Old interview with David Simon

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An old but good interview with David Simon (The Wire) in The Believer.



Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.


But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.


***


My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.


***


There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more time—hence the need for this kind of viewing to be a long-form series or miniseries, in this bad metaphor—but if you stay in one place, say, if you put up your bag and go down to the local pub or shebeen and you play the fool a bit and make some friends and open yourself up to a new place and new time and new people, soon you have a sense of another world entirely. We’re after this: Making television into that kind of travel, intellectually. Bringing those pieces of America that are obscured or ignored or otherwise segregated from the ordinary and effectively arguing their relevance and existence to ordinary Americans. Saying, in effect, This is part of the country you have made. This too is who we are and what we have built. Think again, motherfuckers.



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West Wing, the real world edition

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In the TV show The West Wing, Leo McGarry, an old friend of Josh Lyman, asks Josh to go listen to a man speak. McGarry wants Lyman to help this man run for the Presidency. Lyman is skeptical, but he treks out to a VFW hall in New Hampshire and listens to this candidate speaking to a hostile crowd. And when he hears the man speak, this man named Jed Bartlet, he is converted.


From Chapter 1 of Newsweek's Secrets of the 2008 Campaign:



Barack Obama had a gift, and he knew it. He had a way of making very smart, very accomplished people feel virtuous just by wanting to help Barack Obama. It had happened at Harvard Law School in the mid-1980s, at a time when the school was embroiled in fights over political correctness. He had won one of the truly plum prizes of overachievement at Harvard: he had been voted president of the law review, the first African-American ever so honored. Though his politics were conventionally (if not stridently) liberal, even the conservatives voted for him. Obama was a good listener, attentive and empathetic, and his powerful mind could turn disjointed screeds into reasoned consensus, but his appeal lay in something deeper. He was a black man who had moved beyond racial politics and narrowly defined interest groups. He seemed indifferent to, if not scornful of, the politics of identity and grievance. He showed no sense of entitlement or resentment. Obama had a way of transcending ambition, though he himself was ambitious as hell. In the grasping race for status and achievement—a competition that can seem like blood lust at a place like Harvard—Obama could make hypersuccessful meritocrats pause and remember a time (part mythical perhaps, but still beckoning) when service to others was more important than serving oneself.


Gregory Craig, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., was one of those Americans who wanted to believe again. Craig was not exactly an ordinary citizen—he had served and worked with the powerful all his life, as an aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy in the 1980s, as chief of policy planning at the State Department in the Clinton administration and as a lawyer hired to represent President Clinton at his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in 1999. He had seen the imperfections of the mighty, up close and personal, and by and large accepted human frailty. But, like a lot of Americans, he was tired of partisan bickering and yearned for someone who could rise above politics as usual. A 63-year-old baby boomer, Craig wanted to recapture the youthful idealism that he had experienced as a student at Harvard in the 1960s and later at Yale Law School, where his friends included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. In the late fall of 2003, he was invited to hear a young state senator from Illinois who was running for the U.S. Senate. Craig was immediately taken with Barack Obama. "He spoke 20 to 30 minutes, and I found him to be funny, smart and very knowledgeable for a state senator," Craig recalled. Craig was so visibly impressed that his host that evening, the longtime Washington mover and shaker Vernon Jordan, teased him, saying, "Greg has just fallen in love."



Josh joins the campaign, Jed Bartlet becomes President of the United States, and Josh is appointed deputy chief of staff.


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This isn't just a hulu hoop, it's the circle of life

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One more season of Mad Men done tonight, and we settle in for another long wait for the next season, keeping our fingers crossed that Matthew Weiner will be back.


Jon Hamm hosted SNL yesterday, and to nobody's surprise participated in a Mad Men segment. The best bit was the moment spoofing Don Draper's legendary pitches, which are my favorite part of Mad Men. Here it is, complete with music lifted straight from the Kodak Carousel pitch from the final episode of season one.






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Negative ads, a long and distinguished history

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If you think today's political ads are negative, check out some historical political tv ads. Here, for example, is perhaps the most famous ad of all time, the Daisy Girl ad, created by the ad agency DDB and run just once on TV by Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater.






LBJ crushed Goldwater in the election.


Of course, while McCain hasn't shown an ad with Obama flying a plane into the Empire State Building, we still have a week and a half to go and McCain just had his worst polling day yet. If the McCain campaign goes that route, I suggest Obama run an ad of McCain wandering around the White House in his pajamas, drooling and mumbling incoherently, while elsewhere Palin stands in her enormous walk-in closet flipping through one of several hundred designer suits mumbling, "Ooh, you betcha!"


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Stephen Colbert to appear in Amazing Spider-Man #573

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I didn't even realize that Stephen Colbert is running for President in the Marvel Universe, but now he's making his first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #573.


There will be a variant cover featuring Colbert swinging through the city with Spider-Man in tow (as seen to the left).


This is sure to get play on The Colbert Report, and I'll try to remember to link to the clip once it appears on Hulu.


In the meantime, I'm surprised by how many serial comic books are still in circulation. I suppose they serve the same purpose as patent applications, allowing Marvel to license properties out for movies and toys. The stories themselves matter little now, which is ironic since Hollywood turns to comic books for story franchises. Comic book characters are like pre-existing concepts which, in their built-in awareness, offset enough marketing spend to justify hanging just about any plot on them.


