"Look at it this way, Dawson ..."

TV This blog's so old, I was reviewing episodes of Dawson's Creek during the original broadcast. For old time's sake, here's James Van Der Beek being brutally honest to a Guardian interviewer about the aftermath, especially how he can't quite seem to find visual safe harbour:

"In the 14 years since Dawson’s Creek ended, Van der Beek has taken all sorts of roles in mainly short-lived sitcoms, including Friends With Better Lives, made by the people behind Friends and Frazier. When that was pulled after eight episodes he took a role in police procedural CSI: Cyber but it was “a desert for me, creatively. There’s a lot of standing around and laying expositional pipe.”"

Dawson was actually probably something of a hero if I'm being honest; certainly his love of films somewhat represented my own attitude and was one of the reasons it became my primary hobby - for better or worse.

Poor Jen.

The most pleasant run-ins can happen in the most unexpected places... @VancityJax pic.twitter.com/IU1tDKumvH
— James Van Der Beek (@vanderjames) November 16, 2014

The Films I've Watched This Year #17

Books Yes, well, no, I didn't, not really. This week's been a hermitage week and so to make things extra specially different to usual, I decided to read some books instead of watching films across themed days. Monday was music, Tuesday was theatre, Wednesday was television, Thursday some film and Friday has been what it has been.  As well as the Arden edition of A Jovial Crew which I reviewed the other day, the other items were Hanif Kureshi's diary about the making of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid from some Granta edition, the RSC's King Lear for kids and the documentary and performance content from The Shakespearean London Theatres (SHALT) project's YouTube channel which I know all stretches the definition of what a book is but I needed a break after bashing my way through an actor's autobiography.  You'll see which.  Back to normal, back to work, after today, though frankly it's going to be difficult.  The whole thing has been blissful.  Though I probably do still need to take a week away.  I haven't had a holiday since 2009.



There's something quite discombobulating about reading a nostalgia piece which is just slightly outside of your field of reference especially when it's from someone who would then go on to be squarely within that nostalgic margin. The first half of Louise Wener's memoir Different For Girls covers her teenage years, which weren't spectacularly different to most people, recording the top 40 from Radio One with a finger poised on the pause button to cut out the DJ, having to choose between moonboots or a Human League album due to budgetary considerations (I did much the same with computer games and Kylie Minogue) and attending a David Bowie concert. Except for most of us these are steps towards become workers in the customer service industry. For Wener, they were the research and inspiration for becoming a pop star and ultimately led to her becoming the lead singer of Sleeper.

Which leads to a second half which is the very definition of "a think piece about a mid-level band struggling with their own limitations in the harsh face of stardom" and entirely aware of it (one of the chapters is even called "Almost Famous").  After noodling around in venues for a while, Sleeper are eventually signed to a record company for a horrendous "slave" deal and then find themselves on the crest of the wave they called Brit Pop trying desperately to break an America that doesn't understand them and touring Europe as interrelations within the band fall apart due to Wener breaking up with the guitarist then becoming involved with the drummer.  How much of this is news to fans of music from the period I'm not sure, but as with Sheryl Garrett's Adventures in Wonderland, it's a useful way for me to fill in a gap in my own history, of a period in cultural history I entirely missed because I was still listening to Debbie Gibson tunes and shit.

Wener's trick, and what sets it apart from what you might expect from a rock biography is that she writes about the whole thing in the same way, approaching Saturday jobs and presenting Top of the Pops with the same brutal honesty.  All the while she's entirely cognicent of her and the band's own limitations and that for all their hard work, they'll never quite reach the heights of Oasis or Blur but that to an extent they don't really want to.  Wener has a surprising awareness of how it all what went wrong, that the horror of touring and publicity left little room for finding a proper inspiration for the third album which was mostly written on autopilot and recorded with a different bassist and although it included the odd good song that led to some critical plaudits, was always going to disappoint especially as the Brit Pop cycle was coming to an end.  Middle level bands like Sleeper and Shed Seven would be the casualties and as soon as the first single tanked, they knew it was time to cut their losses.

