What makes a good TV series?

Bonanza, 4th Longest Running Series

What makes a good television series? You probably already guessed that I would say writing. Some might say exceptional characters, but writers define those characters. In fact, the characters are usually defined prior to casting. Actors audition to fill predefined roles. Actors? Without a quality script, even great actors phone it in.

Television writing is a team contact sport. A series can employ over a dozen writers and everyone knows you can’t manage writers. They always want to do something creative and a television series promises continuity. Writers are egotistical. Writers are inflexible. Most writers are slow and disdain deadlines. Television writers want celebrities to mouth their words, not the words of the writer sitting next to them. A room full of writers magnify these flaws exponentially.

Simpson's Writing Room

So again, what makes a good television series?  Not writing per se, but skillful management of a writing team. This is a tough job. The lead writer needs to define hard boundaries, yet encourage craftsmanship and creativity within those boundaries. 

Do you want to see a small example on how this is done? Read Writing for Bonanza: Seven Rules From 1968. Rule #7 summarizes the rules nicely: "What we do want is Western action and Western adventure, concerning a worthy and dramatic problem for the Cartwrights, and strong opponents. We want human drama built around a specific locale and specific period in the country’s history; simple, basic stories as seen through the eyes of Ben, Hoss, and Little Joe Cartwright, and Candy.”

After reading this article, it’s obvious that a key element of managing writers is clarity. Firm rules, stated firmly. Then let them have at it. 

Can the Bloody Benders Revive Western Film?

Bender General Store and Inn

In the early 1870s, the Bloody Benders were a family of serial killers on the Kansas prairie. The four members of the family could not be weirder. If they were a family. The only thing known for certain is that there were four of them and they killed over a dozen travelers that ate or stayed at their makeshift general store located along a popular trail to the West. One more thing is known, they escaped.

This is a fascinating story and now The Topeka Capital Journal reports that two Harvard graduates are making an independent film about this grotesque piece of Western lore. There may also be a Hollywood production about the Bloody Benders. I’m rooting for the indie film. 

When the resurgence occurs in Western film, it will come from solid storytelling. My money is on indie films because they can’t afford elaborate computer generated effects, so they have no choice but to concentrate on a great script. Western enthusiasts keep hoping that movies like Cowboys and Aliens or The Lone Ranger will rejuvenate the genre. Small films have a better chance.

Bender Knife

IMDB reports an estimated budget for Open Range of only $26 million, a pittance for a movie with two bankable stars. Dances with Wolves was only $19 million.  Quigley Down Under $20 million. And even the remake of 3:10 to Yuma was only $55 million. On the other hand, films with nine figure budgets have harmed the genre. Big losses sour Hollywood powers-that-be on Westerns and they’re too dumb to figure out they threw away their money on a lousy script because they believe CGI, fast cuts, and a pulsing soundtrack were the key to a blockbuster.

Good storytelling draws audiences into movie houses … and that’s the forte of low budget films. Since Hollywood is blockbuster obsessed, we’ll have to rely on indie films to have an enjoyable night at the movies with a box of hot, buttered popcorn.

Fan Letters are cool

Carson McCullers to Henry Miller

I always like to get fan letters. Some writers write for themselves, but I write to be read, so a fan letter is a bit of confirmation that someone out there enjoys reading my books. Flavorwire recently posted ten fan letters from famous writers to other writers. I’ve gotten a few of those and even a phone call from a New York Times bestselling author. That certainly made my day … or I should say week. Nothing on the caliber of these Flavorwire letters, of course. 

Here is the link to the Flavorwire post on famous fan letters.

Django Unchained—Quentin Tarantino’s Does Spaghetti Western

I like Tarantino movies and Westerns, so I expected to love Django Unchained.  I only liked it. It wasn’t bad; it just didn’t live up to my expectations.

The Spaghetti Western is a subset of the Western genre, typified by antiheroes, revenge themes, extreme violence, slow scenes, scant dialogue, extreme close-ups, long running times, and heavy scores punctuated by stretches of pure silence. (My favorite is Once Upon a Time in the West.) The Spaghetti Western is a different breed from the traditional Western because all of these characteristics are done to excess.

I knew something was amiss with Django Unchained about two hours into the movie when I wondered how long it would be before the end. Not a good sign, even when three hours is typical for Spaghetti Westerns. The audience is supposed to be transported to another place and time, not squirming in their seats.

Tarantino loves bad movies, especially bad genre movies. He sees art where others see trash. His best works, like Kill Bill for example, blend clichés and corniness from multiple genres into a cornucopia of unexpected delights. Django Unchained seemed too predictable and too narrow. Perhaps Tarantino’s shtick has run its course. I hope not.

Related post: Europe's Infatuation with the American Wild West

Saddle Up ! Denver Post article on resurgence of Westerns on TV

Joanne Ostrow writes a article summarizing television networks new fascination with the Western genre.

"The rugged individualism of myth, the challenge of uncharted territory, the bad sanitation and awful racial stereotypes ... the TV Western is back in the saddle."

