Hope Lies on Television #17 - The Future(?)

The year is still relatively young, and with Spring rapidly approaching there is no better time to look to the future. With that in mind, this edition of Hope Lies on Television focuses on the release of House of Cards, the David Fincher-produced remake of the classic British series, and the question of whether its unique distribution method represents a viable future for television. I'm a little skeptical of the potential, though most of that comes from the quality of the series itself, rather than solely from the system that created it.

Hope Lies on Television #16 - The End of 30 Rock and More Besides

To commemorate the final episode of 30 Rock, Tina Fey's critically adored, popularly ignored sitcom nominally about the behind-the-scenes antics of a sketch show, I wrote about the evolution of the show, how it managed to stay on the air for seven years despite having none of the usual per-requisites for such longevity, and what its legacy might be for future shows.

Side Note: I wrote this article before seeing the excellent final episode, which is why it's focused so much on the past of the show rather than its actual ending, but needless to say the final episode did not disappoint. It managed to offer up plenty of great jokes, some emotional resolution for the characters - even Lutz! - without becoming too sappy or maudlin, and it went out on a great final gag which managed to be both about the history of television and the history of the show itself. A wonderful achievement and a fitting ending to show that was so consistently great I began to take it for granted.

Hope Lies on Television #16 - Luck, David Milch and Humanity

To commemorate the release of HBO's Luck on Blu-ray and DVD, I wrote about the ill-fated horse racing drama, as well as offering my thoughts on the themes of David Milch's career and how they relate to Luck's world of jockeys, trainers and gamblers. Also, because I never miss a chance to make a Father Ted reference, I managed to relate it to My Lovely Horse in a way which still manages to be somewhat reverent.

Luck is available now and is absolutely worth seeking out. It's a beautiful, thrilling and utterly unique series that will hopefully overcome the stigma that has, in all honestly rightly, become attached to it since its cancellation.

Hope Lies on Television #15 - Only Forward

After a lengthy break which was largely due to me moving countries, I have now started writing the Hope Lies on Television column for Hope Lies at 24 Frames per Second. Since this is in some sense a reboot of the series, and because it's nearly Halloween, I decided that the subject of the first new addition to the series would be remakes. Using the remake of The Munsters (renamed Mockingbird Lane) as the jumping off point for a broader discussion about the differences between cinematic and televisiual remakes, it returns to key themes that I've written about before - the importance of character and length of time - whilst also taking in the different economic models that film and television are based upon.

I'm really pleased to be writing the columns again since I find them really fun and rewarding, and I'm hopeful that the new monthly schedule (with the occasional extra column when appropriate) will offer plenty of time for research without leading to the lengthy breaks that have marked the column in the past.

Hope Lies on Television #14 - Chasing The Moment

For this edition of Hope Lies on Television, I decided to take the opportunity to write about my current obsession, HBO's Luck, the horse-racing drama from David Milch and Michael Mann. I've been thinking a lot recently about the changing nature of television in the era of heavily serialised dramas, and wondering whether or not we are heading towards a television landscape where television shows air almost as an obligation, since people will probably not watch them until the whole series has air and been recorded on their DVR, or released on DVD. 

Luck, to me, seemed to indicate a way in which serialised dramas can compel people to watch every week by offering small, beautiful moments that might lose their power if viewed on anything other than a weekly basis, and that is the overall theme that I tried to explore here. In the end, I think I just wound up saying how much I liked the show, which is no bad thing.

In a case of very unfortunate timing, the article went up on Hope Lies mere hours before it was announced that the show had been cancelled due to the accidental death of a horse on set, the third such incident since production began on the show. Considering that I love the show, this is a disappointing but completely understandable result: you can't make a show about horses and the people who idolise them and allow real horses to die without seeming hypocritical. Still, the column seems a little bittersweet now, and I'll really miss all the characters that Milch populated his little world with, and I'll especially miss the amazing opening credits sequence, which I hoped would run before many more stories over the next few years.

Hope Lies on Television #13 - Two Detectives, One Name

To commemorate, if that is the right word, the end of the second series of Sherlock, which airs on BBC1 tonight and on PBS from Januray 15, I wrote an article for Hope Lies comparing the two current iterations of the great detective: Sherlock and Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films. As a big fan of the series, someone who like the films and who burned through all the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories last year, this was immensely fun to write, especially since I felt that it worked within the framework of the columns - writing about the differences between television and film on a grander scale - very well.

Hope Lies on Television #12 - A Family Tradition, From A Non-Traditional Family

A few weeks ago Adam Batty, the editor of Hope Lies, suggested that I should write about The Simpsons for Hope Lies on Television, with a particular focus on their Christmas specials to provide a bit of seasonally appropriately content for the site. Since I sometimes spend most of my days thinking about The Simpsons anyway, it being my favourite television show ever and the single piece of art which has done the most to shape me as a person, I relished the opportunity, but never really found a way into the subject matter.  Fortunately, the show itself came to my rescue by producing a great Christmas special this year that created a nice framework for the resulting article, which I'm pretty proud of, even if the proof-reading leaves something to be desired on my part.