One of Wener's big disappointments was that the band wasn't subversive enough that they weren't the sort of group like L7  or Hole, who'd do naughty things on The Word.  Nicholas Cook's Music: A Very Short Introduction is exactly that in book form.  Instead of offering what you might expect to be a short history of music, Cook instead decides to metaphorically throw the whole notion of musicology under the bus, listing in some detail and plenty of relish its failings as a discipline and how, in deliberately calcifying it through an elitist approach that deifies composers and patronises laypeople, is ultimately hurting our appreciation of music and Western classical music in general.  People familiar with the treatment of other cultural institutions will find suitable comparisons here.  Just as the editorial history of Shakespeare's texts has always threatened to engulf the purpose of the plays through discussions of his intent, so dozens of editions of Beethoven and Chopin's scores have led to wildly differing appreciations of what they were attempting to do.

Nonetheless, Cook has managed to offer a few nuggets to this layman.  As well as the news that Beethoven's 9th is argued over with as much rigour as Hamlet's various editions, there's the elucidation that the difference between Mozart and Beethoven is that the former's work favours the individual, whereas the latter is interested in the overall sound and so consequently are less arguably less enjoyable to play.  There's also a certain confirmation of how unfair we tend to be on pop stars who can't sing live, failing to notice the distinction between pop and rock music, each designed for their own particular set of purposes but neither really "authentic".  As Wener's book demonstrates, she and her guitarist effectively manufactured Sleeper by putting an advert out for a bassist and drummer and when they were signed, they hung around in the studio for six months working out their "sound".  Just because there were more voices in the creation of The Spice Girls, the process wasn't that different.

More brutal honesty in Simon Callow's Being an Actor.  Subsequently updated many times, this version I read this week is the first edition, published in 1984 covering his years in drama school, through his jobbing period and mix of critical acclaim and drubbing on the stage of the National.  He's till flirting with television (his appearance as Raymond Craft in Crown Court isn't mentioned) and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls is still ten years away.  Most of it's about what you'd expect, the period as a youngster when he submerged himself in a persona called "Simon Callow" whom he later realises is a bit of an asshole, through realising that he can act before deciding on several dozen occasions that he's going to be found out to entirely failing to join Ken Campbell's Science Fiction theatre because he realises they're all completely mad.  It's impossible to read without the great man's voice in your head.  The latest edition's available as an audiobook.  That must be a time.

As with all this week's books, the best moments are when the writer breaks from expectation and heads into emotional dangerous areas, and in Callow's case that's his disembowelling of not just his own technique but how it's impacted by poor direction.  There are thrilling passages in which he remembers rehearsals by the moment as directors with controlling tendencies simply want him to do it their way then can't really understand why, at the end of the rehearsal process, the production has no life to it.  Sometimes he simply gives himself over to it then takes the negative notices on the chin, sometimes he fights against it, but the there's a general sense that he prefers directors with flexible visions, willing to collaborate and who understand, or at least agree with Callow, that an important part of the process is realising who this character is that he's playing and how for a story to work, they almost have to exist in a way which makes the text and that story inevitable.  Phew.  In the main though, most of his acting chums are marvellous.

Jeffrey Stepakoff's memoir, Billion Dollar Kiss: The Kiss That Saved Dawson’s Creek and Other Adventures in TV Writing actually follows a similar trajectory of college dawdling before deciding on a career and then success though without quite the level of self-doubt, largely because once he's on the gravy train of working on US network television as a writer, although some of the shows he works on were so cancelled they didn't even receive UK distribution (C-16 FBI? Hyperion Bay?).  Mostly it's a manifesto, written in the moment when traditional scripted fiction television found itself in the quagmire of having to justify its existence in the face of "reality" television, which as Stepakoff notes was just as scripted and in much the same way but had producers and editors thinking up storylines and hoping the dialogue would come.  Across the decades he covers, he tracks the period when writers were kings and development contracts led to million dollar paychecks even if shows never made it to air to, well, not.

