Jane said, Have you seen my wig around?

OK, fine, she didn't--but how awesome would that have been?

The panel with Jane Espenson was about her Web sitcom Husbands (they gave us an early showing of the first episode of the second season, and it was really funny), and a lot of the discussion centered around the digitization of television and how much it has changed things.

In fact, the show wouldn't have existed were it not for YouTube. One of the characters in the show is this young, kind of vapid, kind of ditzy man named Cheeks, who is played by Brad Bell. I didn't know this, but Bell created Cheeks a long time ago and has had a YouTube channel for quite some time. Espenson discovered one of his videos, and that led her to contact him and develop the series. Bell also writes and produces the show, and he is not the least bit vapid or ditzy--it was one of those cases where of course I knew that the character and the person were different, but it was a little surprising to see how very different they are.

Anyway, Espenson paid for the first season out of her own pocket (Battlestar Galactica money--Bell made fun of her, saying, "Here is a hole I can pour all my money into! I could burn it, but this is a faster way!"), and the second season they funded mostly through Kickstarter (although Espenson kicked in some of her own dosh as well). I asked if it was smaller than a normal television production, and the answer is, kind of, but it was still 40 people (many of whom were doing Espenson favors) and two Steadicams. So the barriers to producing a professional-quality Web show are lower than they used to be, but I wouldn't really describe them as low.

What Espenson really liked about going indie was (say it with me) the control (THE CONTROL!!!) and the timeliness of it--she was able to get a show done in a fraction of the time it would have taken a network, which was important to her because the show is about gay marriage, and that's a hot topic right now. "We're not being told what we can and cannot do," she said. "We're figuring out for ourselves what the audience wants, instead of being told what the audience wants." Earlier, she asked who in the audience had contributed to the Kickstarter campaign. Several people raised their hands, and she told them, "You're the network that renewed us."

Once again, the analogy to novels was made, this time specifically regarding digitization--they all think that people love scripted television because it's novelistic, and that they will follow novelistic writing wherever it goes. Espenson pointed out, "Newspapers are dead, novels are not," and Bell agreed, "They just change platforms." (Clearly, these people ignore Scott Turow and don't realize that literature! is! dying! Good for them.)

Espenson also described "a growing hunger for content" with video. Which is interesting, because the podcast people said pretty much the same thing about audio, and it's also true about books--you will never be able to produce content as quickly as the audience can consume it.

Creating vs. receiving

You may recollect that, when I first tried to figure out what kind of book Trang was, I failed miserably. I thought it was "fun action adventure!" which it was clearly not. And I'm not the only one who has had these problems.

I mentioned this difficulty once to my sister, specifically this notion that Trang was fun action adventure. She immediately said, "What? Oh, no. I could see why maybe it was that way to write, but to read? No."

I've been watching The IT Crowd, which is excellent. One episode, "Something Happened," really applied here: In the episode, an IT guy named Roy (who is vaguely social and is played by Bridesmaid's Chris O'Dowd) confesses to another IT guy, Moss (who totally has Asperger's and is played by Richard Ayoade), that when he got a massage, the male masseuse ended the session by smooching him on the fanny.

Roy was quite traumatized by this and is afraid to tell anyone because he is terrified that people will find it funny. Of course, the audience did and does and always will. Roy confesses all this to Moss, who stares at him, without responding, for what O'Dowd later describes as a "giant pause." The longer Moss pauses, the funnier the scene becomes, because the audience is just waiting for him to start laughing. It's completely on par with the schawarma scene in The Avengers--the longer the silence lasts, the funnier it becomes.

Buuuuuuut...if you watch the blooper reel, you discover (8:12) that the giant pause was because O'Dowd forgot that the next line was his.

So, if you're O'Dowd, that episode is "The one where I totally blew it, and they left the mistake in to keep me humble, I guess." If you're the viewer, it's "The episode where Ayoade proves, without a doubt, that he is the on the same level as Gene Wilder as a comic-pause genius!!!"

You just never know. Everyone totally loves the scenes in Trust that are told from the point of view of an alien, and yet I was very nervous about those scenes, because they're such a departure from the rest of the book. But even though I was nervous about it, I went for it. I think you have to, because what people really love about, say, The Avengers is the weird, quirky shit--the schawarma--not the fact that it's a competent action movie.

Telenovelas

This is an article in the Wall Street Journal about how streaming video is changing viewing habits. Turns out, if you make a television show more like a novel, people treat it like a novel!

The urge to sustain that inner experience leads you to press "play" on the next episode, and the one after that—the equivalent of the book you can't put down.

