Author: admin

To: AMC Television Networks programming management
Re: New series development

We believe that we are on the trail of an exciting new series concept, although the exact title remains elusive. Following are some of the more promising ideas we have been batting around.

As always, your suggestions and feedback are welcome.

Sincerely,
The writing staff

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The Gawking Dead: The recently deceased rise from the grave and stare at us.

The Stalking Dead: The dead crawl out of cemeteries everywhere, and proceed to follow us around. But we never see them because they are really good at remaining unnoticed.

The Sporking Dead: A strange fog descends upon the earth. When it has lifted, millions of recently dead people are found wandering the cities and the countryside, clutching eating utensils. Scientists are unable to determine whether these utensils are spoons or forks. Panic ensues.

The Hawking Dead: Zombies return from the dead and try to sell us stuff. [Editor’s note: There may be opportunities here for product tie-ins. Also, has anyone contacted Stephen Hawking’s people?]

The Dworkin Dead: A mysterious world-wide virus causes the dead to return to life en masse with a raised feminist conscience. Half of them wage war upon the other half, whose consciences they feel have not been sufficiently raised.

The Walken Dead: All over the world, dead people rise from their graves and begin doing impressions of Christopher Walken. After only a week of this, everyone else has committed suicide, and civilization as we know it comes to an end.

When I was growing up, a TV show was something you watched gradually. Each week you would wait patiently for a particular time slot, and only then would you get to see the further adventures of your favorite fictional characters.

The arc of any given make-believe universe could take five or even seven years to run its course, during which everyone on the show would slowly get older. For example, actors who started as children would gradually grow up, week after month after year, and end up playing the young adult version of their character.

Eventually producers came up with the brilliant “something for everyone” concept in shows like “The Brady Bunch” and “The Waltons”, casting a boy and a girl on screen for each age range among the audience. This made it much nicer for entire families to watch together. For every child in your family, at least one character in the show was their own (gradually changing) age.

Now, with such a plethora of TV shows available instantly on the Internet, I know almost nobody anymore who watches TV this way. We all find a show we like on sites like NetFlix — often a show that was cancelled some years earlier — and do triage on the entire series. Children become grown-ups, while grown-ups age, right before our eyes. In the course of perhaps several weeks we can watch an entire series of four or five seasons or more.

A representation of life is being played out before our eyes in extreme fast forward. In the long run, I wonder what this will do to our sense of reality.

I had dinner tonight with a friend whom I first met multiple times. The first of these first times was on the New York City subway. I had recognized him from a public access TV show he’d hosted, and I approached him to tell him how much I had enjoyed it. My friend does not recall this momentary meeting.

The second of these first times occurred some years later. I was walking down the isle of an airplane, on a flight to a vacation on a Florida beach. I happened to be wearing a teeshirt upon which were printed the names of contributors to Cahiers du Cinéma, souvenir of a trip to Paris the summer previous.

Seeing me pass by his row thus attired, my future acquaintance asked “Are you going to the festival?” Turns out there was an international french film festival in Florida that week, in the very city I was traveling to. He and I ended up becoming great friends, and have remained so for many years.

I’ve had a number of friendships that started this way — as though the Universe had decided that we were supposed to meet, and kept working to make it happen.

Could it be that some friendships are simply fated to be? The whole topic reminds me of the metaphysics of the 2009 Star Trek movie.

If you follow the logic of that film’s screenplay, it is clear that Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the others all exist in an infinite number of parallel universes. These universes differ from each other in many ways, and the lives of the various characters can be dramatically altered from one universe to the next.

Yet in every single one of these possible universes, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise will end up coming together, to form the ragtag family we love. In a sense, that’s actually the theme of the film.

Maybe this is true in real life as well. If a friendship sees the light of day in even one universe, then in every other universe, the Sun also rises on that friendship.

In any case, as Papa Hemingway once said, isn’t it pretty to think so?

I have always been amazed how great songs — the right combination of words and music — have the peculiar power that they do.

There are moments in some songs that can utterly transport me to another emotional plane. Yet if I merely listen to the music in an instrumental version, or if I look only at the lyrics, nothing happens. The magic occurs only when the two are combined.

