Kelly Writers House on TV (WHYY's "Creative Campus" show)

& my favorite character was Thing

The 1964 opening sequence for The Addams Family is, of course, available on YouTube. My favorite character, from the first episode on, was Thing. And I also immediately loved the Dali-influenced tsotchkes strewn around the set. Note, there, the odd tree-like things bordering this close-up of Thing's table.

a question for Milch

David Milch, Monday & Tuesday

I will be interviewing David Milch next Tuesday, starting precisely at 10:30 AM eastern time. We will be (as always) streaming the video live. Just go here (to our KWH-TV page) and click on the phrase "view live video." The night before--Monday evening at precisely 6:30 PM--Milch will be giving a talk and/or reading. Also streamed live, and the link for that video is the same as the other. Milch is the third of three Kelly Writers House Fellows this spring; the others were Joyce Carol Oates and Susan Howe.

Imperial Beach alienation

“You know that’s flapping your fins for an audience. That’s letting dipshits define you by a number so other dipshits can compare you with other numbers so the other dipshits know who to pay to wear their sunglasses so that dipshits in the malls know which ones to buy."--Mitch Yost, John from Cincinnati, episode 3

brown appetit

To get your daily Al daily, click here.

some other type success story

One of the longest soliloquies in the history of TV dramas:

You shut the fuck up, huh? Gimme that! Hey, you suck my dick and shut the fuck up, huh? Come here. Come on. Now then, here. The place where I found you, huh, is where this warrant’s from. Could you believe that I may have stuck a knife in someone’s guts 12 hours before you got on the wagon we headed out for fuckin’ Laramie in? No! Because I don’t look fuckin’ backwards. I do what I have to do and go on. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? You got a stagecoach to catch or somethin’, huh? Slow the fuck up. Did you know the orphanage part of the building you lived in, behind it, she ran a whorehouse, huh? Oh, so you knew? So, so what are you fuckin’ lookin’ at then, huh? God. Now, I’ll tell you somethin’ you don’t know. Before she ran a girls orphanage, fat Mrs. Fucking Anderson ran the boys orphanage on fucking Euclid avenue, as I would see her fat ass waddling out the boys dormitory at 5 o’clock in the fucking mornin’, every fuckin’ morning she blew her stupid fuckin’ cowbell and woke us all the fuck up. And my fuckin’ mother dropped me the fuck off there with 7 dollars and 60 some odd fuckin’ cents on her way to suckin’ cock in…in Georgia. And I didn’t get to count the fuckin’ cents before the fuckin’ door opened, and there, Mrs. Fat Ass Fuckin’ Anderson, who sold you to me. I had to give her 7 dollars and 60 odd fuckin’ cents that my mother shoved in my fuckin’ hand before she hammered 1,2,3,4 times on the fuckin’ door and scurried off down fuckin’ Euclid Avenue, probably 30 fuckin’ years before you were fuckin’ born. Then around Cape Horn and up to San Francisco, where she probably became Mayor or some other type success story, unless by some fucking chance she wound up as a ditch for fuckin’ cum. Now, fucking go faster, hmm?

Al Swearengen, Deadwood, season 1, episode 11, "Jewel's Boot is Made for Walking" (the very end of the episode).

being frank, seeing Frank

Yes, I'm obsessed with Hill Street Blues. I apologize. My favorite single image from the show comes from the very end of episode 1 of season 3 ("Trial By Fury"--which won an Emmy for the writing). Frank Furillo, having manipulated the justice system to get the guys guilty of the rape and murder of a nun, realizes (we're meant to think: ironically) that he's committed a sin. Got the criminals but gave into mob justice--listened to the advice of his reactionary SWAT-team adjutant (Howard Hunter) and really angered his liberal-left Public Defender lover (Joyce Davenport). Now he's pulling his car into a parking spot in front of the Catholic Church, the place where Sister Carmella had been raped and killed. He'll go into the confessional, we now realize. But in the moment before we realize that, we get this perspective of him, unlike any visual rendering of a major TV series character I'd seen up to that point (1982). We can barely see him through the urban dark and the bars of the church gate and the statue of Mary standing guard.

