There’s only one John Motson, and, with the BBC losing the FA Cup rights to ITV, this could be his last Cup Final appearance. It’s a sad day for us armchair fans – Motty has taken us on a “rollercoaster ride” over the years. So sometimes he makes the odd “Motty-cism”. And sometimes he stretches too far in his attempt to explain – Motty-phors? But, more often than not, he finds the right words, the bon mots, the “bon Motsons”, you could say.
So sit back and take an armchair stroll up Wembley Way with five classic Cup Final commentary moments from Motty and friends, says Chris Condron...
Manchester United v Liverpool, 1977 (2-1)
The year of Motty’s most famous scripted ad lib, “How fitting that a man named Buchan should climb the 39 steps,” a line that proves the two Golden Rules of Commentating, and why the second always takes precedence over the first.
1 Do your research.
2 Know when to keep your mouth shut.
But nearly half the nation missed it because, back in the days of Spangles and Raleigh Choppers, the powers-that-be decided that there wasn’t enough football on the telly, so we had the Cup Final on ITV, too.
Three channels, with the Cup Final on two of them. What’s not to love?
ITV’s own man with the mike was Brian Moore, a man equally capable of both brilliance and, well, talking absolute balls. He teamed up for Cup Final duty here with Jack Charlton, who was the special Statement of the Bleedin’ Obvious correspondent.
Tottenham Hotspur v Manchester City (replay), 1981 (3-2)
It’s easy to mock Motty, but he has the gift of saying exactly what most of us are thinking. If you don’t believe me, go into a Man City pub and shout, “And still Ricky Villa!” in your best Motty. In those four words, Motty articulates the gnawing, inevitable, time-standing-still, “He’s going to go all the way . . .” feeling as the Argentine twists and turns the City defence before slipping the ball under Joe Corrigan to win one of the great Cup Finals.
Coventry City v Tottenham Hotspur, 1987 (3-2)
This one’s got it all. Goals, fairytale stories, more Motty-phors than you could shake a mike at . . . and the “Cov” management duo of John Sillett and George Curtis hugging and gurning like a pair of toby jugs on a massive Ecstasy bender. Oh yes, and ELO’s Mr Blue Sky.
A trio of classic Motty quotes is shoehorned in among the sky-blue madness – none of them meant literally, you hope: “Keith Houchen, the man with the Midas touch in the FA Cup, strikes gold for Coventry.”
“Houchen has written his name all over the competition this season.” “The Sky Blues are sky high.”
Wimbledon v Liverpool, 1988 (1-0)
This game features textbook Motty in his pomp, as the great man delivers the classic commentary one-two – a killer line . . . and an impression of Yoda.
“The Crazy Gang have beaten the Culture Club!” is the perfect example of the commentator’s art. Hardly finger-on-the-pulse from the sheepskin-coated one – Culture Club hadn’t had a No 1 hit in five years – but who would have remembered a reference to Fairground Attraction?
Jimmy Hill neatly sums up Liverpool’s season as “The club that played just one game too many,” before Motty goes all Return of the Jedi in the spring sunshine.
“Champions they are, nobody will deny them . . . but double winners this time they are not.”
Liverpool v West Ham, 2006 (3-3, Liverpool won on penalties)
Another contender for Best Cup Final Ever features Sky’s Andy Gray turning the hyperbole up to 11 and beyond. Though not strictly a commentator – the superb Martin Tyler holds the mike – Andy’s more of a really shouty bloke at chucking out time who’s going to do his prostate a mischief. He explains the effort needed to win a game, albeit in rather Norman Tebbit-esque style: “If you want a goal, you get on your bike.”
Saturday 17 May 2008
Ronson and the Reverend Death
The journalist and documentary-maker Jon Ronson has interviewed some, to say the very least, curious characters. Among his interviewees for his 2001 Channel 4 series Secret Rulers of the World, for example, was the conspiracy theorist David Icke, who informed Ronson that the planet was run by a race of shape-shifting extraterrestrial lizards. But Reverend George Exoo may be Ronson’s most perplexing subject yet.
Exoo, who we’ll meet in Ronson’s unsettling documentary Reverend Death (Channel 4, Monday, 10.00pm) is a Unitarian pastor in West Virginia, USA who helps people to commit suicide. Not people who are terminally ill. People who simply don’t want to go on living. He advises them on ways to go about killing themselves: what pills to use and so on. Often he’s present when they go through with it. He says he’s helped more than a hundred people die. Ronson first heard of Exoo in 2002, when a producer friend alerted him to a news story from Ireland. A woman, Rosemary Toole, had been found dead in her Dublin house, and the police believed it was a case of assisted suicide. Their suspect was Exoo, and they applied to have him extradited from the US to stand trial. In Ireland the sentence for assisted suicide is up to 14 years in prison. In the US the law is foggy: assisted suicide is not a crime in 25 of the 50 states.
Exoo’s activities may sound repugnant. But Ronson says that, when he set out to make the film, he intended it to be supportive of Exoo. ‘I was going through a bit of a libertarian phase,’ he says. ‘The Irish prosecutors seemed very draconian. It looked black-and-white to me: surely everybody has the right to end their life. So my first thought was that it would be nice to do something quite positive.’ You couldn’t exactly say that was how it turned out. Ronson found himself repeatedly changing his views about what Exoo does. Some friends of Ronson’s who have already seen the film say they don’t think Exoo comes across at all well. Having seen it myself, says Michael Deacon, I think Exoo’s a creep. But, at least initially, Ronson liked him: ‘He was funny – he had that camp sort of humour, black humour.’
Well, his humour would have to be black, wouldn’t it? In a bit of film that didn’t get used, Exoo drove for six hours through heavy snow to meet a woman called Molly who’d asked him to help her kill herself. Exoo arrived at her house but nobody appeared to be in. So he drove all the way home again. He later learned she’d already killed herself. The pastor’s response to this news, Ronson says, was to look ‘rueful and amused – he’d gone all that way…’ Exoo, Ronson adds, appears not to see any inconsistency in his own beliefs. Exoo is a man of God, yet he’s helping people die. ‘He’s certainly not ashamed of what he does, he’s proud of it,’ says Ronson. ‘He sees himself as Mother Teresa. Consequently he was never worried about telling us any of this stuff. There was only one moment, in 50-60 hours’ worth of filming, where he said, “I don’t want you to use that bit”.’
Ronson may have liked Exoo on a personal level, but, as the documentary shows, the ethics of what Exoo does are, at the very least, problematic. And Exoo isn’t the only one providing this type of ‘service’. Ronson says there’s a ‘euthanasia underground’, and that ‘it’s a complete mess’. Viewers will see how in the film.
Making Reverend Death – which took around six years, on and off – was the most stressful and emotionally draining job Ronson has done: ‘It’s not been enjoyable, really,’ he says. It’s in sharp contrast to his most recently broadcast work: Journey to the Other Side, a documentary about UFOs he made for Radio 4 with the pop star Robbie Williams. "That was a blessed relief, because that was easy," says Ronson. "Part of me thinks that in the end you should just do things that people enjoy, bringing happiness and laughter to the audience instead of misery. Robbie just approached me and said he was a fan of Them [Ronson’s bestselling book about conspiracy theorists] and said, you know, 'Let’s have paranormal adventures like Mulder and Scully.’"
All the same, Ronson is proud of Reverend Death. "I think the film’s big achievement is learning that this kind of euthanasia underground exists and showing how it operates," he says. "There are some above-board “right to die” campaign groups who will secretly refer people to George. If a mentally ill person phones up and says, 'Will you help me to die?', the group will say no. But if they keep phoning back, as mentally ill people are kind of wont to do, the group will say, 'Well, you might want to phone George Exoo…' It’s extraordinary."
Reverend Death is on Monday on Channel 4 at 10.00pm
Exoo, who we’ll meet in Ronson’s unsettling documentary Reverend Death (Channel 4, Monday, 10.00pm) is a Unitarian pastor in West Virginia, USA who helps people to commit suicide. Not people who are terminally ill. People who simply don’t want to go on living. He advises them on ways to go about killing themselves: what pills to use and so on. Often he’s present when they go through with it. He says he’s helped more than a hundred people die. Ronson first heard of Exoo in 2002, when a producer friend alerted him to a news story from Ireland. A woman, Rosemary Toole, had been found dead in her Dublin house, and the police believed it was a case of assisted suicide. Their suspect was Exoo, and they applied to have him extradited from the US to stand trial. In Ireland the sentence for assisted suicide is up to 14 years in prison. In the US the law is foggy: assisted suicide is not a crime in 25 of the 50 states.
Exoo’s activities may sound repugnant. But Ronson says that, when he set out to make the film, he intended it to be supportive of Exoo. ‘I was going through a bit of a libertarian phase,’ he says. ‘The Irish prosecutors seemed very draconian. It looked black-and-white to me: surely everybody has the right to end their life. So my first thought was that it would be nice to do something quite positive.’ You couldn’t exactly say that was how it turned out. Ronson found himself repeatedly changing his views about what Exoo does. Some friends of Ronson’s who have already seen the film say they don’t think Exoo comes across at all well. Having seen it myself, says Michael Deacon, I think Exoo’s a creep. But, at least initially, Ronson liked him: ‘He was funny – he had that camp sort of humour, black humour.’
Well, his humour would have to be black, wouldn’t it? In a bit of film that didn’t get used, Exoo drove for six hours through heavy snow to meet a woman called Molly who’d asked him to help her kill herself. Exoo arrived at her house but nobody appeared to be in. So he drove all the way home again. He later learned she’d already killed herself. The pastor’s response to this news, Ronson says, was to look ‘rueful and amused – he’d gone all that way…’ Exoo, Ronson adds, appears not to see any inconsistency in his own beliefs. Exoo is a man of God, yet he’s helping people die. ‘He’s certainly not ashamed of what he does, he’s proud of it,’ says Ronson. ‘He sees himself as Mother Teresa. Consequently he was never worried about telling us any of this stuff. There was only one moment, in 50-60 hours’ worth of filming, where he said, “I don’t want you to use that bit”.’
Ronson may have liked Exoo on a personal level, but, as the documentary shows, the ethics of what Exoo does are, at the very least, problematic. And Exoo isn’t the only one providing this type of ‘service’. Ronson says there’s a ‘euthanasia underground’, and that ‘it’s a complete mess’. Viewers will see how in the film.
Making Reverend Death – which took around six years, on and off – was the most stressful and emotionally draining job Ronson has done: ‘It’s not been enjoyable, really,’ he says. It’s in sharp contrast to his most recently broadcast work: Journey to the Other Side, a documentary about UFOs he made for Radio 4 with the pop star Robbie Williams. "That was a blessed relief, because that was easy," says Ronson. "Part of me thinks that in the end you should just do things that people enjoy, bringing happiness and laughter to the audience instead of misery. Robbie just approached me and said he was a fan of Them [Ronson’s bestselling book about conspiracy theorists] and said, you know, 'Let’s have paranormal adventures like Mulder and Scully.’"
All the same, Ronson is proud of Reverend Death. "I think the film’s big achievement is learning that this kind of euthanasia underground exists and showing how it operates," he says. "There are some above-board “right to die” campaign groups who will secretly refer people to George. If a mentally ill person phones up and says, 'Will you help me to die?', the group will say no. But if they keep phoning back, as mentally ill people are kind of wont to do, the group will say, 'Well, you might want to phone George Exoo…' It’s extraordinary."
Reverend Death is on Monday on Channel 4 at 10.00pm
Calling the tunes
Ahead of next Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest final, Sir Terry Wogan tells Michael Deacon why poor old Royaume-Uni may never triumph again...
Sir Terry Wogan must have ears of steel. The day before our interview, he watched the videos of every single entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. All 43 of them. It’s a test of endurance that would have reduced Hercules to a sobbing heap, but the BBC’s indefatigable commentator is in cheerful mood. “They say it isn’t over until the fat lady sings,” he says. “So the Portuguese entrant had better be on last. I thought Russia might win this year since Putin’s got nasty and we need the oil. Then I heard the song and thought, ‘...No’.”
He seems particularly amused by the French entry, Divine by Sébastian Tellier. There’s been uproar in France because its entry, for the first time, has English lyrics. The singer, Wogan notes, has a suspiciously large beard and long hair: “You see, he’s having to do it in disguise for his own safety.” Wogan has been providing the BBC’s commentary on Eurovision since 1971 – first on radio, then (since 1980) on BBC1. Next Saturday he’ll be in Belgrade in Serbia to cover the final; on Tuesday and Thursday this week, viewers of BBC3 can watch the semi-finals. These feature all the entrants except the holders Serbia, plus Spain, Germany, France and “Royaume-Uni”, ie the UK. Those four are Eurovision’s biggest financial contributors, so they go straight to the final. You see what integrity the competition has.
It’s hard to imagine Eurovision without Wogan’s dry (but, he says, affectionate) narration: he introduced the presenters of 2001’s contest in Denmark by crying, “Look, it’s Doctor Death and the Tooth Fairy.” Wogan is such a Euro-institution that he’s mentioned in this year’s Irish entry, Irelande Douze Pointe by Dustin the puppet turkey: one verse begins, “Drag acts and bad acts and Terry Wogan’s wig.” Wogan, I’m afraid, isn’t impressed: he says it’s daft to do a novelty song, as the joke will be meaningless to viewers “east of the Danube”, and because “you shouldn’t try to be funnier than the contest itself”. The “wig” reference clearly doesn’t delight him either: “That’s old hat,” he says.
Last year, the UK’s representatives Scooch finish 23rd out of 24. Wogan, who thought Scooch were terrible, says our song this time, 'Even If' by Andy Abraham, is “the best we’ve had in years”. But he adds that we shouldn’t necessarily expect it to do much better. “It would be a great result to finish in the top 10,” says Wogan. “Just to try to make up for the UK doing so badly in recent years.” He thinks the chances of a win for the UK – or any country in Western Europe – have become remote since the contest was expanded to include so many new states from Eastern Europe. Moldova, Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania... their viewers are bound to vote for each other’s countries. The last winner from the west was Denmark in 2000.
“What we need in the voting is an Iron Curtain,” he says, looking half-serious. “All the big countries in Western Europe – France, Germany, Spain, the UK, San Marino… They should unite just to give one of us a chance.” But even though the block voting frustrates him, he still loves the contest itself. He’s never once considered giving up the job because, he says, there’s always “some silly new thing that makes it worthwhile”. The ridiculousness of the local presenters, for example: one pair of hosts – funnily enough, it was “Doctor Death and the Tooth Fairy” – spoke solely in rhyming couplets. “A great idea,” says Wogan. “For the first link.”
Then there are the variety acts who perform during the interval. One year, it was a mime troupe. “I was doing it for the radio,” says Wogan. “Can you imagine? Fifteen minutes of clowns miming. Not a lot to talk about.” Thankfully, he always has sustenance to hand. “My producer and I used to have a rule: ‘No drinks until song 12’,” he says. “Now it’s song seven. Anyway, I only have Bailey’s Irish Cream – it’s not an alcoholic drink, it’s a dairy product.”
He’ll be 70 in August, but has no plans to retire: he says he’ll do so only when his family tell him he’s passed his peak, if they say, “Your timing’s half a beat off.” Timing is everything to him. He says he’d quit if Radio 2 were privatised and started running ad breaks: “The adverts would ruin my timing.” But, while he’s adamant that the BBC should never go private, he has his criticisms of it. “The BBC needs to contract,” he says. Contract how? By axing BBC3, say? “There would be a case for that – BBC3, BBC4, perhaps some of the digital radio stations, because the audiences aren’t discernible.”
Which is something you certainly can’t say about Eurovision. Nearly 11million in Britain watched last year’s final. And you can be sure they’ll keep watching, for as long as that warm but withering voice is there to guide them through Royaume-Uni’s latest debacle.
The Eurovision Song Contest 2008 is on BBC1 next Saturday, 24 May, at 8.00pm. The semi-finals are on BBC3 on Tuesday and Thursday of this week, at 8.00pm
Sir Terry Wogan must have ears of steel. The day before our interview, he watched the videos of every single entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. All 43 of them. It’s a test of endurance that would have reduced Hercules to a sobbing heap, but the BBC’s indefatigable commentator is in cheerful mood. “They say it isn’t over until the fat lady sings,” he says. “So the Portuguese entrant had better be on last. I thought Russia might win this year since Putin’s got nasty and we need the oil. Then I heard the song and thought, ‘...No’.”
