Harsh Reality

I’m a big fan of Discovery’s AMERICAN CASINO reality show… and one of the major “characters’ is Michael Tata, the nasty, back-stabbing, scheming 33-year-old vp of hotel operations at Green Valley Ranch Casino. Today, Variety reports that Tata was found dead in his home. Now there’s a twist the producers never imagined.

Tata was often shown feuding with hotel manager Ninya Perna as they sought to maintain the hotel’s high standards for VIP guests. Production of the series is ongoing, and the sixth of the 13-episode run will air Friday. Discovery wasn’t sure if or how it would pay tribute to Tata in an upcoming episode.

If Tata was murdered, and if this was a scripted TV show, Perna would be the obvious suspect, but my vote goes to the mousy exec Tata humiliated in a meeting by calling him “a human toilet who lets everybody shit on him.”

The staff of the Green Valley Ranch has hardly come off well in this series….the casino execs would have to be insane to participate in a second season of this show on their property, especially after this. But the big question is, if the ratings spike, will other reality shows knock-off their most-hated “characters?”

Another Unfair Attack on Fanfic

jeriryanThe funny folks at Defamer got in a dig at fanfic in their coverage of the Jack Ryan sex scandal…

I have a hard-time believing Jeri Ryan is the "most favored masturbation target" in the Star Trek franchise. Are they forgetting about DeForest Kelley?

Actress Jeri Ryan, best known as Seven of Nine, the most favored masturbation target in the history of the Star Trek franchise, alleges in court papers (filed in 2000) that her ex-husband pressured her to go to sex clubs and perform sexual activities in front of other couples. Oh, and her ex-husband is Jack Ryan, the Republican senatorial candidate from Illinois. (We’ll leave it up to sister blog Wonkette to detail the undoubtedly hilarious political implications). We just hope that they managed to keep the sex hijinks in da club and away from the hotel rooms at the Trekkie conventions. It’s way too early in the morning for us to handle the image of a Republican, Jeri Ryan, a guy in a Klingon mask, and a midget dressed as a Tribble banging away in a Borgy at the Burbank Ramada Inn.

[Ed.note–We don’t want any Trekkies writing in to tell us they like to jerk off to someone more than Seven of Nine. Just redirect that energy into writing yourself a fan-fiction orgy scene with the object of your intergalactic spank-attacks. OK, another fan-fiction orgy scene.]

Fan Bigotry

Space1999_2My dust-ups with the “Save Karina” fans the last couple of days… and a recent invitation to speak on a panel at Comic-Con next month… reminded me of something that happened at a Worldcon many years ago.

At the time, I was a writer for STARLOG, and the editors hosted a panel called “Meet the Starlog Writers,” or something like that. Much to my surprise, quite a few people showed up… though many of them were dressed as Klingons or trying to squeeze into Federation uniforms that were two-sizes too small.

Anyway, there were a lot of inane questions… (“if they did a mirror-universe episode of LOST IN SPACE, what color do you think their uniforms would be?”). Finally, one guy stood up and complained about how inane and stupid the questions were… how could people be some obsessed with such drivel when there were far more interesting and provocative issues to explore.

My ears perked up. Maybe something interesting was finally going to happen…

The guy said “It’s time we confronted the issue of fan bigotry.”

Wow. Fan bigotry. It sounded important. It sounded provocative. Though I had no idea what he was talking about…

The guy went on, “We can’t turn our backs to it any more. We can’t pretend it doesn’t exists. We must deal with the hatred and unfairness shown by Star Trek fans towards Space: 1999 fans once and for all!”

I must admit I broke out laughing…

The poor guy turned bright red, quaking with rage… “This is a SERIOUS issue!”

Of course, that only made it worse.

I wasn’t subscribing to VARIETY at the time, but I bet he took out an ad….

Where Have All The Cool Heroes Gone?

avengersthiefThere’s nobody cool on television any more.

Not so long ago, the airwaves were cluttered with suave spies, slick private eyes, and debonair detectives. Television was an escapist medium, where you could forget your troubles and lose yourself in the exotic, sexy, exciting world inhabited by great looking, smooth-talking, extraordinarily self-confident crimesolvers.

You didn’t just watch them. You wanted to be them.

When I was a kid, I pretended I had a blow-torch in my shoe like James T. West. That I could pick a safe like Alexander Mundy, seduce a woman like Napoleon Solo, and run 60 miles an hour like Steve Austin. I wanted to have the style of Peter Gunn, the brawn of Joe Mannix, the charm of Simon Templar, and the wealth of Amos Burke, who arrived at crime scenes in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce.

