The Greater Fool

‎"The Greater Fool is actually an economic term. It’s a patsy. For the rest of us to profit, we need a greater fool, someone who will buy long and sell short. Most people spend their lives trying not to be the greater fool. We toss him the hot potato, we dive for his seat when the music stops. The greater fool is someone with the perfect blend of self-delusion and ego to think that he can succeed where others have failed. This whole country was made by greater fools." 
-From the HBO drama "The Newsroom" written by Aaron Sorkin

I am a greater fool.

Rambling About Television Shows Again

Can Network Television just not handle cutting edge TV programming? Did “Kings” fail because it was on Network Television as opposed to Showtime or HBO? I just watched the second to last episode and got to thinking about it. Looking back, I see that that overall plot was pretty good; it was just that the rest of the production didn’t live up to that. I just deleted a large section where I nit-picked what I didn’t like; because, that isn’t really what I wanted to write about. I am really interested as to why this show failed.

There was a bit in “The Long Lead Story,” episode 5 of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” where the president of Entertainment Programming for the fictional NBS, Jorden McDeere (played by Amanda Peet), wants to buy the pilot of a show called “Nations” about the behind the scenes workings of the United Nations. The debate in the show is about how HBO wants the show and that it doesn’t belong on Network TV. When she first comes out and asks for Danny’s help in convincing the writer to let them buy it, he says, “No.” When asked why he says, “Because HBO is better.” At another point in the show she says, “I don’t think that the people who write TV are smarter than the people who watch TV.”

But when I see “Kings” and wonder what happened that made the show into the mess that got it canceled to nobody’s surprise, when I see a show as unbelievably good as “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” get canceled due to low ratings, and when I see the high ratings of all the reality TV shows; I wonder if the statement above is true… at least for Network TV. Over on the high end pay channels like HBO and Showtime we have shows like “Deadwood,” “Rome,” “Dexter,” “Californification,” “Weeds,” “The Tutors,” “Entourage,” “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “Trueblood” to name more than a few. Even basic cable has great stuff like “Rescue Me,” “The Shield,” “Battlestar Galactica” and “Mad Men.” To be fair there have been some good shows on cable that got the axe before their time such as “Dead Like Me” and “Farscape” to name two.

There is a lot of well written TV out there across all genres, but it appears to only flourish on cable. Could these shows not survive on regular Network TV? If not, why? Is it the audience? I hesitate to blindly place blame with the network executives. I know they want their shows to succeed even if they sometimes appear to be working hard against that. I don’t really think it was entirely their fault for canceling “Terminator, the Sarah Conner Chronicles.” I think the writers have to take some of that blame as well; because, they appeared to be dragging out too much of the personal character issues at the expense of the action we would expect in a TV show about time traveling killer robots from the future. But for all I know that could have been the network guy’s fault too. Something obviously went wrong and now the show is gone. Dollhouse was moving along just as slow until the last two episodes, but thankfully that survived the axe and hopefully Josh and the gang will pick up the pace a bit next season.

I loved Westwing but even it suffered from low ratings in its later years. I was never that impressed by 24. If you haven’t seen the YouTube clip of David Cross’ reaction to “Arrested Development” being canceled, you really should. What else? I haven’t watched “Lost” since season two, thanks to the even worse Australian Network TV (whole other rant) but I hear people complaining about it all the time. In the beginning the show was going too slow and dragging everything out and now they are complaining that it is going too fast and confusing everybody. Speaking of Joss Whedon, there was “Angel” that I still don't understand while another network didn't pick up and of course “Firefly.” I am trying to think of a other shows... there was the one about the American Embassy years ago that I think I liked, that one where Gena Davis was President which I thought was horrible, and a few others that have already slipped my mind.

Back to the audience issue, is network TV just for those people who want some instant satisfaction entertainment without all the baggage of having to concentrate too deeply on the show or its ongoing back story? Shows like CSI and Law and Order seem to fit that bill, “done in one” as they say in the comic book industry. Sure it’s an on-going show, but the whole story is pretty much done in one episode and you don’t lose anything if you miss any shows in-between. That is pretty much true for most sit-coms as well. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with this. But is it the fate of Network TV to be saddled with nothing but that type of show while the harder stuff is confined to cable?

Anyway... sorry was just rambling there. I always have this fear that I am going to be trying to get a job as a writer at sometime in the future and somebody is going to read my blog, see these rambling posts, and not hire me. Dear Mr. Editor from the Future, If I was writing this for you I would have structured and paced it a whole lot better, not to mention actually proof read it. Okay, that should solve that problem. Now I am just going to go toss a penny into the fountain and make a wise that Aaron Sorkin will come back and do another TV show.

This is what I'm reduced to

Alright a real quick post. Yeah, they are just coming fast and furious while I sit here jobless. I'm burning so much creative energy I have to wear different colored socks just to get myself grounded.*

I just caught up to current with The Big Bang Theory tv show. Yes Cameron, I already caught up with Dollhouse. I just love Amy Acker as Dr. Claire Saunders. She was cute on Angel, but there is something about her on Dollhouse with the scars on her face that just fascinates me. I'm hoping this steams from a natural male-protector role and not something creepy. I already have enough interesting problems for other people to deal with.