He seems particularly amused by the French entry, Divine by Sébastian Tellier. There’s been uproar in France because its entry, for the first time, has English lyrics. The singer, Wogan notes, has a suspiciously large beard and long hair: “You see, he’s having to do it in disguise for his own safety.” Wogan has been providing the BBC’s commentary on Eurovision since 1971 – first on radio, then (since 1980) on BBC1. Next Saturday he’ll be in Belgrade in Serbia to cover the final; on Tuesday and Thursday this week, viewers of BBC3 can watch the semi-finals. These feature all the entrants except the holders Serbia, plus Spain, Germany, France and “Royaume-Uni”, ie the UK. Those four are Eurovision’s biggest financial contributors, so they go straight to the final. You see what integrity the competition has.
It’s hard to imagine Eurovision without Wogan’s dry (but, he says, affectionate) narration: he introduced the presenters of 2001’s contest in Denmark by crying, “Look, it’s Doctor Death and the Tooth Fairy.” Wogan is such a Euro-institution that he’s mentioned in this year’s Irish entry, Irelande Douze Pointe by Dustin the puppet turkey: one verse begins, “Drag acts and bad acts and Terry Wogan’s wig.” Wogan, I’m afraid, isn’t impressed: he says it’s daft to do a novelty song, as the joke will be meaningless to viewers “east of the Danube”, and because “you shouldn’t try to be funnier than the contest itself”. The “wig” reference clearly doesn’t delight him either: “That’s old hat,” he says.
Last year, the UK’s representatives Scooch finish 23rd out of 24. Wogan, who thought Scooch were terrible, says our song this time, 'Even If' by Andy Abraham, is “the best we’ve had in years”. But he adds that we shouldn’t necessarily expect it to do much better. “It would be a great result to finish in the top 10,” says Wogan. “Just to try to make up for the UK doing so badly in recent years.” He thinks the chances of a win for the UK – or any country in Western Europe – have become remote since the contest was expanded to include so many new states from Eastern Europe. Moldova, Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania... their viewers are bound to vote for each other’s countries. The last winner from the west was Denmark in 2000.
“What we need in the voting is an Iron Curtain,” he says, looking half-serious. “All the big countries in Western Europe – France, Germany, Spain, the UK, San Marino… They should unite just to give one of us a chance.” But even though the block voting frustrates him, he still loves the contest itself. He’s never once considered giving up the job because, he says, there’s always “some silly new thing that makes it worthwhile”. The ridiculousness of the local presenters, for example: one pair of hosts – funnily enough, it was “Doctor Death and the Tooth Fairy” – spoke solely in rhyming couplets. “A great idea,” says Wogan. “For the first link.”
Then there are the variety acts who perform during the interval. One year, it was a mime troupe. “I was doing it for the radio,” says Wogan. “Can you imagine? Fifteen minutes of clowns miming. Not a lot to talk about.” Thankfully, he always has sustenance to hand. “My producer and I used to have a rule: ‘No drinks until song 12’,” he says. “Now it’s song seven. Anyway, I only have Bailey’s Irish Cream – it’s not an alcoholic drink, it’s a dairy product.”
He’ll be 70 in August, but has no plans to retire: he says he’ll do so only when his family tell him he’s passed his peak, if they say, “Your timing’s half a beat off.” Timing is everything to him. He says he’d quit if Radio 2 were privatised and started running ad breaks: “The adverts would ruin my timing.” But, while he’s adamant that the BBC should never go private, he has his criticisms of it. “The BBC needs to contract,” he says. Contract how? By axing BBC3, say? “There would be a case for that – BBC3, BBC4, perhaps some of the digital radio stations, because the audiences aren’t discernible.”
Which is something you certainly can’t say about Eurovision. Nearly 11million in Britain watched last year’s final. And you can be sure they’ll keep watching, for as long as that warm but withering voice is there to guide them through Royaume-Uni’s latest debacle.
The Eurovision Song Contest 2008 is on BBC1 next Saturday, 24 May, at 8.00pm. The semi-finals are on BBC3 on Tuesday and Thursday of this week, at 8.00pm
Jerry's all gold
It's 10 years since Seinfeld - Larry David's magnificent sitcom 'about nothing' - ended. Jerry's jeans and trainers combo may have dated, but the lines assuredly have not. Will Dean compiles the best of them...
George: When you look annoyed all the time, people think that you're busy.
George: I'm 33 years old; I haven't outgrown the problems of puberty, I'm already facing the problems of old age. I completely skipped healthy adulthood. I went from having orgasms immediately, to taking forever. You could do your taxes in the time it takes me to have an orgasm. I never had a normal... medium orgasm.
Jerry: I never had a really good pickle
George: I have a bad feeling that whenever a lesbian looks at me they think, "That's why I'm not a heterosexual."
George: Why do they make the condom packets so hard to open?
Jerry: Probably to give the woman a chance to change her mind
George: My father was a quitter, my grandfather was a quitter, I was raised to give up. It's one of the few things I do well.
George: It became very clear to me sitting out there today that every decision I've made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every aspect of life, be it something to wear, something to eat - it's all been wrong.
George: Someday, before I die, mark my words... I'm gonna tell that woman exactly what I think of her. I'll never be able to forgive myself until I do.
Jerry: And if you do?
George: Well, I still won't be able to forgive myself, but at least it won't be about this.
George: I'm disturbed, I'm depressed, I'm inadequate, I've got it all!
George: Maybe if he could see me with some of my black friends...
Jerry: That would be great except that you don't really have any black friends.
[pauses]
Jerry: Outside of us, you don't really have any white friends, either...
George: I just don't see what purpose is it going to serve your going? I mean, you think dead people care who's at the funeral? They don't even know they're having a funeral. It's not like she's hanging out in the back going, "I can't believe Jerry didn't show up."
Elaine: Maybe she's there in spirit. How about that?
George: If you're a spirit, and you can travel to other dimensions and galaxies, and find out the mysteries of the universe, you think she's going to want to hang around Drexler's funeral home on Ocean Parkway?
George: A beautiful, successful, intelligent woman is in love with me and I throw it all away. Now I will spend the rest of my life living alone. I'll sit in my disgusting little apartment, watching basketball games, walking around with no underwear because I'm too lazy to do the laundry.
Jerry: You walk around with no underwear?
George: Ya, what do you do when you run out of laundry?
Jerry: I do a wash.
Mr Ross: I don't think there's any greater tragedy than when parents outlive their children.
George: Yes, I hope my parents die long before I do.
George: Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it.
George: And to think I'd fail at failing...
Jerry: Aw, come on now.
George: I feel like I can't do anything wrong.
Jerry: Nonsense. You do everything wrong.
George: You think so?
Jerry: Absolutely. I have no confidence in you.
George: Well, I guess I'll just have to pick myself up, dust myself off, and throw myself right back down again.
Jerry: That's the spirit. You suck.
George: I don't like when a woman says, "Make love to me." It's intimidating. The last time a woman said that to me, I wound up apologising to her.
Jerry: Really?
George: That's a lot of pressure. "Make love to me." What am I, in a circus?
Kramer: You're wasting your life.
George: I am not. What you call wasting, I call living. I'm living my life.
Kramer: OK, like what? No, tell me. Do you have a job?
George: No.
Kramer: You got money?
George: No.
Kramer: Do you have a woman?
George: No.
Kramer: Do you have any prospects?
George: No.
Kramer: You got anything on the horizon?
George: Uh, no.
Kramer: Do you have any action at all?
George: No.
Kramer: Do you have any conceivable reason for even getting up in the morning?
George: I like to get the Daily News.
George: Oh, see? That's why I don't have cable in my house. Because of that naked station. If I had that in my house, I would never turn it off. I wouldn't sleep, I wouldn't eat. Eventually, firemen would have to break through the door, they'd find me sitting there in my pyjamas with drool coming down my face.
George: When you look annoyed all the time, people think that you're busy.
George: I'm 33 years old; I haven't outgrown the problems of puberty, I'm already facing the problems of old age. I completely skipped healthy adulthood. I went from having orgasms immediately, to taking forever. You could do your taxes in the time it takes me to have an orgasm. I never had a normal... medium orgasm.
Jerry: I never had a really good pickle
George: I have a bad feeling that whenever a lesbian looks at me they think, "That's why I'm not a heterosexual."
George: Why do they make the condom packets so hard to open?
Jerry: Probably to give the woman a chance to change her mind
George: My father was a quitter, my grandfather was a quitter, I was raised to give up. It's one of the few things I do well.
George: It became very clear to me sitting out there today that every decision I've made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every aspect of life, be it something to wear, something to eat - it's all been wrong.
George: Someday, before I die, mark my words... I'm gonna tell that woman exactly what I think of her. I'll never be able to forgive myself until I do.
Jerry: And if you do?
George: Well, I still won't be able to forgive myself, but at least it won't be about this.
George: I'm disturbed, I'm depressed, I'm inadequate, I've got it all!
George: Maybe if he could see me with some of my black friends...
Jerry: That would be great except that you don't really have any black friends.
[pauses]
Jerry: Outside of us, you don't really have any white friends, either...
George: I just don't see what purpose is it going to serve your going? I mean, you think dead people care who's at the funeral? They don't even know they're having a funeral. It's not like she's hanging out in the back going, "I can't believe Jerry didn't show up."
Elaine: Maybe she's there in spirit. How about that?
George: If you're a spirit, and you can travel to other dimensions and galaxies, and find out the mysteries of the universe, you think she's going to want to hang around Drexler's funeral home on Ocean Parkway?
George: A beautiful, successful, intelligent woman is in love with me and I throw it all away. Now I will spend the rest of my life living alone. I'll sit in my disgusting little apartment, watching basketball games, walking around with no underwear because I'm too lazy to do the laundry.
Jerry: You walk around with no underwear?
George: Ya, what do you do when you run out of laundry?
Jerry: I do a wash.
Mr Ross: I don't think there's any greater tragedy than when parents outlive their children.
George: Yes, I hope my parents die long before I do.
George: Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it.
George: And to think I'd fail at failing...
Jerry: Aw, come on now.
George: I feel like I can't do anything wrong.
Jerry: Nonsense. You do everything wrong.
George: You think so?
Jerry: Absolutely. I have no confidence in you.
George: Well, I guess I'll just have to pick myself up, dust myself off, and throw myself right back down again.
Jerry: That's the spirit. You suck.
George: I don't like when a woman says, "Make love to me." It's intimidating. The last time a woman said that to me, I wound up apologising to her.
Jerry: Really?
George: That's a lot of pressure. "Make love to me." What am I, in a circus?
Kramer: You're wasting your life.
George: I am not. What you call wasting, I call living. I'm living my life.
Kramer: OK, like what? No, tell me. Do you have a job?
George: No.
Kramer: You got money?
George: No.
Kramer: Do you have a woman?
George: No.
Kramer: Do you have any prospects?
George: No.
Kramer: You got anything on the horizon?
George: Uh, no.
Kramer: Do you have any action at all?
George: No.
Kramer: Do you have any conceivable reason for even getting up in the morning?
George: I like to get the Daily News.
George: Oh, see? That's why I don't have cable in my house. Because of that naked station. If I had that in my house, I would never turn it off. I wouldn't sleep, I wouldn't eat. Eventually, firemen would have to break through the door, they'd find me sitting there in my pyjamas with drool coming down my face.
You don't know what you've got till it's gone
An end to war? Environmentally friendly alternatives to oil? The second coming? No. What the world has been crying out for, apparently, is the return of Gladiators (Sun, 6pm, Sky One), which vanished from our screens eight years ago. I don't recall much protest at the time, writes Charlie Brooker. No one established an emergency helpline or threw themselves under the controller of ITV's car. Not a single leading newspaper ran a wounded editorial lamenting its demise and pleading with God for a revival. There were no dazed crowds of jonesing Gladiators fans wandering the street in a sorrowful funk, dumbly bumping into shop windows without even noticing, quivering in a puddle of tears in the cold and distant grief dimension. Its passing went largely unnoticed. A gentle nationwide shrug rolled across the country like an underfed Mexican wave. Gladiators had passed away, and we, as a nation, moved on.
But, like the song says, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. A year after Gladiators disappeared, 9/11 shook Planet Earth's axis to its core, creating a new landmark paradigm in watershed epochs. The world was left stunned, reeling. "Where are our Gladiators now?" it wailed with its mouth, "Because we need something to take our minds off this shit." And in the years following, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, widespread economic meltdown, and the growing awareness of impending environmental disaster, the clamour for the return of the soothing balm of Gladiators grew ever more cacophonous.
Now the dark ages are at an end: Gladiators is back, and it's better than ever. And by "better", I mean "the same": an hour of people in leotards running, tumbling, wrestling, jumping, and hitting each other over the head with padded sticks, inside a cavernous crash mat-and-searchlight repository.
Gladiators has never felt very British. The audience shriek and hoot throughout, and they're all waving outsized foam hands with pointy fingers, which must make it nigh-on impossible to see. Perhaps they're not baying for blood at all, but just shouting at the person in front to get that stupid foam hand out of the way.
Everything in the arena is either red or blue or a 20,000-watt lightbulb - apart from the Gladiators, whose costumes are monochrome and more individually "pimped" than before. Spartan, for instance, has some vaguely Ancient Roman-style strappy bits hanging down round his balls, leaving him looking like a cross between a promotional poster for the film 300 and a collector's edition of Boyz magazine.
Incredibly, he's not the gayest-looking male Gladiator. That honour goes to Atlas, who has a body made of raw, bulging muscle, but the head and face of a woman. In his introductory ident, he appears to shake his flowing locks and wink coquettishly at the viewer. They should've called him Dorothy and had done with it.
Keeping with the homoerotic theme, you may have noticed that all the male Gladiators have names that sound like gay nightclubs. Oblivion, for instance, sounds like a steaming 4am sinbox filled with strobe lights and shaved heads. But it isn't. It's a 6ft 3in bellend in black trunks. The producers have given Oblivion a complex personality: he's angry and he complains a lot. This makes him different to Predator, who brags and looks hard. The level of characterisation pisses all over The Wire.
The lady Gladiators are slightly less absurd, apart from Inferno, who looks like a pornographic Manga sketch of Geri Halliwell circa 1998, and Battleaxe - a champion hammer-thrower, and the least ladylike of the bunch. She may look beefy and stern, but calling her Battleaxe seems a tad harsh. Perhaps next year they'll bring in one called Dog. Or Moose. Or Boiler.
Actually, in this interactive age, they should throw the naming of the Gladiators open to the public. How about one called Bastard? Or Perineum? Any other suggestions? Send them to charlie.brooker@guardian.co.uk and we'll make it a contest.
But, like the song says, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. A year after Gladiators disappeared, 9/11 shook Planet Earth's axis to its core, creating a new landmark paradigm in watershed epochs. The world was left stunned, reeling. "Where are our Gladiators now?" it wailed with its mouth, "Because we need something to take our minds off this shit." And in the years following, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, widespread economic meltdown, and the growing awareness of impending environmental disaster, the clamour for the return of the soothing balm of Gladiators grew ever more cacophonous.
Now the dark ages are at an end: Gladiators is back, and it's better than ever. And by "better", I mean "the same": an hour of people in leotards running, tumbling, wrestling, jumping, and hitting each other over the head with padded sticks, inside a cavernous crash mat-and-searchlight repository.
Gladiators has never felt very British. The audience shriek and hoot throughout, and they're all waving outsized foam hands with pointy fingers, which must make it nigh-on impossible to see. Perhaps they're not baying for blood at all, but just shouting at the person in front to get that stupid foam hand out of the way.
Everything in the arena is either red or blue or a 20,000-watt lightbulb - apart from the Gladiators, whose costumes are monochrome and more individually "pimped" than before. Spartan, for instance, has some vaguely Ancient Roman-style strappy bits hanging down round his balls, leaving him looking like a cross between a promotional poster for the film 300 and a collector's edition of Boyz magazine.