TV drama-show form/content jibe

Still in an online discussion with a few dozen adults, talking about season 3 of Hill Street Blues, 1983. We just watched episode 14, "Moon over Uranus," one of my favorites. (Watch it here.) Peter Wolk, the attorney and screenwriter, is in the group, and here is something he wrote us last night:

A couple random thoughts. It's amazing how much is going on in each episode. A typical hour-long drama today has an A story, a B story, and maybe a C story that's more comedic. [David] Milch is giving us A through G stories. One advantage he has is that the show runs 49+ minutes. An episode of Monk in 2009 is 42+ minutes.

My response is not profound by any stretch, but gave me a chance to express my admiration for an experiment in television-show narrative (a tight set of rules there, to be sure!) that today seems easy but in '83 was hard to get past the network ratings worry-warts:

You are right that Milch gives us stories A through G. And maybe H. One of us should count them all up. Someone years ago tracked them all across a season, charting which were maintained across episodes and for how long, which died out in a single episode, etc.

I believe it was in the very first show of the series, ep. 1 season 1, that two characters whom we immediately knew would be mainstays, Hill and Renko, were shot and presumably killed about halfway through the episode.** This was much commented-upon at the time. What a disruption of TV conventions! Introduce two characters and then kill them off, and not even at the end of the individual episode, let alone the end of a season! Threw us all way off, and we knew right then that we had to pay attention to our expectations and be prepared for them to be violated.

The formal/structural violations of course mirror the crazy frenetic anything-can-happen early 80s urban reality being depicted. For me, as a longtime TV watcher whose favorite subgenre was the one-hour 9 PM or 10 PM drama series, this was the first time I truly experienced that form/content jibe.

Helter-skelter reality --> handheld camera, ensemble cast, crazy audio techniques, random elimination of characters, many plots going at once.

** Episode was entitled "Hill Street Station" and aired 1/15/81. Official plot summary is: "A hostage situation arises in Captain Furillo's precinct. Public defender Joyce Davenport is looking for her client, lost due to bureaucratic mismanagement. Officers Hill and Renko are shot in the line of duty." The episode was awarded an Edgar for Best Teleplay from a Series.

baroque cop

I've been watching episodes of season 3 of Hill Street Blues on Hulu, and discussing them with an adult "class" of a dozen or so people far flung (all by email). Here are some thoughts about the speech style of Lt. Howard Hunter and Sgt. Phil Esterhaus:

David Milch inherited the hyperbolic and circumlocutious speech of Esterhaus and Hunter, but he added the baroque grammar, upped the ironic euphemisms several notches, and made especially Esterhaus unforgetttably different from your usual TV cop.

About Hunter: I never warmed to that character at all. I enjoyed episodes in which Hunter's law-'n-order ideology directly conflicted with Henry Goldbloom's the-less-fortunate-are-not-to-blame liberalism, because at such moments other characters (including Furillo) had to take sides, and not predictably. But when Hunter's conservatism was ridiculed and left dangling as a non-starter (as in "Trial by Fury"--in the bathroom scene) I have the feeling that dialogue is being wasted for mere satire.

Milch's complex cops

Thanks to Allison Harris, I now have put together a list and quick summary of episodes of NYPD Blue written by David Milch -- those for which, at least, he officially received credit. (There's little doubt, early in the show's run, that he had a big hand in all episodes.)

trial by fury

I'm hosting David Milch at the Writers House next spring. I've long been a fan of this quirky genius. To prepare, I'm reading and watching. First up: Hill Street Blues. Milch, it's said, rescued the show from its tendency toward silliness. "Trial by Fury," the first episode of season 3, was all his - and it won an Emmy. I think this was Milch's very first crack at a teleplay. Amazing.

I've tracked every show Milch wrote (is credited for writing) - many in seasons 3 and 4, and two near the end. For the very latest episode, May 12, 1987, in season 7, they brought Milch back. The result is "It Ain't Over Till It's Over," of course.