I am so glad that we have Joss Whedon back doing TV. Now if we could just get another Aaron Sorkin show going I could rest easy.

No Cameron, I haven't watched anymore of the second season of Terminator. The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I told you before, I'm going to get the whole season from iTunes.

Anyway, about Cameron. He interrupts like that all the time. What I wanted to post about was the lyrics to the theme song for The Bing Bang Theory written and performed by The Bare Naked Ladies. It goes like this:

The Bing Bang Theory Theme Song - Bare Naked Ladies

Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait...
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries,
That all started with the big bang!

I have one small problem with it. The line in the background "we built the pyramids" right after "We built a wall" just doesn't work. First of all it is redundant. Secondly, it throws the rhythm off right in the middle of a very fast rhythmic part of the song. Next time you are watching the show, sing along and try replacing that line with "Not to mention pyramids." I think you'll find it works much better.

*I was joking about the socks. I only own two types of socks: black dress socks and short, white, athletic socks. Wearing one of each would do the opposite of grounding me. If you witness me wearing such, you should alert the medical authorities immediately as I have most likely gone off my medication. Okay! Okay! MedicationS - plural.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Okay, here is the Studio 60 post I said I wasn't going to post because its long and boring. But I still need to proof my funny post so I figured I would throw this up since I'm just sitting here waiting for Dan to decide if the servers are going to come tumbling down soon now that we sent out emails or if its going to take long enough that we could go get dinner and come back in time to watch them crash.

I purchased a number of shows from iTunes to watch while traveling about, one of them being Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I am a big Aaron Sorkin fan so it was the first show I started watching on the trip. To be completely honest I’ll admit I cheated and watched Season 2 of Dexter before the trip started.

I heard various things about the Studio 60 while it was airing, but I couldn’t watch it as I live in Australia where television is more dramatic. That doesn’t mean they have more dramatic shows. Its things like the fact that the episode order of a show having little to do with the order the episodes are aired. Sometimes they aren’t aired at all, for example if there is a big cricket match on completely different station, they might decide that airing their regularly scheduled show would damage the space time continuum or something so they’ll throw on a English, 2-year old, Jamie Oliver cooking instead. And if Big Brother runs late; oh just forget it! The rest of the night is screwed! There is also the fact that Stuido 60 wasn’t on Australian television. Or if it was they hid it at 12:30 on some random weekday like they did with Firefly. Gee, wonder why nobody watched it!

To start I didn’t get the name of the show. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip conjures images of the infamous nightclub "Studio 54" (which, according to the wiki was actually CBS's Studio 52 at one point, learn something new everyday) When I first heard about the show, I pictured a Melrose Place type soap opera type show set in a night club. Granted, that included images of sexy young women bouncing around in flimsy little clubbing outfits which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, the show is actually about the behind the scenes workings of a live, late-night, comedy show. I imagine Aaron Sorkin's first show; "Sports Night" had the same problem as it sounded like a sports show when it was actually about the behind the scenes working of a sports show. An ad for Sports Night read, “It’s about sports the same way Charlies Angels was about law enforcement.” You’d have thought though, that if he had those problems with Sports Night he would have thought of a better name for Studio 60. If I didn’t know anything about any of this and I saw either of these shows listed in the TV guide; I wouldn't have watched them because of assumptions I would have made about them based on their name. The wiki for Studio 60 mentions that it was called “Studio 7 on the Sunset Strip” during production. Not too much better. I think maybe it’s a matter of showbiz people having studio number whatever conjure up images of a television studio where the rest of think other things.

But about the show itself, as with all Aaron Sorkin scripts, the dialog is very fast and dynamic. It is very intelligent and assumes you are as well. The show doesn't feel as polished or as snappy as West Wing but you can easily see it was going there.

Although a lot of my political beliefs are opposite of Aaron Sorkin’s on a number of issues, as with West Wing, I never really felt he was treating my position unfairly. He does a respectable job of presenting strong arguments for both sides of most issues. Again as in the West Wing, I felt a lot of time he is just throwing the issues out there, letting the characters debate them back and forth, and letting you see both sides. There were exceptions, some of them even justified.

I liked pretty much all of the characters and sub-plots the show went into. I liked that Matthew Perry showed he isn't still Chandler from Friends, but that isn't really fair as he really already showed that, for example when he played Joe Quincy on West Wing. I also thought D. L. Hughley did a great job as Simon Stiles. In West Wing I thought that a lot of the sub-plots into the lives of the characters were choppy or cut short. You would see a character get involved in a relationship or something in one episode, then nothing about it for half a season, and then finally that character would return and you would learn they had broken up. In Studio 60, since it is more about the characters than the place or the events like it is in West Wing, the show is more personal and it follows those character-based story lines as the main flow of the show.

