Up and Down and In The Middle

I am a big fan of The Middle, which I think is an under-rated and under-appreciated part of ABC's Wednesday comedy line-up.

But as much as I enjoyed the episode that aired on October 1, I was also kind of down on it, because the main story-line deals with college admissions and financial aid in a way that perpetuates the worst kind of thinking, the kind of thinking that keeps people in the middle down rather than helping them up.

Basic premise of the show:  working class family with two parents who work hard and never get ahead, with three kids to feed and a house and a mortgage and bills.  The middle kid is Sue, who's surrounded by two brothers and who is a font of sometimes misplaced enthusiasm.  She's tried out for every club or sport in the school, usually to very bad results, but she's slowly been getting her act a little more together, starting to find boys and a little more common sense and a little more assertiveness in the right places.

In this episode, Sue announces that she's retaken her ACTs, gotten a much better score, and can now set her sites on so many more schools that are so much better.  Which sends her parents into a panic, because there's no money, so how can they afford to send her to any of these really nice schools, so they get second jobs because they're going to do everything they can to get their daughter into the good college she wants.

Funny?  Yes.  It's rare that the show isn't funny.  The main story-line sees the mom working from home with one of those airline call center jobs that doesn't require being in the call center.  But as she says, the job means working from her home, with all the distractions from her three kids, which goes rather poorly in ways that are quite richly humorous.  The dad gets a scene of two wearing a uniform that's very fast food in a way we don't usually see the father.  And the B and C storylines are as good as the main one.  The son in his sophomore year at college decides to walk off with his share of the family's possessions to stock his first student housing apartment.  The youngest sone finds all of the noisy toys his parents had taken from him 10 years ago hiding in the basement.  Sue and a friend of hers work on a school play that's way funnier than Waiting for Godot.

But the basic premise is just wrong.

One of the biggest problems with disadvantage kids getting into good colleges is that they won't apply in the first place.  They don't understand that the schools might offer financial aid, that they might be able to aim higher and afford it.  And this episode totally buys into that idea.  I guess in theory if both parents work dead-end jobs for 25 hours a week, that's 25x2 is 50 hours, and that could be $500 or $600 a year (or $400) and that's an extra $20K or $30K before taxes.  And they've got three kids.  Well, that's not going to cover rack rate at a college.  It's a farce, but not the kind of farce that the show is thinking it is.

No.  Wrong.

Why don't the writers and producers of The Middle find the humor in a show that models better behavior, where Sue and her parents decide that they're going to apply to the best schools possible and Sue is going to chase every scholarship she can possibly chase.  Or they can go looking for schools that waive the application fee, or find out that they're poor but that they make $10.23 too much to qualify for the application fee waiver.   Even if that goes as poorly as their efforts to have these dead-end second jobs, at least it's modeling a better idea.  It's modeling for a parent that maybe they should encourage instead of discouraging if a child wants to aim high and pray for financial aid rather than aiming low because that's all the family can afford.  Maybe it helps a child decide they can do Sue one better and succeed where she doesn't at getting a scholarship because it's Sue, the child who can't succeed at a tryout for anything and in the real world they're better.

I'm not asking The Middle not to be The Middle.  I've been watching this family since June 2009 when I started laughing out loud in the middle of an airplane sampling an episode on the in-seat TV.  I know these characters.  I know there's plenty of humor that's just right for The Middle in the better version of this episode, and they don't need to turn The Middle into The Message in order to put a better message into the middle of their 22 minutes.

The Devane and I

Watching the premiere of 24: Live Another Day earlier in the week gets me to thinking where it is that I have heard the name of William Devane before...

Once Upon a Time, 24 years ago strangely enough, in September 1990, a client of mine named Barbara Paul called to say that there was a TV movie on NBC by the name of Murder COD being previewed in TV Guide that sounded a lot like her book Kill Fee.

The TV movie and a perfectly respectable cast.  Patrick Duffy, still on Dallas, starred as a police detective, and one William Devane was the bad guy.  Devane was on Knots Landing.

And if it sounded a lot like Barbara Paul's novel Kill Fee -- well, that's because it was.

The book had been under option for a while.  The option had, if memory serves, expired on September 10, which was now a few days in the past.  The producers of the TV movie had not quite forgotten to pay the purchase price for the TV movie, which they should have done months before when the started filming the movie.  And now, the check really was in the mail.

I don't know how it would have played out if they had sent their late check even a coupe of weeks or a month sooner, when the check would have been late but at least within the option period.  Had it come in before we knew the movie and actually been shot and delivered we almost certainly would have cashed it and then been a little perturbed to find put two weeks later that they had screwed us a bit.

But here, the option had expired, the producers had no rights to the movie, and they were planning to show it on NBC in a few days.  So of course the check was returned.

