Television
Friday, January 13, 2012
Last exit to Llanview: Michael Malone looks back at his work on "One Life to Live," which ends today
Nor was it the stroke, the brain aneurysm, the killer virus, the breast cancer or the traumatic repressed memories that had resulted in her developing seven personalities and forgetting about giving birth to not one but two daughters (one of whom developed a split personality of her own before dying of lupus). No, for all her resilience, what finally killed Viki and her fellow residents of the fictional Llanview, Penn., was a diet show.
Llanview, setting of the 43-year-old ABC soap opera One Life to Live is just the latest fictional small town to disappear from TV screens in the last few years, in a wave of cancellations that have also seen Guiding Light, As the World Turns, Passions and All My Children leave the air.
“In a way, it was inevitable — not just to One Life, but to a genre that had a very good long run,” says Duke University English professor Michael Malone, who served as One Life’s head writer from 1991-1996 and 2003-2004.
“I’ll always say the fiction of Llanview lasted longer than Shakespeare’s Globe. These were very long-lived shows—30 years, 40 years, Guiding Light was 70 years. That’s a lot of stability in a very fast-moving medium like television. And it taught other parts of television how to make serials.”
Malone, a Durham native who resides in Hillsborough, says it’ll be “too painful” for him to watch on Friday, Jan. 13 when Viki and the others say goodbye, with a few cliffhangers and Viki taking yet a third round-trip to heaven before giving way to the new self-improvement talk show The Revolution with Ty Pennington and Tim Gunn. But he remembers his time in Llanview fondly, and maintains a deep and abiding respect for daytime soap operas, a genre of TV that seems on the verge of extinction.
Malone cites declining audiences for network programming for the soaps’ demise, along with the fact that “there became so many other ways to see this stuff,” citing shows such as Gray’s Anatomy and Six Feet Under as examples of programming that co-opted the soaps’ style of open-ended long-form serialized storytelling.
“It’s not that (audiences) don’t want story, it’s just that they have so many more ways to get it,” Malone says.
His tenure in Llanview was one of the show’s most influential periods, with many of the characters he created still playing major roles on the canvass as One Life to Live reaches its end. It was also one of the most unlikely pairings in television—a Southern literary novelist with no television-writing experience and a soap that by the time he arrived, had eschewed its roots as a spotlight for social issues in exchange for stories about time travel, lost underground cities and the aforementioned trips to heaven (in fairness, a storyline about a soap-within-a-soap had shot some exterior scenes on Duke University’s campus).
1993: Malone won an Emmy for this episode, which guest-starred Marsha Mason as a priestess who marries reformed bad boy Max and “North Carolina goddess-worshipping feminist” Luna.
Dirty Dancing producer Linda Gottlieb, who’d been brought on the save the program, recruited Malone as headwriter based on his experience as “someone who wrote capacious novels” such as Time’s Witness and Handling Sin.
“In a way, our complete ignorance of (daytime’s) traditions gave us complete freedom to do adventuresome things,” Malone says.
Those “adventuresome things” included tackling issues that even prime-time TV was shying away from in the 1990s. One of Malone’s first major storylines cast a 17-year-old Ryan Phillippe as a gay teenager struggling to come out; the story climaxed with the AIDS quilt being brought to Llanview, with the names of actual AIDS victims read on a location shoot.
For Malone, the story represented an opportunity to allow viewers to relate to the issue through characters they had come to know through years of viewing.
“To have Viki carry the AIDS quilt into the church and lay it on the altar was to say to the audience of One Life who had spent so many years with Viki and trusted her judgment that ‘It can’t be all bad to be accepting and understanding,’” Malone says. “For all its conservatism, daytime expands tolerance.
It also allowed him a broader audience than his literary work.
“There was no way ever on God’s green earth that five million people a week would be reading my novels, but they might see Viki carrying that AIDS quilt to that altar.”
