2010 Emmy slots: Just another beauty contest
posted 8-5-2010 - 11:23 pm

 
So: are we surprised and disappointed again this year by the nominations? Yup. You bet. And there will be much carping about who made it and who didn’t, and about the voting system itself. Again. And no effort made to fix and of the voting system’s flaws. Surprise.

I’m talking about the prime-time Emmy nominations (I don’t watch soap opera, so I couldn’t care less about the daytime awards. Sue me). Truly, if there’s a difference here between the Emmys and the Miss America pageant, it’s not much.

Yes, The Pacific leads in the number of nominations – congrats to powerhouse HBO yet again – yet all of The Pacific’s actors were snubbed. How the hell did THAT happen?? The actors and the writers are what made this ambitious, well executed miniseries fly. Partly at fault here is the fact that whereas the Emmy voting system has separate categories for best film and best miniseries, it lumps the two formats together when it comes to best actors/actresses and best supporting categories. Very unfair: the actors in a miniseries have to sustain a character over several episodes, whereas those in a film have to do it for an hour and a half to two hours. It's a different kettle of fish.

Shows we hope to love:  FlashForward gets reduced to Hollywood's lowest common denominator
posted 7-22-2009 - 8:11 pm

 
I dread the premiere of this show (relax, no spoilers here: you can learn this much just by watching the ABC trailers). Yet I was prepared to love it, based on my reaction to the book. The show hasn't even debuted yet, and already people are wondering: can this show be saved from its developers' mistakes? Disclosure: I am an aficionada of sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer's work and have just recently reread the novel on which this new TV series is presumably based (except that it isn't, really). Given how much I liked the book, I was looking forward to the show's premiere, until I actually learned something about the show. Talk about disappointing.

It's not new for Hollywood to botch something from the get-go, but I keep hoping at least a few people in the TV and film business will learn from Hollywood's mistakes. That hope isn't usually rewarded, but I comment here just in case there's still time to influence the show's developers. To that end, I left a lengthy comment on one of the industry sites earlier today, then decided I should at least post that much on my own blog; therefore, I'm going to repeat here most of what I've already posted there. When you're the author, you get to do this. But back to Sawyer and FlashForward.

I hesitate to say that I'm a Sawyer fan because fan is short for 'fanatic,' and I'm not a fanatic about anything (except, possibly, the correct use of the English language, which is an occupational hazard for all good writers and editors anyway). But I've enjoyed and been challenged by Sawyer's novel and his books Calculating God and Factoring Humanity. The Neanderthal series, not so much: I've never liked alternative histories and am much more interested in speculations about the present and future. Earlier this summer, I read Sawyer's latest, WWW.Wake, and loved that. So when I heard about the spin-off show, I reread (and again enjoyed) FlashForward.

Shows we love:  exit Kings? Not necessarily
posted 7-22-2009 - 8:11 pm

 
Kings is the kind of program that NBC hasn’t had in years, at least not since The West Wing ended: a pure, grown-up drama that isn’t in the cops-and-doctors genre. Inspired by the biblical chapters about David and Goliath, King Saul, and Saul’s son Jonathan, the show draws parallels with those parables while going well beyond the original tales to examine timeless issues of ethics, war, politics, and human character. In that respect, it is very like The West Wing and the marvelously reinvented Battlestar Galactica as well as the best episodes of the Star Trek franchise. It's also marvelously well cast

What’s most remarkable is that despite everything it had going for it, Kings got canceled after 12 episodes that almost nobody knew about. If more people had known, they’d have seen it and been glad. Splendidly reimagined in modern terms, Kings is set in the ersatz contemporary coastal kingdom of Gilboa, for which you can substitute New York, Washington, London, Beijing, several central African regimes, or pretty much any modern capital located in an industrialized nation.

Gilboa is led by King Silas Benjamin, a former general who dethroned and imprisoned his former monarch and dragged his nation into the 21st century, both modernizing it drastically and enmeshing it in costly warfare with less than impressed neighbors. The young David in this case is Captain David Shepherd, who serves his king and country loyally despite grave misgivings and in the process becomes a hero uncomfortable in the limelight, providing a very public contrast to the less than scrupulous monarch. And from there, the conflicts and combatants multiply, even (most pointedly) within the royal family. Nearly everyone but David is ambitious and maneuvering for something.