We ended up getting a few dollars more.  Not a lot, I wonder if we could have held out longer and gotten more, but as little as it was it represented a 60% increase in what they needed to have paid had they done so just that wee bit sooner.

So this is my William Devane story that had absolutely nothing to do with William Devane.

You can give a listen to the Audible audio edition of Barbara Paul's novel Kill Fee.

The Candidates on TV

With both 24 and Friday Night Lights going off the air the past couple of years, two shows that were appointment viewing for me, I've been willing to cautiously explore finding replacements.

Glee never quite cut it, too inconsistent.

I've been trying Smash. The first three episodes were enh. The 4th episode the show seemed to have found its footing. The next two were OK, the 7th episode that aired this past Sunday was the best so far. I'm willing to keep going with it a bit, I'm a NYer and a theatregoer.

But the show I've taken to wholeheartedly after watching a few episodes tonight is The Good Wife.

I've heard a lot over the years about how good this is, and they are frequently filming at the courthouse across the street from my apartment (yes, New York City doubles for Chicago in The Good Wife).

And a few minutes in to an episode I still had on the DVR from the end of January, I was totally hooked.

What's not to like?

The writing is excellent. Sharp characters, sharp conflicts, ongoing character arcs but each episode also provides some resolution to a case. In essence, it's all the things that TV people like to say they're doing but which they rarely execute on or often say they want but don't actually do.

The cast is excellent. Smash might be about the New York theatre, but The Good Wife brings the best of NY theatre into your living room every week. One episode, there's David Pittu who was just playing in CQ/CX, the next week there's Josh Hamilton whom you've seen multiple times in the judge's robes, and then another week it's Bebe Neuwirth. If it's a delight, at least for someone like me who goes to the theatre and can appreciate the guest stars, the rest of the world gets to enjoy the regulars. They all seem just right. Christina Baranski and Josh Charles and Juliette Margulies and everyone else, and they all just work.

The best film and TV manage to tow the line of the exaggeratedly real, a little over the top and a little Hollywood and a little manipulative and a little of everything but without ever going completely over the top. Shows like Glee today or Ally McBeal a decade ago can cast a brief bright flame by actually going over the top in some different or fresh way, but they flame out. The gimmick can't be fresh forever, or they fall in love with the gimmick and go over the top, and over time you lose the connection with the audience. It seems horribly unlikely in one episode that the prosecutor would start to ask our lead character in a grand jury investigation about whether she was sleeping with the guy they're trying to indict, but then you can think about how Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sex. It seems even less likely that the person being questioned would then walk out of the courtroom in the middle of the questioning and dear the prosecutor to have her arrested, and even less likely that the grand jury would start asking questions and rebel against the prosecutor. But the characters are strong enough that you suspend disbelief, you enter the world of the exaggeratedly real where you can recognize the implausibility but believe. No dancing babies, no teaching the world to sing.

The show keeps things fresh with some tonal variety. One episode was pretty serious, the main case is about the father of a college student who committed suicide suing a filmmaker who documented it. This is serious stuff, and it's handled reasonably seriously within the realm of the exaggeratedly real. The next episode is a laugh riot. Dylan Baker is hilarious as a corporate executive specializing in peccadilloes, caught up in a paternity and harassment case in the middle of a proxy fight. It's laugh out loud stuff.

So this show is as good as everyone's been saying it is. I doubt I have the hours in the day to catch up on previous seasons, but it is so tempting to go and buy season passes on iTunes.

I don't want to rush to judgment on Smash when the show is giving signs of finding its footing as it goes along, but it's also the case that you don't get a second chance at a first impression and Smash's has been inconsistent.

Writing: If you are doing a show that's about a Broadway musical, is it a great idea to have a major subplot about the co-composer's attempts to adopt a Chinese baby? Not in my book, it's too off-center, it's a subplot that could be thrown into pretty much any hourlong drama if you wanted to, it's not why I'd decide to sample this particular show. And then there's the live-in boyfriend of the Marilyn who works in the Mayor's office as the Press Secretary, and that's another character that just seems like something you could have everyplace. The Good Wife is gloriously incestuous, within minutes I'm picking up on all of these connections between the district attorney's office and the law firm and the good wife and her husband, and they're not afraid to just make everything about the lawyers and the politicians. Smash is a TV show about a Broadway show that constantly seems to look over its shoulder, fearing that the outside world is gaining on it because who really wants to watch a show that's just about Broadway. It's commercially logical and entirely mistaken. The show is about what it's about, if you don't think people want to watch what your shows about, then make a different show, don't bring in lots of extraneous elements in order to appeal to people who don't care about what you care about.