Incredibly, he's not the gayest-looking male Gladiator. That honour goes to Atlas, who has a body made of raw, bulging muscle, but the head and face of a woman. In his introductory ident, he appears to shake his flowing locks and wink coquettishly at the viewer. They should've called him Dorothy and had done with it.
Keeping with the homoerotic theme, you may have noticed that all the male Gladiators have names that sound like gay nightclubs. Oblivion, for instance, sounds like a steaming 4am sinbox filled with strobe lights and shaved heads. But it isn't. It's a 6ft 3in bellend in black trunks. The producers have given Oblivion a complex personality: he's angry and he complains a lot. This makes him different to Predator, who brags and looks hard. The level of characterisation pisses all over The Wire.
The lady Gladiators are slightly less absurd, apart from Inferno, who looks like a pornographic Manga sketch of Geri Halliwell circa 1998, and Battleaxe - a champion hammer-thrower, and the least ladylike of the bunch. She may look beefy and stern, but calling her Battleaxe seems a tad harsh. Perhaps next year they'll bring in one called Dog. Or Moose. Or Boiler.
Actually, in this interactive age, they should throw the naming of the Gladiators open to the public. How about one called Bastard? Or Perineum? Any other suggestions? Send them to charlie.brooker@guardian.co.uk and we'll make it a contest.
BBC to make on air Burma picture apology
The BBC is to make an on air apology after admitting that it broadcast a picture yesterday which it claimed was of dozens of people killed by the devastating Burmese cyclone, but which instead was taken in Sumatra during the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.
Peter Horrocks, the head of the newly created BBC multimedia newsroom, said the corporation was now reviewing its processes for checking pictures it received following the incident. The still photograph in question was used to introduce a report from inside Burma by correspondent Natalia Antelava on last night's BBC1 10pm bulletin. "This was a mistake, and we will be correcting it on all BBC output where the still was used," Horrocks wrote today on the BBC news website editors' blog.
The BBC confirmed it would make the on-air apology about the use of the picture on this evening's 10pm BBC1 bulletin. The picture was shown prior to the report in an introduction by 10 O'Clock News presenter Huw Edwards and was used to represent dozens of bodies that Antelava had seen lying on the waterfront of the Irawaddy delta.
Antelava's eyewitness account was broadcast by the BBC after she had left Burma to protect her. The BBC said it had now discovered that the picture was actually taken in Aceh in Sumatra, Indonesia, following the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day, December 26, 2004.
"Last night the BBC broadcast a still which we said showed dozens of bodies lying in the waterfront of the Irrawaddy delta," Horrocks said. "We have since discovered that the picture was actually taken in Aceh, Sumatra following the tsunami of 2004. This was a mistake, and we will be correcting it on all BBC output where the still was used.
"The BBC has first-hand evidence from its correspondent Natalia Antelava, who recently travelled in the delta, that there were many bodies in the water a week after the cyclone.
"However the picture we used yesterday to illustrate that truth was itself inaccurate. BBC News apologises for that. We will be reviewing our processes for checking pictures we receive."
Peter Horrocks, the head of the newly created BBC multimedia newsroom, said the corporation was now reviewing its processes for checking pictures it received following the incident. The still photograph in question was used to introduce a report from inside Burma by correspondent Natalia Antelava on last night's BBC1 10pm bulletin. "This was a mistake, and we will be correcting it on all BBC output where the still was used," Horrocks wrote today on the BBC news website editors' blog.
The BBC confirmed it would make the on-air apology about the use of the picture on this evening's 10pm BBC1 bulletin. The picture was shown prior to the report in an introduction by 10 O'Clock News presenter Huw Edwards and was used to represent dozens of bodies that Antelava had seen lying on the waterfront of the Irawaddy delta.
Antelava's eyewitness account was broadcast by the BBC after she had left Burma to protect her. The BBC said it had now discovered that the picture was actually taken in Aceh in Sumatra, Indonesia, following the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day, December 26, 2004.
"Last night the BBC broadcast a still which we said showed dozens of bodies lying in the waterfront of the Irrawaddy delta," Horrocks said. "We have since discovered that the picture was actually taken in Aceh, Sumatra following the tsunami of 2004. This was a mistake, and we will be correcting it on all BBC output where the still was used.
"The BBC has first-hand evidence from its correspondent Natalia Antelava, who recently travelled in the delta, that there were many bodies in the water a week after the cyclone.
"However the picture we used yesterday to illustrate that truth was itself inaccurate. BBC News apologises for that. We will be reviewing our processes for checking pictures we receive."
Missing Live to return
BBC1's daytime show Missing Live, which attempts to reunite missing people with their families, has been recommissioned after a successful first run. Recently arrived BBC daytime controller Liam Keelan has ordered a second series of the BBC1 show after the first run managed to reunite 17 missing people with their families.
Fronted by BBC Breakfast's Louise Minchin and Crimewatch's Rav Wilding, Missing Live follows the work of the police and the charity Missing People. Among those found as a direct result of the programme are 50-year-old Paul Hopkins and Chinese pensioner Lin Sinh Luc. The first series ran for four weeks at 9.15am every weekday on BBC1 and concluded today. Guests who appeared on Missing Live included Kate and Gerry McCann and Bob Geldof.
The programme was also praised in parliament when Liberal Democrat MP Susan Kramer and the former Conservative minister Peter Bottomley signed an early day motion recognising Missing Live's "immense value in bringing wider understanding and exposure to the reasons many people go missing, as well as the technology and techniques involved in trying to find them".
During the series, methods used to help find those who have disappeared included age-progression techniques and behavioural recognition cameras. Keelan said: "I had no hesitation in recommissioning Missing Live. Not only has it proved extremely popular with the audience, but it has received praise in the Commons and crucially 17 people have been found. It's exactly the sort of programming that BBC Daytime should be doing."
Missing Live is made by independent producer Leopard Films. Leopard chief executive and Missing Live executive producer James Burstall said: "Missing Live is a truly interactive programme as it has directly asked the British public for help in finding missing persons - and they responded. "This is public service TV at its most compelling best - we've built a two-way relationship with our audience and they have helped us return a number of people to safety. We very much look forward to building this relationship with the BBC1 audience into the future."
Missing People chief executive Paul Tuohy added: "Missing Live has without doubt enabled successful resolutions to cases that might otherwise remain unresolved."
Fronted by BBC Breakfast's Louise Minchin and Crimewatch's Rav Wilding, Missing Live follows the work of the police and the charity Missing People. Among those found as a direct result of the programme are 50-year-old Paul Hopkins and Chinese pensioner Lin Sinh Luc. The first series ran for four weeks at 9.15am every weekday on BBC1 and concluded today. Guests who appeared on Missing Live included Kate and Gerry McCann and Bob Geldof.
The programme was also praised in parliament when Liberal Democrat MP Susan Kramer and the former Conservative minister Peter Bottomley signed an early day motion recognising Missing Live's "immense value in bringing wider understanding and exposure to the reasons many people go missing, as well as the technology and techniques involved in trying to find them".
During the series, methods used to help find those who have disappeared included age-progression techniques and behavioural recognition cameras. Keelan said: "I had no hesitation in recommissioning Missing Live. Not only has it proved extremely popular with the audience, but it has received praise in the Commons and crucially 17 people have been found. It's exactly the sort of programming that BBC Daytime should be doing."
Missing Live is made by independent producer Leopard Films. Leopard chief executive and Missing Live executive producer James Burstall said: "Missing Live is a truly interactive programme as it has directly asked the British public for help in finding missing persons - and they responded. "This is public service TV at its most compelling best - we've built a two-way relationship with our audience and they have helped us return a number of people to safety. We very much look forward to building this relationship with the BBC1 audience into the future."
Missing People chief executive Paul Tuohy added: "Missing Live has without doubt enabled successful resolutions to cases that might otherwise remain unresolved."
The X Factor vision spells disaster for Brown
In Hollywood, producers let you know their intentions for a movie script by calling for certain "types". It's pretty euphemistic. Scripts looking for "a Nicole Kidman type" might persuade Naomi Watts to become attached to them. A Renee Zellweger type? You might get that one in Grey's Anatomy. A Lindsay Lohan type? Honey, these days Lindsay Lohan's taking scripts meant for a Lindsay Lohan type. The past year has not been kind.
The practice of managing expectations in this way came to mind this week, says Marina Hyde, when it emerged that Gordon Brown has been approached by the BBC to judge a young talent show called Junior PM, aimed at what its producers describe as "an Apprentice meets Maria/Strictly Come Dancing audience". You couldn't help thinking they were looking for "an Alan Sugar type", and after being rejected by several cheap imitations, eventually sighed: "Well, I suppose we could settle for the prime minister."
And weren't they in luck? Whereas Sir Alan would never have lowered himself to even read the proposal, Junior PM's producers only had to raise it with Hazel Blears for her to take it all the way to a bleeding cabinet meeting. Her special adviser confirmed that the communities secretary intended to raise it "in the margins of cabinet". I suppose we should be grateful it wasn't item one on the agenda at the table around which political titans of yesteryear once sat. But you are formally dared to imagine Barbara Castle turning to Harold Wilson and saying: "Ooh, now, the Beeb has come up with a great idea in which you judge a telly talent contest. Hughie Green's turned it down, so unless Monkhouse fancies it, you should start looking grateful." In fact, it's difficult to decide which is more hilarious: that the running of Britain has now been relegated to the status of a telly prize, or that the BBC thinks the prime minister might actually say yes.
Put delicately, the idea of spending licence payers' money on a Gordon Brown vehicle is up there with Alan Partridge's legendary Monkey Tennis. The entire country knows Gordon is not what you'd call a TV natural. For the past couple of months he has only worn one expression: that of a man watching his legacy being torn down in slow motion. His telly outings already make us squirm in vicarious discomfort; it would be positively excruciating to see him dispensing a Simon Cowell-style verdict on some precocious little horror: "That was the worse post-neoclassical endogenous growth theorising I've seen in the Birmingham auditions ..."
This isn't the Beeb's vision, apparently. "It is a golden opportunity for the PM to gather a youth manifesto and become more popular than Alan Sugar," ran its pitch, and at some level you have to admire the misplaced confidence that Brown can afford to be worrying about the nine-year-old demographic, when his need to appeal to the already enfranchised would seem rather more pressing. "It is a very worthy programme idea," a Blears spokesman insisted, as though the entertainment potential were not sufficiently moribund without a government press officer describing it as "worthy". "The idea is to get more young people interested in politics."
But of course it is, because it is one of the orthodoxies of the age that more young people vote in reality TV elections than in general elections. Complete cobblers, as it goes, though I won't trouble you with the statistics. That said, you'd think our mathlete of a prime minister might be aware of them, because he is absurdly, uncomfortably obsessed with reality TV. Last month he appeared on American Idol, but two years ago he was already outlining his vision of "an X Factor Britain", a comment that managed to combine fatuity, neediness, and a total failure to understand what these kind of talent shows are really about. They don't make dreams come true; they sell you disappointment, which is why every series includes more and more of the episodes focusing on deluded clods auditioning.
And increasingly, doesn't Mr Brown's torment remind you of one of these tone-deaf unfortunates, whose painful progress makes you shriek "How on earth did he think he could do this?", and whom you can hardly bear to watch for the transferred embarrassment? Watching PMQs can feel like intruding on private grief, while the prime minister cannot seem to reverse the perception that he is faintly ridiculous. There is a sort of momentum to it now, where every one of these mooted stunts plays atrociously for him. It's just so easy to turn his gimmicks against him, a fact not lost on the Tories, who not only spent this week's PMQs making jokes about the electorate telling Mr Brown "You're fired!", but gave Strictly Come Dancing host Bruce Forsyth a special ticket to watch proceedings from the gallery. They do like to sledgehammer home a point in Westminster.
Need they even have bothered? The episode barely needed glossing. Everything about Junior PM feels hackneyed, knackered and devoid of ideas - the format, the thinking behind it, but most of all its intended star. As Sir Alan would say: he hasn't got a bladdy clue.
The practice of managing expectations in this way came to mind this week, says Marina Hyde, when it emerged that Gordon Brown has been approached by the BBC to judge a young talent show called Junior PM, aimed at what its producers describe as "an Apprentice meets Maria/Strictly Come Dancing audience". You couldn't help thinking they were looking for "an Alan Sugar type", and after being rejected by several cheap imitations, eventually sighed: "Well, I suppose we could settle for the prime minister."
And weren't they in luck? Whereas Sir Alan would never have lowered himself to even read the proposal, Junior PM's producers only had to raise it with Hazel Blears for her to take it all the way to a bleeding cabinet meeting. Her special adviser confirmed that the communities secretary intended to raise it "in the margins of cabinet". I suppose we should be grateful it wasn't item one on the agenda at the table around which political titans of yesteryear once sat. But you are formally dared to imagine Barbara Castle turning to Harold Wilson and saying: "Ooh, now, the Beeb has come up with a great idea in which you judge a telly talent contest. Hughie Green's turned it down, so unless Monkhouse fancies it, you should start looking grateful." In fact, it's difficult to decide which is more hilarious: that the running of Britain has now been relegated to the status of a telly prize, or that the BBC thinks the prime minister might actually say yes.
Put delicately, the idea of spending licence payers' money on a Gordon Brown vehicle is up there with Alan Partridge's legendary Monkey Tennis. The entire country knows Gordon is not what you'd call a TV natural. For the past couple of months he has only worn one expression: that of a man watching his legacy being torn down in slow motion. His telly outings already make us squirm in vicarious discomfort; it would be positively excruciating to see him dispensing a Simon Cowell-style verdict on some precocious little horror: "That was the worse post-neoclassical endogenous growth theorising I've seen in the Birmingham auditions ..."
This isn't the Beeb's vision, apparently. "It is a golden opportunity for the PM to gather a youth manifesto and become more popular than Alan Sugar," ran its pitch, and at some level you have to admire the misplaced confidence that Brown can afford to be worrying about the nine-year-old demographic, when his need to appeal to the already enfranchised would seem rather more pressing. "It is a very worthy programme idea," a Blears spokesman insisted, as though the entertainment potential were not sufficiently moribund without a government press officer describing it as "worthy". "The idea is to get more young people interested in politics."
But of course it is, because it is one of the orthodoxies of the age that more young people vote in reality TV elections than in general elections. Complete cobblers, as it goes, though I won't trouble you with the statistics. That said, you'd think our mathlete of a prime minister might be aware of them, because he is absurdly, uncomfortably obsessed with reality TV. Last month he appeared on American Idol, but two years ago he was already outlining his vision of "an X Factor Britain", a comment that managed to combine fatuity, neediness, and a total failure to understand what these kind of talent shows are really about. They don't make dreams come true; they sell you disappointment, which is why every series includes more and more of the episodes focusing on deluded clods auditioning.
And increasingly, doesn't Mr Brown's torment remind you of one of these tone-deaf unfortunates, whose painful progress makes you shriek "How on earth did he think he could do this?", and whom you can hardly bear to watch for the transferred embarrassment? Watching PMQs can feel like intruding on private grief, while the prime minister cannot seem to reverse the perception that he is faintly ridiculous. There is a sort of momentum to it now, where every one of these mooted stunts plays atrociously for him. It's just so easy to turn his gimmicks against him, a fact not lost on the Tories, who not only spent this week's PMQs making jokes about the electorate telling Mr Brown "You're fired!", but gave Strictly Come Dancing host Bruce Forsyth a special ticket to watch proceedings from the gallery. They do like to sledgehammer home a point in Westminster.
Need they even have bothered? The episode barely needed glossing. Everything about Junior PM feels hackneyed, knackered and devoid of ideas - the format, the thinking behind it, but most of all its intended star. As Sir Alan would say: he hasn't got a bladdy clue.
Hollywood private eye faces life in jail
A self-proclaimed "private eye to the stars", Anthony Pellicano, was found guilty yesterday of 76 counts of illegal activity, including unauthorised wiretapping, intimidation and bribing police in a case that laid bare the seedy side of Hollywood. Pellicano, 64, was found guilty by a jury in a Los Angeles federal court of all but one of the charges brought against him and may spend the rest of his life in prison. Four co-defendants were also found guilty of supporting him in his illegal ventures.
