announcing his support for the DGA deal while he was serving in an unofficial capacity for the negotiating committee is not entirely unreasonable, though it may be exaggerated and may not even be true.

Alas, this is the part where not knowing the people and the history means not knowing for sure what Wells' intentions were.

And ultimately I don't really care at this point.

Mazin took umbrage with Bowman's statements regarding Wells being more of a producer than an advocate for the cause of the writer in all circumstances. Fine, but it's not fair to John Bowman or anyone who read that criticism to then wipe it from existence as it if never happened. Having Craig Mazin take sides gives that side added weight, on the one hand, even though the criticism was little more than weak rhetoric, on the other.

It's critical for people to be able to know how substantive Mazin's criticism was, if he's going to join the fay, beyond simply knowing which side he took. It's also worth noting something which ought to effect how anyone values that criticism. Mazin took one paragraph from Bowman's statement and criticized it out of context to the rest of the email in one post, but in another, he copied John Wells' entire reply along which his own commentary.

[A cache of that first post can be found here, and the third with Wells' response is here, thanks to Google.]

That's hardly objective or reasonable, and people ought to be able to know about this kind of selective criticism when deciding whether or not it has any merit. But that's not possible when someone writes a post, which is then read, and then deletes it a couple of days later when things suddenly change.

Even if one were to take this at face value, that "There's been a very good development", that hardly changes the fact that accusations of lying in the midst of a union election were made and that sides were taken, which was subsequently erased from history after "very good developments".

It's even ironic that Wells himself lashed out at Bowman, saying "In a perfect world, Patric and John would publicly retract their dishonest statements and apologize for these ugly and highly regrettable tactics."

Worse still, the end result is that even though people were accused of undermining their own union, while others were accused of lying about it -- all made in public -- the outcome is not public and may never be known to anyone outside of the WGA.

Such behavior, even if it has been resolved in private, ought to warrant public retractions of some kind to address the very public and damaging accusations that brought it to light to begin with. Simply deleting evidence of support or opposition from public view only serves to undermine confidence both in the parties involved, and those who write about them.

I have no interest in dictating such things to other people, but it's always worth pointing out that if you're going to make negative statements about people in public, you should have the courage and integrity to stand behind those statements publicly, or renounce them publicly as well.

Full feeds now

2009-09-03T06:18:00Z

I made a small change to this site's ATOM feed. Now instead of just seeing the one or two sentence summary, if your feed reader is configured to show the entire content of the post, you'll see it now. If your reader is setup to only show the summary, then that's what you'll keep seeing. We get so little traffic here that it really doesn't matter to me either way at this point, so I figured that anyone still subscribed to our feed ought to get something useful out of it for a change.

Hopefully you'll have much more to read as time progresses. If you like something you see, please do share it, or drop by the site and comment. It'd really appreciate it.

As a reminder, you can follow this site and me via Twitter.

MacGruber? Do we really need this?

2009-09-02T17:30:00Z

The more I think about the MacGruber film, the more I realize that it's not an intentional spoof of a real television show so much as it's an accidental spoof of the current state of the film industry.

If you're not a fan of Saturday Night Live or haven't seen it in a few years, you're probably wondering what this is. If you're even remotely aware of what MacGyver was, then you don't really need to know anything other than MacGruber is a recurring sketch that parody's MacGyver. MacGruber, the son of MacGyver, is placed in risk of imminent death the likes of which MacGyver was famous for thinking his way out of, only MacGruber usually gets distracted and ends up failing.

I've only ever seen one or two sketches and the result is usually somebody getting blown up.

Cute, but it's a redundant concept that's limited to people who saw and liked MacGyver in the first place. Nobody else is really going to get it, it'll be like watching a two hour version of Mr. Bean (which I fear will end up vastly superior by comparison.) Worse still, it's a symbol of everything that is wrong with Hollywood's shortsighted obsession with the safe and the old.

It apparently made more sense in Hollywood's twisted and dysfunctional state to make a costly feature film based on this SNL sketch than it did to just make a movie based on the show it was parodying. Devoid of all originality these days, it actually makes sense that some studio would look back on MacGyver and convince themselves that the once-loved series was ripe for a reboot on television, or possibly a new movie franchise.

Obviously I disagree, although I'd watch that movie, I'd groan that the business is still brain dead and still painfully terrified of taking any real risks on new material, which at this point is probably overflowing every inch of Los Angeles given how many original scripts are written on spec every year.

But to eschew that in favor of this is really taking the absurdity to a whole new level. I don't care who you get to star in it (Val Kilmer? I love the guy but when is the last time he brought one home? And as a villain..?) or who writes it, this is not going to work. People are going to stay away from this movie like the plague. They get it even if Hollywood doesn't.

I hope I'm wrong, but there's just no way this was a good idea.

Fringe reruns will feature cast commentary via Twitter

2009-09-02T16:08:39Z

You may have heard by now that Fox is going to start showing reruns of Fringe when the show returns for its second season this fall (along with Glee), with a little something extra added for entertainment value: a live Twitter stream.