1992: A CBS This Morning segment and the final scenes from Malone’s gay teen/AIDS storyline.
Malone’s greatest acclaim came the following year with a large story where town bad girl Marty Saybrooke (named for his daughter Margaret), was brutally gang-raped and brought her attackers to trial. The story won Emmys for many of the actors involved (and Malone himself received an Emmy for his work on the show that year), but ran into trouble when Roger Howarth, who played lead rapist Todd Manning, became so popular that the character had to be kept on the show.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
A tribute to the lovable awfulness of "One Tree Hill," which begins its ninth and final season tonight
On Jan. 11, the CW drama—and that term is used loosely—One Tree Hill will begin its ninth and final season, bringing to an end nearly 200 episodes of teen melodrama that included brazen guest stars (Kevin Federline!), shameless product placement (watch Tree Hill High’s cheerleaders pose for Maxim!) and plot twists seemingly borne out of a combination of desperation and illegal narcotics (villainous Dan loses out on a heart transplant because a dog eats his donor heart!).
Please take a moment to think of all the decisions required for this scene to take place, including finding a heart and training a dog to grab it on cue. Or just the impulse to write this, pitch it to a network, have sets built and make actors play it out with a straight face.
Other shows and films produced in North Carolina have made more of an impact on the cultural zeitgeist, notably One Tree Hill’s predecessor in teen angst, Dawson’s Creek, which also filmed in Wilmington (One Tree Hill premiered the fall after Dawson's Creek wrapped).
But for all its insanity, One Tree Hill remains one of the most important productions in the history of North Carolina for one simple reason: It lasted. Even as production for film and TV moved out of state—or out of country, more often—One Tree Hill's patented combination of vacillating romance, 20-somethings playing shirtless teenagers and wall-to-wall emo rock that provided episode titles and a slew of bestselling soundtrack albums kept it on the air for nearly a decade, coming in second only to the original Beverly Hills, 90210 as the longest-running American teen drama.
Its success was improbable—originally a feature film, it was reconceived as a TV series and saw its production abruptly move to Wilmington after the then-head of The WB was concerned for the area after Dawson’s Creek wrapped production there. (I dimly remember reading at the time he was moved to tears after receiving the key to the city.)
It then got bumped at the last minute from a mid-season replacement to the fall lineup when The WB decided to preemptively dump the series Fearless before its premiere. It launched with no hype, negative reviews and was initially beaten in the ratings by a short-lived UPN sitcom called The Mullets.
And then it somehow ran nine years.
The smaller viewership expectations of The WB and later The CW no doubt helped, but One Tree Hill's longevity can be attributed to certain ruthlessness in targeting its audience. Its attitude can best be summed up in the Gavin DeGraw lyrics that made up the theme song for its early seasons: “I don’t want to be anything other than what I’ve been trying to be lately.”
That strange mixture of earnestness, defiance and articulate-yet-inarticulate grammar defined One Tree Hill, allowing it to survive a changed network, the loss of its original stars and a time-jump that conveniently skipped over the characters' college years. The world of One Tree Hill served as an interior landscape for the teen psyche worthy of Charlize Theron’s deluded author in Young Adult.
Teenagers got married—and stayed married. Or they launched hugely successful clothing lines straight out of high school. Bands like Fall Out Boy would just happen to show up in the fictional hamlet of Tree Hill, N.C., and stick around for a while. Interlopers would turn out to be full-blown psychos who had to be blown away in a cornfield. Parents weren’t just disapproving—they would actually commit arson, manipulate politics and in one case, kill one another. We’re still trying to figure out that bit with the dog and the heart.
Behind the scenes, One Tree Hill was…well, nothing could be as insane as its storylines, but it came close. Star Chad Michael Murray married co-star Sophia Bush, was divorced by her on grounds of “fraud” and became engaged to a Wilmington extra who was still in high school when they met.
Recurring player Antwon Tanner pleaded guilty in a federal court with plans to sell Social Security numbers.
