Moving Day: The blog is relocating

For various reasons, I've decided to migrate my blog over to Wordpress. Visiting andrewdaglas.com will automatically direct you to the new site, but anyone who follows or visits the blogspot.com URL should update their bookmarks/RSS/etc (you must be out there somewhere, right?) to andrewdaglas.wordpress.com

Sunday driver: What does AMC's scheduling say about its branding?

I contributed a discussion to In Media Res, a project of MediaCommons curated by friend of the blog Noel Kirkpatrick. Check out my thoughts on how AMC's determination to schedule their programs on Sunday nights represents a conscience branding decision on the part of the network - one that may not be working to its overall advantage.


Sunday driver: What does AMC's scheduling say about its branding?

Guest-criticizing from around the web this week

Over in the realm of TV criticism, I've teamed up with friend of the blog Cory Barker of TV Surveillance for a couple of projects this week.

Check out our dueling takes on the pilot episode of HBO's K Street, a short-lived 2003 docudrama from Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney.

Then give a listen as Cory, fellow friend of the blog Les Chappell of A Helpless Compiler, and I ruminate for 90 damn minutes about Boardwalk Empire and The Walking Dead on the TV Surveillance podcast.

Stratford-On-Hellmouth

One of the many reasons I adore Twitter is the way the hive mind can concoct some amazing things. A good idea can become a great idea can become something truly gazoinksbo, in the best possible way.

In that spirit, I give you a sampling of how I spent much of Monday evening with a group of Twitter comrades. In the wake of the news that some of the Joss Whedon Players have made a film adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, we naturally took it upon ourselves to cast some of the Bard's other works with our favorite denizens of the Whedonverse. And Christine Becker, who curates the wonderful @GoodTVeets, was there to chronicle the wackiness.

Check it out, shan't you? And then be sure to follow all these participants on Twitter, so as not to miss out on the next bout of inspiration that strikes we few, we happy few, we band of Scoobies.


UPDATE 11/3/2011: This carefully curated bit of tomfoolery is now available in Tumblr form, with all the original participants playing along.

In which I make my podcast debut

Do you enjoy reading about TV, except for the part where you have to read? Then why not try a podcast instead! In the inaugural episode of the ChicagoNow TV Tandem, Julie Hammerle of Hammervision and I gab about the season finale of Breaking Bad, the return of The Walking Dead, our favorite new shows of the fall, and just why Julie and the rest of femalekind insist on oppressing hard-working white men like me and Tim Allen.

A version should also be available through iTunes shortly. Check it out, and feel free to send questions, suggestions, or cookie recipies to chicagonowtvtandem@gmail.com. We'll hope to make these podcasts a regular feature, so listener feedback will go a long way. You may even receive a cut of our profits!*

*Editor's note: Our profits are zero.


Listen to the ChicagoNow TV Tandem podcast, Episode 1

The Vast Wasteland on the radio tubes!

On September 25, I was invited to appear on Blog Talk Radio's The Down and Dirty with Frank Fontana, discussing fall television. Starting at 26:40 in the clip below, I talk with the show's hosts about some of the season's early storylines, including Ashton Kutcher's debut on Two and A Half Men, Ted Danson joining the cast of CSI, my distaste for Jim Caviezel in Person of Interest, and my impassioned plea for everyone in America to watch Community and Parks and Recreation.

The Craftsman World of DIY Presents The Down and Dirty 09/25 by Down and Dirty | Blog Talk Radio

AOL's Patch, HBR, and sustainable local journalism

Last week, Maxwell Wessel posted an entry on the Harvard Business Review’s blog network critiquing AOL’s strategy for Patch, an experiment in local news aggregation that is currently a rather high-profile drain on the company’s coffers. I appreciate the thesis of the post: that rather than ignore or discard Patch, AOL should invest in it more intelligently.

Why you'd rather be killed by a Mayan prophecy than a French psychopath

In the latest installment of  The New Cult Canon (a feature you should be reading regularly at The A.V. Club), Scott Tobias examines the grisly French horror film Inside, and questions how viewers gauge what is "too far" when it comes to representations of violence and death in movies. He notes how often people are repelled by the visceral depiction of individual deaths in horror films, but shrug off the far greater lethality implicit in end-of-the-world blockbusters from the Michael Bay or Roald Emmerich mold. Writes Scott:

As a rule, I’m reluctant to draw any hard lines on what horrors are beyond representation, because I recognize how subjective that can be. For example, I find the trailer for 2012 far sicker in its bloodless apocalypse fetishization than anything I’ve ever seen in “torture porn” genre, but clearly that opinion isn’t shared by the legions who gave a pass to the former while routinely turning up their noses at the latter.