The lower third of the screen will show live tweets from "producers and actors" - presumably those who actually work on these shows as opposed to celebs and producers in general -- although no names have been floated quite yet about just who will be participating. According to the L.A. Times, they'll be commenting about the episode as it airs, and will answer questions from fans, also via Twitter.

This isn't an original idea by any means, SpikeTV has been doing this with reruns of Heroes since last year, although they've been using a proprietary chatroom (I assume connected with their network website) to accomplish the dirty deed. Reruns of COPS have also gotten the fan commentary treatment in recent times.

I doubt it'll attract very many new viewers which is undoubtedly the real goal. Providing some level of interactivity for the fans is a nice gesture, but the real point of this is to get more people to watch reruns so the show will be more profitable for the network.

This is actually great news for the talent since recent trends have seen networks slowly eliminating on-network reruns, which are expensive due to residual payments to the cast and staff, in favor of pseudo-syndication on cable channels that are also owned by the network which can be done for much cheaper, but ends up screwing the talent out of hard earned money. Naturally that has also been talk that this practice will be dropped in favor of online streaming, which the networks/studios are fighting extremely hard to not have to pay for at all.

Innovative idea (for a network) and I'd like to see more experiments like this in the future, but I have a feeling that Fox will give up on this just like they gave up on running fewer commercials for Fringe and Dollhouse this past season.

Cable Internet sector will not rescue Hollywood

2009-07-24T21:00:00Z

I'd love nothing more than to be able to link to this transcript (after reading it myself) so that I could give better context to this post, but the only reference I found for it was on Deadline Hollywood, so you'll have to settle for mostly out-of-context quotes for the time being. A company called Bernstein Research held a little get together about "web video" which is a deceivingly simplistic and confusing way to talk about movies and TV shows produced through the traditional studio system being broadcast online, as opposed to what you might find on YouTube.

This is all about highly rated and expensive-to-produce network television shows and blockbuster feature films being made available either streaming from websites, or more importantly through direct-download services like iTunes where you buy-to-own.
My problem is this (paraphrased by DHD):

Cable operators will slow the migration to Web video by ditching the flat monthly Internet fee and charging people for how much they use.

There are so many problems with this statement that it's hard to know where to begin. When it comes to Internet access in the United States, the cable companies are the dominant players but by no means do they have any sort of monopoly on access. To ignore the big telecommunications providers offering DSL service -- AT&T's service is backed by fiber-to-the-node which makes it extremely fast -- is either naive or intentionally dishonest, and it's a game changer of an error.

Cable companies have a traditional video business to protect when it comes to their Internet offerings but the telcos do not. If not for that reason alone, cable companies will not adopt metered Internet service plans because their competition (DSL from telcos and the increasing threat of fiber-to-the-home from Verizon and state and local municipal coops) almost certainly will not, which would place them at a severe and untenable competitive disadvantage.

Moreover, it assumes that online video is the number one use for cable Internet service (some real research is beginning to indicate that this might actually be the case for "mobile", celluar-based Internet usage) and would the the driving factor in future business decisions related to that sector, which is anything but proven.

It's also contradicted by recent evidence to the contrary, where Time Warner began trials in select states where all of their Internet plans were converted to "pay for what you use" which resulted in such a fierce public backlash that the project was scrapped within weeks and permanently shelved.

What made it even worse is that Time Warner, being a publicly traded company, is required to file reports with the SEC about where their earnings and expenditures come from. Ars Technica found that the cost of providing Internet service for Time Warner was dropping year-to-year even while revenues were increasing, making the claim that metered plans were required by out of control Internet usage that the company couldn't afford to keep up with a rather blatant and insulting lie.

[Note: Here is a story showing most of the major Internet service providers making good money from that sector even during this recession, including Cablevision, which just got done implementing "precisely the setup that Time Warner Cable said might ruin it without switching to a capped data model".]

The possibility of cable companies or any significant ISP segment switching to a metered service plan for all of their customers is laughable at face value, but to think that they'd do it simply to protect Hollywood's traditional distribution mediums of television and theaters is downright idiotic.

If anything, it would seem to me that the entertainment industry is getting exactly what it's paying for: the things it wants to hear.

While I don't disagree that replacing broadcast television (cable, satellite, and over-the-air) with the Internet is a bad idea on many different levels, it's simply not reasonable to expect or predict that Internet service providers are going to make a major change in their businesses just to placate an industry that is quickly losing control over its product much the same way that the music industry did.

Hollywood needs to embrace the online experience because that's increasingly where people are demanding their content be available, not the pirates, but actual consumers who are willing to pay for some of this stuff. And not because I say so, but because the cable companies aren't going to bail them out of a paradigm shift in information availability. The music industry dragged its feet and paid the price, and now Hollywood is doing exactly the same thing.

I hate to break it to Bernstein, but the bandwidth caps being floated by some companies (unsurprisingly, companies with some of the worst reputations for customer service in all of corporate America) have more to do with greed than what Hollywood wants or thinks it needs.

They'll do what's in their best interests and if that means sticking with high monthly caps but not "pay as you use" service, that's exactly what they'll do, Hollywood be damned.