TV's best remaining crime show, The Shield, returns to FX a week from tonight, on Sept. 2, for its final season. I've been waiting a long time for this, and it promises to be exciting, compelling, and brilliant television. If you're not caught up, get the DVDs and take a week off so you can watch it all!
Beginning Sept. 8, after Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow of Air America Radio gets her own show on MSNBC. Rachel is the best guest host Keith has ever had, and in her own right she's funny, opinionated, and articulate, with a keen sense of moral outrage. It should be a great show, and definitely worth checking out.
And while we're on the topic of cable news, take a look at what Jack Cafferty of CNN had to say about "Is McCain Another George Bush?" Short answer--yes, and then some.
Tonight is the debut of 7-part miniseries Generation Kill on HBO. I don't know much about it, and have not read any reviews. But it's by David Simon and Ed Burns, the team that produced and wrote much of The Wire, and Simon is the best writer/producer working in TV today. It's about Iraq, so it may feel a little too close to current events, but it should be well worth watching.
We learned when we turned on the TV for Countdown with Keith Olbermann today of the passing of Tim Russert, the man introduced on the air so often these last many years as "NBC's Washington Bureau Chief and moderator of Meet the Press".
Tim Russert died at work, which is probably what he would have wanted, but two days before Father's Day, which he certainly would not have. He was best known as a journalist, but to a vast swath of the public, he is notable primarily as America's most famous son, and his paean to his father, "Big Russ and Me," was a huge bestselling father's day card from him to his father. On this weekend when we think about our own fathers, whether present or not, it's hard not to remember Tim's devotion to his dad, and to his son Luke, both of whom he frequently referenced on the air.
I watch Meet the Press nearly every Sunday morning. I'm not always a fan of his style of "gotcha" journalism, which sometimes seems more concerned with pointing out every inconsistency in someone's past statements than with revealing the truth about the issues. But I respect much of what he does on that show--he listens to his guests, he allows them to complete their answers without interruption, he knows what they're talking about, and he knows how to frame his questions so that they're understandable to the viewers. Sometimes he seems a little too chummy with the people he covers, but when they're across the table he doesn't let that interfere.
I'm going to have to start thinking of those qualities in the past tense, but not yet.
As a political junkie and a storyteller, this election season has been utterly fascinating, start to finish. Talking to my friend Steve Mertz a couple of weeks ago, we discussed its novelistic aspects, the larger-than-life characters, the sweep of history present in its every iteration. This truly is the election of our lifetimes, and the country has been changed by it even as it unfolds, whatever the end result is. There is not a better political team on television than he NBC/MSNBC team to watch it with, from Olbermann to Brokaw to Chuck Todd and all the rest, who explain it so well and cover it with such enthusiasm.
But always, backing that team, was Tim Russert. His love of politics was boundless, his knowledge of political and historical minutiae unmatched, his grasp of the meaning of events unparalleled. When he said "We now know who the Democratic nominee is, and no one's going to argue with it," the night of the North Carolina primary, he was right--we knew, some people argued for a while, but even then they knew they were no longer fighting to win the spot, but to win some sort of after-election concessions. Russert was the one who called the race first, because he understood what had happened, and in political journalism, everyone knew he had made the accurate call once again.
I don't know how it will feel to watch the rest of the race without Tim Russert on the screen. Strange, maybe subdued, quiet. He leaves a hole in NBC's political coverage that will be hard to fill. His enthusiasm for politics will be missed, and I can't help hoping that, wherever he is now, he will still get to watch the rest of this incredible contest.
I'll close with my favorite Tim Russert story...the one where Tim attended the Woodstock festival, but instead of hippie garb, he wore a Buffalo Bills jersey and instead of taking pot or acid with him, he took a case of beer. That's the Russert I'll remember--the all-American working class kid who was able to turn his raw enthusiasm into a meaningful career that had an impact on journalism and on his nation. We should all be so blessed.
David Simon on The Wire's final season, from Huffingtonpost.com. Wire fans, check it out.
Sunday night will be the last night for The Wire, which is not only the best dramatic program currently on TV, but one of the best that's ever been on TV. The show, created by David Simon of Homicide: Life on the Street fame, employs everything that TV can do when it's at its best--serial storytelling, excellent acting, brilliant writing, evocative, dramatic cinematography--and employs them all together to tell a gripping, exciting story of life in an American city. It's hard to imagine a better TV show, and hard to imagine never again seeing Bunk or Freeman or Snoop or the rest of the characters, who have become so familiar to us over the seasons.
Last Sunday's episode was written by crime novelist George Pelecanos. The one before that was by Dennis Lehane. I imagine Simon will write the final one, maybe with co-creator Ed Burns. It will be, I'm sure, as good as TV gets, which can be very good indeed.
Another note--Richard Belzer continued racking up his score of TV appearances as John Munch, the detective first seen in Homicide, on a recent episode of The Wire. It was a classic moment. He didn't have a line, was never identified by name or even noticed by the characters, he was just sitting having a drink in a Baltimore cop bar and you knew immediately that it was Munch. Now Munch has appeared on The Wire, Homicide, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order, Law & Order: Trial by Jury, The X Files, The Beat, and Arrested Development.