As an aside, I was surprised to discover whilst researching the article that I had seen all but one of the specials, since my viewing of The Simpsons has been spotty in recent years, so in the end all I had to do was catch that last un-watched episode. The episode in question was "The Fight  Before Christmas," and whilst it isn't the worst episode I've ever seen, but the moment at the very end when they make a joke about a Muppet version of Moe performing oral sex on Katy Perry makes a strong case for being the nadir of the show as a whole.

Hope Lies on Television #11 - To End, or to Finish

After a brief-ish hiatus, which was brought on partly by being too busy in real life to research the columns and partly due to a lack of strong ideas for them, I semi-triumphantly returned to Hope Lies on Television with a column about the possibility that Community might be cancelled, and how the reactions of the fans to that possibility suggest that the way in which people perceive television shows has changed over the years, to the extent that a show that people are worried that Community, a show which does not have a strong central narrative, might end before it gets to properly tell its story.

This was a fun, if difficult, column to write since I got sidetracked on a massive tangent about serialisation in television. Thankfully, I realised before the column got completely swallowed by the tangent that the subject was too big to be just an afterthought, so it'll form the basis of the next one.

Hope Lies on Television #10 - Movin' On Up

In the latest instalment of Hope Lies on Television, I use the success of The Inbetweeners Movie (review up soon, maybe, but I liked it) as a jumping off point to look at the reasons why a television show might want to make the leap to the big-screen - and I have limited myself solely to spin-offs, rather than adaptations a la Bewitched - with specific interest in ideas of content and scope. It also gave me the opportunity to write a little about In The Loop and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, which are two of my absolute favourite spin offs.

Hope Lies on Television #9: One For All And All For One, For Once

Slightly delayed Hopes Lies on Television article on the differences between TV and film comedy, with particular attention paid to the rise of the ensemble comedy in U.S. television, as exemplified by Modern Family and Parks and Recreation, both of which focus on groups of people who genuinely like each other, as opposed to films like The Hangover Part Two and Horrible Bosses, whose humour is very much based in humiliation and insults. Not a bad thing, as I say in the article, but the fact that these two completely opposing kinds of comedy are arising in different medium struck me as pretty interesting.

Hope Lies On Television #8 - It All Ends

Having spent the last few columns focusing on specific creatives within the television industry - something which I found very interesting and will return to soon, I imagine - I wanted to return to a more conceptual idea by considering Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, which I liked a great deal, as a finale to a long running series, rather than as a film in its own right. In doing so, it allowed me to write a little bit about the finales of Lost and Friday Night Lights, both of which are shows that I love, and which had endings that would have far less impact if viewed by people who are unfamiliar with the shows in their entirety. In much the same way, Deathly Hallows means much more to people, like myself, who have lived with the characters for over a decade, in both film and book form.

Hope Lies on Television #7 - Walk With Me: The Work of Aaron Sorkin

Continuining the slightly new direction of the column away from broad concepts about television to the work of specific auteurs within the medium, this week I tackled the work of one of my very favourite writers, Aaron Sorkin.

I'm very, very pleased with the way that this column turned out, especially because the first draft of it was a mammoth 3,000 words. The current version isn't exactly short, but it's much more concise and has a stronger central argument behind it than the first, in which I tried to cover every aspect of Sorkin's career, including lengthy digressions about the way in which his film work fits into the work he did on television. Some of that stuff was good, but I felt that it distracted from the actual point I was trying to make. The punchier, more focused version is far preferable.

Hope Lies on Television #6 - One Man, One Show, One Vision

Having written a bunch of more conceptual pieces about kinds of television, I decided that I wanted to write a couple of articles that focused on the careers of people I would consider to be auteurs of the medium. Since Hope Lies on Television has always been about examining the points at which film and television overlapped, I thought it was only fitting to apply one of the most purely cinematic terms - auteur - to television, and I thought that Louis C.K.'s show Louie was about as perfect a place to start as any, since the degree to which he puts himself and his life into the show, and the amount of control that he maintains over every aspect of the series, make it one of the most readily identifiable auteurist shows on television. Plus, the second season starts tonight and that tied in nicely.

I'm really pleased with how this one turned out, particularly in terms of charting C.K.'s career for anyone unfamiliar with him, and I'm looking forward to the next one, which will be on the career of Aaron Sorkin.

Hope Lies on Television #5 - If It Looks Like A Film, And Sounds Like A Film...

After a month away, thanks largely to a sojourn to Florida to visit my parents (during which I could have written an article or two but you try writing anything when you're somewhere as sunny as Florida; I don't know how Carl Hiassen manages it), I returned to Hope Lies on Television with an article that I've been meaning to write for a while, but which I had to keep pushing back because of other commitments that kept me from actually watching Mildred Pierce, the HBO miniseries which forms the backbone of the piece. I'd become fascinated by the movement towards miniseries that were, in essence, long films, rather than short TV series. I wanted to also talk about something like Generation Kill, which, even though it was directed by multiple people, unlike Mildred Pierce, has the clear stamp of David Simon on it and so feels like the work of a single creative mind, but I thought that a sharper focus would be best. Plus, I'm planning on writing about Simon in a future column, and wouldn't want to repeat myself so soon.