Something something "write stuff" pun

As a writer, one of my strongest and most well-practiced skills is talking myself out of writing. This should come as no surprise to anyone who follows the lamentably sparse updates of either of my blogs lately (hey, I had one good week in July there!) Oh sure, every now and then some diaphanous wisp of an idea floats into my head and I manage to mold it into 900 words of reasonably entertaining prose. But for every one that somehow sees the light of day, three or four others vanish ignominiously into the ether, having inspired little more than a few illegible scribblings or incoherent out-loud sputterings.

It's a discouraging state of affairs, and one I'm inspired to improve after attending a class/discussion group on blogging last night with genuinely accomplished blogger & writer Kate Harding, at Story Studio Chicago (a terrific resource for you fellow Windy City wordsmiths). In that light, I've decided that step one is identifying the most common—well, excuses is such an ugly word; let's call them "perfectly sound and logical counterarguments"—which lead me to abandon a potential piece of writing:

• Somebody must have already made this exact point. Probably better. And if not, they will.
• The DVR's at, like, 64%.
• What sentient, literate being would ever even want to read this misshapen jumble of quarter-baked doofusery??
• Hey, 18 new tweets!
• Yup. This is it. This one would wake them all up to the reality that I am a hack and a charlatan. It must be buried and forgotten. The illusion of my competence must live another day!
• Welp, this Dragon Age quest ain't gonna play itself.

Other creative types, please feel free to chip in with your own favorite self-defeating tactic.

Programming Update

Cory Barker, impresario of the excellent site TV Surveillance, welcomed me to guest on his regular feature Test Pilot. Check out our thoughts on the pilot episode of the classic late-1980s drama thirtysomething.

Nostalgia: It's not just for Boomers anymore!

Every now and then, the New York Times likes to check in on the mystifying attitudes of These Kids Today. Case in point, this piece from Tuesday in which the Old Gray Lady reports on Nickelodeon’s (stupendously awesome) plan to revive a handful of beloved early ‘90s programs - including Clarissa Explains It All, All That, and Doug - in a late-night bloc on its Teen Nick channel.

It's clear, if baffling, that the headline - "The Good Old Days of 20 Years Ago" - is shooting for ironic juxtaposition. To the Times' brass and much of its target demo, anything that post-dates the Pentagon Papers probably seems like last Tuesday. When he declares, “That’s right: classics from the 1990s," writer Brian Stelter (a member of the generation Nick is targeting) probably anticipates plenty of readers harrumphing incredulously into their Sankas.

2011 TV Preview Part Four: The Network from Whence The Premise Came

Round four of America’s newest favorite way to kill ten minutes at work brings us to the network that started it all: NBC. It gave the world both The Cape and Community, without which this entire gimmick wouldn’t exist (for background, see the installments for FOX, CBS, and ABC), and without which I might be forced to actually put some thought into what I write on this blog rather than falling back on half-assed jokes and YouTube embeds.

A dozen new programs are tasked with resuscitating the once-proud Peacock from its perennial place in the ratings cellar. Proving itself to be a fount of originality, NBC’s line-up includes a modern day spin on classic fairy tales (...wait...), a sitcom developed by popular stand-up comic Whitney Cummings (no, not this one, a different one), a coming of age tale set in the world of musical theater (but not, y’know, THAT one), and a moody 1960s period piece centered on a brooding, nattily-attired anti-hero. Yup.

Eh, to hell with originality. I just want to know if any of these new shows will give us 2011’s answer to this guy!

Breaking Bad: Box Cutter

Been a busy few days, but I wanted to register a quick reaction after the jump to Breaking Bad, which began its fourth season this week in a confidently low-key fashion.

Self-Interest ≠ Selfishness; A Brief Response to HBR

The current issue of Harvard Business Review features a somewhat frustrating piece by Yochai Benkler called “The Unselfish Gene.” It’s quite engaging in places, particularly when discussing some of the research regarding how context shapes people’s motivations, and in the resulting prescriptions for restructuring business environments to promote collaborative behavior. Unfortunately, the arguments are weakened by two fairly key misinterpretations central to his thesis. 

