• Deadwood remains my favorite-ever show, though it was clearly less successful than any of Klosterman’s four.
• That ”the ultimate takeaway from The Wire was more political than philosophical” is a point in its favor, and David Simon’s critique of institutions is one of the most politically complex and philosophically interesting (and entertaining) things to ever appear on television.
• Breaking Bad is fantastic, but also unbearable to watch. I only just brought myself to finish Season 3 last week. If it were a feature, it would have released some tension by now. It never releases tension.
• The holy top tier is very boy, although The Sopranos has vital female characters and Mad Men’s are arguably more central to its purpose than its men. I think there’s a case that Six Feet Under doesn’t make this cut because of sexist bias.

Still, he’s right about the dazzling central feature of Breaking Bad, which is that Walter White is long past the sly gray area that Weedsinhabited for its first three seasons (so, I gather, is Nancy Botwin). Plenty of people have died because of Walter’s actions who didn’t have to; not only has his cost to society vastly outweighed the benefit of providing for his family, he no longer even has those personal stakes: he’s both beat his cancer into remission and racked up enough cash to serve that initial purpose.

But I don’t think Klosterman’s exactly right in his conclusion:

There’s a scene in Breaking Bad‘s first season in which Walter White’s hoodrat lab assistant Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) tells Walter he just can’t “break bad,” and — when you first hear this snippet of dialogue — you assume what Jesse means is that you can’t go from being a law-abiding chemistry teacher to an underground meth cooker. It seems like he’s telling White that he can’t start breaking the law after living a life in which laws were always obeyed, and that a criminal lifestyle is not something you can join like a club. His advice seems pragmatic, and it almost feels like an artless way to shoehorn the show’s title into the script. But this, it turns out, was not Jesse’s point at all. What he was arguing was that someone can’t “decide” to morph from a good person into a bad person, because there’s a firewall within our personalities that makes this impossible. He was arguing that Walter’s nature would stop him from being bad, and that Walter would fail if tried to complete this conversation. But Jesse was wrong. He was wrong, because goodness and badness are simply complicated choices, no different than anything else.

In the world of Breaking Bad, this argument applies more to Jesse than it does to Walter. Jesse is capable of horrible acts, but tortured by them; without Walter’s guidance, he’s a knucklehead, not an evildoer.

But Walter is native here, and to the manner born. Or at least sculpted long ago. Walter has a pulsing vein of barely tamped-down rage that cancer slices open like a box cutter on a vein. His boss at the car wash, the old friend who purportedly cheated him out of millions, his existence — something about the impersonality of cancer brings out something in Walter that is ready for bad and has no need of breaking.

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A 13-year-old was served an order banning him from using the word “grass” anywhere in England and Wales.

…

In February 2003, a 16-year-old boy was banned from showing his tattoos, wearing a single golf glove, or wearing a balaclava in public anywhere in the country.

…

A 26-year-old West Lothian man has been made the subject of an ASBO after playing the Band Aid single “Do they know it’s Christmas” dozens of times daily to the annoyance of neighbours. He has been banned from “playing loud music, stamping his feet and dropping objects.”

And my personal favorite:

The oldest recipient of an order to date is an 87-year-old who among other things is forbidden from being sarcastic to his neighbours.

All under Labour governments! Just imagine what the Tories will do.

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The trend right now for hiring in television is towards original material (“pilots”) rather than sample episodes of existing shows (“specs”). However, most of the writers’ fellowships still require specs. I think this is a good thing; I think it’s important to master a spec episode of an existing show before attempting a pilot, even if agents, managers and showrunners are less interested in reading specs right now. Even if you’re not planning to enter a script in one of the fellowships, I still recommend writing a spec of a show you love. Hopefully this advice will be helpful.

Generally, my scores broke down like this:

1 – 1.5: wildly long or short, incorrectly formatted, poor command of structure or dialogue.

2: Adequate but not special.

2.5: If a comedy, made me laugh; if a drama, didn’t bore me. Dialogue was crisp and right for the characters, conflict was present.

3: An enjoyable episode of television. Conflict came from characters and wasn’t too clichéd.

3.5-4: Made me laugh, kept me riveted, most of all, made me care.