But that's not the only similarity--there's a lot of parallels on an industry level. As we're seeing with e-books, people are rediscovering old titles. 24, Lost, and Prison Break are all popular on Netflix, and of course they're bringing back Arrested Development.

This is a big change for television. The way you used to watch old shows was in syndicated reruns, which worked better with stand-alone shows. (Law & Order was developed specifically so that it could be broken into two 30-minute shows for syndication.) Streaming, however, turns all that on its head.

As with the company's other original series, all 10 new "Arrested Development" episodes will go up for streaming at the same time. [Show creator Mitch] Hurwitz is sure some fans will devour the entire five hours in one sitting. "It's throwing me," he says.

His solution was to build each new episode around one character. The stories in all 10 episodes unfold simultaneously, overlapping here and there. Unlike writing a traditional sitcom, Mr. Hurwitz says, "we're sort of driving into the next episode rather than wrapping things up."

It also means that people aren't necessarily watching the ads, which is seen more as a problem in the industry. But just like with e-books, the fact that television shows don't "expire" any more allows an audience to build in a powerful way.

In a speech [Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted] Sarandos made in April to the National Association of Broadcasters, whose members worry that services like Netflix are cannibalizing the audience for ad-supported TV, he joked about looking for a trap door under his podium. He then cited the 800,000 subscribers who watched "every minute" of "Mad Men" season four on Netflix, arguing that those viewers likely flocked to the season-five premiere on AMC, whose audience grew by 21% over the year before.

AMC President Charlie Collier says, "With 'Mad Men' and 'Breaking Bad,' each year has been better [in the ratings] than the year prior, and that's not the norm in historic TV-watching trends."

In addition, weird shows are building audiences. Two notably "sticky" shows (i.e. shows where people tend to watch all the episodes) on Netflix are an Australian drama (McLeod's Daughters) and a South Korean soap opera (Shining Inheritance).

(And the fact that Netflix knows all that about viewing habits reminds me of how your e-book knows how you read it....)

Throwing Occam's razor

This is a post from my old blog, written in 2008. I'm posting it again because I recently saw a play in which somebody had clearly gone to great efforts to rationalize a very unsatisfying story ending in a highly intellectual way, and it didn't make the story ending any less unsatisfying, nor any less essentially lazy. Also, some months after I posted this, I read an interview with one of the Lost writers, in which he parroted the New York Times article almost word-for-word--you could practically see the thought process: "Thank God! Someone's come up with a plausible-sounding excuse!"

Here's the post:

Ah, yes, the New York Times has this long article about how the television show Lost makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. (I stopped watching about halfway through the first season for this very reason, even though the show had some very fine individual episodes.)

And there's all this philosophical rigmarole about how the show rejects the very notion of resolution. So the incoherence isn't really incoherence: the show is sooo deep it goes beyond coherence; it's coherent on a level that you and I and everyone else who has ever watched it cannot possibly grasp, just like real life! Oh, please. Sometimes you'll hear this kind of thing trotted out when something has a really unsatisfying ending--real life doesn't tie up neatly, so why should fiction?

Let me let you in on a little secret: It's hard to write something coherent. It's also hard to create a really satisfying ending. Whenever anyone starts telling you that real life BLAH BLAH BLAH, what they are really saying is, This is hard, and I am lazy. The writers of Lost cash equally large paychecks whether the show makes any sense or not--why should they do it the hard way?

Self-knowledge: Good for real people, bad for fictional people

I am of the generation that discovered the television show Beverly Hills 90210: No, Not the New One--Shut Up and Get Off My Lawn. This was back when TV shows were all basically produced by the big networks, and as a result they tended to be very bland and predictable, because they were geared toward not offending anybody.

In contrast, the first season of 90210 was delightfully shocking. For example, you had a character named Kelly, who was super-duper popular. Why was she popular? Because she lost her virginity at the age of 14, when she was a freshman, and the guy she lost it to was a senior. She wielded this fact like a cudgel--you're telling her what to do? Well, honey, are you so hot that you lost your virginity at age 14 to a senior? Guess not!

Trust me, at that time, nooooooobody was suggesting in a teen-oriented show that having sex could make you popular in high school, especially if the guys you were having sex with were a lot older. Of course, out in real life, it certainly could, and everyone knew it, but they weren't supposed to admit that on television.

90210 became very popular, at which point they toned it way down and I stopped watching it.