In the end I understand that the show was very expensive to produce and the ratings just weren’t anywhere near where they needed to be. But it was a quality show and it was obvious that the show needed a beat to find its rhythm. I read on the wiki that the show had the highest percentage increase in ratings numbers when you include people who used a DVR to record the show to watch later. I wish they had let it have more time to breath and find its place. The actual ending of the show was a bit of a letdown. It felt like a quick, "The show is ending, quick lets tie off all these ends." Granted, that is better than just leaving us hanging. But with the quality of the rest of the writing, I expected that 'tie off' to be handled better.

Viral Marketing... or more like 'Evil Marketing in General'

I was looking up stuff on viral marketing while watching Mad Men TV episodes that I downloaded from iTunes. (I was going to photoshop the cover of Pattern Recognition into the Mad Men logo to make it look like he was reading the book... can you imagine what would have happened if they had though of viral marketing back then? We'd be so doomed.) I’ve been kind of fascinated the whole viral marketing thing since reading William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition.” Things like hiring attractive girls to go to bars and order a certain brand of drink while talking to various men a.k.a. the target demographic. I wonder what other ‘stealth’ approach campaigns are out there and what effect they are having and is that effect measurable? Though there is a big argument that no advertising is really measureable and who is to say somebody wouldn’t have bought that product anyway. Kinda related to that is something I read a few years ago that said that most of the high rated beer commercial campaigns didn’t correspond to higher sales of that brand of beer. The notable exception was the popular “whassup” Budweiser commercials.

There are other ‘non-stealth’ viral marketing campaigns such as the Alternate Reality Games, called ARGS, such as “I Love Bees” which was used to promote the video game “Halo 2” and “The Beast” which promoted the Steven Spielberg film “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.” In those type of things you know, or find out pretty early on that it is part of a marketing plan. They are less evil and more fun that way.

I’ve always had a love hate relationship with “marketing.” I one of the little annoying and completely pointless stories I used to tell was how Marking People are more Evil than Lawyers. Lawyers are just tools, things to be wielded when going into battle. I hire my lawyer, you hire your lawyer and they fight it out. The problem is that I can’t hire a marketing person to fight your marketing person, at least not directly. Marking people bypass all normal defenses and go right after you. That would be a NND Attack for your Hero Role-Playing system people out there. (Sorry, RPG geek moment.)

I’ve been told at least twice that I should have gone into marketing because my brain functions that particular way. I’ve never been sure if that was an insult or not.

The point of all this is that I found an article on Techcrunch from late last year. It is written by a guest author Dan Ackerman Greenberg and details some of the things his company The Comotion Group does to promote videos made by their clients into viral sensations that get spread out across the internet. The article caused a huge sensation with lots of people calling him out as a dishonest, unethical, spammer. You should read the article, its choice material. He posted a second article to answer some of his critics, but that just caused more criticism.

What I just don’t get is the fact that everybody knows this is going on; he is just laying out the details. And, all things considered how is this different than hiring popular actors to promote your product, product placement in movies and TV shows, paying money to appear higher in a search engine’s results, air-brushing models in layouts, etc.?

Here let me tell you another random, only somewhat related story. (Shut up Adam.) There used to (and maybe still is) a series of television commercials, I think for Lucky supermarkets. They claim that they had an independent accounting firm randomly selected 100 grocery items and then added up the cost of those items at their store and the stores of their competitors. When they looked at the total price for those grocery items, Lucky Supermarkets was cheaper!

It isn’t a lie, but it is pretty obvious what they are doing. They had their accounting firm randomly select more than just a single ‘set of 100 grocery items’ and they decided on which was the best set of 100 that they could use in their commercial.

In the seemly endless comments and other websites about Dan’s article, I especially love all the indignation regarding how people who work for him have multiple accounts to have conversations with themselves on various forums. To you personally, what is the difference between a bunch of random internet posters who you know anything about and a secret marketing person pretending to be a bunch of random internet posters? Is anybody out there really following the advice of strangers on the internet?

As you may know I buy audio books from Audible.com, who should be paying me for all the times I’ve plugged them on my site (I just got the new Neil Gaiman novel, “The Graveyard Book” woot!). Unfortunately Audible’s plot Synopses and user reviews aren’t as robust as I would like, and their web layout makes them hard to read. So normally I go over to Amazon.com for that information. When looking at Amazon reviews if I see a bunch of positive reviews, I usually pick out the negative ones to read. I think I do this because I believe negative reviews are more honest most of the time, than positive ones that tend to be too fanatical and fan-boyish in nature. I do the same to movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

I did read something else about the U.K. passing a law last year where it is illegal for marketers to pose as consumers.

I really have nowhere else to go with this. This whole post was me writing a quick little something about that article and look what it ballooned into. What you really don’t know is that hidden is this message was a subliminal advertisement guaranteed to get you to buy a certain product. Don’t believe me? Well in the near future when you are in the store reaching for something you’ll suddenly remember this post.

Anyway, I just wanted to post this and get it out there before burying it with the really funny video game related post I wrote last night. I'm probably not going to post the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip post, let me just sum up the major points: I liked it, wish they would have let it go one more season to get its legs, and I am a big Aaron Sorkin fan and wish I could write dialog like he does. Stay tuned true believer!