Note that starting with scores of 2, I’m not listing deficits. You may have written a spec that does everything technically right — may even be as good as a sample episode of that show. You may have written clear, believable dialogue and internalized important rules about structure, but to get a second reading from a stack of 1100, you’ll need to go a step beyond. Here’s my advice:

The basics. Your script is formatted correctly and in Courier. You’ve not only used spell-check, but you’ve read your dialogue out loud and double-checked your they’re/their/theres. Your Final Draft revisions aren’t showing. Your cover page is attached. Your action writing is active: “Jane chops potatoes” is always superior to “Jane is chopping potatoes,” even if she’s in the middle of it when we enter the scene. Your script is of the correct length. (Note on length: the page-per-minute dictum shouldn’t be taken too literally. A 22-page half-hour single-cam will usually be short a turn in the plot. Keep single-cam 1/2-hours around 30 and hours under 60.)

Use guest stars sparingly. Guest stars are necessary in some shows, especially procedurals, but use them sparingly or not at all. The best use of a guest star is to reveal something about the regular characters. Have your guest star generate a conflict — say, two regular cast members fighting over a common romantic object, or taking opposite sides in a case. I know you can invent a neat character; I’ll be more impressed if your character draws out something I know about the regular cast that I haven’t seen before, and most impressed if you can create a new situation without using a new character at all.

Skin in the game. This is especially important for procedurals. I read many episodes where the case was interesting and the mystery wasn’t obvious, but that alone wouldn’t earn more than a 2.5, even if it was totally in keeping with a typical episode. But you don’t want to write a typical episode — you want to write a standout episode that shows us how deep you can go. Why is this case important to this detective (or fiction novelist, serial killer with a code, human lie detector, etc. etc.)? Is his family at risk? Are his most cherished beliefs challenged? Show me something more.

Funny isn’t enough. Jokes need to be rooted in the characters, how they understand the world, and how this puts them into conflict with those around them.

Use theme. It’s better to be heavy on this than light: have your A- and B- (and C- and D-) plots echo each other on the level of  theme. The episode will feel more substantial.

Since I started drafting this entry, I had the pleasure of meeting the new class. I had read two of the scripts by program participants, and had given both scores of 3.5. The comedy script was notable for converging plotlines in which the interaction between the A- and B-plot resulted in steadily heightened emotional stakes, and created high-tension humor rooted in the characters’ conflicts. The drama that got in stood out because the protagonist had “skin in the game” — solving the case required him to face aspects of his past that were brought to light realistically and painfully. Good luck!

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Since Rachel introduced her project with a suggestion that her audience might not have all the necessary film vocabulary to appreciate her project, I was prepared for some kind of winking acknowledgement of That Obscure Object of Desire (previously here). But instead, Rachel’s advanced film knowledge was just a jokey reference to her use of bad iMovie effects, and everybody got mad at her for showing how many boys she had revolving around her.

I thought it was cool. Buñuel vs Lea Michele! ¿Quien es mas macho?

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First, Groff on Glee. Speaking as a straight man experienced in the ways of high school musical theater, talented musical theater high school boys are pretty fucking queer. We haven’t quite learned the ways of conventional masculinity, which leaves us freer to express ourselves on stage but also never terribly persuasive as leading men. My h.s. drama apotheosis was playing Henry Higgins, who as an educated British man is queer enough. My other big lead role was as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, for which I played up my shrimpiness and probably put a little too much Yid inflection on So Sue Me. Frank Sinatra was a subtler Nathan. The romantic lead role, Sky Masterson, was played with much more convincing masculinity in that production by a boy who was out to a few friends even back in 10th grade.

Groff’s high school champion vocal stylist carries an ineluctable whiff of queer? We all did. Chalk a point for verisimilitude.

Missing from the article is any sense that a little queerness might give an actor some performance-inflecting insight into the crude construction of straightness. Missing is any nuance whatsoever into the last-legs binary of gay and straight at this fragile historical moment. America loves Glee, people. “Straight” is in decline. For the killing blow, look to the straightest man on television, How I Met Your Mother‘s Barney Stinson, played by America’s number one gay, Neil Patrick Harris. Harris’s Barney, a priapic epicure, is as much a straight man as the leads of Absolutely Fabulous were straight women.