And Paul Johansson, who played Dan, used his time away from the show to direct the critically derided film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Interview: The areas of John Hodgman's expertise; tonight at Durham Armory
- Photo by Bradley Gutierrez
Now, Hodgman has completed his continuously paginated saga of false knowledge with That is All (Dutton, $25), a massive compilation of made-up facts and stories centered around the coming global superpocalypse, Ragnarok, in 2012.
Hodgman will appear at the Durham Armory at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday to read from and sign copies of That is All. We were able to get up with him on the road to ask him questions about the reading, his thoughts on Occupy Raleigh and the extremely unsettling mustache he's been sporting for That is All.
Independent: So, the description for the Durham event is a "reading and riffing." That scares the hell out of me. What will this be? Improvising? Do you have a talk or anything?
John Hodgman: Well, usually with book tours, I start by reading passages from the book I think the live audience will enjoy. Gradually, as the experience gets tattooed onto my brain, the book tends to fall aside, and I think by the time I'm in Durham, I will be speaking more or less extemporaneously from the book.
I might talk about sports, and the difference between American football and European football, including the fact that one actually uses a ball, while the other uses something that could only be called a ball by a mentally ill person. I'll also probably touch on how magic tricks are performed, and a reality television show I think is going to be very successful that I have devised, and certainly the coming global superpocalypse, which I refer to as Ragnarok.
Of all the things to latch onto from what you just said, I have to say your reality show is going to have a hard time topping Hillbilly Handfishin', which is sort of a sign of Ragnarok in and of itself.
Are you referring to the ancient art of noodling, or catching a catfish with one's bare hands? That's the ancient battle of man against disgusting mud creature. It taps into that.
Just last night, you did "Money Talks" on The Daily Show, riffing on the Occupy Wall Street movement. You might be interested to know that just 20 miles or so from Durham, there's an Occupy Raleigh movement going on near the State Capitol. Any plans to drop by?
Is this specific to North Carolinian (pronounced "North Caro-LEAN-ian") issues?
There's some overlap with local issues and the broader movement.
I don't know that I'll have time to visit the Occupy movement there in Raleigh. I don't want to make fun of people when I don't know what they look like. That's the thing with the whole Occupy movement—it truly is leaderless and grassroots in every possible way, so even I hesitate to call those people "dirty hippies" as a joke, because there are a lot of people down there who are extremely eccentric, and many who are extremely thoughtful.
There would be a lot of people down there I would agree with tremendously—in or out of character as the "Deranged Millionaire." There's a lot of people I feel are not going to be productive trying to solve our problems with a drum circle.
Speaking generally, I think when it is not violent, which I do not think is productive even as an expression of frustration, it is a perfectly reasonable thing to be happening, and it tests our ability to tolerate ambiguity that we cannot put a particular ideology on it. It's a good challenge for our media and our country to appreciate, that we are not living in a world where politics are right vs. left, like two opposing sports teams.
But I do hope that they are able to take showers before I come to town, because that's just something that I'm not willing to tolerate.
Speaking of the "Deranged Millionaire," of all the things you discuss in your book, the thing that has burned itself most into my brain is the mustache.
Right. I think you put it well. More than anything else, it is an issue. It is troubling to people; it is a subject of debate; it is controversial.
Will you be bringing this mustache to your reading, and what does it say about the mindset of myself and others that the mustache is the first thing that leaps out at people?
Well, I will be bringing the mustache, because it has attached itself to my face. So I have no choice about that. I can reassure the people of Durham that it will not be jumping out at people. It seems to have established a very stable parasitic relationship with my upper lip, and it seems to not be wanting to change hosts. So people should not fear my mustache, or worry that it's going to take over their own upper lips.
So it's a mustache détente, where it's peacefully occupying your face?