2011 TV Preview Part Three: Separating ABC's "Meh" Wheat from its "Meh"-ier Chaff

Continuing to raise the bar for shallow, gimmick-based criticism everywhere, my highly scientific assessment of next season’s network TV schedule rolls on. See here and here for the first two entries in this series, in which I watch the trailers for a few new shows and predict whether they are bound to more closely match the creative nadir of The Cape, or the hopes once held by Mr. Nadir for The Cape. Today I take a gander at some of the whopping 13 new programs to be unleashed by ABC in 2011-12, while categorically refusing to suffer even a second of Work It, lest I pop a few veins and activate Dark Willow mode.

2011 TV Preview Part Two: In which CBS knows what CBS do

Yesterday, I took it upon myself - dedicated servant to the people of the Internet that I am - to predict the fates of some of next season's new television hopefuls. In lieu of pilot screeners or genuine critical talent, I've opted to approach this task with the next best thing: a preposterous gimmick: Which shows will wind up on the scrap heap before finishing out a season, like last year's poster child of ineptitude, The Cape? And which will become the sort of Nielsen-slobbering stalwarts that run for six seasons and a movie, as a normally wise man once predicted for that selfsame The Cape?


Today, I check in on CBS, which continues to dance with the fluffy multi-camera sitcoms and moody procedurals that brung 'em to the network TV catbird seat.

A Look At The 2011 TV Season, Through The Lens of The Cape

No sooner does the current television season come to close than do the five (four? four and a half?) main networks begin directing our collective gaze to the awesome and amazing new shows awaiting us next season.

Some of these offerings may approach the sort of cultural ubiquity that renowned TV guru Abed Nadir imagined was in store for The Cape (i.e., six seasons and a movie). Others will turn out to be risible, misbegotten calamities that crash and burn in a blaze of anti-glory, like what actually happened with The Cape. Most will probably fall somewhere between those extremes, but I’m going to ignore those cases because they don’t conform easily to this admittedly strained joke premise.

Pop culture is ready for its next favorite psychopath

This month's GQ excerpts an essay from Jon Ronson's new book The Psychopath Test, which examines the frightening likelihood that the subtly yet undeniably insane are prevalent in every area of society - especially in the upper echelons of power. Reading the piece - an intriguing mini-profile of a notorious corporate executive, "Chainsaw" Al Dunlop - motivated me to revisit two related texts that I've loved (though one of which I have
only the faintest memories of).

One is Snakes In Suits, a book co-authored by Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, the psychopathy expert who designed the test which gives Ronson's book its inspiration and title. Babiak and Hare argue, with fairly chilling plausibility, that many traits endemic to psychopaths are also traits that drive a great deal of success in corporate America. (It's important to note here that, despite its grisly popular connotation, the medical diagnosis of psychopathy is not intrinsically tantamount to violent crime.)

From Gapers Block - Chicago Rot: Embracing the City's Dark Side

In a sparsely-furnished office in the Merchandise Mart, five recent graduates of Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy are striving to write the next chapter in Chicago's film history. With their independent movie Chicago Rot, currently in pre-production, they're determined to change the perception of their hometown among film-goers and filmmakers alike. And by partially funding the project via the crowd-sourcing website Kickstarter, they're inviting Second Citizens who share that vision to chip in.

Continue reading at Gapers Block

A (partial) defense of History Channel

The announcement that History Channel will air a 10-hour scripted series based on the Bible, just a few months after very publicly rejecting a miniseries about the Kennedy family on the grounds of historically inaccuracy, is raising some eyebrows. James Poniewozik of Time.com, astute as ever, sums up the case well.

As a committed agnostic, I’m sympathetic to the argument that the Bible shouldn’t be regarded as a work of history in the sense that it accurately relates real world events which occurred in the past. Few but the most devout fundamentalists would argue otherwise.

But it’s absolutely a work of history in another sense. It’s a cultural artifact of rare significance spanning continents and millennia, on par with the Odyssey or Arthurian legend. It’s an ineffable, protean amalgam of historical truths, parables, cultural prisms, and good old-fashioned storytelling flair.

This makes it an altogether different case than that of The Kennedys, which sought to dramatize factual events - recorded, verified, remembered by plenty of people who lived through them first hand. Taking creative liberties with that sort of dictionary-definition history clearly runs afoul of History Channel’s nominal brand identity. I don’t think dramatizing the Bible falls under the same standard, and I similarly don’t think anyone would bat an eye if History announced it was producing a scripted tale of, for instance, Arthur’s exploits in Camelot.

Now, if we’re going to gripe about History Channel tarnishing or outright discarding its brand identity as one of cable’s preeminent institutions of nerdery - well, that's an argument I'm even more sympathetic too, as I rant about after the jump.