Pellicano acted on behalf of several powerful clients, helping them to avoid criminal prosecutions, deal with messy divorces and secure business deals. In tape recordings played to the court of conversations he had made himself, he told his clients he would make their problems go away for a non-refundable retainer of $25,000 and upwards. All but a few of those clients have never been charged - some received promises of immunity from prosecution in exchange for evidence, others argued that they had no knowledge of his illegal methods.
The case was a culmination of a six-year investigation into Pellicano's practices by the FBI that began in 2002 when a reporter for the Los Angeles Times found a dead fish on the bonnet of her car, the windscreen smashed and a note saying "STOP". The FBI linked the threat to the fact that the reporter, Anita Busch, had been writing unfavourable pieces about Michael Ovitz, a powerful Hollywood agent and former co-president of Walt Disney. Ovitz employed Pellicano to help him deal with two people who were suing his company, as well as with Busch and another reporter.
The FBI investigation unveiled an enormous criminal network deployed by Pellicano on his clients' behalf. He engaged in widespread wiretapping of conversations, including those of Sylvester Stallone. He bribed police and other officials to run illegal database searches of, among others, Gary Shandling of the Larry Sanders Show fame and the Saturday Night Live actor Kevin Nealon.
The prosecution, which relied on witnesses including Farah Fawcett and Steven Segal, presented the jury with evidence of racketeering and death threats. Prosecutor Dan Saunders portrayed it as a case about illegal behaviour, not glamour and glitz. "This case is about corruption, cheating, greed, arrogance and the perversion of the justice system. It just happened to take place in Hollywood," he said.
Seven people pleaded guilty to charges related to the case before Pellicano's trial began. The most prominent was John McTiernan, director of Die Hard and other action movies, who was heard on tape in conversation with Pellicano during which the detective discussed wiretapping a film producer. Another casualty was Sandra Carradine, the former wife of the Oscar-winning actor Keith Carradine.
Several big names employed Pellicano, but have avoided any charges. Apart from Ovitz, they include the celebrated entertainment lawyer Bert Fields and Brad Grey, the head of Paramount studios. Grey used the services of Pellicano to target the comedian Garry Shandling, who was suing him for $100m. Shandling said Pellicano ran a smear campaign against him.
Meanwhile, the husband of an Emmy award-winning make-up artist was arrested last night, hours after human remains were found in woodland. David Chenery-Wickens, 51, is being questioned by detectives investigating the disappearance of 48-year-old Diane Chenery-Wickens in January. He had previously been arrested on suspicion of her murder and his police bail was extended to May 30 pending further inquiries.
A woman walking her dog found the body in woodland near Little Horsted, Uckfield, East Sussex. Mrs Chenery-Wickens' family has been informed of the discovery. Mrs Chenery-Wickens, who worked on such shows as The League of Gentlemen and Casualty, was reported missing by her husband on January 24.
Pellicano acted on behalf of several powerful clients, helping them to avoid criminal prosecutions, deal with messy divorces and secure business deals. In tape recordings played to the court of conversations he had made himself, he told his clients he would make their problems go away for a non-refundable retainer of $25,000 and upwards. All but a few of those clients have never been charged - some received promises of immunity from prosecution in exchange for evidence, others argued that they had no knowledge of his illegal methods.
The case was a culmination of a six-year investigation into Pellicano's practices by the FBI that began in 2002 when a reporter for the Los Angeles Times found a dead fish on the bonnet of her car, the windscreen smashed and a note saying "STOP". The FBI linked the threat to the fact that the reporter, Anita Busch, had been writing unfavourable pieces about Michael Ovitz, a powerful Hollywood agent and former co-president of Walt Disney. Ovitz employed Pellicano to help him deal with two people who were suing his company, as well as with Busch and another reporter.
The FBI investigation unveiled an enormous criminal network deployed by Pellicano on his clients' behalf. He engaged in widespread wiretapping of conversations, including those of Sylvester Stallone. He bribed police and other officials to run illegal database searches of, among others, Gary Shandling of the Larry Sanders Show fame and the Saturday Night Live actor Kevin Nealon.
The prosecution, which relied on witnesses including Farah Fawcett and Steven Segal, presented the jury with evidence of racketeering and death threats. Prosecutor Dan Saunders portrayed it as a case about illegal behaviour, not glamour and glitz. "This case is about corruption, cheating, greed, arrogance and the perversion of the justice system. It just happened to take place in Hollywood," he said.
Seven people pleaded guilty to charges related to the case before Pellicano's trial began. The most prominent was John McTiernan, director of Die Hard and other action movies, who was heard on tape in conversation with Pellicano during which the detective discussed wiretapping a film producer. Another casualty was Sandra Carradine, the former wife of the Oscar-winning actor Keith Carradine.
Several big names employed Pellicano, but have avoided any charges. Apart from Ovitz, they include the celebrated entertainment lawyer Bert Fields and Brad Grey, the head of Paramount studios. Grey used the services of Pellicano to target the comedian Garry Shandling, who was suing him for $100m. Shandling said Pellicano ran a smear campaign against him.
Meanwhile, the husband of an Emmy award-winning make-up artist was arrested last night, hours after human remains were found in woodland. David Chenery-Wickens, 51, is being questioned by detectives investigating the disappearance of 48-year-old Diane Chenery-Wickens in January. He had previously been arrested on suspicion of her murder and his police bail was extended to May 30 pending further inquiries.
A woman walking her dog found the body in woodland near Little Horsted, Uckfield, East Sussex. Mrs Chenery-Wickens' family has been informed of the discovery. Mrs Chenery-Wickens, who worked on such shows as The League of Gentlemen and Casualty, was reported missing by her husband on January 24.
Friday 16 May 2008
HBO film about 2000 recount draws protests from Democrats
Wounds from the Florida recount, still healing for many Democrats, are being ripped open again for some prominent former advisers to Al Gore. They say that a coming HBO film dramatizing the ballot battle after the 2000 election unfairly blames them for the Democrats’ failure to secure the White House.
Warren Christopher, the former secretary of state who served as the public face of the Gore team in the early days of the recount effort, said this week that he believed the film, Recount, was “pure fiction” in its portrayal of him as a weak strategist unprepared to stand up to the aggressive tactics of James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state who was the chief Republican adviser. William M. Daley, Mr. Gore’s campaign chairman, who helped to lead the Democratic recount team in Florida, said the film created misperceptions about the Gore team’s decision-making process. Mr. Gore, who oversaw the team from Washington, is largely absent from the film.
Even Mr. Baker questioned the portrayal of Mr. Christopher. “I don’t think I was as ruthless as the movie portrays me, and I know he was not as wimpish as it makes him appear,” Mr. Baker said. The film, which has its premiere on May 25 on HBO, stars John Hurt as Mr. Christopher, Tom Wilkinson as Mr. Baker, Mitch Pileggi as Mr. Daley and Laura Dern as Katherine Harris, then the Florida secretary of state. Kevin Spacey plays Ron Klain, the Gore lawyer who led the on-the-ground recount effort and through whose eyes much of the action is seen.
As many dramatizations do, Recount includes invented scenes and dialogue. Danny Strong, who wrote the screenplay, said in an interview that while those inventions condensed events, they reflect what actually happened. “The film tries to give the essence of the truth,” he said, and is based on his own research and interviews, as well as on books and newspaper and magazine articles documenting the recount effort.
Dramatizations of historical events, particularly political ones, have frequently given trouble to writers and producers trying to create compelling entertainment. In 2006 ABC made changes to The Path to 9/11 after complaints from former Clinton administration officials that it portrayed them as less than vigilant in their pursuit of Osama bin Laden. CBS dropped plans to show The Reagans, a 2003 mini-series, after Republican and conservative groups protested its portrayal of President Reagan as forgetful and unsympathetic to AIDS victims. (The series was broadcast on Showtime.)
Recount, which has been screened for invited audiences in Washington and New York and will be shown in Florida this week, is inspiring similar protests. “I think a lot of the strategizing in the script that I saw was somebody’s hindsight rather than what we had to deal with in the immediate aftermath of the election,” Mr. Daley said. He added: “The perception that Warren Christopher was some wuss who got hoodwinked by Jim Baker is absolute fantasy in the mind of somebody who is trying to make themselves out to be bigger than they were.”
Neither Mr. Christopher nor Mr. Daley has seen the completed film, which has been sent to television reporters and critics for review. Mr. Daley said he requested and was given a draft of the script last year by HBO after filming had begun. Mr. Baker, who has seen the film, said he reviewed a draft of the script before production began and requested changes that were incorporated into the film.
Mr. Christopher said he learned of the film from his tailor, who was asked by the filmmakers to reproduce one of Mr. Christopher’s suits. He said he offered to review the script but never received one. The New York Times gave him a transcript of the scenes in which his character appears. “I was stunned by the excerpt,” he said in an interview. “Much of what the author has written about me is pure fiction. It contained events that never occurred, words I never spoke and decisions attributed to me that I never made.”
The film portrays Mr. Christopher as blocking attempts by other Gore advisers to rally protesters and to take the fight over disputed ballots to court. He is depicted as backing away from confrontation during a meeting with Mr. Baker, seeking compromise and negotiation as the Republicans prepare for war. The portrait stands in stark contrast to Mr. Baker’s. This is largely because the film is edited to jump directly from scenes in which Mr. Baker prepares the Bush team for “a street fight,” giving directions about where to stage protests, to scenes where Mr. Christopher counsels caution and calls for an “orderly process” without protesters. That characterization of Mr. Christopher has some support. Accounts published in The New York Times in 2000 characterized Mr. Christopher as urging caution and a disciplined approach to the recount.
Early reviews of Recount have been positive. Writing on huffingtonpost.com, Jeffrey Wells calls it “a thoroughly engaging, first-rate political drama.” But, he added, “I can’t see how this film won’t be seen as having done serious damage to the reputation” of Mr. Christopher, whom Mr. Wells says is portrayed “as one of the great all-time wimps.” Mr. Strong disputes that characterization. “It was our goal to show him as a noble statesman who held a deep concern at how the rest of the world would be negatively affected if the United States was not able to handle a disputed election in a non-violent manner,” he said.
The film is Mr. Strong’s first produced screenplay. Also an actor who appeared for four seasons on Gilmore Girls, Mr. Strong said he focused his book research on four works by reporters who covered the 36 days between the election and the Supreme Court decision that ended the recount. Mr. Strong gave several people depicted in the film the opportunity to review the script before filming began. Among them, he said, was Mr. Klain, who oversaw much of the day-to-day activity in Florida after Mr. Christopher returned to California for a family matter.
Mr. Klain said the film “gets the big things right,” but faults its portrait of Mr. Christopher. “He was as intense and vigorous an advocate for Vice President Gore as anyone there,” Mr. Klain said. Mr. Christopher and Mr. Daley were interviewed by the film’s creators only after filming began. Mr. Christopher said he was told that scenes involving his character had already been filmed; Mr. Strong denied that, saying the scenes were to be filmed that day. Mr. Strong confirmed that Mr. Christopher offered to review the script but, he said, he decided not to send one. “I didn’t feel comfortable sending it to him because I didn’t feel that he was being totally candid in our interview,” Mr. Strong said. “He wasn’t as forthright with me as other people I’ve interviewed.”
Mr. Strong also said that the film did not intend to pin the blame for the Democrats’ defeat on anyone. In a later interview, though, he said Mr. Christopher and Mr. Daley “wanted to concede from Day One.” He said that conclusion was supported by one of his primary sources, “Too Close to Call,” a book by Jeffrey Toobin, who served as a consultant on the film. In it Mr. Toobin argues that by the end of the first week, both Mr. Daley and Mr. Christopher were “making the case for surrender.”
The director of Recount recently gave an interview about his HBO docudrama on the Florida recount, in which he discusses how you know you’re funny and the difficulties of running for office...
As the director of “Meet the Parents” and other hit comedies, you adopt a surprisingly sober tone in your coming film, “Recount,” which takes us back to the 36 days in the autumn of 2000 when the results of the presidential election remained disputed in Florida. Have you shown the film to Al Gore?
He has not seen the film as far as I know.
It stars Kevin Spacey as Ron Klain, the lawyer for the Democrats. Has Klain seen the film?
He likes it. It’s kind of painful for the real people to relive it. It’s painful for everybody to relive. Particularly the Democrats who are involved in it. They always say, “Can’t you change the ending?” That’s always the joke.
I thought the film was very fair, except, perhaps, that the actors who play the Democratic operatives are more physically appealing than the Republican operatives.
That’s interesting. I think Tom Wilkinson, who plays James Baker, is a very handsome man.
He’s kind of beefy, though. Laura Dern, who plays another key Republican, Katherine Harris, is smothered in pancake make-up.
People get nervous when they’re thrust into the public eye. There was a rumour that someone told Harris that when you’re on TV, your make-up washes out so don’t be shy with those eyelashes and with that lip colour.
You give dimpled chads great prominence in this film, as opposed to hanging chads.
The hanging chads get a few close-ups too. Hopefully we’ve put punch-card machines into permanent obsolescence, because they really are just unacceptably primitive.
As the director of all three Austin Powers films, you resisted turning Recount into a comedy. It’s not a comedy at all.
No, no one in Recount says, “Yeah, baby, yeah.” There are no zinger catch phrases.
You and Mike Myers are rumoured to be working on a fourth Austin Powers film, but nothing has emerged since Goldmember in 2002.
Whenever I talk with Mike, we talk about it. The pressure is always there. But the script should earn its existence. It has to be really funny.
It sounds as if you have standards.
I try. The standard in comedy is so much easier because, like, is that going to be funny or not? You can usually tell.
What do you make of the fact that Austin Powers and Borat — you produced Borat — are both regressive male personalities in pursuit of bimbos?
I don’t disagree.
Are you like that, too? Are you trying to live in the mojo zone?
I think men are obsolete to some extent. I was going to do a film called "Used Guys" about a future where women run the world because they finally figured out that men are poisoned with testosterone and shouldn’t be allowed near anything sharp or explosive.
What did your father do for a living during your childhood in Albuquerque?
My dad is a retired engineer. He used to work for Sandia National Laboratories.
Was he helping to develop nuclear power?
He worked on aspects of that. But he worked in energy research and other things as well. He couldn’t talk about the work he did.
So he was an Austin Powers-style international man of mystery.
An Albuquerque man of mystery.
When did you leave New Mexico?
I went to Stanford to be a lawyer, and I really thought I might go into politics.
You do sort of look like a governor.
I get confused with City Councilman Bobby Shriver sometimes. People literally come up to me in Santa Monica, and he’s told me the same thing.
Maybe you have a future in politics.
I’m not equipped. I have terrible stage fright.
Warren Christopher, the former secretary of state who served as the public face of the Gore team in the early days of the recount effort, said this week that he believed the film, Recount, was “pure fiction” in its portrayal of him as a weak strategist unprepared to stand up to the aggressive tactics of James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state who was the chief Republican adviser. William M. Daley, Mr. Gore’s campaign chairman, who helped to lead the Democratic recount team in Florida, said the film created misperceptions about the Gore team’s decision-making process. Mr. Gore, who oversaw the team from Washington, is largely absent from the film.
Even Mr. Baker questioned the portrayal of Mr. Christopher. “I don’t think I was as ruthless as the movie portrays me, and I know he was not as wimpish as it makes him appear,” Mr. Baker said. The film, which has its premiere on May 25 on HBO, stars John Hurt as Mr. Christopher, Tom Wilkinson as Mr. Baker, Mitch Pileggi as Mr. Daley and Laura Dern as Katherine Harris, then the Florida secretary of state. Kevin Spacey plays Ron Klain, the Gore lawyer who led the on-the-ground recount effort and through whose eyes much of the action is seen.
As many dramatizations do, Recount includes invented scenes and dialogue. Danny Strong, who wrote the screenplay, said in an interview that while those inventions condensed events, they reflect what actually happened. “The film tries to give the essence of the truth,” he said, and is based on his own research and interviews, as well as on books and newspaper and magazine articles documenting the recount effort.