In many ways, you're right. The mustache has a lot of similarities to what's going on on Wall Street; it's almost like an outgrowth of the Occupy movement. It is clearly a disruptive presence. It has something to say, and yet precisely what statement it is making is multitudinous and unfathomable.
And I don't quite know what to do about it. I grew it on a whim earlier this year, where it was something that I liked, and yet it is something that causes a lot of discussion. I think that people are unnerved by an otherwise pale and baby-faced human baby walking around with a mustache, and because of its unnatural lustrous dark color. It is jet black with streaks of gray, compared to my otherwise mousy brown, limp hair, and people presume it is fake.
I think people are concerned I'm turning into some kind of creature. You remember the 1980s movie The Fly, when Jeff Goldblum was transforming into the giant fly? His transformation manifested itself in many ways, including large dense coarse hairs growing out of his body. And that is effectively what has happened to me, though what I am becoming remains to be seen.
"Perhaps I was a mustache that dreamed it was a man, and now the dream is over and the mustache is awake."
Exactly.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
[UPDATE 9/30/2011: Video of the full lecture is now embedded at the end of the story.]
David Simon warned Monday night that America’s “great engine is beginning to rust,” the middle class is being destroyed, the poor are cast aside and the sale of the political system to the highest bidder along with wars on drugs and the Middle East spell the end of the country’s ability to lead and prosper.
“We basically said, ‘As much of our political system as you’d like to buy, feel free,’” Simon said. “Nothing buys stupidity like money in this country. … That means our political process is stupid, and our TV is stupid.”
No one is going to confuse Simon, the screenwriter and director for The Wire, Treme and Homicide: Life on the Street, for an optimist.
“Every time I try to reach a level of cynicism that goes too far, I find out I’ve been outmaneuvered,” he said.
Friday, August 5, 2011
[UPDATED MONDAY, AUG. 8 WITH VIDEO AT BOTTOM OF POST.]
North Carolina-based actress Melissa Lozoff runs filmmaking classes and workshops for kids at Movie-Makers, a project she founded in 2001. Fans of reality TV can get a glimpse of her teaching process on Monday, Aug. 8, at 9:30 p.m. on the TLC channel.
"I basically make films with kids," Lozoff says. In fact, she's in the middle of giving classes and summer camp with kids right now at her property in Orange County. She also just got finished with some acting work on One Tree Hill in Wilmington.
"The kids help come up with the ideas for the script," Lozoff describes Movie-Makers. "They basically learn the aspects of filmmaking, and then they get to star in their own movie."
Those classes and summer camps always take place on her Orange County property, with one recent exception—the movie project she did with the Gosselin kids at the family's Pennsylvania compound for this Monday's second episode of TLC's Kate Plus 8. (The first episode airs at 9.)
Lozoff's brief involvement in the reality TV show came about because of a longstanding North Carolina connection to the show. The original incarnation of the series, Jon & Kate Plus 8, was created by Advanced Medical Production (later known as Figure 8 Films) in 2007, back when Jon and Kate were still a couple whose experiment with fertility treatments yielded twins, then sextuplets. (That version of the show ended when Jon's infidelities nixed the marriage.)
Lozoff taught filmmaking to the daughter of one of the producers at Figure 8, Kirk Streb, a few years ago, and he fondly remembered the experience when the Figure 8 staff were brainstorming ideas for upcoming episodes.
He also knew that one of the 10-year-old Gosselin twins, Mady, really likes putting on little plays. So Figure 8 flew Lozoff to Pennsylvania in March to make a "cute little movie with the Gosselin kids."
- Courtesy of Melissa Lozoff
- Lozoff and her charges at work on the Kate Plus 8 set
"They're comfortable in front of the camera, but all of that acting and blocking—that was brand new," Lozoff says, adding that, otherwise: "They're basically like all the other kids that I've worked with."
Lozoff went back to Pennsylvania in late May/ early June for the "premiere" of the film in the family's basement. That was the first time that the mom saw the mini-movie, according to Lozoff.