Read more ...

Read related article on popularity of Westerns

Hollywood—Get Real

Hollywood must believe that the only way to draw us into a theater is to give Sherlock Holmes the glitter of James Bond, portray the Three Musketeers as superheroes, and pit cowboys against ghastly aliens. If the script is really weak, they shove it in our face by releasing the movie in 3-D. Are there no real writers left in Hollywood? Are kids the only ones that can gin up box office? Flash and dash is great when it’s integral to a story, but a bore when it consumes the entire one hundred and ten minutes. Storytelling is an art. It seems Hollywood commits all of is creative talents to bookkeeping. It’s hard to believe that they’re still is an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

Oscar Night Ramblings by Raymond Chandler

Whenever the Oscars come around, I'm reminded of this article written by Raymond Chandler in March of 1948. By the way, in 1948, the Oscars were broadcast on radio. I hope he will forgive some editing for brevity. The highlights are mine, of course.

Oscar Night in Hollywood

By Raymond Chandler

It isn't so much that the awards never go to fine achievements as that those fine achievements are not rewarded as such. Technically, they are voted, but they are not decided by the use of whatever critical wisdom Hollywood may possess. They are ballyhooed, pushed, yelled, screamed, and in every way propagandized into the consciousness of the voters so incessantly, in the weeks before the final balloting, that everything except the golden aura of the box office is forgotten.We elect Presidents in much the same way, so why not actors, cameramen, writers, and all rest of the people who have to do with the making of pictures? If we permit noise, ballyhoo, and theater to influence us in the selection of the people who are to run the country, why should we object to the same methods in the selection of meritorious achievements in the film business?

If you think most motion pictures are bad, which they are, find out from some initiate how they are made, and you will be astonished that any of them could be good. The point is not whether the average motion picture is bad, but whether the motion picture is an artistic medium of sufficient dignity and accomplishment to be treated with respect. Those who deride the motion picture usually are satisfied that they have thrown the book at it by declaring it to be a form of mass entertainment. As if that meant anything. Greek drama, which is still considered quite respectable by most intellectuals, was mass entertainment to the Athenian freeman. So was the Elizabethan drama. It might reasonably be said that all art becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. In painting, music, and architecture we are not even second-rate by comparison with the best work of the past. Our novels are transient propaganda when they are what is called "significant," and bedtime reading when they are not.

Show business has always been a little over noisy, over dressed, over brash. Actors are threatened people. Before films came along to make them rich they often had need of a desperate gaiety. Some of these qualities have passed into the Hollywood mores and produced that very exhausting thing, the Hollywood manner, which is a chronic case of spurious excitement over absolutely nothing.

If you can go past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of the human intelligence; if you can stand the hailstorm of flash bulbs popping at the poor patient actors who, like kings and queens, have never the right to look bored; if you can glance out over this gathered assemblage of what is supposed to be the elite of Hollywood and say to yourself without a sinking feeling, "In these hands lie the destinies of the only original art the modern world has conceived "; if you can stand the fake sentimentality and the platitudes of the officials and the mincing elocution of the glamour queens; if you can do all these things and not have a wild and forsaken horror at the thought that most of these people actually take this shoddy performance seriously; and if you can then go out into the night to see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the golden ones from the mob in the free seats; if you can do all these things and still feel next morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong, because this sort of vulgarity is part of its inevitable price.

Perverse fellow that I am, I found myself intrigued by the unimportant part of the program. I was intrigued by the efficiently quick on-and-off that was given to these minnows of the picture business; by their nervous attempts via the microphone to give most of the credit for their work to some stuffed shirt; by the fact that technical developments which may mean many millions of dollars to the industry, and may on occasion influence the whole procedure of picture-making, are just not worth explaining to the audience at all; intrigued most of all perhaps by the formal tribute which is invariably made to the importance of the writer, without whom, my dear, dear friends, nothing could be done at all, but who is for all that merely the climax of the unimportant part of the program.

If the actors and actresses like the silly show, and I'm not sure at all the best of them do, they at least know how to look elegant in a strong light, and how to make with the wide-eyed and oh, so humble little speeches as if they believed them. If the big producers like it, and I'm quite sure they do because it contains the only ingredients they really understand—promotion values and the additional grosses that go with them—the producers at least know what they are fighting for. But if the quiet, earnest, and slightly cynical people who really make motion pictures like it, and I'm quite sure they don't, well, after all, it comes only once a year, and it's no worse than a lot of the sleazy vaudeville they have to push out of the way to get their work done.

But that is the real point, isn't it?—whether these annual Awards, regardless of the grotesque ritual which accompanies them, really represent anything at all of artistic importance to the motion picture medium, anything clear and honest that remains after the lights are dimmed, the minks are put away, and the aspirin is swallowed? I don't think they do. I think they are just theater and not even good theater.As for the personal prestige that goes with winning an Oscar, it may with luck last long enough for your agent to get your contract rewritten and your price jacked up another notch.