Casting: It's not bad, but it's just the slightest bit off. If you've just come off seeing Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn, it's harder to buy into Megan Hilty's performance here. Katharine McPhee is good but generic, when she's put into the ensemble instead of being given the lead role, you don't automatically think it's a bad decision. There's nothing wrong with having personality, the faces of the people in The Good Wife radiate all kinds of personality, all of it the right kind for the role. Smash is just that little bit off, that fine line between that person in high school with some weird ambition that everyone respects because it's so true and real for that person, and the person with some weird ambition that everyone thinks is just weird.

As always, these things run into one another. The role of an assistant to the composers is underwritten. This character could be the audience's surrogate, by seeing what makes him tick we could find ourselves with an interest in the Broadway stage that we didn't know we had until this character started voicing it for us. The way Lloyd's desire to be Ari Gold on Entourage makes us envy Ari at the same time we despise him. In Smash, we get a lot about the adaptation, a little less about this potentially pivotal character, who ends up being defined by his weirdrobe.

I'm being a little too hard on Smash, there are a lot of smart people involved with it. There's this sense that they've slowly gotten more confident over seven episodes to be about the musical instead of the adoption. The original musical numbers are solid. But comparing and contrasting, it's hard to see this grow to be The Good Wife, to be better definitely, but not to be one of the best dramas on TV.

Shame No More

Well, most of the obituaries I've read have neglected to mention Cliff Robertson's finest role, as Shame on the Batman TV show in the 1960s. I loved this show, it always saddens me when a Special Guest Villain passes the scene.

Pop Culture

Shortly after my last funny book roundup I sat down with Wonder Woman 700 and the latest issue of Simpsons Super Spectacular. I would've gotten more pleasure flushing myoney down the toilet. Wonder Woman was a disaster. It wasn't that I couldn't finish any of the three stories. No, they were so bad I couldn't start them. When that happens with the fiction in The New Yorker -- well, tastes differ. But in Wonder Woman? I missed Batman 700 the week it came out, leafed through at the store, and after my experiences with WW600 and Superman 700 decided to leave on the shelf. Simpsons Super Spectacular is the weak link in the Bongo line. Like an all-star film comedy whose creativity stops with the casting this book often thinks the very idea of it is so fun that there's no need to take it further. But this issue is bad on an entirely different level. I keep buying the book because I like the idea, but I think after this issue it might seriously be time to do The Simpsons, Bart Simpson and Futurama (the comic book consistently better than what I remember of the original run of the TV show) and leave Simpsons Super Spectacular behind. But will I remember I said I was going to do this when the next issue comes out.

Friday Night Lights got lots of Emmy nominations including for its overlooked lead actors Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton and it's third season deserves all of them.

But the 4th season airing now on NBC after being on Direct TV in the fall is a letdown. Biggest problem is the loss of Minka Kelly's Lyla Garrity, a well-acted female character with lots of interesting stuff going on. She hasn't been replaced. Yes, they have new female cast members but not as well acted and with no interior life. I don't care about the characters, don't know where they came from, don't care what they do with the guys. As to the guys Taylor Kitsch's character is back but it must be for his looks because the writers have no idea this year what the character is doing. So he does lots and none of it is interesting and John Geilgud couldn't play the role.

This Washington Post opinion pieceby Lonnae O'Neal Parker compares the new Karate Kid movie as a portrayal of black youth with a recent episode of Friday Night Lights. Karate Kid, real black person. Friday Night Lights the worst cliches about black people. Half right. There are black communities where the dysfunction we see in Friday Night Lights is all too real. But insofar as pop culture exists they're very boring stereotypes. Like the world has never seen a John Singleton movie. It would be more rewarding to watch Boyz N the Hood from 1991 than the entire collection of scenes of black football player with great potential hanging out with homey hood friends from this season of Friday Night Lights. The actor playing said role, Michael B. Jordan, is bringing some subtlety and texture in his performance that I'd look hard to find in the script, but I'd like for this entire plot to disappear. Also, where was this entire black ghetto district in Dillon, TX during the first three seasons of the show?

I've used the word interesting a lot. The first three seasons of the show had interesting actors doing interesting performances of characters with interesting backstories and personalities. The new characters to replace the graduating seniors are not interesting in any of these ways.

There is still enough good in the show and enough accumulated good will that I'm not bailing yet. But it's a shame anyone turning to the show on account of the Emmy attention will find a season well beneath the quality of the first three.

Pop Culture

First, I am so happy to hear that Breaking Dawn will be split into two movies, like the last Harry Potter movie. I was so worried that I would be able to skip only three Twilight movies, and now I know I can skip a fourth. Phew! Let me suggest The Dawner Party and Dawn & Dawner as two possible titles for the added movie in the series.

I watched some TV on the plane rides to/from LA for the Season 3 premiere of True Blood on Tuesday night.