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Taco truck, where art thou? Also, some Hulu updates

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We launched a bunch of new features to Hulu at around midnight, debugged for a while, and then just before 3am the late night crew here hopped into cars and rushed over to hit our late night go-to spot, the taco truck near Vons in West Los Angeles. Taco trucks do a poor job of branding. They have no names, only locations, and they are all referred to just by the generic name of their classification: taco truck.


That truck typically operates from 10pm to 3am, but on this night, it was not there. You know the economy is bad when even the taco trucks are impacted.


So we went to Izzy's Deli in Santa Monica and celebrated our labors until 4 in the morning.


Some of the new things you'll find on Hulu:



There are other subtle changes, some of which you may notice as you browse around the site.


Two other cool Hulu news bits: the latest issue of Wired magazine has an article on us, and Tina Fey mentioned Hulu when accepting the Emmy for 30 Rock as best comedy series on Sunday night. It's probably the closest I'll ever come to having Tina Fey say my name. Good enough.

We're also still working hard on adding and replenishing our content library. Here's the season three premiere of Heroes.





Okay, I will go collapse now.


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Mad Men's one mistake

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From Panopticist: Mad Men gets all the details right--except one:



...everything is of a piece: The art direction is so immersive that there are no clangy wrong notes to distract you from the rich psychological world the characters inhabit.


Until the show ends, that is. When the last frame flickers off the screen and the credits start to roll, careful observers—okay, just the font freaks—will notice a curious thing: The end credits are set not in the iconic sans serif used in the opening-credits sequence, and not in, say, Helvetica, which was designed in 1957 and became popular soon thereafter, but in Arial, the controversial Helvetica knockoff that Monotype cobbled together in the late 1980s to avoid paying license fees on Helvetica.


Thanks mainly to Microsoft, which has bundled Arial with every version of Windows since version 3.1, this “shameless impostor

A fresh take on reality programming

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From one of the sites in my blogroll, This Blog Sits At The, a fresh look at the qualities of reality TV.



Reality programming is instructive. Pam and I watch Project Runway. I see a new design come down the runway, I take my money and I place my bet. Out loud, so that Pam can hear, I say what I think. And eventually I discover whether my judgment bore any resemblance to the experts who eventually hold forth.


It's clear that some education is taking place. My judgments diverge less and less. This means that this kind of reality programming is actually making me a more discerning observer of the world of fashion. It is helping me internalize my own modest mastery of the code.


...


Reality programming is not just cheap TV, it is responsive TV. Surely, one of the most sensible way for the programming executive to get back in touch with contemporary culture is to turn the show offer to untrained actors who have no choice but to live on screen, in the process importing aspects of contemporary culture that would otherwise have to be bagged and tagged and brought kicking and screaming into the studio and prime time. Reality programming is contemporary culture on tap. It is by no means a "raw feed." That is YouTube's job. But it is fresher than anything many executives could hope to manage by their own efforts. In effect, reality programming is "stealing signals" from an ambient culture, helping TV remain in orbit. (Mixed metaphor alert. Darn it, too late.)


This is an era in which we are inclined to issue lots of brave talk about cocreation, open source, and dynamic institutions. We speak of breaking down the citadel that separate the corporation from the real world. Well, this is actually what it looks like (for certain purposes). And funny old TV may in fact be one of the first meaning makers to figure out how we solve this particularly thorny problem. This, in turn, would make reality programming not the end of civilization as we know it, but a test case in what comes next.



What I find fascinating about reality programming are people who are addicted to the shows yet love to watch them just to tear down the participants. There is something bizarre in that ironic, conflicted behavior. Not that schadenfreude doesn't exist, but there is no greater charity you can contribute to a reality program participant than your eyeballs to their ratings.


Speaking of reality programming, Hulu now has the first episode of Architecture School.






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Already, problems with Olympics broadcasting

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I was so excited for this year's Olympics because for the first time, 2,200 hours were going to be put online at NBCOlympics.com. DirecTV has some 6 or 7 channels dedicated to the Olympics. It didn't seem possible that the problems with the last Olympics would recur, namely that anyone who is on the Internet would find out results before they were shown somewhere.


Alas, that idea of maximizing audience via an artificially enforced notion of primetime still haunts us. If you want to watch Michael Phelps compete in events, you don't get to see them live, at least not on the West Coast in any legal fashion. I logged into ESPN this morning and there on the front page were the results of Phelps' first heat of the 400 IM Medley (which I won't share here). In fact, the result is even listed on the homepage of NBCOlympics.com. But the network is trying to still aggregate an audience for TV, so marquee events like that are not shown online, they are only shown on TV on a delayed schedule. In this case, the heats are shown at 3:30 to 4:30pm PST.


The final is at 5pm PST, but on the west coast they are going to delay coverage until 8pm PST, so for three hours the East Coast and Midwest in the U.S. will know the results, while the PST folks will have to detach all electronic devices and live in willful ignorance of the sports world if they wish to have any suspense when watching the main events on TV.


The revolution will be tape-delayed. Sigh.


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