All Your Blog Are Belong to Us

I have to start reading other blogs so I can post nifty links on my site! I have no links. It's sort of sad. I'm the Unabomber of bloggers. And I suppose the ranting doesn't help with that. Today is a very special day -- it's the first day of spring training. Pitchers and catchers have reported! Yay! I'm a big Dodger fan, and to see the starting rotation already being cool is almost too exciting for words. Derek Lowe, Brad Penny, Jason Schmidt (formerly known as THE ENEMY), Randy Wolf and that elusive fifth starter, either Kuo or Billingsley. An actual ROTATION! Hurray! No power hitter, but yay for the rotation! Back when we were with our other agent, that CBS show Clubhouse got ordered. We wanted to be submitted but according to our agent, they wouldn't read us because girls don't know anything about baseball. Well, according to what I saw on the show, neither did the boys working on it. It wasn't nearly as inaccurate as ABC Family's horse-racing show Wildfire, though. As a writer, sometimes you have to forego total accuracy for the sake of drama. I think we all understand that. But the Wildfire pendulum swings WAY too far that way. Because NOTHING is accurate on that show. I accidentally saw five minutes of it the other night and boy howdy! Nobody on that show knows a goddam thing about horse racing. We have been submitted for the show before. The first time, the producers didn't think we were "right" for it. That was after we'd written a horse racing pilot for UPN. And when we went in to meet on Dead Zone (same producers, and even though we did a freelance episode of DZ, we apparently weren't right for THAT, either) they said vaguely that we just must've not been available for Wildfire.

Um. WHAT? We were available. But I think they would regret hiring us, because we would constantly be telling them that things don't WORK that way. And it won't lessen the drama of the show, because WHO SHOULD SHE CHOOSE? isn't that compelling. Or gramatically correct, for that matter. If the show is set in the world of horse racing, DO something with it. And don't just cull shit from a Brady Bunch episode. No, Wildfire writers, racehorse trainers do NOT have "playbooks." Honestly. That's the dumbest thing ever, in a long, shameless string of dumb things. It's sheer laziness. They don't CARE at all about being accurate, because they don't give a shit about the setting of their show. That's APPALLING. And it's insulting to the audience, because it assumes that the audience either doesn't care or won't understand it. And people wonder why the TeeVee audience doesn't care anymore. It just isn't more work to do something right. But people act like it is.

Conversely, "Lost" has gone the other way. I don't know WHAT the hell is going on with that show. One episode rarely leads to another. But MAN, every week they do a new TeeVee pilot! Last week's episode was fan-freaking-tastic and could totally be the pilot for a show. What it had to do with "Lost" is hard to say. I wonder how much longer the network and the studio will let them get away with this type of insular, enigmatic storytelling. I appreciate how smart it is, but just throwing shit in there isn't going to make for compelling drama. Well. Not ALL the time. I think my favorite bit of the episode was Charlie busking "Wonderwall." LOL, "Lost." You're not even pretending he's not a Gallagher. I applaud that, because we did the exact same thing on "Haunted." Which was prior to "Lost." Ahem.

I thought of another Ducky -- George, from "Grey's Anatomy." I mean, shit, when was that charming?? And the way George initially reacted to Meredith is the way Duckys react -- he got furious and stopped speaking to her. But from his point of view, he was the righteous one and she wronged him. See, this is just NOT a warm and fuzzy character type. Duckys are egocentric and passive aggressive. But they just never see that. They'll always be right, and their pain will always be fresh. What's most annoying about Duckys is that they'll make their other friends choose between them, the victim, and the asshole/bitch who wronged them. And that sucks.

I'm still reading pilots, albeit slowly because we've been writing a lot, finishing up new samples for staffing season. We should have two pilots, three if we can pound through another one. So I'm halfway through the "Bionic Woman" pilot and I'm liking it so far. It does seem dependent on production, though. So we'll see.

Alan sent me a really funny Andy Borowitz article about how he used to work on "Facts of Life," which he calls the worst TeeVee show of all time. That's not actually true; "Small Wonder" is a real contender, and don't forget "Charles In Charge" and "Galactica 1980." On second thought, "Galactica 1980" wins. Anyway, Borowitz talks about how he was told that he didn't get the voices of the girls. He was blamed when the scripts were bad. Obviously, he took the job for the money and he says that the only thing worse than being a whore is being a whore and sucking at it. Word to that. For whatever reason, you always tend to work even harder on bad shows than good ones. I think that deep down, writers have a great sense of optimism. We believe we can make anything work, even the worst crap ever committed to screen. We are ALWAYS wrong, but still we try, crap show after crap show. This is probably why we get taken advantage of, because we're worried that we'll be found out, that somebody will point a finger and say "YOU'RE A FAKE!" So we endeavor to try and prove them wrong, even with "Facts of Life." Bummer for us.

There's been some really great music out so far, and some of it is even going to come out in the U.S.! The new Kings of Leon sounds pretty good. So does the Silverlake band The Little Ones. But my favorite album so far this year is from The View. The British mags are touting them pretty heavily, but they're worth it anyway.

That's the story for President's Day weekend. I guess I'll go buy a mattress or a huge TV this weekend. Because you're either with America, or the terrorists.