I'd watched one episode of The Middle in November, and two more including the pilot/first episode on the aeroplano. This is a really good show, and it's all there pretty much from minute one of the pilot. The closest in ancestry might be Malcolm in the Middle, and it will be interesting to see if The Middle can hold up a little longer than Malcolm did. I think it has a couple advantages. The family in Malcolm in the Middle wasn't a real family. It was very close to one, but the exaggeration was just a little too much. The family in The Middle is exaggerated but I think is an exaggerated version of reality instead of going beyond it. The writing is sharp and snark without looking down on its characters. By keeping the focus more on the mother than on the children it may better be able to survive the inevitable aging of the cast which began to really hurt Malcolm because things that were fun when the kids were younger seemed not so fun at all when the kids were bigger. This is a show that deserves its success.

30 Rock, two episodes, has gotten a lot better than its earliest episodes from Season 1. I may give more time to The Middle next year now that I don't have 24 to watch and can look for another hour or so of network TV to amuse me. But I'm still not sure I like 30 Rock so much that I want to start making it appointment viewing. But it's decent.

The Big Bang Theory. Huh? From sampling that, I'm a little puzzled the show's taken off so much. It's not bad. I've watched bad sitcoms, this isn't one of them. One of the problems may actually be the show's laugh track. The show's funny, but it's not always THAT funny, and the disconnect between the uproariousness of the laughter on the laugh track and the actual quality of the jokes was incredibly distracting to me. The cast isn't bad, but they also seem visibly to be working while the best acting is the kind you don't notice. It reminds me somewhat of It's Like, You Know, a sitcom from ten years back with similar-ish characters similarly sitting around doing sitcom banter, but I kind of liked that the older show was a little dryer.

Friday Night Lights isn't airplane viewing, that's appointment viewing every week for me, and season 4 is no exception. Last week's episode had four different commercial breaks with lead out scenes powerful enough that it took me ten or fifteen seconds to decompress from the show before I could turn to my newspaper reading during the commercials. At the end of the prior episode we found out that the father of one of the main characters, the now-graduated QB of the Dillon Panthers, had been KIA in Afghanistan, this week we're dealing with his deeply conflicted feelings. There's a great scene when the QB visits his coach's family for dinner, and in the writing and the acting it's what the characters aren't saying that's as important as what they are. You're looking at the faces in the background. The QB storms out and nobody knows what to do and the coach says "I'll go talk to him," but what we see is that he doesn't really talk. He goes out, says "I'll walk you home," and maybe they'll talk or maybe they won't, but it's just being there for the person. The one thing I didn't like was the actual funeral scene. Season One of True Blood, one of the points that won me over as the show found its groove over the course of season #1 was when they had a funeral scene where not everyone in the show was wearing a black funeral suit. I was told by Tim Akers that it wasn't uncommon in his upbringing to have one of those hanging around, but I still think there are people in the world who don't have and don't buy and don't wear black. Well, not in last week's Friday Night Lights, where everyone is indeed dressed in black. No, no, no, no, no a thousand times no.

And speaking of True Blood -- well, yes, I'm biased, but I do think the show is hitting a home run in its third season. There's a strong consensus that the first season really started to get good around the 4th episode, that the second season was stronger than the first, and season 3 is at least the equal of the previous. Season 3 motors out of the starting gate picking up its characters right where the previous season left them, and moves forward with great energy. The actors and the writers are all finding their characters. Hence, in Season #1 there were occasional forced message moments with obvious metaphor and real life parallel. Those moments aren't gone in Season #3, but now they're totally in character. When Sookie's giving a message to someone, it's Sookie giving the message. There are an abundance of nice little touches throughout. I was especially fond of the menu for the meal between Bill and the vampire king of Mississippi played by Denis O'Hare. The meal starts out with blood taken from willing donors fed a tangerine diet for the past two weeks. If you're the kind of person who really digs the cage-free hens and the free-range chickens, you'll be able to laugh at yourself while taking the moment very seriously. And if you're the kind of person who thinks that whole cage-free hen stuff is exceedingly silly, you'll be able to take the moment the exact opposite way. It's written and played so dead-on straight that you can't tell which way anyone on the show is going with it, so the moment becomes your own. And let me assure you the second episode is worth watching entirely for the meal. Haven't enjoyed a movie meal moment so much in years, up there with Louis Jordan serving his speciality to James Bond in Octopussy.

If you haven't watched the first two seasons of True Blood, I'm not sure how much the recap at the start of episode #1 will help. Happily, enough people have been watching that it probably won't make a difference.

When they say "it's not TV, it's HBO..." Well, TV doesn't have the budget. The cast of True Blood keeps growing and growing and growing. This Variety review says they're now up to 29 regular characters and I wouldn't argue. In the real world of TV, you can't do that. Maybe once in a while you can have an episode where you drag in everyone for some event, and then the bean-counters will say you can't have any guest stars next week and must use only the regulars.

the vagaries of life

This is the week when the TV networks are announcing their fall schedules, and it's always interesting to see what does and doesn't get picked up.