But around the time coaxial cable and satelite dishes made TV antennaes obsolete, television began to change. Suddenly, it wasn’t cool to be cool. It was cool to be troubled. Deeply troubled.

TV cops, crimesolvers, and secret agents were suddenly riddled with anxiety, self-doubt, and dark secrets. Or, as TV execs like to say, they became “fully developed” characters with “lots of levels.”

You can trace the change to the late 80s and early 90s, to the rise of “NYPD Blue,” “Twin Peaks,” “Miami Vice,” “Wiseguy,” and “The X Files” and the fall of “Magnum PI,” “Moonlighting,” “Simon & Simon,” “MacGyver,” and “Remington Steele.”

None of the cops or detectives on television take any pleasure in their work any more. They are all recovering alcoholics or ex-addicts or social outcasts struggling with divorces, estranged children, or tragic losses too numerous to catalog and too awful to endure.

FBI Agent Fox Mulder’s sister was abducted by aliens, his partner has some kind of brain cancer, and he’s being crushed by a conspiracy he can never defeat.

CSI Gil Grissum is a social outcast who works knee-deep in gore and bugs while struggling with a degenerative hearing disorder that could leave him deaf.

Det. Lennie Briscoe of “Law and Order” is an alcoholic whose daughter was murdered by drug dealers.
Det. Olivia Benson of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” is a product of a rape who now investigates the worst forms of sexual depravity and violence.

“Alias” spy Sydney Bristow’s loving boyfriend and caring roommate were brutally murdered because of her espionage work, she’s estranged from her parents, one of whom just might be a murderous traitor.
I’ve lost track of how many of Andy Sipowitz’s wives, children and partners have died on horrible deaths on “NYPD Blue,” but there have been lots.

Master sleuth Adrian Monk solves murders while grappling with his obsessive-compulsive disorder and lingering grief over his wife’s unsolved murder. And Monk is a light-hearted comedy. When the funny detectives are this psychologically-troubled and emotionally-scarred, you can imagine how dark and haunted the serious detectives have to be not get laughs.

Today’s cops, detectives and crimesolvers work in a grim world full of sudden violence, betrayal, conspiracies and corruption. A world without banter, romance, style or fun…for either the characters or the viewer. Robert Goren, Bobby Donnell, Vic Mackey, Chief Jack Mannion… can you imagine any kids playing make-believe as one of those detective heroes? Who in their right mind would want to be those characters or live in their world?

And that, it seems, is what escapism on television is all about now: watching a TV show and realizing, with a sigh of relief, your life isn’t so bad after all.

I think I preferred losing myself in a Monte Carlo casino with Alexander Mundy or traveling in James T. West’s gadget-laden railroad car… it’s a lot more entertaining than feeling thankful I don’t have to be Det. Joel Stevens in “Boomtown” or live in the Baltimore depicted in “The Wire.”

At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon at my tender young age, I long for a return to escapist cop shows, to detectives you envied, who live in a world of great clothes, sleek cars, amazing apartments, beautiful women and clever quips. Detectives with lives that are blessedly free of angst and anxiety. Detectives who aren’t afraid to wear a tuxedo, sip fine champagne, confront danger with panache, and wear a watch that’s actually a missile-launcher. Detectives who are self-assured and enjoy solving crimes, who aren’t burdened with heartache and moral ambiquity.

Yeah, I know it’s not real. Yeah, I know it’s a fantasy. But isn’t that what television is supposed to be once in a while?

Congratulations, Naren!

Many years ago, when I was a supervising producer on Seaquest, we had a wildly enthusiastic story editor on staff who was justifiably frustrated by the scientifici silliness of our show. He was Naren Shankar, and I was thrilled to read in Variety of his recent success…

“CSI” scribe Naren Shankar has been upped to exec producer of the top-rated crime drama, inking a new seven-figure, multi-year deal in the process.
Shankar has been with “CSI” the past two seasons, most recently as co-exec producer. Deal with CBS, Alliance Atlantis and Jerry Bruckheimer Television is expected to keep the scribe with the show through May 2007.

“CSI” exec producer-showrunner Carol Mendelsohn — already at work on the fifth season of the Thursday-night blockbuster — said Shankar fits in well with “all of us on the show, who are preoccupied with death and murder. And he brought his own warped sensibility with him to the show.”Shankar also adds something else to “CSI” not usually associated with drama scribes — a Ph.D. from Cornell U. in applied physics. Scribe started out his showbiz career as a WGA intern and, later, a science consultant on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

So you can imagine what it was like for him writing on a show where the characters included a talking dolphin and a guy with gills. Still, he gave it his all… doing his best to make the show as good as it could be… against insurmountable obstacles (like, for instance, the concept of the show). Naren wrote arguably the best episode of the season, “Good Soldiers,” which revealed that goody-goody Capt. Bridger (Roy Scheider) was, in the past, the equivalent of a Nazi concentration camp guard who turned his back on horrific abuses.