For example, Judy Collins’ cover of the Ian Tyson classic “Someday Soon” contains one moment near the end that thrills me, no matter how many times I listen to it. You can hear it in this video. In the refrain that starts around 2:58, when she sings the word “California”, I just melt.

I suspect this may be partly because of the way her voice in this passage becomes more wistful, tempering the excitement of awaiting her true love with the intuition that life won’t be perfect even after he returns (you have to listen to the entire song to get the full effect).

This sudden increase in emotional complexity makes the tale feel more vivid and alive and true, lifting it beyond a mere love story.

I don’t think such a thing could be achieved with mere words or music alone. Only through the strange alchemy of songs.

I’m only on the third episode of season one, yet I’m already starting to understand why “The Walking Dead” is so fun and entertaining, in spite of being a vision of our world transformed into a hellish nightmare.

I think the key is the humor. Not humor among the characters — their lives are grim and terror-filled and constantly in peril. I am speaking, rather, of all the witty meta-humor sailing over the fourth wall. The characters are not in on the joke. But we and the writers are.

For example, at this point our intrepid every-man hero, having braved huge ravenous hordes of flesh-eating zombies through a combination of resolve, resourcefulness, and an insane amount of dumb luck, is finally reunited with the wife and young son he had feared dead.

Because he is the hero, and therefore noble, our man decides to turn right back around to brave the flesh-eating hordes yet again, in order to honor a promise he had made. His wife is frantic with despair at the thought of her husband deliberately heading to near-certain death so soon after their tearful reunion.

But listen to what their young son tells her in the very next scene:

Son:	“I’m not worried.”
Wife:	“Why?”
Son:	“Think about it mom. Everything that’s happened to him so far. Nothing’s killed him yet.”

Just in case, um, you were worrying that they would kill off the hero after only three episodes. 🙂

This is very funny stuff. The writers are obviously having a great time, and so am I.

“Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man”

      -John Lennon

In the “Ethicist” column of this week’s New York Times Magazine a reader asked whether stealing is unethical. I found the answer by the columnist Chuck Klosterman to be unsatisfying. Here is the core part of his response:

“Can objects truly be ‘owned’ by someone, or is this just a word we use to describe an unreal proviso? The more you think about that question, the more complicated it becomes. But it ultimately doesn’t matter, because we’ve collectively decided to live as though ownership is real. We believe our possessions are extensions of ourselves. So if stealing were an acceptable practice — if we lived in a world in which people just took whatever they wanted, simply because there was no clear argument for doing otherwise — our lives would be consumed by anxiety. We would live in constant fear and spend all our energy protecting our possessions. Traveling would become impossible, because we couldn’t go anywhere without bringing along everything we owned. People would be less motivated to create things, because they would have no way of stopping others from taking away those creations. Violence would increase exponentially.”

It seems to me that this is a shallow and incomplete view of the question. After Klosterman says “if we lived in a world in which people just took whatever they wanted”, he does not really follow the full implications of his own premise.

One could at least posit economies that function without ownership. This has been done a number of times in speculative literature, two notable examples being Skinner’s “Walden Two” and Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed”.

For example, in a pure gift economy, the very concept of stealing would become meaningless, since value would be created by people freely sharing what they create. Your reward would be precisely that people use what you create, while their reward would be that you use what they create.

Of course this way of thinking is radically different from the way you and I live, and it is not even certain that such a way of thinking is compatible with how our brains are wired. But shouldn’t a discussion that dwells on the nature of “stealing” also touch on the nature of “property”?

Today I finally started watching “The Walking Dead”. I’m half-way through the first episode, and so far it’s great fun.

At the very beginning, our sympathetic every-man hero wakes up to find that his familiar town has been transformed into a post-apocalyptic nightmare overrun by flesh-eating zombies.

As I watched this transition, I thought of the “experiment gone horribly wrong” in the game Half-Life, in which an inter-dimensional rift causes our hero to suddenly find his familiar research facility has been transformed into a post-apocalyptic nightmare overrun by flesh-eating zombies.