Like, over on Fox, the Simpsons gets 6.3 million viewers last week, 24 gets 8+ million. The Simpsons is coming back next year, and 24 is not. And you could find conundrums like that up and down the scheduling announcements.

Well, it's a lot like that in book publishing sometimes. There are the numbers where nobody will want you and the numbers where everyone will want you, and then there are the numbers in between where life isn't fair. Where this author selling 12,000 copies in paperback gets dumped while that author who is selling 9,000 copies gets to return for another day.

There's one big difference in publishing, which is that demographics aren't as important to we book people, while in TV it can be much nicer to have 3 million views of 8 that are those hard to find younger viewers than to have 1.2 million younger viewers from a 9 million audience.

But a lot of the reasons for this can be very similar. Is one series on a growth curve, while another series is on the downward path? Can you buy that next book for the 9K selling author for $5500 while the author selling 12K is getting a much bigger advance that you can't as easily cut? Do you have a relationship in the one instance that might be important to you while you really don't care so much about your relationship with the other guy?

A lot of it is about the numbers. But it's never all or only about...

Required Viewing

I just finished catching up on the last two weeks of The Simpsons. This season is shaping up to be a very good one. Earlier in the season, there was "I was one Uday who didn't need a Qusay." This past Sunday, Homer pays a visit to Israel, and the episode is wonderful. There's Homer ordering a falafel with extra cheese, being asked to say that latkes are better than American pancakes in order to enter the country, a teaching opportunity if you watch with your family to tell your children what a tagine is, and more. Some of it, I assure you, is in quite bad taste. The week before that, there was an extended sequence called Koyani-Scratchy, which is classic Simpsons. If you're at all familiar with the movie Koyaanisqatsi it's hilarious on one level, and if you are 14 and can't tell the difference between Glass, Philip and Glass Plus -- well, it is Itchy and Scratchy and works on another level entirely. That episode also has a montage of great kiss scenes from various film and TV shows, how many of these can you identify? You've got to hulu or fox.com and watch these episodes.

Let me also say a brief word about 24. I'm glad this season will be the show's last, but at the same time, I'm not glad to see the show go. I've watched almost every single episode. And yes, some seasons have been better than others and some episodes just plain silly. Some things keep happening season after season which is why it's good they need not happen again in 2011. Moles in CTU. Prisoners lost in custody. CTU being bombed. If it's happened once, it's happened eight times, and every so often this season I've gotten a little tired of seeing the same thing happen yet again. But for all that, it's been a well-crafted show, well-made and most importantly of all well cast. Really well cast. And that makes all the difference. This season, the cast includes Anil Kapoor, who was the host of Who Wants to be a Millionaire in Slumdog Millionaire. Cherry Jones is back again as the President. She's a veteran actor who's done lots and lots of roles in theatre, with two Tony Awards to her credit. Her chief of staff is played by Bob Gunton, who was on Broadway in Evita and Sweeney Todd and has two Tony nominations. Mkelti Williamson is giving a slightly different spin to his role as the head of CTU. These are all real actors, and they fill their roles with real authority, real conviction, real talent, and this year is the rule, not the exception. OK, Freddie Prinze Jr. isn't in Bob Gunton's league. But more often than not it works. I've spent this season waiting in the best Star Trek tradition for the demise of the young CTU agent who we know will get his by the final reel just like the young Lt. who Kirk sees in the first five minutes in the Enterprise hallway, but while we wait for that to happen, and for all of the other things we know will happen because they've always happened, we get to watch some of the consistently best acting in TV. So thank you, for sparing me the need to watch a 9th season, but don't think I'm that happy about it.

D'oh!

Oh those Simpsons!

I've probably watched the lion's share of episodes, and certainly pretty much all from the last 12 or 15 seasons. As the show's gotten on in years, there are the occasional weeks, and sometimes stretches of weeks, when the series shows its age. There are some ideas like the historical reenactments or fairy tale retellings that I can't stand at all.

The show is a lesson in TV credits. The longer a show is on the air, the more and more people manage to get contractual producer credits of some sort or another. The roster that appears on air is now pushing 30 producers of various shapes and sizes in the opening credits.

Most weeks, though, the show is pleasant enough, that it's worth watching because the only way to find the great episodes like this past week's is to keep plugging away, and then lo and behold once or three times a season there's something that works so wonderfully on so many levels that you just sit and marvel. This week's episode, written by Matt Selman (who is responsible for more than his share of great series moments), has Bart Simpson deciding he needs to have a a younger brother, so he hooks up with a kid from an orphanage.