The episode that made me realize that this show was no longer worth my time was one with Emily Valentine. She was Brendan's psycho stalker ex-girlfriend, who started out as bad news and spiraled down into more and more insane behavior. Finally she doused a homecoming float with gasoline and sat on it with a lighter. Dun-dun-duuuhhh!

And then not only did she decide not to make Emily Flambé, but she proceeded to launch into this lengthy analysis of why she was so unstable. (Her family moved a lot.)

OK. Say, you're emotionally unstable. You've been unstable for quite a while. Your instability is making you screw things up, and which is making you even crazier. Finally you get ready to commit suicide by setting yourself on fire.

You are not in a position to analyze why you are acting this way, OK? You are too unwell. You might understand intellectually that what you are doing is harmful, but you don't understand the forces that drive you to harm yourself, at least not in a helpful way. Maybe after therapy and perhaps medication, and once you get some distance on events, maybe then you can sort out all the whys and wherefores--but not in the red-hot moment.

It's contrivance. In 90210 it was that safe, pedagogical approach to teen fare--you can't have someone do harmful things without turning it into a "The More You Know" moment, otherwise all the parents' groups will accuse you of glorifying bad behavior. I recently read a novel where, despite the fact that it was set in the 19th century, all the characters exposit (constantly) about their family and their interactions exactly the way people who have been through a lot of therapy in the 21st century do. That's also contrivance--historically-inaccurate contrivance.

These kinds of contrivances suck away all the drama. It's not just that having all your characters prattle on about how their father and their brother and their mother and their sister and their cousin and their brother-in-law and their dog all interact now and have interacted at every point in the past is dull--although it's certainly that. It's that Emily Valentine was all better. She was 100% fine--no need to worry about her any more! She's never going to do anything bad again! Please don't care! It's very, very difficult to relate to someone who has a mental-health hotline in their head that will magically call them at any stressful moment in their life and make sure they never, ever do the wrong thing.

Which is not the same as saying a character can't grow and become more stable--but it's a process, and circumstances have to be right. In Lois McMasters Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, Mark Vorkosigan does this pretty convincingly: He is given a very robust support network, it takes a lot of time, and he's never without his hang-ups. The very fragility and imperfection of his recovery is emotionally engaging. He isn't just bonked on the head by the Contrivance Fairy's wand and magically made all better the way Emily Valentine was.

Be careful what you wish for

I blew off writing Trials today--this is typical for me, I always take a little time to actually start. Instead I finished reading The Passive Voice archives (I told you I was addicted--now, the withdrawal will have to begin).

There were two good entries about blowing off work, so you know, at least it's all thematically connected. The first provides an actual scientific-sounding name for why I have a blog: The Hawthorne Effect. Basically it's the strategy of forcing yourself to tell people that you're slacking off, in the theory that the humiliation will make you slack off less.

Proof that the Hawthorne Effect doesn't always work? A different post about the Internet controversy over George R.R. Martin's work habits. God help me, I find the whole thing hilarious. My feeling about ANY Internet controversy is that 99% of the people flaming away have absolutely no skin in the game and are just doing it for the fun of it. (For the record, I haven't read Martin, either. These kinds of sprawling fantasy epics are so popular that a lot of writers just churn out 600-page books that are 550 pages of boring filler, followed by a 50-page cliffhanger designed to make you buy the next book, so I'm very skeptical of them.)

But to take that impulse to just force a writer to write seriously for a moment: There's actually a real problem with making writers work on a series or book that they don't want to do anymore. And that happens all the time--when a series gets popular, publishers want only books in that series. Had another idea that excites you? Too damned bad! The only thing you can get paid to do is to crank out volume 230 in the Will This DIE Already? series.

That's the reason most series degenerate over time. To use a television example: I'm a huge Joss Whedon fan, and I think season 7 of Buffy should not have happened, because he was clearly done with it before it ended. As it was airing, I was at a party with a bunch of other Buffy fans, and they were all complaining about how awful that season was turning out to be. Yet, they all categorically refused to watch Whedon's new-and-very-good show Firefly, because it was going to be Buffy or it was going to be nothing, and damn that Whedon fellow to hell if he was trying to do something that actually interested him! I was amazed, because they seemed to have no comprehension that there was a person behind all this, and that person might get a little tired of writing the same story for seven freaking years.

But the worst is definitely what happened to P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster books. The early books are great: Bertie Wooster is a young, upper-class British man who, although not unintelligent, always manages to get himself "in the soup" thanks to a certain obtuseness. (For example, he believes that if a woman erroneously believes that you have proposed marriage to her, the gentlemanly thing to do is to marry her, even if you really, really don't want to. Otherwise you might hurt her feelings.) Jeeves saves the day eventually, but it's not easy for him.