For anyone who's been watching NBC's Las Vegas for the past five years, the news that the network has decided not to pick up the sixth season is very disappointing. It means that last Friday's cliffhanger becomes the series finale, and it was by no means an ending to anything. It leaves nothing but loose ends and one character in a terribly precarious situation.
I don't know if there's any hope, but an online Save Las Vegas campaign has launched, trying to get people to send baby booties and socks to NBC brass to let them know that we want to find out what happens to Delinda and her baby. If you're interested in taking part, check the details here.
The story of America is really the story of race and class. It's hard to write anything meaningful about this country without addressing those issues--and if they're not addressed, that makes a statement too. My novel Missing White Girl tried to deal with those issues--aspects of them, anyway--in the context of a supernatural thriller. Some writers address them more directly than others, but it's always there.
Tonight on HBO, the best drama ever to appear on an American television set begins its final season. The Wire, created by David Simon and Ed Burns, focuses its brilliant spotlight on the media in this season, but the other characters (so well written, so fully conceived and terrifically brought to life by one of the best casts imaginable) will be back as well. If you haven't been watching The Wire, you can catch The Wire Odyssey before the first episode and get caught up. And if you don't have HBO...well, I guess that's what DVDs are for.
You don't have to take my word for it. Here's an extensive review from Time magazine which echoes some of the things I've tried to say about the show over the years, including a fairly detailed examination of its take on race and class--and Time agrees that it's "the best drama on TV."
Check out the show if you possibly can. And enjoy.
I'm quoted (briefly) in an article on fantasy TV published in the Canadian newsmagazine Maclean's. I went on at much greater length than you see here, but made many of the same points other folks did, so the article's writer spread the wealth and let everybody have a say. If you're interested, check it out here. Might as well, since there won't be any new fantasy on TV to watch for a while.
Having never written for TV or film, I'm not a member of the Writers Guild of America, and so I'm not on strike. But since a lot of my income is tied to TV shows in one way or another (not to mention enjoying TV and movies for their own sakes), I'm interested in the current writers' strike, and hope it comes to a quick and decisive end, before we're stuck with nothing but American Idol on every channel, and half-written movies clogging the theaters.
Here's what's a stake. The writers (and they're just the first union whose contracts have come up for negotiation--others will follow, and these same issues will be part of their discussions too) get small residuals for TV shows or movies that are released on DVD, but none at all for "new media," essentially downloads from iTunes or Netflix or whatever. A rerun aired on TV pays residuals, but an episode downloaded from online (even if it costs something, or includes commercials--hence profit for the studio) doesn't. The WGA wanted greater participation in DVD profits, and some in new media--since, after all, we're moving toward a download society, and within five or ten or maybe fifteen years it's very likely that DVDs will be ancient history, with all movies being downloaded instead. At the last minute, the WGA took DVD participation off the table, but the studios still wouldn't give in on the more long-term issue of new media. Hence the strike.
Writing the Buffy Watcher's Guide and the Angel Casefiles, I spent a lot of time on TV sets (along with Maryelizabeth and Nancy Holder), and got to know much more about how the business works than I had before. People working on the crews of TV shows make pretty good money. TV and film writers make good money--far more for writing a single half-hour sitcom than 90% of novelists make from writing an entire novel (which is, to my mind, a lot more work--but read by fewer people than will watch that sitcom, sadly). Directors make very good money, and actors--stars, anyway--make wonderful money.
But it's a precarious existence. Shows get canceled, sometimes after only an episode or two. Movie work is sporadic--if you're working on a film this year, maybe you'll get six or eight months of work. In a town full of other people who also work in the business, it's hard to stay busy all year. Even hit TV shows go on hiatus for months at a time. All of the hundreds of people involved in any production have to keep eating, feeding their families, buying gas at expensive L.A. prices, paying rent or mortgages, etc., all year long, even when they're not working. Residuals help them do that. Not getting residuals on the method most people will be using to acquire their entertainment hurts the people who can least afford to be hurt, while enriching the studios--and as I said, this time, it's the writers, but other crafts will be negotiating soon, and precedent matters.
In the meantime, as the strike drags on and productions are shut down, it's the lowest-paid people on the lot--the carpenters, set dressers, production assistants, craft services workers, etc., who will be the most affected. Filtering down from that, grocers and waitresses (and, as writer/director James Gunn [SLiTHER] points out on his MySpace blog, strippers) are being affected. In a separate post, James has some suggestions on how you can help, if you feel strongly about it too.
UPDATE: My friend Joe Harris has been keeping a blog from the other side of the country, New York, where there are lots of members of the WGAE (for East) also out on the picket lines. Check it out, and note the photo of picketers in front of Fox/News Corp. (where, really, people should just picket all the time just on general principle). Plus, he links to a petition that non-WGA members can sign to indicate their support of the effort.
ANOTHER UPDATE: This is such an important issue to writers--all writers, as Doris Egan points out in this blog post, or at least all writers who value what they do enough to want to be paid for it--that I'll likely continue updating this post, or adding new ones, as other points of view are heard from. Meanwhile, read Doris.