And in the middle of the episode, Bart says his dad told him "I was one Uday who didn't need a Qusay."

And I was still thinking about this line and laughing to myself about this line hours later when I went to bed.

It would have been worth watching the episode for that one line alone, but in the best Simpsons tradition the episode references an amazing potpourri of just about everything. The first 8 minutes encompass references to the Food Network (or is it the Learning Channel that shows documentaries on how Twinkes are made), climate change, the Emmy Awards, Lewis Carroll, Peanuts, video games, pop-up books, the X-Men, the Manning Brothers, the Blues Brothers, the Smothers Brothers, the Mario Brothers, Smith Bros. cough drops and the Wright brothers. After the second commercial break, I think I might have missed two or three references but could spot the ones to South Park, Jerry Maguire, the Kama Sutra, carpal tunnel, birth control, breath mints and Buy America. And Homer's birds and bees talk with Bart consists of three words: "point and shoot."

And if I'm not entirely sure about one or two references, well, there's always "I was one Uday who didn't need a Qusay."

For the record, this is an awful, miserable, godawful line, because there's nothing in Homer's background or history over twenty seasons to suggest he would have the intellectual grounding to tell Bart that he "was one Uday who didn't need a Qusay."

There may not be another episode the rest of the season as good as this, but I'll keep watching to find one more "Uday who didn't need a Qusay."

Another shoe...

With Van Johnson, aka The Minstrel, and Earth Kitt, aka Catwoman, having sadly passed in this season, is there a third to come...  The old saying is that things like this will happen in threes.

True Blood, True Life

One of my pet peeves in movies and TV shows has to do with funeral scenes.  I don't have a "funeral suit" in my closet, some black suit with a black tie and a white shirt that I can drag out on a day's notice in the unfortunate and unwanted event that I need to mark someone's passing. Do you?  Yet it's this awful cliche in Hollywood that the real world is full of people young and old who either have that special suit in their closet or run out and buy.  You look at a group of mourners, and they're all there in a funeral suit.  I'm not going to go to a funeral in my gaudiest ensemble, but nor am I going to go in a black suit with a white shirt and a black tie.

So three cheers for Episode #6 of True Blood.  There's a funeral in this episode, and the characters are dressed like actual real people at most of the actual funerals of real people I've attended in my life.  One of the relatives is in a suit, but it's a blue suit with a loose tie.  A friend of the family is in an ensemble that looks like the kind of thing the character might actually have had in his closet.  Some of the people aren't wearing ties at all.  They're dressed respectfully,appropriately, but not like a lazy falsified version of the real world.  

And I'm a little bit biased about True Blood, obviously .

As an aside, and in response to a commenter from last week, yes, Borders does have an endcap for Charlaine Harris now, running thru the end of November, and has ordered lots and lots of books and even put in lots and lots of reorders as books sold over the first few days of the promotion; Barnes & Noble stores have gotten six-packs of the backlist and some may have a floor riser, but for a lot of these stores that might be only a one-week supply and after that I'm not so sure.  A Sookie box set will be out for the holidays!

Biased, but easy enough just to blog about other things and ignore if not for the fact that I'm really liking the show.  Charlaine had gotten a DVD of the first five episodes and told me the show got better with each one, and ya know, she's right.  Episode #4 had some squirmy funny business going on with Jason that I couldn't bare to watch and yet couldn't avoid enjoying.  Episode #5 was a tight rope act with some scenes that were really funny mixed with some scenes that had very strong emotional pull to them and the balance was just right.  Episode #6 was more tightly focused on the immediate ramifications of the death that cliff-hung at the end of the prior episode, but suffice to say that the funeral dress is far from the only thing worth praising.  We're seeing more and more of Jason's darker side so I'm loving him less than I was at the start, but that's a reflection of the approach to the character.  Anna Paquin has been superlative and continues to be spot-on.  Bill is growing on me.  

Six more episodes to go, the season finale slated for Nov. 23, and if things continue on this level I'll have a lot to give thanks for come Nov. 27.

True Blood & Red Letter Days

So I confess that I've been a little jealous of Peter V. Brett, who had some wonderful experiences the past week going to London for the British launch of his excellent debut fantasy THE PAINTED MAN (US, THE WARDED MAN, March 2009).  I love the picture here, and would loved to have been there.

But I've also got to confess that I had a pretty cool time myself at the gala premiere of True Blood on Thursday night, and I can't really think what experience I'd possibly trade for that very very special evening.

Now, for those of you who don't know, True Blood is the new HBO series based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris.  It is created by Alan Ball, the award-winning creator of Six Feet Under and screenwriter for American Beauty.  It has the biggest-ever marketing campaign for HBO, and it is a big thing.  