This will be a hard lesson for the 27 members of Facebook’s Barney Stinson is NOT gay! group to learn. Their cri de coeur after the jump.

Now obviosly i dont mean barney the character…im on about Neil Harris, the guy that plays him…a.k.a Doogie Howser. Whilst (now keep this secret) he is actually gay, and there is nothing wrong with that blah blah blah…i know i’m not the only guy who died a little inside when i found out he was in fact a barbara streisand fan.

Why didn’t he just take a leaf out of the stinsons book and say something like “When I’m about to be gay, I just stop being gay and be awesome instead”…thats a direct quote…of me..that i just made up. True Story.

So anyways, yeah he loves a bit of johnson in his private life, fair play to him…..BUT, for our own sakes, just to keep up the pretence that Barney is not a character, he supercedes TV, he exists, he is a hero to bro’s/wingmen everywhere and just awesomes all over the place wherever he is, can we just pretend none of us know he gardens uphill and is hetro bro…a Hebrosexual so to speak.

Now who’s with me?….Hetrosexual 5…..PSSHHH!

Clearly, if these fellows can “pretend none of us know he gardens uphill”, Ramin Setoodeh can do at least that much until he comes to some more expansive understanding of sex.

UPDATE: Setoodeh mentions Neil Patrick Harris in his article, saying that he and Portia de Rossi “inhabit broad caricatures, not realistic characters likes the ones in Up in the Air or even The Proposal.” Approaching, but still missing, the point.

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Remember when Friday Night Lights went nuts and had Landry murder a dude? Skins just went that route only worse, having one of its main characters bludgeoned to death for no reason just before the final credits. This is a show I absolutely loved in its first two series, still thought was okay in its third year, and that now has definitively gone off the rails. Gone are all deeply funny and weird moments (like Osama! the Musical) that balanced out the human-scale tragedies that the show never shied from. Now every character has a pathology in place of a personality and there’s barely any meaningful interaction among them. How is it possible to run out of ideas so quickly when you only have to make eight to ten episodes a year?

And they’re making another two seasons, no less. Help us.

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The source of all the anguish? Chuck kissed a girl other than Sarah, and Sarah got a back rub from Clark Kent.

Look, I remember hanging out on the Television Without Pity boards and complaining at great length about the last 1.5 seasons of Gilmore Girls, and I’ve ranted myself about the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, so I’m not one to deny fans the right to get upset at their favorite TV shows.

Here, though, I think we have a clear case of shippers gone berserk. No, this week’s episode of Chuck was not particularly good, but the season up until now has continued last year’s strong run. (We got Buy More Fight Club and Captain Awesome on a mission. That’s pretty good right there.) It reminds me of all the people on the TWoP boards who weren’t so much upset that the new showrunner in Gilmore Girls season 7 turned Lorelei into a simpering, inarticulate freak as they were that she married Chris instead of Luke. But as long as the characters remain reasonably true to themselves and the writers are telling good story, who the hell cares how they’re paired up?

The sad thing is that Chuck is such a marginally rated show that even the defection of a small, crazy segment of its audience could doom its chances for a fourth season.

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She may not have been lucky in love on the “Jersey Shore,” but Snooki has found herself a man – and he’s just her type.

“He is just like my typical guido juicehead with like a good personality,” Nicole (Snooki) Polizzi told RadarOnline. …
He is freaking banging.”

Can somebody maybe write a zombie movie called “Juiceheads?” I would probably watch it.

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Storyboard TV, an online community of scriptwriters, producers, and tv enthusiasts, launched its website this week with a script competition awarding $5,000 to the writer with the best pilot for a television drama. At storyboardtv.com, writers can share scripts for original shows with their potential audience members, while soliciting feedback and gauging enthusiasm for their story. Membership to Storyboard TV is free and open to all, and all members will be able to read, critique, and vote on their favorite pilots.

More about Storyboard TV:
Storyboard TV believes in the power of the television drama to document, enhance, and transform people’s lives for the better. Storyboard TV’s mission is to move show selection and pre-production away from the networks and directly to the web. Established in 2009, Storyboard TV endeavors to cultivate new writers and TV scripts, to nurture the connection between the scriptwriter and the fan, and to shepherd new television drama into production during the Internet age.

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