This in turn made me think both of the stories of Stephen King and of the book/film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. This idea of horror arising out of the familiar — as opposed to taking place in an exotic or gothic locale — seems to get at the very heart of modern anxieties.

After all, isn’t it precisely the exquisite ordinariness of the housefly on the video monitor that turns “The Ring” into a masterpiece of modern horror? In these technologically sophisticated times, a film about the Cthulhu Mythos of Lovecraft would elicit not much more than a bored shrug. We might pause to admire some nicety of special effects, but that’s about it.

Yet horror that shows up within our everyday, in our bedroom or kitchen, has the power to scare us half to death. After all, deep down we in the modern world know that our feeling of everyday familiarity masks some terrible truths.

We live in a world in which it is dangerous to look too closely at things, such as how our iPhone was made, or the process that brought that fried chicken to the table, or exactly what our soldiers are being asked to do half way around the world.

So when we turn on the TV and see zombies show up in our living room, this is our modern equivalent of Bettelheim’s “The Uses of Enchantment”: We see our deepest fears transformed to a safely metaphorical form, and for a while we feel better.

I was having a discussion today in which the question came up of “what makes something a game” — as opposed, say, to a toy or a simulation.

For me there is a fairly simple approximate answer (although of course there are subtleties here): A game is an interactive experience that encourages its participant(s) to aim toward defined goals, and offers some sort of reward for a player who succeeds in reaching those goals. The reward can be minimal (eg: a message that says “Congratulations, you did it!”), but it needs to be present.

This conversation got me thinking about the interactive java applets on my NYU home page. Most of these applets are clearly not games, even though it would have been very easy for me to structure them as games.

And it occurred to me, for the first time really, why I don’t make them as games: Because the last thing I would wish visitors to do is focus on reaching some predefined goal.

Rather, I want visitors to my site to explore with no agenda. My hope is that my ragtag little band of demos will encourage people to follow their own free-wheeling thoughts, to form their own creative associations, and to discover worlds of their own.

I grew up not far from a little town named “Grandview”. So when I saw the Will Wellman film Magic Town, which takes place in a town of the same name, it felt sort of funny, as though the events in the movie were happening right next door.

Something similar happened when I saw the film Pleasantville, since I used to live pretty much within walking distance of a real town called Pleasantville.

And now the TV show American Horror Story: Asylum takes place in a placed called Briarcliff Manor. I used to leave in a real place called Briarcliff Manor (which is not far, it turns out, from the real Pleasantville).

This sort of thing happens a lot. My best friend when I was six years old was named Salvatore Romano. So when a character named Salvatore Romano showed up in Mad Men, I had a moment.

The rational part of my mind dismisses all this as coincidence. But there is another part of my mind, the wild romantic part inherited from my childhood self, which on some level believes The Purple Rose of Cairo and The Truman Show are documentaries. That part of me is paying close attention.

I’ve just been doing a little experiment: I’ve spent the last ten days not having anything alcoholic to drink. It’s not that I’m against people drinking (unless of course you are one of those people who cannot handle alcohol, in which case it is essentially poison). It’s more that I was curious what the effect would be on my mood, my sleep patterns, and my general feeling of well being.

A bit to my surprise, the result has been dramatic. I’ve been sleeping better, feeling more calm and relaxed, and generally in better spirits all through the day.

I was visiting friends this weekend where there was magnificent scotch to be had, and as part of my experiment I demurred. I love the taste of a good scotch, but my reasoning is that I can always indulge after my experiment has ended, and it’s not as though good scotch is vanishing from the planet any time soon.

But the real surprise was what happened when somebody offered me some perfectly good white wine. My immediate feeling upon seeing the wine was something in my gut pulling away. It was as though my body remembers the negative effects of drinking white wine, but not the positive ones.

I suspect that the next time I drink, whenever that is, the rush from all that alcohol metabolizing into blood sugar will reset some primordial switches, and I will again feel the familiar pull. But at least for now, my mind and body are having a lovely and quite enjoyable vacation.