Dramatizations of historical events, particularly political ones, have frequently given trouble to writers and producers trying to create compelling entertainment. In 2006 ABC made changes to The Path to 9/11 after complaints from former Clinton administration officials that it portrayed them as less than vigilant in their pursuit of Osama bin Laden. CBS dropped plans to show The Reagans, a 2003 mini-series, after Republican and conservative groups protested its portrayal of President Reagan as forgetful and unsympathetic to AIDS victims. (The series was broadcast on Showtime.)
Recount, which has been screened for invited audiences in Washington and New York and will be shown in Florida this week, is inspiring similar protests. “I think a lot of the strategizing in the script that I saw was somebody’s hindsight rather than what we had to deal with in the immediate aftermath of the election,” Mr. Daley said. He added: “The perception that Warren Christopher was some wuss who got hoodwinked by Jim Baker is absolute fantasy in the mind of somebody who is trying to make themselves out to be bigger than they were.”
Neither Mr. Christopher nor Mr. Daley has seen the completed film, which has been sent to television reporters and critics for review. Mr. Daley said he requested and was given a draft of the script last year by HBO after filming had begun. Mr. Baker, who has seen the film, said he reviewed a draft of the script before production began and requested changes that were incorporated into the film.
Mr. Christopher said he learned of the film from his tailor, who was asked by the filmmakers to reproduce one of Mr. Christopher’s suits. He said he offered to review the script but never received one. The New York Times gave him a transcript of the scenes in which his character appears. “I was stunned by the excerpt,” he said in an interview. “Much of what the author has written about me is pure fiction. It contained events that never occurred, words I never spoke and decisions attributed to me that I never made.”
The film portrays Mr. Christopher as blocking attempts by other Gore advisers to rally protesters and to take the fight over disputed ballots to court. He is depicted as backing away from confrontation during a meeting with Mr. Baker, seeking compromise and negotiation as the Republicans prepare for war. The portrait stands in stark contrast to Mr. Baker’s. This is largely because the film is edited to jump directly from scenes in which Mr. Baker prepares the Bush team for “a street fight,” giving directions about where to stage protests, to scenes where Mr. Christopher counsels caution and calls for an “orderly process” without protesters. That characterization of Mr. Christopher has some support. Accounts published in The New York Times in 2000 characterized Mr. Christopher as urging caution and a disciplined approach to the recount.
Early reviews of Recount have been positive. Writing on huffingtonpost.com, Jeffrey Wells calls it “a thoroughly engaging, first-rate political drama.” But, he added, “I can’t see how this film won’t be seen as having done serious damage to the reputation” of Mr. Christopher, whom Mr. Wells says is portrayed “as one of the great all-time wimps.” Mr. Strong disputes that characterization. “It was our goal to show him as a noble statesman who held a deep concern at how the rest of the world would be negatively affected if the United States was not able to handle a disputed election in a non-violent manner,” he said.
The film is Mr. Strong’s first produced screenplay. Also an actor who appeared for four seasons on Gilmore Girls, Mr. Strong said he focused his book research on four works by reporters who covered the 36 days between the election and the Supreme Court decision that ended the recount. Mr. Strong gave several people depicted in the film the opportunity to review the script before filming began. Among them, he said, was Mr. Klain, who oversaw much of the day-to-day activity in Florida after Mr. Christopher returned to California for a family matter.
Mr. Klain said the film “gets the big things right,” but faults its portrait of Mr. Christopher. “He was as intense and vigorous an advocate for Vice President Gore as anyone there,” Mr. Klain said. Mr. Christopher and Mr. Daley were interviewed by the film’s creators only after filming began. Mr. Christopher said he was told that scenes involving his character had already been filmed; Mr. Strong denied that, saying the scenes were to be filmed that day. Mr. Strong confirmed that Mr. Christopher offered to review the script but, he said, he decided not to send one. “I didn’t feel comfortable sending it to him because I didn’t feel that he was being totally candid in our interview,” Mr. Strong said. “He wasn’t as forthright with me as other people I’ve interviewed.”
Mr. Strong also said that the film did not intend to pin the blame for the Democrats’ defeat on anyone. In a later interview, though, he said Mr. Christopher and Mr. Daley “wanted to concede from Day One.” He said that conclusion was supported by one of his primary sources, “Too Close to Call,” a book by Jeffrey Toobin, who served as a consultant on the film. In it Mr. Toobin argues that by the end of the first week, both Mr. Daley and Mr. Christopher were “making the case for surrender.”
The director of Recount recently gave an interview about his HBO docudrama on the Florida recount, in which he discusses how you know you’re funny and the difficulties of running for office...
As the director of “Meet the Parents” and other hit comedies, you adopt a surprisingly sober tone in your coming film, “Recount,” which takes us back to the 36 days in the autumn of 2000 when the results of the presidential election remained disputed in Florida. Have you shown the film to Al Gore?
He has not seen the film as far as I know.
It stars Kevin Spacey as Ron Klain, the lawyer for the Democrats. Has Klain seen the film?
He likes it. It’s kind of painful for the real people to relive it. It’s painful for everybody to relive. Particularly the Democrats who are involved in it. They always say, “Can’t you change the ending?” That’s always the joke.
I thought the film was very fair, except, perhaps, that the actors who play the Democratic operatives are more physically appealing than the Republican operatives.
That’s interesting. I think Tom Wilkinson, who plays James Baker, is a very handsome man.
He’s kind of beefy, though. Laura Dern, who plays another key Republican, Katherine Harris, is smothered in pancake make-up.
People get nervous when they’re thrust into the public eye. There was a rumour that someone told Harris that when you’re on TV, your make-up washes out so don’t be shy with those eyelashes and with that lip colour.
You give dimpled chads great prominence in this film, as opposed to hanging chads.
The hanging chads get a few close-ups too. Hopefully we’ve put punch-card machines into permanent obsolescence, because they really are just unacceptably primitive.
As the director of all three Austin Powers films, you resisted turning Recount into a comedy. It’s not a comedy at all.
No, no one in Recount says, “Yeah, baby, yeah.” There are no zinger catch phrases.
You and Mike Myers are rumoured to be working on a fourth Austin Powers film, but nothing has emerged since Goldmember in 2002.
Whenever I talk with Mike, we talk about it. The pressure is always there. But the script should earn its existence. It has to be really funny.
It sounds as if you have standards.
I try. The standard in comedy is so much easier because, like, is that going to be funny or not? You can usually tell.
What do you make of the fact that Austin Powers and Borat — you produced Borat — are both regressive male personalities in pursuit of bimbos?
I don’t disagree.
Are you like that, too? Are you trying to live in the mojo zone?
I think men are obsolete to some extent. I was going to do a film called "Used Guys" about a future where women run the world because they finally figured out that men are poisoned with testosterone and shouldn’t be allowed near anything sharp or explosive.
What did your father do for a living during your childhood in Albuquerque?
My dad is a retired engineer. He used to work for Sandia National Laboratories.
Was he helping to develop nuclear power?
He worked on aspects of that. But he worked in energy research and other things as well. He couldn’t talk about the work he did.
So he was an Austin Powers-style international man of mystery.
An Albuquerque man of mystery.
When did you leave New Mexico?
I went to Stanford to be a lawyer, and I really thought I might go into politics.
You do sort of look like a governor.
I get confused with City Councilman Bobby Shriver sometimes. People literally come up to me in Santa Monica, and he’s told me the same thing.
Maybe you have a future in politics.
I’m not equipped. I have terrible stage fright.
Home-grown, everyday sadism
If Ellen Page ever worried that her roles in Juno and Smart People would too securely set her image as a feisty know-it-all, she chose well to appear in An American Crime, a film that manages to wrench all the placid innocence from her bones, writes Gina Bellafante. The movie, which appeared at the Sundance Film Festival last year and which made its debut on Showtime on Saturday, calls for none of her verbal wood chopping. Indeed, it demands a listless opposite, turning Ms. Page’s body into a cadaver long before her character becomes one, speaking to us softly, phlegmatically and from the grave. Ms. Page is all dreamy, spectral passivity; she mesmerizes. But so much is done to her that it is hard to know what she is actually doing.Children are victimized so frequently on television these days — the babies left in Dumpsters on Law & Order: SVU, the boys or girls raped or chained up on Medium — that we may think we’ve become inured to depictions of such abuse. But An American Crime is such a shocking study of the will to defile, so forensic in its details, that it arrives as an act of vengeance against our habituation.
Based on the true story of Sylvia Likens, a teenage girl in Indianapolis in 1965 who found herself subjected to cruelties any adjectives applied here would only cheapen, the film almost begs us to look anywhere else. Her parents, carnival workers, leave her and her younger sister in the temporary care of a local laundress named Gertrude Baniszewski. Sylvia is burned, bruised, beaten and sodomized, the horrors magnified by the viral quality of her steward’s sadism. Before long, it isn’t merely Baniszewski drawing the blood, but her lot of vacant-looking children and a whole neighbourhood of young novices bored into violence.
Tommy O’Haver, the film’s director and co-writer, tips us to its agenda in the economy of his title. Sylvia had the misfortune to be born to parents who were comfortable leaving her with a stranger, but she also had the bad luck to grow up in a time and a place where ignorance was understood as its own brand of wisdom. The 1960s haven’t yet sounded the nation’s social alarm clock. Images of Vietnam flicker on television sets (Mr. O’Haver gives us President Johnson making a speech about General Westmoreland) but no one in an Indianapolis of church picnics and girl-group pop is paying heed.
Sylvia’s community, we learn, did nothing to save her. An older neighbour of Baniszewski’s, in cheap make-up that she seems to think will dignify her, had a faint hint of what was going on, but testifies at Baniszewski’s murder trial that she simply couldn’t judge a hard-working woman who seemed to be struggling. Despite all the visual terror in An American Crime, the single most disturbing moment is aural: Sylvia explaining in post-mortem voice-over, quite matter-of-factly, that her parents kept working, leaving her younger sister behind again, after the trial, this time with a local district attorney.
Mr. O’Haver understands the inexplicable nature of horrors like this one and he never panders to our reductive wish for clear answers. Gertrude Baniszewski, portrayed brilliantly by Catherine Keener, was clearly a woman who struggled: she had respiratory problems, multiple children with different men and virtually no money. But Mr. O’Haver doesn’t redeem her with a more extensive biography, a litany of whatever deeper mistreatments she surely endured. Ms. Keener takes on the role as if she were built on a skeleton of rusty needles. Looking at her, we know plenty. Baniszewski hates the purity of Sylvia, a quality she can neither reclaim for herself nor bequeath to her daughters, whose young lives already seem destined for similar miseries.
An American Crime is the most brutal evocation of wrongdoing to appear in quite a while; it is hardly a pleasure to watch. But it is also one of the best television movies to appear in years.
What time is prime time?
This week, the television upfronts — in which the broadcast networks present their schedules to advertisers — opened with a mystery. Who stole six million viewers? That’s the number who were watching prime time television last May, a month affectionately known as “sweeps,” but have disappeared this year, according to the overnight Nielsen ratings. Each of the major broadcast networks, save for Fox, has seen its audience decline this season. The ratings for hit shows like American Idol and CSI have approached record lows.
Where some of last May’s 44 million viewers went is not a mystery, according to the networks. The writers’ strike this winter deflated the ratings and accelerated the flight of viewers to cable channels. But the more significant shift can’t be blamed on the strike. In the past television season, there has been a sharp increase in time-shifting. Some of the six million are still watching, but on their own terms, thanks to TiVos and other digital video recorders, streaming video on the Internet, and cable video on demand offerings. So while overall usage of television is steady, the linear broadcasts favoured by advertisers are in decline, writes Brian Shelter.
The mystery, then, is what the networks should do now. Brad Adgate, research director of the advertising agency Horizon Media, said that advertisers were paying attention to the changes. “Part of the reason why advertisers buy television is because of its immediacy,” Mr. Adgate said. As more consumers time-shift their viewing, “there becomes less of a difference between ads in magazines and ads on television.” Broadcast television remains the dominant medium for advertising, as the $9 billion upfront market attests, but its prime-time audience is gradually shrinking. Time-shifting has cushioned the declines, but in ways that are trickier to measure and pitch to marketers. With on-demand options available in more households than ever, networks have no choice but to adapt.
For starters, the prime-time schedules crafted by television programmers might become less important with each passing year. David Wolf, a senior executive with the consulting firm Accenture’s media and entertainment practice, said that “must-see TV” — the long-time slogan for of NBC’s Thursday night line-up — might become a television relic. “The days of the ‘line-up’ are numbered,” Mr. Wolf said. In other words, with fewer viewers watching linear over-the-air television, networks can’t assume that a heavyweight lead-in like Dancing With the Stars will keep viewers watching all the way to the late local news, a pattern that has helped networks introduce new shows.
It may also mean that matching up programmes becomes less important, or at least less potentially damaging. Last fall’s powerhouse Thursday at 9 p.m. match-up — ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy versus CBS’s CSI versus NBC’s The Office — was a scheduling move influenced by time-shifting. All three shows are popular among the young, up-scale viewers who record and stream shows most often. “I think that scheduling decision would have been a lot harder to make in a non-DVR world,” said a senior network executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid about the issue. “It would have been more of a zero-sum game then.”
Many of the top-rated broadcast shows now have 20 percent to 25 percent ratings gains when DVR viewing is calculated. In urban areas, the gains are even greater. In Los Angeles, fully half the 18- to 49-year-old viewership for some shows, including The Office and another NBC sitcom, 30 Rock, happens on a time-shifted basis. Some viewers shift their viewing only slightly, overlapping shows scheduled later in the evening.
Of 20 shows time-shifted most often, only one (Medium) is on at 10 p.m. As appointment viewing wanes, hit franchises — ones that viewers will record or watch online each week — become even more important. “As a result of time-shifting, the biggest shows are getting bigger and some of the smaller shows are getting negatively impacted,” the senior television executive said. At a series of upfront presentations this week, the networks are likely to discuss the dizzying number of new ways to watch television. Last week, for example, the General Electric unit NBC started streaming some episodes to the Apple iPhone, and Microsoft added show downloads to its online store.
The availability of television shows online has become widespread surprisingly quickly. Some series are viewed millions of times a week via free, advertising-supported streaming Web sites like Hulu, Veoh and Fancast (and the network sites themselves). DVRs and online streams offer “a fairly large library of content available on an on-demand basis,” said Amy Banse of Comcast Interactive Media. The Hills, the most popular show on Viacom’s MTV, is a leading example of the shift. Comparing television ratings with online streams is imprecise, but the audience for the series soars when on-demand options are factored in. Since the show returned on March 24, premiere episodes have averaged 3.7 million “live” viewers on Monday nights. Almost a million more viewers have watched each episode using DVRs. On the Internet, episodes and excerpts have been streamed another 32 million times. Some overlap undoubtedly exists, as some fans watch the episode both on TV and online. But every viewing is another advertising opportunity for MTV.
Streaming is particularly popular among younger viewers, who are able to sample shows they would otherwise miss. In a first-of-its-kind experiment, the CW decided last month to stop streaming the teen drama Gossip Girl on its Web site and steer viewers to the television broadcast in an effort to bolster its over-the-air ratings. Stephanie Savage, an executive producer, said she worried that the move would alienate viewers. After all, each episode put online had been streamed hundreds of thousands of times. “There were a lot of question marks,” she said.
But executives at the CW, a joint venture between a Time Warner unit and the CBS Corporation, were pleased with the results when the ratings rose slightly in late April, Ms. Savage noted, and the episodes are still for sale for $1.99 each at Apple’s iTunes store, where they regularly rank No. 1.
Cable operators offer yet another on-demand option. Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the country’s two largest cable providers, are increasingly promoting their video-on-demand platforms, which are mostly associated with movies and premium programming. One-third of United States households now have on-demand capabilities, and Comcast said its platform recorded more than 300 million video views in March, up 50 percent over the previous year. But of all the time-shifting technologies, digital video recorders are the most popular. One in four American households now uses a digital video recorder to time-shift shows and skip commercials, up from about 15 percent last May. The broadcast networks experienced a 60 percent rise in recorded viewing this season. Last year, in recognition of the growth of DVRs, many television networks converted to a new ratings metric for buying and selling ad time that includes shows watched within three days of the broadcast.