Hope Lies on Televions #4 - In The Shadow of 30 Rock

Here's my latest Hope Lies on Television column, in which I discuss the nature of acting for television versus acting on film. At least, that's what I started out trying to write about, but in the end I seemed to shift focus and make it about the way in which film and television acting are perceived, and how that has shifted over time.

I'm happier with that approach, really, since this column came about as a last minute replacement for my planned column on the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, which I just had not found the time to watch this week. This one wasn't difficult to write, since it's a subject I find really interesting and I've been thinking about it for a while as a potential column anyway, so bringing together the disparate threads was only the only real problem. I think I was largely successful, in the end.

I might revisit this subject in the future, with particular focus on the idea of an actor being able to examine the different facets of a character over time on television in a way that film does not allow, since it's a really big subject and I wouldn't even dare to think that I have covered it all in a single column, especially one that's fairly short by my standards.

Hope Lies on Television #2 - Teleconventional Breakdown

Following on from the first column, in which I discussed the ways in which television shows try to maintain a certain stylistic consistency between different directors, I wanted to offer the flipside to that discussion with an examination of how TV shows will challenge their own established formal conventions, i.e., disgarding their usual look or style in favour of a radical departure.

The main reason I wanted to write this column was to discuss Community, which I think has been one of the funniest, smartest and sweetest sitcoms of the last couple of years, and if Parks & Recreation (which I will try to find a reason to write about soon, hopefully) weren't having such a spectacular third season I'd say that it was the best comedy on television right now. As it is, it has to settle for number 2, which is still pretty good. Anyway, what sets Community apart for me, and I hope that this comes across in the article, is the way in which it manages to constantly push boundaries and redefines itself in terms of what kind of stories it can tell whilst also remaining true to its established characters and reality. It's a delicate balancing act that not manner shows manage, but Community consistently does.

Likewise, the Buffy episode Once More With Feeling, which I discuss in some depth, managed to push the show far beyond what it would normally do without losing sight of the central conflicts that the show was built around, even going so far as to use the exuberance and heightened emotions of the musical form to have the characters not only say but sing lines of dialogue that they would otherwise not say, or would not say without it seeming forced. The reveal at the end - that Buffy was in heaven and was wrenched from it by her friends - is one of the most hauntingly beautiful moments in the history of the show and it's one that could not have been done in a normal episode. It's such a melodramatic idea that it could only be voiced in a situation as melodramatic as a musical.

I had wanted to write about The Body, too, which is one of my favourite Buffy episodes, even if it reduces me to a blubbering wreck every time I watch it. Again, it tackles ideas and themes that the show might struggle to handle successfully in a normal episode, but in this instance the show went entirely in the opposite direction by stripping its style down to one that was incredibly minimalistic, using handheld cameras, no music and rawer, more realistic performances to create the sense of grief and confusion that the characters experience in the wake of a shocking and unexpected death. Unfortunately, the column was already quite long and even though I think that The Body gets my point across just as well as Once More With Feeling, the musical is ultimately flashier and the emotions are much broader, so they are easier to use as examples.

Hope Lies on Television #2 - Teleconventional Breakdown

Hope Lies on Television #1 - Boardwalk Bad

And here's the first instalment proper of my column at Hope Lies following the brief introductory column I wrote a few weeks ago.

The idea of writing about how directing for television differs to directing for film was what sparked off the idea of the column as a whole since I was really fascinated by how everything that people associate with distinctive film directors - a personal vision, style and recurring themes - can actually be a handicap when it comes to television since multiple directors will often work on one show. There are of course exceptions to the rule, such as in the case of a show like Spaced, in which every episode was directed by Edgar Wright, or traditional three-camera sitcoms which will often have one director because the very nature of those shows means that each episode has to be filmed live and sequentially, which is why you get people like Tom Cherones, the series director for many of the early seasons of Seinfeld, who will direct literally hundreds of episodes of a television show. In the former example, Wright's distinctly cinematic approach gave Spaced a look that was at the time, and even now, completely unique in comedy, whilst in the latter Cherones' direction sticks to a fairly rigid formula which, with a few rare examples, the show would never deviate from, so that when other directors took over from Cherones after Season 5, there was little noticeable difference.

It's that idea of consistency that interested me, and which I explored in this column.

Hope Lies On Television #1 - Boardwalk Bad

An Introduction to Hope Lies on Television

Starting today, I will be writing a fortnightly television column at www.hopelies.com, in which I will examine the meeting points between film and television using a variety of thematic elements.

Partly in order to keep track of just how much writing I do, and partly so I will have easy access to all of them, I will be posting links to these columns on here along with brief notes of explanation so that they aren't just complete wasted spaces.

So, here's the introduction, in which I lay out my intentions for the column.

The Cold Open