"Kate wasn't really around while we were making the movie, because they wanted it to be a surprise for her," she says. "We rented a red carpet and sort of decorated their basement and did their little premiere."
That's typical of Lozoff's process with her Movie-Makers camp kids. After the films are made, she'll spend a few weeks editing and then will rent out a venue to show her kids the finished products. Most recently, she rented out The Varsity on Franklin Street.
She also has "an advanced group" that makes more professional-caliber films to submit to film festivals.
Another particular she's not allowed to talk about much is Kate Gosselin, the fiery star of the show (which, interestingly, is not on the fall schedule recently announced by TLC).
"She was always very gracious with me," Lozoff says, and leaves it at that.
Melissa Lozoff has appeared in numerous films, TV shows including The Young and The Restless and Days of Our Lives, and theater productions with the Common Ground and Ghost & Spice companies. In 2010, she won for Best Actress at the Carrboro Film Festival for her work in Nic Beery's Twelve. To find out more about Movie-Makers, go to www.movie-makers.net.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Illness, privacy and reality TV: The Independent interview
with Now You See Me playwright Neal Bell
It’s her television—even though, a certain David Byrne lyric notwithstanding, they are not good friends.
Bell’s dark comedy, whose world premiere opens Wednesday at Manbites Dog Theater, is a sharp-eyed critique from an industry insider of a medium that has proven, in its own way, to be every bit as metastatic in our culture as the carcinomas are in Claire’s body.
Now You See Me asks to what lengths will a television network go in order to insure what it might call the “human continuity” in its latest smash reality TV series—a show focusing on people who are gravely, if not terminally, ill? Why would anyone watch the show in the first place? And under such circumstances, if a producer offered you a promising new cancer-fighting drug—and a shot at stardom—why might you really not want to sign that contract?
We spoke with Bell for an hour by phone last weekend.
INDEPENDENT: That oddly prescient ’80s TV news network drama Max Headroom was supposedly set “15 minutes into the future.” The world in Now You See Me has a similar sense to it. It’s not tangential to our time, but a logical extension of it.
NEAL BELL: I hope so. While I was writing it, I actually thought that maybe this premise—a reality show about dying people—was so far out there that it went beyond parody into ridiculousness.
But while I was writing it, a British reality TV star named Jade Goody, who’d been a big hit on several different Big Brothers because she was so apparently abrasive and obnoxious, finally ended up on one in India, where she was diagnosed—on camera—as having terminal cancer.
She quit the show, went back to England and basically sold the rights to her death to a television company, which filmed as much as they could of her final month or two. She got married—though she was barely able to walk down the aisle—to the father of her two children. It was a huge media event in England.
And I thought, well, (laughs) I guess I didn’t make it up. It’s actually happening.
As Lily Tomlin said, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s impossible to keep up.”
I think that’s true. It goes beyond the “stranger than fiction” thing. I think cynicism is exactly the right word. You just cannot calculate the bottomless desire or appetite for the most invasive glimpses into people’s lives.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
- TBS/ Team Coco
1. The bearded O’Brien looks happier than ever. I always thought he looked uncomfortable on The Tonight Show, so frankly, I stopped watching. (Maybe he shared my foreboding about that whole thing.) And it’s nice to have Andy Richter out from behind that announcer’s podium and back on the couch, where he belongs.
2. The set looks scary huge. The big-screen effects behind his desk are amusing; it was fun to see Tom Hanks getting drenched by a whale “breaching” in the “ocean” (starting at minute 7:30 below) on Night 2. Conan’s close proximity to his adoring audience raises the excitement level, too, and I hope he embraces the opportunities there.
3. His pal Jon Stewart must have winced a bit the next day. Stewart nudged past Leno and Letterman in the October ratings thanks to the big momentum he’s been rolling on since he announced that D.C. rally. And then—BAM!—along comes Conan, and he clobbers them all.