For networks, the DVR is a friend and an enemy: “the classic frenemy,” said Alan Wurtzel, the head of research for NBC. While they enable viewers to watch more hours of television, they hurt the rate of commercial recognition, as about half of all commercials are skipped in time-shifting modes. “Honestly, if I could wish away the DVR, I would,” Mr. Wurtzel added. “But I can’t. It’s growing.”
Time Warner is trying a half-measure: letting viewers start an episode any time during the hour of its broadcast. “I’d like to see this get to the point where we have so much content that consumers can actually plan their lives around knowing that they don’t have to plan their lives,” said Peter C. Stern, the executive vice president for product management at Time Warner Cable.
Where some of last May’s 44 million viewers went is not a mystery, according to the networks. The writers’ strike this winter deflated the ratings and accelerated the flight of viewers to cable channels. But the more significant shift can’t be blamed on the strike. In the past television season, there has been a sharp increase in time-shifting. Some of the six million are still watching, but on their own terms, thanks to TiVos and other digital video recorders, streaming video on the Internet, and cable video on demand offerings. So while overall usage of television is steady, the linear broadcasts favoured by advertisers are in decline, writes Brian Shelter.
The mystery, then, is what the networks should do now. Brad Adgate, research director of the advertising agency Horizon Media, said that advertisers were paying attention to the changes. “Part of the reason why advertisers buy television is because of its immediacy,” Mr. Adgate said. As more consumers time-shift their viewing, “there becomes less of a difference between ads in magazines and ads on television.” Broadcast television remains the dominant medium for advertising, as the $9 billion upfront market attests, but its prime-time audience is gradually shrinking. Time-shifting has cushioned the declines, but in ways that are trickier to measure and pitch to marketers. With on-demand options available in more households than ever, networks have no choice but to adapt.
For starters, the prime-time schedules crafted by television programmers might become less important with each passing year. David Wolf, a senior executive with the consulting firm Accenture’s media and entertainment practice, said that “must-see TV” — the long-time slogan for of NBC’s Thursday night line-up — might become a television relic. “The days of the ‘line-up’ are numbered,” Mr. Wolf said. In other words, with fewer viewers watching linear over-the-air television, networks can’t assume that a heavyweight lead-in like Dancing With the Stars will keep viewers watching all the way to the late local news, a pattern that has helped networks introduce new shows.
It may also mean that matching up programmes becomes less important, or at least less potentially damaging. Last fall’s powerhouse Thursday at 9 p.m. match-up — ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy versus CBS’s CSI versus NBC’s The Office — was a scheduling move influenced by time-shifting. All three shows are popular among the young, up-scale viewers who record and stream shows most often. “I think that scheduling decision would have been a lot harder to make in a non-DVR world,” said a senior network executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid about the issue. “It would have been more of a zero-sum game then.”
Many of the top-rated broadcast shows now have 20 percent to 25 percent ratings gains when DVR viewing is calculated. In urban areas, the gains are even greater. In Los Angeles, fully half the 18- to 49-year-old viewership for some shows, including The Office and another NBC sitcom, 30 Rock, happens on a time-shifted basis. Some viewers shift their viewing only slightly, overlapping shows scheduled later in the evening.
Of 20 shows time-shifted most often, only one (Medium) is on at 10 p.m. As appointment viewing wanes, hit franchises — ones that viewers will record or watch online each week — become even more important. “As a result of time-shifting, the biggest shows are getting bigger and some of the smaller shows are getting negatively impacted,” the senior television executive said. At a series of upfront presentations this week, the networks are likely to discuss the dizzying number of new ways to watch television. Last week, for example, the General Electric unit NBC started streaming some episodes to the Apple iPhone, and Microsoft added show downloads to its online store.
The availability of television shows online has become widespread surprisingly quickly. Some series are viewed millions of times a week via free, advertising-supported streaming Web sites like Hulu, Veoh and Fancast (and the network sites themselves). DVRs and online streams offer “a fairly large library of content available on an on-demand basis,” said Amy Banse of Comcast Interactive Media. The Hills, the most popular show on Viacom’s MTV, is a leading example of the shift. Comparing television ratings with online streams is imprecise, but the audience for the series soars when on-demand options are factored in. Since the show returned on March 24, premiere episodes have averaged 3.7 million “live” viewers on Monday nights. Almost a million more viewers have watched each episode using DVRs. On the Internet, episodes and excerpts have been streamed another 32 million times. Some overlap undoubtedly exists, as some fans watch the episode both on TV and online. But every viewing is another advertising opportunity for MTV.
Streaming is particularly popular among younger viewers, who are able to sample shows they would otherwise miss. In a first-of-its-kind experiment, the CW decided last month to stop streaming the teen drama Gossip Girl on its Web site and steer viewers to the television broadcast in an effort to bolster its over-the-air ratings. Stephanie Savage, an executive producer, said she worried that the move would alienate viewers. After all, each episode put online had been streamed hundreds of thousands of times. “There were a lot of question marks,” she said.
But executives at the CW, a joint venture between a Time Warner unit and the CBS Corporation, were pleased with the results when the ratings rose slightly in late April, Ms. Savage noted, and the episodes are still for sale for $1.99 each at Apple’s iTunes store, where they regularly rank No. 1.
Cable operators offer yet another on-demand option. Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the country’s two largest cable providers, are increasingly promoting their video-on-demand platforms, which are mostly associated with movies and premium programming. One-third of United States households now have on-demand capabilities, and Comcast said its platform recorded more than 300 million video views in March, up 50 percent over the previous year. But of all the time-shifting technologies, digital video recorders are the most popular. One in four American households now uses a digital video recorder to time-shift shows and skip commercials, up from about 15 percent last May. The broadcast networks experienced a 60 percent rise in recorded viewing this season. Last year, in recognition of the growth of DVRs, many television networks converted to a new ratings metric for buying and selling ad time that includes shows watched within three days of the broadcast.
For networks, the DVR is a friend and an enemy: “the classic frenemy,” said Alan Wurtzel, the head of research for NBC. While they enable viewers to watch more hours of television, they hurt the rate of commercial recognition, as about half of all commercials are skipped in time-shifting modes. “Honestly, if I could wish away the DVR, I would,” Mr. Wurtzel added. “But I can’t. It’s growing.”
Time Warner is trying a half-measure: letting viewers start an episode any time during the hour of its broadcast. “I’d like to see this get to the point where we have so much content that consumers can actually plan their lives around knowing that they don’t have to plan their lives,” said Peter C. Stern, the executive vice president for product management at Time Warner Cable.
McCain and Schrute are the dream ticket
John McCain was ridiculed last month after he claimed to be a devoted viewer of the MTV soap opera The Hills. More than a few sceptics suggested that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee could not be serious. Mr. McCain seemed to set himself up again last Wednesday when, in an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, he jokingly proposed Dwight Schrute, the sycophantic character on the NBC sitcom The Office, as his running mate.
“That is pandering of the highest degree,” Mr. Stewart quipped. But Mr. McCain’s fondness for The Office seems sincere. The next day he seemed slightly star-struck upon meeting B. J. Novak, a writer and actor on the show, at a gala sponsored by Time magazine. Mr. McCain started rattling off the details of Dinner Party, a recent episode that he apparently enjoyed and remembered.
Mr. McCain explained that he used a Comcast service to record the shows. (An aide reminded him that it is called a digital video recorder.) Mr. Novak said the staff of The Office was very excited by the endorsement. “It really meant a lot to us,” he told Mr. McCain.
Presidential candidates long ago learned the power of pop culture, but this year they seem to be leaning particularly hard on it. In the days leading up to the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, both Democratic candidates appeared on Late Show With David Letterman with duelling Top 10 lists. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 10 reasons to love America included No. 6, “TiVo,” and Barack Obama’s 10 surprising facts included No. 10, “My first act as president will be to stop the fighting between Lauren and Heidi on The Hills.”
Then there is Mr. McCain, who has appeared on The Daily Show more than any other guest (14 times and counting). At the Time gala, Mr. McCain said he also watched Lost on ABC and The Tudors on Showtime. He didn’t mention The Hills.
“That is pandering of the highest degree,” Mr. Stewart quipped. But Mr. McCain’s fondness for The Office seems sincere. The next day he seemed slightly star-struck upon meeting B. J. Novak, a writer and actor on the show, at a gala sponsored by Time magazine. Mr. McCain started rattling off the details of Dinner Party, a recent episode that he apparently enjoyed and remembered.
Mr. McCain explained that he used a Comcast service to record the shows. (An aide reminded him that it is called a digital video recorder.) Mr. Novak said the staff of The Office was very excited by the endorsement. “It really meant a lot to us,” he told Mr. McCain.
Presidential candidates long ago learned the power of pop culture, but this year they seem to be leaning particularly hard on it. In the days leading up to the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, both Democratic candidates appeared on Late Show With David Letterman with duelling Top 10 lists. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 10 reasons to love America included No. 6, “TiVo,” and Barack Obama’s 10 surprising facts included No. 10, “My first act as president will be to stop the fighting between Lauren and Heidi on The Hills.”
Then there is Mr. McCain, who has appeared on The Daily Show more than any other guest (14 times and counting). At the Time gala, Mr. McCain said he also watched Lost on ABC and The Tudors on Showtime. He didn’t mention The Hills.
Take my wife. Please. I’ll take yours.
When the television series Swingtown has its US premiere on June 5, viewers can expect to see the following scenes in the first episode: a ménage à trois; a high school junior smoking pot and later flirting with her English teacher; the flagrant enjoyment of quaaludes and cocaine; and the sight of the neighbourhood scold unwittingly stumbling upon a groaning and slithering orgy. “Why don’t you kick your shoes off, Mom, and join the party?” is how a middle-aged participant, clad only in mutton chops, says hello.
Debauchery, however, is only an appetizer for the main story line: the open marriage of an airline pilot and his wife, who, in pursuit of new partners, set about seducing the businessman and housewife who have just moved in across the street. Seems like something that would be right at home on HBO or Showtime, where programs tend to loiter in the muck of moral ambiguity. But Swingtown, a one-hour scripted drama, will appear on CBS. Though perhaps not as prim and upstanding as it was when shows like Murder, She Wrote and Touched by an Angel defined its airwaves, this network tends to be more decorous than others where sex is concerned. So basing a series on sexual experimentation and other taboos, even if from a bygone era — Swingtown is set in the mid-1970s — is a notable experiment in and of itself, suggests Jacques Steinberg.
Swingtown was born in large part from a serendipitous collision of circumstances. A CBS executive happened to have a hankering for ’70s retrospection at a time when the network was looking for critical cachet and a way to expand its brand beyond grisly crime dramas and mainstream comedies. Swingtown, then, is something of a trial balloon.
One CBS official said it was probably inevitable that some companies now advertising on Without a Trace, the show temporarily yielding its time slot at 10 p.m. Thursdays to Swingtown, would beg off during the new show’s run. But with a subtle release of its 13 episodes between June and late summer (the heart of its promotional campaign is a teaser already on YouTube and spots on classic-rock radio stations), the network is hoping to beckon new viewers without alienating old ones.
“We wanted to give people something fun and fresh in the summer,” said Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment and the person who green-lighted the series. “The summer gives you a kind of different license.”
In setting the tone for Swingtown, its producers— including Mike Kelley (a writer for The OC and Jericho) and Alan Poul (a principal director of Six Feet Under) — said they aimed to combine the raucous abandon of Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s tongue-in-cheek take on the 1970s porn industry, and the sweetness of The Wonder Years, the ABC series (starring Fred Savage) in which a grown man looks back on his upbringing in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
While Swingtown does not have a narrator, it is certainly born of an adult looking back on his childhood. In 1976 Mr. Kelley, the show’s creator, was 8 and living in Winnetka, Ill., the Chicago suburb in Swingtown. And while the show is fiction, he said he was inspired by his memories of the Harvey Wallbanger-fuelled parties that his parents and their friends staged on Saturday nights; he would often watch from a perch on the stairs.
When he wrote the pilot episode, he surrounded himself with photographs his mother took of those times, and some of their details have been virtually grafted onto Swingtown. One character drives a maroon Cadillac Eldorado convertible and works as a trader, just as Mr. Kelley’s father did. Another wears the long denim skirts his mother favoured and sips gimlet martinis, her favorite drink. (The singer-songwriter Liz Phair, a classmate of Mr. Kelley’s at New Trier High School, has created the show’s original score.) Mr. Kelley, now 40, also says that at least some of the show’s more salacious moments are based on real events. “I remembered one summer where the kids all hung out, and some of the parents in the neighbourhood kind of switched partners,” he said in a recent interview. “It felt like they all just moved one house to the left. Eventually most of those marriages broke up.”
In a later conversation Mr. Kelley’s mother, Marcia Arnold, speaking with her son at her side, said that particular recollection was “embellished a bit.” “Mike saw it through young eyes,” she said, adding that she had no frame of reference, for example, for anything remotely like the basement orgy depicted in the series pilot. (She has seen that first episode twice.) Mrs. Arnold did acknowledge, however, that within her circle of perhaps 20 couples, most of them in their 30s by the mid-1970s and many of them already parents to adolescent children, there were flirtations, breakups and eventually remarriages. “A lot of us married very early because that’s what you did, and some people grew apart because they probably shouldn’t have been together in the first place,” Mrs. Arnold said.
Mr. Kelley’s parents were among those who separated, much to his relief. “It was hard to see your parents so unhappy in something they didn’t seem to be able to get out of,” Mr. Kelley recalled as his mother sat next to him in the big backyard of his red-brick home, which is near Hollywood but looks like it could be in the northern suburbs of Chicago. “Even though I was 20, I remember feeling thrilled for Mother in particular.” He shifted his gaze toward her. “You did something that was right for you emotionally, personally,” he added.
With both his parents now happier in new marriages than they were in their first, Mr. Kelley said he has taken their experience to heart. “Watching my mom navigate her first marriage and the crazy second adolescence she and her friends seemed to be living in the 1970s inspired me to be as brave and honest as I can be in my own adult relationships and not worry so much about what other people think or say about them,” he later wrote in an e-mail message. “But the jury is still out for me on marriage and monogamy.” Asked if he is now involved in a relationship, he said only, “I’ve been lucky to have had a handful of primary relationships over the years, none of which society would probably deem conventional.”
In setting out to sell a story as unconventional as Swingtown, Mr. Kelley said, he did not immediately think of the broadcast networks. Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul first pitched the idea to executives at HBO, where Mr. Poul had a development deal following his run on Six Feet Under. HBO passed, Mr. Poul said, at least in part because Big Love, which is about polygamy and was already in production, and Tell Me You Love Me, a soft-core treatment of intersecting relationships that was in development, were deemed too similar. The producers then began to shop their idea to Showtime.
But in the interim an acquaintance of Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul mentioned to a dinner companion that her friends had conceived a TV series that touched on open marriage in the 1970s. Lucky for Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul, that dinner companion was Ms. Tassler. Luckier still, Ms. Tassler’s second cousin, Nena O’Neill, had with her husband written “Open Marriage,” a well-known 1972 book that encouraged couples to consider experimenting sexually outside matrimony as long as everyone’s cards were on the table. (It went on to sell nearly four million copies through the decade and beyond.) “I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Tassler, 50, recalled in a recent interview. “That’s right in my sweet spot, in terms of my nostalgia.”
Less than 24 hours later Ms. Tassler was reading the script. “It was a page turner,” she said. “I called the next day and said, ‘I want it.’” There was, however, the not insignificant matter of nudity and the graphic depiction of sexual acts. The script, as written for cable, was rife with both. Mr. Kelley, in consultation with Mr. Poul, was directed to do a rewrite. “I think we’re able to be more ground-breaking and more culturally subversive by putting this on a network, where more people will be exposed to it and where we’ll have to deal with these adult issues in an oblique way,” Mr. Poul said. Mr. Kelley agreed. “I actually think the shackles of having to show more explicit things every week to week to week on cable would have been far more constricting.”
What remains to be seen is whether viewers accustomed to the quick and easy doffing of clothes on cable will be interested in a network series about sex with no more nudity than an afternoon soap opera — and far less than NYPD Blue had on prime time on ABC in the 1990s. Still, whatever restraint the network and creators have imposed on themselves is unlikely to quiet a vocal segment of the viewing public that feels prime-time television is sufficiently polluted and in no need of a series in which the central characters may well go off to bed in groups of three, four or more.