Getting invited to the premiere is no sure thing.  The first draft of a film agreement will rarely contain anything about the author being invited to the premiere, not even when it's one of the things in the deal memo.  You've got to be sure to ask, you've got to be sure it covers the author and a guest, you try and ask for the author's agent to have a guaranteed invite, and if you're lucky the film company will go along with that, or maybe agree to give the author three guests so you can hope the author will be kind to you.  Sometimes the best you'll get is the author invite.  In this case, it was the author, the agent, and a guest for each.  And happily HBO has been treating Charlaine very nicely, and agreed it would be nice for her entire family to attend, so I didn't have to cede my or my guest's ticket so some of her children could go.  I decided to invite Jeff Gelb, a long-time client of mine who lives in the LA area and has edited and co-edited some 20 horror anthologies including the current Dark Delicacies series with his friend Del Howison.

The premiere was at the Cinerama Dome, and this was a thrill all by itself.  I've long yearned to see a movie there or at the Chinese, and now I was going to get to do it!  It was exciting to turn on to Sunset Blvd. and see the red carpet in front of the theatre, the photographers already lined up, the True Blood signs on the marquees, the backdrops in place.

Not all invitations are created equal.  I was a "gold" guest, with an assigned row in the theatre and an invitation to the after-party.  Others maybe not the party, or the unassigned seats in the far back sides of the theatre.  I had told Charlaine ahead of the premiere that she would be walking in the red carpet while I was entering the theatre thru the exit door, and this was pretty much correct. I badly wanted to soak in the atmosphere outside, but you couldn't stand here if you weren't walking the red carpet, and nobody could stand there, and maybe you could stand in that other place if you were doing jumping jacks and not blocking the lane for the fire marshall.  I did as much as I could outside with the pushing and pulling from the security, watching as Charlaine was posed with Alan Ball and with various cast members and moved from spot to spot on the carpet so all of the photographers had a clean straight-on shot and sometimes standing still for an interview.  Then I gave up and walked in to the auditorium, where Charlaine's family was watching thru the glass at the front entrance from directly behind where it was hard to see very much but at least you could stand, at least until it got to be near to the alleged 7:30 starting point when they started to try to shoo people away from the lobby so that the red carpet crowd wouldn't have to suffer the likes of me when they were ready to come in.

HBO was paying for the soda and the popcorn, so the lobby concession stand was closed off and tables set up in front where piles of popcorn and soda were being attended to by the theatre staff.  This meant that (a) the drinks were watery since they were sitting in piles and (b) the popcorn was stale.

There's a blue starry motif to the lobby, understated and attractive, and the theatre is a real dome, with the entrances curving off to the sides, with a sloped floor leading to the aisle across the middle and stairs leading up to the entrances from the back of the theatre.  Whenever I've walked by the Dome I've always been amazed at how small it looks from the outside, but it's plenty big inside with a really really huge curved screen (like but bigger and more curved than that for the Uptown in Washington DC), a modestly sloped front seating area in front of the aisle, and then a stadium-style rear section.  The projection booth sticks out a few rows from the back, and if I could have chosen a seat I would have taken one a few rows from the rear directly beneath the booth where I could look up and see the light starting its journey.  But that wasn't a choice.  The Harris party of 7 had seats in row GG at the front.  The aisle seats were reserved for the major talent, so Charlaine's marked seat was there, and that meant her husband would be next to her, and then the kids, and though I felt kind of guilty having the prime center seats for Jeff and I there was really nothing to be done for that. 

As was to be expected, the premiere actually started at 8:00ish instead of the 7:30 on the invites.  These sorts of things always have speeches, so two people from HBO spoke and gave their thanks, and then Alan Ball got his turn.  Alan has been a gem toward Charlaine over the entire course of the show's development, even finding time during Emmy Day two years ago to have lunch with Charlaine when she was in town for WorldCon in Anaheim.  He saved his most lavish thanks to Charlaine, as the one person without whom any of us would have been there, to the very end, and gave Charlaine a gracious pat on the shoulder as he returned to his seat, which I thought to be quite a generous gesture.

And then at long last the show began, the first two episodes projected onto the big curved screen of the Cinerama Dome, and every little cricket chirp on the soundtrack sounding so gorgeous and so beautifully placed courtesy of the Dome's excellent sound system.  If only I had fresh popcorn to snack on, instead of deciding to abandon the popcorn ship a short way through.

The after party was on the roof of the Cinerama Dome parking structure.  We emerged from the elevators to a red-carpeted oasis, a Merlotte's sign on the far end, the perimeter filled with tables offering southern style food like gumbo and chicken, alternating with dessert tables filled with little red velvet cupcakes and pecan pies and full-sized brownies and ice cream and toppings, and then bars offering various true blood inspired cocktails, some of them in special Tru Blood glass mugs.  A dj and a small dance floor were on the middle of the west parapet.  The major talent had reserved tables in the center with waiters to tend to their needs, not that anyone actually sits for very long.  The views were wonderful.  To the southeast, the lights of downtown.  To the southwest, Beverly Hills and Century City, to the west and northwest, Hollywood.  To the  north, klieg lights that must have been for somebody else.  A full panorama of the entire LA basin, with the hills in back.  The walls of the portable toilet area in the corner were bedecked with production blueprints.