4. Jay, and maybe even Dave, just became several degrees less relevant. I say “less relevant” because I reluctantly include the still very funny Letterman in that assessment. Forget Leno: He’s ir-relevant. Ah, sweet revenge.
5. It’s not the best late-night talk show. Jimmy Fallon’s 12:35 a.m. show on NBC has the best musical guests, the funniest skits, the best celebrity impressions and the most creative ideas for integrating the audience and guests into the fun (beer pong with Betty White, anyone?). That’s cool; Conan has his work cut out for him, and now that he’s no longer trying to court Leno’s lame audience, the long, lanky clown enjoys some much-needed leg room.
Friday, December 11, 2009
In the "oh, no, not again" category of pop culture news, Kate Gosselin of "Jon & Kate Plus 8" fame was spotted by WRAL "working" for a day in a Raleigh eatery this week, probably for some new reality show.
The hush-hush location shoot is not the only North Carolina showbiz connection for the octo-mom with the Flock of Seagulls hairdo. Her recently-canceled reality series on TLC was shot for three years by Figure 8 Films in Carrboro, which created the series. (Figure 8 did not respond to repeated requests by The Independent Weekly for an interview this year, when revelations of dad Jon Gosselin's infidelity derailed the marriage, and, soon after, the series.)
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Personal chef and singer/bassist extraordinaire Shirle’ Hale Koslowski is no stranger to television – she did a cooking segment on News 14 for a while until she was replaced by some dorky guy. But this latest development is just surreal.
Koslowski, who plays in the Durham band Free Electric State with her husband David, will appear Monday, Oct. 26 on the “Rachael Ray” show, which airs in the Triangle at 10 a.m. on WTVD.
A wine rack that Shirle’ made out of coffee cans will be featured in Ray’s regular "Double Duty Tips" segment. It turns out that a production assistant on Ray’s show spotted it on Shirle’s “Rockin’ the Stove” blog.
“I got this email, like, two months ago, in the morning,” Koslowski says. “I thought it was spam. I’m sitting here in my office, laughing, and going, ‘Hey David, check out this piece of spam I just got from The Rachael Ray Show.’” David thought it was “junk,” too, but when Shirle’ examined the return address, she saw that it was from Oprah Winfrey’s company. So she wrote back, and the segment producer called her within minutes.
A script was emailed to Shirle’, and David shot the footage that outlined the steps for making the wine rack. The producers will edit it down to a one-minute segment that will likely include David as well, enjoying a glass of wine with his wife.
Shirle’ is still just surprised by the whole thing.
“I had no idea that anyone subscribed to my blog, other than friends and family.”
By the way: Free Electric State plays tonight at Tir Na Nog in Raleigh with The Poles and Gross Ghost. And Shirle’ is hosting a vegan brunch at Durham’s The Pinhook on Nov. 8 from 12-2 p.m.
Friday, October 16, 2009
If you've been watching cable news lately -- you poor soul -- you may be aware that four Republican lawmakers are promoting a new right-wing-media-inspired witch hunt.
No, we're not talking about ACORN-bashing or "czar" paranoia here. Them's old news, partner. But did ... did ...did you know that Muslim spies are infiltrating Congress?!
So says loon fringer David Gaubatz, co-author of Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America, published by World Net Daily Books. (World Net Daily, for those of you lucky enough not to know, is a "conservative " Web site that has been pushing the "birther" meme about Obama.)
And so says Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC), one of the aforementioned lawmakers, and ...hmmm... author of the foreword to Gaubatz's book. Here she is on Fox News this week, explaining her position on all those dangerous Muslim interns in Congress.
Thursday night on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, which, by the way, was pure fire from start to finish, Maddow broke the whole thing down for the sane among our populace.
Politico has more on the "controversy" here.
Sorry about that! Here it is: http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/may-16-cr…
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wow interesting reading...I was particularly moved by the section discussing the "scalpeling away of our gender" by people.......Hahaha I really …
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