“I have seen the promo for it that was posted on YouTube,” said Melissa Henson, director of communications and public education for the Parents Television Council, a watchdog group that has campaigned for years against what it considers inappropriate content on shows including NYPD Blue and, recently, 30 Rock. “It’s sort of driving a stake through an institution most of us regard as being fundamental to our culture and to our society,” she said. Ms. Henson added she would wait to see the show until she and her group would act. “We’re certainly disturbed by the premise,” she said, “or at least our understanding of the premise.”
None of the series’s stars will be immediately recognizable to most viewers. Molly Parker, who plays one of the lead characters, a housewife named Susan Miller, appeared in Deadwood and Six Feet Under on HBO, and Jack Davenport, who plays her husband, Bruce, was in the original British version of Coupling, a sex-obsessed comedy. The best-known actor to American television viewers is probably Grant Show, of Melrose Place, though he is hard to place behind the long blond mustache he has grown to play Tom Decker, the pilot.
Mr. Kelly gave Mr. Show one of the most memorable lines in the first episode (and in that YouTube trailer) — one that signals to viewers early the ride on which they are about to embark. “Your wife’s going to kill me,” a flight attendant says to Tom after she has inadvertently spilled a drink on his shirt in the cockpit. “My wife,” Tom says, a smile broadening on his face, “is going to love you.”
Debauchery, however, is only an appetizer for the main story line: the open marriage of an airline pilot and his wife, who, in pursuit of new partners, set about seducing the businessman and housewife who have just moved in across the street. Seems like something that would be right at home on HBO or Showtime, where programs tend to loiter in the muck of moral ambiguity. But Swingtown, a one-hour scripted drama, will appear on CBS. Though perhaps not as prim and upstanding as it was when shows like Murder, She Wrote and Touched by an Angel defined its airwaves, this network tends to be more decorous than others where sex is concerned. So basing a series on sexual experimentation and other taboos, even if from a bygone era — Swingtown is set in the mid-1970s — is a notable experiment in and of itself, suggests Jacques Steinberg.
Swingtown was born in large part from a serendipitous collision of circumstances. A CBS executive happened to have a hankering for ’70s retrospection at a time when the network was looking for critical cachet and a way to expand its brand beyond grisly crime dramas and mainstream comedies. Swingtown, then, is something of a trial balloon.
One CBS official said it was probably inevitable that some companies now advertising on Without a Trace, the show temporarily yielding its time slot at 10 p.m. Thursdays to Swingtown, would beg off during the new show’s run. But with a subtle release of its 13 episodes between June and late summer (the heart of its promotional campaign is a teaser already on YouTube and spots on classic-rock radio stations), the network is hoping to beckon new viewers without alienating old ones.
“We wanted to give people something fun and fresh in the summer,” said Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment and the person who green-lighted the series. “The summer gives you a kind of different license.”
In setting the tone for Swingtown, its producers— including Mike Kelley (a writer for The OC and Jericho) and Alan Poul (a principal director of Six Feet Under) — said they aimed to combine the raucous abandon of Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s tongue-in-cheek take on the 1970s porn industry, and the sweetness of The Wonder Years, the ABC series (starring Fred Savage) in which a grown man looks back on his upbringing in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
While Swingtown does not have a narrator, it is certainly born of an adult looking back on his childhood. In 1976 Mr. Kelley, the show’s creator, was 8 and living in Winnetka, Ill., the Chicago suburb in Swingtown. And while the show is fiction, he said he was inspired by his memories of the Harvey Wallbanger-fuelled parties that his parents and their friends staged on Saturday nights; he would often watch from a perch on the stairs.
When he wrote the pilot episode, he surrounded himself with photographs his mother took of those times, and some of their details have been virtually grafted onto Swingtown. One character drives a maroon Cadillac Eldorado convertible and works as a trader, just as Mr. Kelley’s father did. Another wears the long denim skirts his mother favoured and sips gimlet martinis, her favorite drink. (The singer-songwriter Liz Phair, a classmate of Mr. Kelley’s at New Trier High School, has created the show’s original score.) Mr. Kelley, now 40, also says that at least some of the show’s more salacious moments are based on real events. “I remembered one summer where the kids all hung out, and some of the parents in the neighbourhood kind of switched partners,” he said in a recent interview. “It felt like they all just moved one house to the left. Eventually most of those marriages broke up.”
In a later conversation Mr. Kelley’s mother, Marcia Arnold, speaking with her son at her side, said that particular recollection was “embellished a bit.” “Mike saw it through young eyes,” she said, adding that she had no frame of reference, for example, for anything remotely like the basement orgy depicted in the series pilot. (She has seen that first episode twice.) Mrs. Arnold did acknowledge, however, that within her circle of perhaps 20 couples, most of them in their 30s by the mid-1970s and many of them already parents to adolescent children, there were flirtations, breakups and eventually remarriages. “A lot of us married very early because that’s what you did, and some people grew apart because they probably shouldn’t have been together in the first place,” Mrs. Arnold said.
Mr. Kelley’s parents were among those who separated, much to his relief. “It was hard to see your parents so unhappy in something they didn’t seem to be able to get out of,” Mr. Kelley recalled as his mother sat next to him in the big backyard of his red-brick home, which is near Hollywood but looks like it could be in the northern suburbs of Chicago. “Even though I was 20, I remember feeling thrilled for Mother in particular.” He shifted his gaze toward her. “You did something that was right for you emotionally, personally,” he added.
With both his parents now happier in new marriages than they were in their first, Mr. Kelley said he has taken their experience to heart. “Watching my mom navigate her first marriage and the crazy second adolescence she and her friends seemed to be living in the 1970s inspired me to be as brave and honest as I can be in my own adult relationships and not worry so much about what other people think or say about them,” he later wrote in an e-mail message. “But the jury is still out for me on marriage and monogamy.” Asked if he is now involved in a relationship, he said only, “I’ve been lucky to have had a handful of primary relationships over the years, none of which society would probably deem conventional.”
In setting out to sell a story as unconventional as Swingtown, Mr. Kelley said, he did not immediately think of the broadcast networks. Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul first pitched the idea to executives at HBO, where Mr. Poul had a development deal following his run on Six Feet Under. HBO passed, Mr. Poul said, at least in part because Big Love, which is about polygamy and was already in production, and Tell Me You Love Me, a soft-core treatment of intersecting relationships that was in development, were deemed too similar. The producers then began to shop their idea to Showtime.
But in the interim an acquaintance of Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul mentioned to a dinner companion that her friends had conceived a TV series that touched on open marriage in the 1970s. Lucky for Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul, that dinner companion was Ms. Tassler. Luckier still, Ms. Tassler’s second cousin, Nena O’Neill, had with her husband written “Open Marriage,” a well-known 1972 book that encouraged couples to consider experimenting sexually outside matrimony as long as everyone’s cards were on the table. (It went on to sell nearly four million copies through the decade and beyond.) “I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Tassler, 50, recalled in a recent interview. “That’s right in my sweet spot, in terms of my nostalgia.”
Less than 24 hours later Ms. Tassler was reading the script. “It was a page turner,” she said. “I called the next day and said, ‘I want it.’” There was, however, the not insignificant matter of nudity and the graphic depiction of sexual acts. The script, as written for cable, was rife with both. Mr. Kelley, in consultation with Mr. Poul, was directed to do a rewrite. “I think we’re able to be more ground-breaking and more culturally subversive by putting this on a network, where more people will be exposed to it and where we’ll have to deal with these adult issues in an oblique way,” Mr. Poul said. Mr. Kelley agreed. “I actually think the shackles of having to show more explicit things every week to week to week on cable would have been far more constricting.”
What remains to be seen is whether viewers accustomed to the quick and easy doffing of clothes on cable will be interested in a network series about sex with no more nudity than an afternoon soap opera — and far less than NYPD Blue had on prime time on ABC in the 1990s. Still, whatever restraint the network and creators have imposed on themselves is unlikely to quiet a vocal segment of the viewing public that feels prime-time television is sufficiently polluted and in no need of a series in which the central characters may well go off to bed in groups of three, four or more.
“I have seen the promo for it that was posted on YouTube,” said Melissa Henson, director of communications and public education for the Parents Television Council, a watchdog group that has campaigned for years against what it considers inappropriate content on shows including NYPD Blue and, recently, 30 Rock. “It’s sort of driving a stake through an institution most of us regard as being fundamental to our culture and to our society,” she said. Ms. Henson added she would wait to see the show until she and her group would act. “We’re certainly disturbed by the premise,” she said, “or at least our understanding of the premise.”
None of the series’s stars will be immediately recognizable to most viewers. Molly Parker, who plays one of the lead characters, a housewife named Susan Miller, appeared in Deadwood and Six Feet Under on HBO, and Jack Davenport, who plays her husband, Bruce, was in the original British version of Coupling, a sex-obsessed comedy. The best-known actor to American television viewers is probably Grant Show, of Melrose Place, though he is hard to place behind the long blond mustache he has grown to play Tom Decker, the pilot.
Mr. Kelly gave Mr. Show one of the most memorable lines in the first episode (and in that YouTube trailer) — one that signals to viewers early the ride on which they are about to embark. “Your wife’s going to kill me,” a flight attendant says to Tom after she has inadvertently spilled a drink on his shirt in the cockpit. “My wife,” Tom says, a smile broadening on his face, “is going to love you.”
Where a little awkward whimsy can take you
As if by decree, the fans who came to Town Hall in Manhattan on a Tuesday night to see the comedy-music duo Flight of the Conchords arrived in pairs, one with glasses and one without. Among them were two sisters, Janice and Erica Jim. Seated in a front row, Erica (with glasses) was holding a hand-painted sign, shaped like a hot dog, bearing the band’s name, while Janice (without) toted a bag of tacky sweatshirts. (Both items were elaborately specific references to the Flight of the Conchords television show.)
The sisters expected a more animated audience — maybe people in costume? — but were still excited to be among the more clued-in members of the crowd. “It’s a nice little secret,” said Janice Jim. “If you know about them, you know about them.” It was an appropriately low-key reception for a low-key band, reports Dave Itzkoff. Its two laconic, hirsute New Zealanders — Jemaine Clement (glasses, sideburns) and Bret McKenzie (no glasses, beard) — are emblematic artists for an age of diminished expectations. On their HBO series they play a novelty pop-music team striving to make it big — or medium, or small — on the New York scene, and they muddle through performances at tiny, mostly empty clubs and airport lounges. In real life they are big enough that their two shows at Town Hall sold out almost immediately, yet small enough that they can inspire ritualistic loyalty in their fans.
When Flight of the Conchords was first shown on HBO last summer, it was a modest hit, infrequently drawing more than 1 million viewers an episode. In a post-Sopranos, post-Sex and the City era, however, the hip but little-seen show delivered badly needed buzz for the cable channel. Unlike the recent HBO misfire John From Cincinnati, which drew more scrutiny (and more viewers), Flight of the Conchords was renewed for a second season, though no date has yet been set.
Similarly, the band’s new album, also titled Flight of the Conchords (Sub Pop), sold only 52,000 copies in its first week when it was released last month, according to Nielsen SoundScan. But measured by the ever-constricting yardstick of the music industry, that was enough to make it a success; Flight of the Conchords made its debut at No. 3 on the Billboard chart, placing it ahead of new releases by more, shall we say, omnipresent acts like Ashlee Simpson.
On Tuesday, following a stand-up set by Todd Barry, a comedian whose deadpan delivery was drier than an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, Mr. McKenzie and Mr. Clement took the stage, seated on stools, acoustic guitars on their laps. Their unrepentantly Caucasian efforts at funk, soul and R&B often pretended to address a specific topic or tell a single story, but wandered off on comedic tangents: a plea for social justice becomes a rant about the high cost of sweatshop-produced sneakers; a conversation between two ex-lovers veers into a critique of the Weekend at Bernie’s movies.
Between songs the two men bantered with self-conscious, Bob Newhartesque clumsiness, often about the clumsiness of their banter. (When Mr. McKenzie lamented feeling “out of kilter,” Mr. Clement asked, “What kilter are you usually in?”)
Though most of their music was created for the stage show, the songs came across more vividly on the HBO series, where they provided the soundtracks for music videos and fantasy sequences. (It’s hard to hear The Prince of Parties without thinking of the “Magical Mystery Tour”-style LSD trip that it accompanied on the television show.) Still, most audience members laughed along, even when they knew the punch lines that were coming.
“They’re not even trying, it’s so natural how awkward they are,” said Jennifer Gardiner, an appreciative fan (no glasses) who had come to the show with a friend, Crissi Bariatti (glasses). Both women were gazing adoringly at merchandise bearing the likenesses of Mr. Clement and Mr. McKenzie.
Nothing makes Flight of the Conchords more flustered than the opposite sex. When, in songs like “Ladies of the World,” they drool lustily over all manner of women — Caribbean, Namibian, amphibian — the facetiousness is obvious. Their outlook on male-female relations is more accurately reflected in the satirical slow jam “Business Time,” in which sex is merely a mechanical activity, something to do on a Wednesday night when there’s nothing good on television.
And sometimes sex is best avoided altogether. After boasting about their kissing skills, they performed “A Kiss Is Not a Contract,” which includes the lyric, “Just because you’ve been exploring my mouth/Doesn’t mean you get to take an expedition further south.”
There probably should be limits to the intimacy between the performers and their fans. During lulls between songs, when Mr. McKenzie and Mr. Clement were not bantering, audience members were relentless in shouting out titles of songs they wanted to hear, whether they were actual Flight of the Conchords tunes or the perennial Free Bird. When these requests went unheeded, they shouted the names of characters from the television show.
“Where’s Murray?” someone asked, referring to the hapless band manager played by the comedian Rhys Darby. “Murray’s not here,” Mr. Clement replied. “Murray’s doing a movie. But we’re here.” Apparently there are associates of Flight of the Conchords more famous than the band itself. “Murray blew up,” Mr. McKenzie said.
The sisters expected a more animated audience — maybe people in costume? — but were still excited to be among the more clued-in members of the crowd. “It’s a nice little secret,” said Janice Jim. “If you know about them, you know about them.” It was an appropriately low-key reception for a low-key band, reports Dave Itzkoff. Its two laconic, hirsute New Zealanders — Jemaine Clement (glasses, sideburns) and Bret McKenzie (no glasses, beard) — are emblematic artists for an age of diminished expectations. On their HBO series they play a novelty pop-music team striving to make it big — or medium, or small — on the New York scene, and they muddle through performances at tiny, mostly empty clubs and airport lounges. In real life they are big enough that their two shows at Town Hall sold out almost immediately, yet small enough that they can inspire ritualistic loyalty in their fans.
When Flight of the Conchords was first shown on HBO last summer, it was a modest hit, infrequently drawing more than 1 million viewers an episode. In a post-Sopranos, post-Sex and the City era, however, the hip but little-seen show delivered badly needed buzz for the cable channel. Unlike the recent HBO misfire John From Cincinnati, which drew more scrutiny (and more viewers), Flight of the Conchords was renewed for a second season, though no date has yet been set.
Similarly, the band’s new album, also titled Flight of the Conchords (Sub Pop), sold only 52,000 copies in its first week when it was released last month, according to Nielsen SoundScan. But measured by the ever-constricting yardstick of the music industry, that was enough to make it a success; Flight of the Conchords made its debut at No. 3 on the Billboard chart, placing it ahead of new releases by more, shall we say, omnipresent acts like Ashlee Simpson.
On Tuesday, following a stand-up set by Todd Barry, a comedian whose deadpan delivery was drier than an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, Mr. McKenzie and Mr. Clement took the stage, seated on stools, acoustic guitars on their laps. Their unrepentantly Caucasian efforts at funk, soul and R&B often pretended to address a specific topic or tell a single story, but wandered off on comedic tangents: a plea for social justice becomes a rant about the high cost of sweatshop-produced sneakers; a conversation between two ex-lovers veers into a critique of the Weekend at Bernie’s movies.
Between songs the two men bantered with self-conscious, Bob Newhartesque clumsiness, often about the clumsiness of their banter. (When Mr. McKenzie lamented feeling “out of kilter,” Mr. Clement asked, “What kilter are you usually in?”)