It’s great to see nice guys… and friends of mine…doing so well!

Your Show Belongs to US, the Sequel

lwordLooks like some of the “Save Karina Lombard” organisers stumbled on my rant from a while back (“Your Show Belongs to US) and left some comments.

Who is Karina Lombard, you ask? Well, unless you’re watching THE L WORD (The L is for Listless), the lesbian soap on Showtime, you can’t be blamed for not knowing who she is. In fact, I doubt 95% of the people who do watch the show could tell you her name. Anyway, apparently her character isn’t coming back next season and it has a vocal minority of fans in a tizzy. On the Karina Lombard site, the welcome screen reads:

She has given us a priceless gift. The purity of her soul. We are drawn to her reality. Her spirit lives within us. We will not let her go.

Keep in mind, they’re talking about a TV CHARACTER. .. a sexually predatory bartender who seduces a guy’s fiance into the bliss of lesbian love…and, presumably, the purity of her soul. Or, worse, they’re talking about AN ACTRESS… who gives us the priceless gift of performing every scene as if she’s under heavy sedation.

Either way, it’s icky… and creepy.

Thank God Karina, or whoever she plays, can live on in the fanfic.

Hey, now there’s something to contemplate… listless lesbian soap fanfic. I wonder if anyone has started writing the QUEER AS FOLK/L WORD crossover fanfic yet…or, L WORD “slash fic”… where the characters have straight sex!

The Shooting Script

dm3fullTwo copies of THE SHOOTING SCRIPT, the third Diagnosis Murder book, were delivered by UPS today. I was thrilled to get them, of course… but the real shocker was seeing the “sneak preview” of the first two chapters of THE WAKING NIGHTMARE at the end of the book.

What was so shocking was I only turned the manuscript in last week. Then I remembered that a couple days after my accident (the one that left me with two broken arms), I had my wife email my editor the first two chapters of my incomplete book so they could publish the tease.

Even so, it was jarring to see portions of a book I’d finished writing only last week already in print.

You can see’em for yourself on Aug 3 when THE SHOOTING SCRIPT comes out in bookstores everywhere…

A MOMENT TO PREY

I’m supposed to be concentrating on writing my next MISSING script, which preps in a week. But I made the mistake of picking up Harry Whittington’s A MOMENT TO PREY and couldn’t stop reading it until I was through. Wow. What an amazing book.

I stumbled on Whittington and this classic noir tale thanks to a posting on Ed Gorman’s blog:

HARRY’S BEST
I had to get my car repaired so I grabbed A MOMENT TO PREY by Harry Whittington to take along. I’d nominate this as Harry’s best. I’d forgotten how good the monstrous villain is. This is Max Cady (Cape Fear) country, Cady played by Robert Mitchum, not Robert DeNiro (though I’m generally a huge DeNiro fan–he had a terrible script). This may be (and I mean this in a reasoned, thought-through way) the spookiest villain in crime fiction outside of Hannibal the Cannibal. He is a sexual psychopath unlike any I’ve ever encountered before. And the plot is sensational. There are three perfect twists in the storyline, each marking the curtain in the manner of a three-act play. Though it doesn’t offer the depth of John D. MacDonald in backstory, it does, I think, equal MacDonald is sheer storytelling power. And I’d certainly put it above any of the Travic McGees which, much as I like them, were never JDMs best work. Harry cranked them out, never had an agent who tried to move him up, and I don’t think had the faith in himself he deserved. This is a first-class book that merited hardcover publication and many, many, many paperback reprint editions. What you would call a minor masterpiece or cult classic.

He was right.

The Mail I Get…again

I got an email today imploring me to write a SEAQUEST novel….

You should write Seaquest books because they will be HUGELY SUCESSFUL and that will bring back the series for TV or as a movie. They brought back Thunderbirds, why not SeaQuest, only without Darwin, because a talking fish is stupid. If you need blueprints of the SeaQuest, I made some I can send you. I think they should make the Seaquest submarine for real, too. The books could help that happen. Wouldn’t that be GREAT!!!

After reading that, I think I’m gonna do it. Right after I finish writing my MANIMAL novel…