Here's a PDF giving you of all the Milch-written Hill Street Blues. Some full episodes are available on Hulu. Only seasons 1 and 2 are available, so far, on DVD. Season 3 is available in a new-ish service provided by Amazon; you pay $1.99 to watch each episode on demand.

- - -

Later: Patrick Dillon points out to me that Hulu offers all season 3 episodes for free: here.

HBO dialogue c. 2004

Wild Bill Hickok: You know the sound of thunder, Mrs. Garret?

Alma Garret: Of course.

Wild Bill Hickok: Can you imagine that sound if I asked you to?

Alma Garret: Yes, I can, Mr. Hickok.

Wild Bill Hickok: Your husband and me had this talk, and I told him to head home to avoid a dark result. But I didn't say it in thunder. Ma'am, listen to the thunder.

local TV news covers....advising

Oh it seems to be Archiving Old Media week here. Well, we found another item. This was a local TV news spot on the all-online pre-matriculant advising I was doing in the 90s. Innovative in those days. Not innovative now, but--amazingly--rarely practiced. Huh? Yes, students are admitted to colleges and universities beginning in mid-December but the faculty who will work closely with them don't really interact with them in any meaningful way until September. I can understand why people balk as such an "extra assignment" when the students are random admits, all across the board of interests, passions and talents. But the kids I advise are those who are writers and who are going to be, or in a sense are already, a part of the Writers House community. Start with them early, watch them flourish all the more when they set physical foot on the property. In '99 the local news "discovered" this "story" and did one of their personal-interest angles on it. But you get the gist. Click here and watch the video.

TV past its prime

Lately I'm thinking... about how bad the Emmy's are on television. I know I shouldn't be surprised but I was last night astonished - shocked, even - by the extent of the self-congratulation. These people actually believe that television is currently our most effective medium. (One TV exec said this explicitly in a speech - TV is "the most important medium for bringing people together," he announced - that was perhaps the most uninteresting thing I've ever seen on the tube, and that's saying something.) Gee, in this view the television people are at least five or six years out of date in their thinking. Yet haven't these been the medium-changing years? Their ignorance is their only willful quality.

Tim Carmody adds: "It was also bizarre to watch the Academy on the one hand honor Tommy Smothers for political insouciance and to watch everyone, EVERYONE, not just presenters, skirt anything resembling a direct political comment. We had bizarre claims about how The West Wing "was a nonpartisan exploration of politics," purely formal invocations to vote or speak truth to power, joking denunications of ugliness in political advertising, and oblique references to John Adams as a time when politicians could express complex ideas in full sentences. It was as though if anyone spoke the words Obama or McCain or Bush, the TV shock troops would have descended on the stage and the screen would go black."

the roller of big cigars has brain cancer

Two days ago (May 20) Chris Matthews on his nightly TV show Hardball likened Ted Kennedy to the "man in the poem" - the poem being Wallace Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice Cream." Click here and listen to a brief excerpt of the show. For Chris, the poem is about the life-force, the one guy who's completely alive in the atmosphere of death. Maybe he's put his finger on the poem's essential antic quality. Well, maybe not. But it's certainly an illuminating way to think about this particular Kennedy. Death all around, so there's got to be someone whom we can call who will constantly remind us of life's ongoing fecundity, the wenches dawdling in their usual dresses; the boys, oogling; the creamy messes prepared in the kitchen; as many drinking joking jaunts in one's boat in the bay as one has time left for.

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Cage scores game show

John Cage as a guest on a TV game show. For more, click here.

what do Newton Minow & T.S. Eliot have in common?

This is really a quiz question. What indeed do Newton Minow (JFK's then-young FCC chairman) and T. S. Eliot have in common? You really should know the answer to this. Here's a hint: if you click here you will go to my 1960 blog, where I've written something about the state of television in that year. A few months after the year ended, Minow made a speech in which a single phrase will always be remembered.