Though most of their music was created for the stage show, the songs came across more vividly on the HBO series, where they provided the soundtracks for music videos and fantasy sequences. (It’s hard to hear The Prince of Parties without thinking of the “Magical Mystery Tour”-style LSD trip that it accompanied on the television show.) Still, most audience members laughed along, even when they knew the punch lines that were coming.
“They’re not even trying, it’s so natural how awkward they are,” said Jennifer Gardiner, an appreciative fan (no glasses) who had come to the show with a friend, Crissi Bariatti (glasses). Both women were gazing adoringly at merchandise bearing the likenesses of Mr. Clement and Mr. McKenzie.
Nothing makes Flight of the Conchords more flustered than the opposite sex. When, in songs like “Ladies of the World,” they drool lustily over all manner of women — Caribbean, Namibian, amphibian — the facetiousness is obvious. Their outlook on male-female relations is more accurately reflected in the satirical slow jam “Business Time,” in which sex is merely a mechanical activity, something to do on a Wednesday night when there’s nothing good on television.
And sometimes sex is best avoided altogether. After boasting about their kissing skills, they performed “A Kiss Is Not a Contract,” which includes the lyric, “Just because you’ve been exploring my mouth/Doesn’t mean you get to take an expedition further south.”
There probably should be limits to the intimacy between the performers and their fans. During lulls between songs, when Mr. McKenzie and Mr. Clement were not bantering, audience members were relentless in shouting out titles of songs they wanted to hear, whether they were actual Flight of the Conchords tunes or the perennial Free Bird. When these requests went unheeded, they shouted the names of characters from the television show.
“Where’s Murray?” someone asked, referring to the hapless band manager played by the comedian Rhys Darby. “Murray’s not here,” Mr. Clement replied. “Murray’s doing a movie. But we’re here.” Apparently there are associates of Flight of the Conchords more famous than the band itself. “Murray blew up,” Mr. McKenzie said.
As terrifying as your real life
Aside from some of the more banal horrors of reality programming, Medium has nothing to rival it as the most frightful hour on television, says Ginia Bellafante. The series, which stars Patricia Arquette as an earnest telepath (Allison Dubois) who lends her powers of premonition to Phoenix law enforcement, has been a quiet success on NBC for four seasons, receiving some of its highest ratings in recent months as the show has delved further into the human capacity for selfishness and intimate depravities.Medium creates a mood of gothic foreboding from the first few seconds of its opening credits. Its score recalls the tense chords of a Bernard Herrmann soundtrack, and the accompanying graphics look like the dark and unequivocally right answers to a Rorschach test — mutating hands and faces and evocations of dripping blood. Life in the 21st century provides so many opportunities to terrify us that popular culture has generally seemed enfeebled in its efforts to compete. Over the past decade, as movies have been less frequently consumed in the vulnerable territory of public space, the idea that they might possess the power to scare and undo us has become something of joke, rolfing the horror genre almost entirely into a satire of itself. And if television has been increasingly adept at producing anxiety (24, Lost, Jericho), it has rarely elicited anything resembling sensory fear.
Created by Glen Gordon Caron (and existing at a significant tonal distance from Moonlighting, his other great contribution to television), Medium can be genuinely hard to endure, especially at home, alone, late at night (it is shown at 10 p.m. on Mondays), without wondering whether you should check behind the bedposts for sadists and other wack jobs. Something terrible has always just happened, or is about to, and the viewer bears the apprehensive weight of Allison’s foreknowledge, having witnessed the violently detailed dreams that disrupt her sleep almost every other nocturnal hour. (No one has ever needed a regular prescription of Ambien more.) Sometimes Allison’s forecasts can keep a rape or a killing from occurring. Mostly, though, Allison receives random images in the night — a woman, for example, fighting with her husband in a hotel room in France — only to learn, usually the next day, that someone who looks like the person she dreamt about has disappeared, which propels her toward the evidence that allows the authorities to solve the case. The woman in France, Allison intuited, had been abducted by her embittered ex-husband and then psychologically tortured in a re-creation of the honeymoon suite in Paris that the couple had stayed in years before.
Medium borrows from the conventions of classic horror the idea that real nightmares result from arbitrary or misplaced trust. The camera lingers on the faces of victims in waiting as they put their faith in attackers whose malevolence they cannot yet see. An episode shown in the US early this year revolved around the killing of a little boy, supplying the single most chilling moment on television in quite a long while: a smiling child watched as a man, shot from the waist down, slowly kicked off his shoes and danced to “Rapper’s Delight” in front of him. The little boy had followed his kidnapper out of a toy store, lured by a marionette slung over the man’s back and lost to his father’s distracting business call on his cellphone.
Work, on Medium, has been implicated as a distinctly dangerous pastime more than once. At the end of last US season Allison’s husband, Joe (Jake Weber), an aerospace engineer, and his colleagues were held hostage at gunpoint by a fired employee who, dying of cancer, demanded millions of dollars in compensation for the loss of his health insurance and other benefits. Medium is so committed to the grim realities of middle-class life that it is a paranormal show that very often doesn’t feel like one. This season Joe has no job at all: it’s a tough economy, and he has found it impossible to find another. Allison’s credit cards are declined at a grocery store; her eldest daughter hasn’t gotten her allowance in weeks. Indian call centres operating on behalf of lenders phone the Dubois household constantly, and the bills keep falling, one on top of the other.
When Medium isn’t terrifying us with images of children about to be sodomized and killed, it is unsettling us with its belief that all of our systems and institutions essentially fail us. Families are fragile, and sons kill fathers. Charitable organizations are bilked by greedy maniacs. Journalists are sleazy and operate on falsehoods. (Last season Allison befriended a woman she thought was an out-of-towner looking for company, only to discover, after it was too late, that the woman was a reporter seeking to expose the Phoenix district attorney’s reliance on her unorthodox services.)
And, of course, what does it say about the skills of the show’s police officers and prosecutors that they depend so heavily on the musings of a psychic mother of three? It says that they just cannot hack it with their blood samples and clues and shoe leather. Allison’s notions are almost always infallible, but information isn’t. The scariest message from Medium, says Bellafante, is that we only have our instincts to guide us.
Voilà (sort of)!
So what’s on the block at the 'upfronts' this month? Could it be the future of television? asks Virginia Heffernan...
Every spring since the early ’80s, the lavish presentations known as the upfronts have been a propaganda jamboree for the TV business. What began as a network trade show for ad-world elites has evolved, thanks to industry one-upmanship, into a bacchanal of variety shows hosted by the networks and staged before standing-room hordes at places like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Centre.
In the midst of extravagant audiovisuals, musical numbers, comedy sketches, pricey giveaways and celebrity appearances, the networks divulge their fall prime-time schedules — the sitcoms, dramas, game shows and reality programmes that are broadcast between 8 and 11. They settle with great fanfare industry nail-biters like “Will Fox cede the Thursday 8:30 hammock time slot to NBC?” The audience for this arcana includes reporters and prospective advertisers, who sit rapt for an hour or two and then mill around at swanky after-parties, hoping to glimpse Kiefer Sutherland and sounding off about how dumb or weird the presentations were.
And the upfronts are kind of dumb. They are overblown tributes to a bygone style of salesmanship, and from the point of view of advertisers, they are almost pointless. In the old days, execs from Ralston Purina, say, would attend exclusive in-studio screenings of CBS pilots so they could be sure to place Puppy Chow ads during shows that featured dogs. But today, when media buyers can screen shows online and study a network’s demographics and ad platforms, the upfronts function chiefly as an ostentatious corporate week on the town.
They are a sight to see: the ad world squealing over small-screen stars, small-screen stars conversing knowingly with network accountants and alpha executives donning big shoes and clown noses, begging for ad dollars while flanked by high-flying guys and dolls. (Think Aretha Franklin, the Who, Mary J. Blige, Chris Rock, Eli and Peyton Manning, Jerry Seinfeld, Tyra Banks, Ashton Kutcher, Mariah Carey.) The whole spectacle has got to be one of the most embarrassing, astonishing, confusing, wondrous collisions of American sensibilities you’ll ever see.
Or it was. For decades. When TV was a business of winners. But winning streaks must end. Having so long excoriated themselves as a nation of zombie-eyed TV addicts — they average six hours a day, the old studies always showed — Americans cannot seem to face the fact that we have sobered up. But it’s true: many of us seem to have shut off the networks, at least in prime time. Instead, we watch DVDs, DVRs, on-demand, online and niche cable channels. We also do other things. No one knows what, exactly, but it’s evidently less quantifiable than watching TV. (One suggestive statistic: Americans watched 10 billion videos online in the month of February alone, according to the comScore Video Metrix service.)
To people who work in television, this development is known as “the viewer plunge.” Last spring at the upfronts, a chilling number was widely whispered: 2.5 million fewer people were watching NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox than had in spring 2006. TV executives repeatedly reassured ad buyers that everything was A-O.K., but they also took to kitchen-sinking to explain away the plunge. Daylight Savings Time had come too early. Everyone was using TiVo and the Internet. The rating system is unfair. The war. The economy. The toxins. The bees. But things were going to be great in ’08.
And then came the writers’ strike. Combined with the viewer plunge, it was like the Depression and the Dust Bowl — a double whammy for television and its audience. The strike “orphaned” viewers (as the jargon has it) without their favourite shows, which gave viewers a reason to leave network television entirely. And they did. Sayonara. According to The Hollywood Reporter, most returning shows lost between 10 and 30 percent of the viewers they had before the strike, when ratings for the networks were already low.
It’s not immediately clear what all this means for the upfronts. How do you celebrate your wedding anniversary the year that divorce is imminent? Do you drink alone? Toast to old times? “It’s going to be much more like a meeting,” Mike Shaw, the president of sales and marketing for ABC, said, referring to this year’s upfronts, on an advertising panel at the Harvard Business School in February. He cited, as one reason for this change, the fact that the writers’ strike compressed the time available for producing pilots. Still, the writing is on the wall: the good times are over. The ABC gang will show up at Lincoln Center but offer some kind of “streamlined” corporate presentation and no party. Sounds like fun.
Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, which is trailing closely behind the three other big networks, seems equally chastened. At the same event in February, he declared that NBC would be “much more realistic and much more honest” in its presentation of programming to advertisers. (NBC has resolved to make shows faster, cheaper and year-round, meaning they won’t make and summarily kill the usual huge number of sample shows.) Fox, which still has a bona fide, if recently weakened, hit in American Idol, planned its upfront as usual, but with no surprises or dramatic unveilings. Finally, CBS did a programming and advertising presentation. No party.
"I’m not going to any upfronts this year," says Heffernan. "I’ll miss them: I’ve loved every minute of the cuckoo shows in the past, and I’ll probably never get to see those mongo entertainers at such close range again. At the upfronts I always learned something too about what the American people want: heartwarming dramas, women’s stuff, sports, heroism, complex characters, real people, guilty pleasures, eye candy, names they can trust, ambiguous villains, simple comedies, hipster hipness, good old-fashioned values, edginess, upscaleness, satire, science fiction, girls, boys, Latinas, crime procedurals, urban sitcoms, aspirationalism, a way to express their anger."
Closing credits. Colour bars. Static. For decades, what Americans want has been something that could be piped into a television screen. What if it’s not any more?
Every spring since the early ’80s, the lavish presentations known as the upfronts have been a propaganda jamboree for the TV business. What began as a network trade show for ad-world elites has evolved, thanks to industry one-upmanship, into a bacchanal of variety shows hosted by the networks and staged before standing-room hordes at places like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Centre.
In the midst of extravagant audiovisuals, musical numbers, comedy sketches, pricey giveaways and celebrity appearances, the networks divulge their fall prime-time schedules — the sitcoms, dramas, game shows and reality programmes that are broadcast between 8 and 11. They settle with great fanfare industry nail-biters like “Will Fox cede the Thursday 8:30 hammock time slot to NBC?” The audience for this arcana includes reporters and prospective advertisers, who sit rapt for an hour or two and then mill around at swanky after-parties, hoping to glimpse Kiefer Sutherland and sounding off about how dumb or weird the presentations were.
And the upfronts are kind of dumb. They are overblown tributes to a bygone style of salesmanship, and from the point of view of advertisers, they are almost pointless. In the old days, execs from Ralston Purina, say, would attend exclusive in-studio screenings of CBS pilots so they could be sure to place Puppy Chow ads during shows that featured dogs. But today, when media buyers can screen shows online and study a network’s demographics and ad platforms, the upfronts function chiefly as an ostentatious corporate week on the town.
They are a sight to see: the ad world squealing over small-screen stars, small-screen stars conversing knowingly with network accountants and alpha executives donning big shoes and clown noses, begging for ad dollars while flanked by high-flying guys and dolls. (Think Aretha Franklin, the Who, Mary J. Blige, Chris Rock, Eli and Peyton Manning, Jerry Seinfeld, Tyra Banks, Ashton Kutcher, Mariah Carey.) The whole spectacle has got to be one of the most embarrassing, astonishing, confusing, wondrous collisions of American sensibilities you’ll ever see.
Or it was. For decades. When TV was a business of winners. But winning streaks must end. Having so long excoriated themselves as a nation of zombie-eyed TV addicts — they average six hours a day, the old studies always showed — Americans cannot seem to face the fact that we have sobered up. But it’s true: many of us seem to have shut off the networks, at least in prime time. Instead, we watch DVDs, DVRs, on-demand, online and niche cable channels. We also do other things. No one knows what, exactly, but it’s evidently less quantifiable than watching TV. (One suggestive statistic: Americans watched 10 billion videos online in the month of February alone, according to the comScore Video Metrix service.)
To people who work in television, this development is known as “the viewer plunge.” Last spring at the upfronts, a chilling number was widely whispered: 2.5 million fewer people were watching NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox than had in spring 2006. TV executives repeatedly reassured ad buyers that everything was A-O.K., but they also took to kitchen-sinking to explain away the plunge. Daylight Savings Time had come too early. Everyone was using TiVo and the Internet. The rating system is unfair. The war. The economy. The toxins. The bees. But things were going to be great in ’08.
And then came the writers’ strike. Combined with the viewer plunge, it was like the Depression and the Dust Bowl — a double whammy for television and its audience. The strike “orphaned” viewers (as the jargon has it) without their favourite shows, which gave viewers a reason to leave network television entirely. And they did. Sayonara. According to The Hollywood Reporter, most returning shows lost between 10 and 30 percent of the viewers they had before the strike, when ratings for the networks were already low.
It’s not immediately clear what all this means for the upfronts. How do you celebrate your wedding anniversary the year that divorce is imminent? Do you drink alone? Toast to old times? “It’s going to be much more like a meeting,” Mike Shaw, the president of sales and marketing for ABC, said, referring to this year’s upfronts, on an advertising panel at the Harvard Business School in February. He cited, as one reason for this change, the fact that the writers’ strike compressed the time available for producing pilots. Still, the writing is on the wall: the good times are over. The ABC gang will show up at Lincoln Center but offer some kind of “streamlined” corporate presentation and no party. Sounds like fun.
Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, which is trailing closely behind the three other big networks, seems equally chastened. At the same event in February, he declared that NBC would be “much more realistic and much more honest” in its presentation of programming to advertisers. (NBC has resolved to make shows faster, cheaper and year-round, meaning they won’t make and summarily kill the usual huge number of sample shows.) Fox, which still has a bona fide, if recently weakened, hit in American Idol, planned its upfront as usual, but with no surprises or dramatic unveilings. Finally, CBS did a programming and advertising presentation. No party.
"I’m not going to any upfronts this year," says Heffernan. "I’ll miss them: I’ve loved every minute of the cuckoo shows in the past, and I’ll probably never get to see those mongo entertainers at such close range again. At the upfronts I always learned something too about what the American people want: heartwarming dramas, women’s stuff, sports, heroism, complex characters, real people, guilty pleasures, eye candy, names they can trust, ambiguous villains, simple comedies, hipster hipness, good old-fashioned values, edginess, upscaleness, satire, science fiction, girls, boys, Latinas, crime procedurals, urban sitcoms, aspirationalism, a way to express their anger."
Closing credits. Colour bars. Static. For decades, what Americans want has been something that could be piped into a television screen. What if it’s not any more?
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