Of course it was nice to partake of the goodies and admire the view, but the nicest part was really to basque in Charlaine's reflected glory, to watch her and her kids having pictures taken with Anna Paquin, or to enjoy the endless series of admirers from the production, from the set dressers to the composer to the PAs, coming up to thank her and express their admiration and their gratitude, and to see the enjoyment written all over.  I was also happy to finally get to meet Charlaine's eldest son, the last in her immediate family I had the pleasure of meeting.

The legend has it that Alan Ball happened upon DEAD UNTIL DARK while killing time before a dentist appointment and browsing the shelves of a Barnes & Noble.  I asked him which, and to my disappointment he could say only it was somewhere in the Valley, and along Ventura Blvd.  Which I guess would make it the Barnes & Noble in Encino, though I guess if I were to know that for sure I'd have to try and triangulate against the location of his dentist.  But for right now, I will hereby declare Barnes & Noble #2583 in Encino CA to be a JABberwocky Literary Agency Historic Preservation Site.

And I will hope to get a copy of the one picture with me in it, of Charlaine and I at the party, and maybe asw I sort through some of the other links I'll set up to some of the other red carpet pictures and such.

Charlaine had a morning flight on Friday, and she and her family left around midnight.  I headed back to my hotel a few minutes later, with a lot of memories to cherish, maybe even a little more so than getting to see Elizabeth Moon take home the Nebula Award for The Speed of Dark, and I'm not sure what could top this except for maybe being at the Hollywood premiere of a movie based on The Speed of Dark.  It's the difference between being recognized within the sf/fantasy community and within the world at large.  As a long-time sf fan there's nothing that means more to me than seeing my authors receive the full-on respect of their peers in the Nebula balloting or of my fellow fans with the Hugos, and especially for a book like The Speed of Dark whom I love dearly.  But I've been with Charlaine through many years in the midlist wilderness, and HBO gave her a helluva debutante ball on Thursday night.  

And what about the show?

I'm a fan.

It's not perfect.  I think the only perfect shows in my life have been the first 3 seasons of Soap, the run of Party of Five, and Friday Night Lights.  With True Blood, the episodes are a little under an hour in length, and I was maybe ready for them to end 5 minutes sooner than they actually did.  It is possible this is because my TV clock is weaned on broadcast TV where the shows are more like 45 minutes, and my clock needs to reset itself for cable.  The first two episodes end with cliffhangers, which has a certain charm but which I think may be beneath the dignity of this particular show.  And I am now totally spoiled; how can I go from watching the first 2 episodes in the Cinerama Dome to watching episode #3 on September 21 on my 30"?

But those small things aside, this is good TV.

Alan and his chosen cast are quite true to the essence of Charlaine's books.  Anna Paquin is excellent.  She gives us a Sookie Stackhouse who is very very strong but not quite as strong as she thinks she is or may need to be, and a Sookie who has totally integrated into her life while totally wishing to rid herself of her gift of reading minds.  As excellent as Anna Paquin is, I found myself wanting to look at Ryan Kwanten's Jason, Sookie's brother, every single second he's on the screen.  I heard Charlaine tell someone that Jason was exactly like the character she'd written only doing things she'd never actually seen him do in the course of her own writing,  and I think that's it.  A lovable cad, so smoldering you know you'll get burnt if you get too close and yet so charming you can't resist getting as close as you possibly can.  Acting isn't always about acting; the choice of t-shirts for Jason is a good example of how the people behind the scenes support what shows in front of the cameras. Lois Smith is another winner as Sookie's grandmother, and Sam Trammell's Sam is another spot-on portrayal, though he (like many of the characters) is a bit younger in the TV show than what you'd gather from the books.  Nelsan Ellis and Rutina Wesley are of note in the supporting cast.   The arc of the first season will follow along with the basic story of Charlaine's own DEAD UNTIL DARK.

The reviews I've seen have been all over the map, from 3 1/2 stars in USA Today to much more lukewarm in the LA Times and NY Times, and I haven't even read thru the entire stack that my assistant pulled while I was away for the week.  With no critical consensus, it will be interesting to see how the public at large reacts.  I do think some of the negative reviews have been reviewing a political agenda in the show that I just don't see at all.  Other than a line or two here or there, there's no overwhelming metaphorical content.  I'm seeing Charlaine's books nicely tailored to the small screen, and I'm not seeing a Message.