The later books are horrible--Wodehouse had clearly come to hate his characters (and I'm sure, his readers) with a fiery passion. Bertie is now simply a moron--barely intelligent enough to breathe. Jeeves disappears for most of the book, only to appear at the end having magically resolved every last little problem. The contempt and resentment are palpable.

I really wish the creative process worked differently. I'm not proud of taking forever to edit Trust: I have a strong work ethic, and it annoys the piss out of me when I can't get going on something. But it's not like making widgets, or even like cranking out X many earnings briefs per day. You just have to respect it, because the results when you don't are never pretty.

Plots and premises

So, I've got a couple of days before the kids descend again--I may edit, or I may just enjoy the novelty of peace and quiet. Anyway, I've been watching Battlestar Galactica--yes, yes, I know I'm behind the times with this one, but better late than never, right? Anyway, I'm most of the way through season 2, and it has given me food for thought on why plots are so important.

If you look at Wikipedia's definition of an A plot, you'll see that it's job is to drive the story--and believe me, stories need to be driven. Battlestar Galactica's premise is what's contained in the opening credits: The remnants of humanity are hunted by the Cylons as they search for a new home called Earth.

That's a premise. That's not a plot. The A plot for the first 1-1/3 seasons of Battlestar Galactica is that the humans find Kobol, which points them toward Earth. This is not a simple process, because the whole Kobol-will-lead-to-Earth contingent is lead by a person who is actively hallucinating, and there's a whole other you-are-a-nutbar contingent, which is equally if not more powerful.

Now I'm, oh, about another third of the way through the second season, and we no longer have an A plot. We just have a premise. And if you're like me and you like novels as well as television shows that are novel-like, the drop-off in quality is just painful. It's not only that the episodes suddenly stand alone, it's the contrivance necessary to create the emotional resonance that came organically in the first 1-1/3 seasons. Did you know that Apollo had a pregnant girlfriend, who he betrayed? That there's this Cylon raider named Scar who has been devastating the Viper pilots? That there's a huge black market on the fleet, dominated by someone who has been with it less than a month? All these things are introduced in single episode, and a HUGE deal is made of them, despite the fact that we've never heard anything about them before. It reminds me of the bad old days of network television, where a major character would fall in love, get engaged, and break of the engagement/watch their fiance die all within 40 minutes. Then six months later they would do it all again with somebody else, because it was assumed that television viewers were too stupid to care.

The nice thing about having a single big A plot drive the action is that events have a built-in emotional resonance, because they are somehow associated with this big idea. Hopefully that idea is important enough to make the audience care, but at least you only have to puff up one plotline, instead of having the characters gnash their teeth and rend their garments over a brand-new idea every freaking episode.

Editing away

Today I did some more editing of chapter 2 (including some background material that it was obvious was confusing the writers group) and edited chapter 3 and most of chapter 4. I'm now a little concerned that all the background material is delaying us from getting to the A plot, but we'll see--I've done some compressing and may do more. Feedback from people who have read Trang also may help, but it's also important for me to remember that this is all going to be a big compromise.

Yesterday I didn't do jack, because the night before last I didn't sleep. I have the occasional sleepless night, as well as the periods where I will switch off between not sleeping and sleeping, like, 14 hours at a stretch. That's always really annoying, because writing is not busy work--if I'm tired or sick or hungover, I just can't do it very well (although sometimes I'm actually better at copy editing if I'm tired and just a little cranky).

I wound up watching most of Samurai Champloo. Heh-heh-heh. I lovelovelove Cowboy Bebop (which is by the same director), and I had been warned that Samurai Champloo lacked the character depth of that show. And that's true--it's also much more R-rated, with, say, an entire episode taking place in a brothel and revolving a character's unsuccessful attempts to get laid by a geisha who is actually an undercover police officer. (The first time she beats him up, he's so horny/dumb that he thinks it's "the rough stuff"--and he likes it!) But I love it, I just love it--I have enough of a frat-boy sense of humor that the crudeness doesn't bother me, plus it just hits the right WTF? note for me. I don't mind anachronistic beatboxing any more than I minded The 1970s Blaxplotation Planet or how the crew was hunted down by some old leftovers in Cowboy Bebop. It's funny because I definitely have a tipping point on that kind of randomness--I really didn't enjoy FLCL because the whole thing was just, Hey, that doesn't make any sense! But if it makes emotional sense (which the beatboxing does) or is just a funny add-on to an otherwise coherent story, I don't mind it a bit.