As the title hints, it's Stepakoff's attempt at offering a an Adventures in the Screentrade for television writing, and arguably it's when he's actually describing the process of writing and what it's like to be in the rooming churning out these scripts that the book pings not least the horror that was producing Dawson's Creek once Kevin Williamson had left.  As he says, the first season is a golden thirteen episodes of television, some of the best teen drama every produced.  But it's a complete story and after that there wasn't a motivating element so it simply became soap opera, which is an interesting distinction, which Stepakoff acknowledges, but it did leave us viewers, as it meandered onwards, wondering quite what to make of it (as these posts from this blog while it was transmitting attest).  His argument is that when Pacey and Joey kissed it saved Dawson's Creek because it made the show about something again, which is arguably true but also led to it becoming horribly maudlin and even Proustian at times even after Busy Philipps joined.

Robert McKee would presumably describe the kiss as an "inciting incident" and it certainly was that though for the whole thing to really work in metanarrative terms it should have occurred at the end of the first season.  But McKee's Story doesn't much cover television other than to suggest what not to do in a film screenplay in terms of character and structure, though he also suggests they're one in the same thing anyway.  He does that a lot, tells the reader not to do something then a hundred pages later offers some examples of when it's perfectly ok or when it works, that, although he doesn't ever specify this, there are exceptions that disprove a rule, which you would think is problematic in a book which is supposed to be offering rules for writing a film screenplay.  No wonder Charlie Kauffman's character of Charlie Kaufmann in Adaptation is so bloody confused and manic by the end.  What is a screenwriter supposed to do when a four hundred page writing manual essentially boils down to two words,  "avoid cliche"?

In offering reasons why I finally read Story, Adaptation would be one.  Another would be so that I can say that I have, even though to say you've done something is no reason to actually do it.  Museums and archaeological sites are filled with tourists who've little to no interest in what they're seeing but are ticking the Mona Lisa or Stonehenge off a list (annoying the shit out of the people who actually do want to be there in the process).  Having spent the best part of a day working through the thing, I certainly wouldn't say I was equipped in any way to write a screenplay, though perhaps it shouldn't considered a failure in that regard since I wasn't going to write one anyway.  I do wish I'd glanced at it in 2006 when I was writing my dissertation though, since the section about multiplots, what I called hyperlink films, would have proven invaluable even if I think he misses the point by just saying they're a bunch of subplots without what he calls a "central plot".  In most cases, they're either a group of "central plots".

None of which is to say he didn't offer some insights.  He agrees with me that all films need some kind of mystery and intrigue and that too much exposition all dissipates rather than increases interest.  I'm always especially grumpy when films begin with back story, often with main characters as children since more often than not this doesn't provide much that couldn't be best served by simply showing the characters as adults, though as McKee notes if its a natural part of the story's structure, for example, The Last Emperor or I'd argue in Your Eyes, it's perfectly fine.  There's also an excellent section explaining why some films feel flabby in the middle - it's because the writer is letting duration dictate the plot rather than the other way around and is inventing incident that has nothing to do with what the protagonist wants.  Oh and he also led me to realise that Joss Whedon's way into scripting The Avengers was to make Nick Fury the central character and make all of the turning point actions about him.

Through a Glass Darkly
The Act of Killing

McKee also led me to finally watch what is my film of the week, Ingmar Bergman's bleak chamber piece about the spirituality and mental illness, which the script consultant for Barbie as the Island Princess (no, really) uses to demonstrate how character motivations work within a scene.  As with all films which treat the viewer as an adult, it's impossible to really discuss after a single watch, so tightly woven are the themes and so subtle the acting.  McKee describes a water motif which I missed completely, so involved was I in the story, though as he says the very best films stand up to multiple watches for just these reasons but also that it's important the symbolism is so overt that it becomes amusing (apart from the occasions when the symbolism is being particularly forefronted for a reason) (see what I mean?).  The real magic was in how I watched the film.  Having realised I needed to see it before reading a section of the book but not owning a copy, I checked Amazon Prime Instant and there it was with eleven other Tartan releases.

The modern world continues to astound me.

Review 2013: Not The Doctor: My Fan Fiction.

TV Back in the late 90s when I didn't have this blog as a distraction, I was under the delusion I could write fiction and after reading many, many My So-Called Life continuation scripts decided it was about time I attempted to write my own. Me being me, and not being able to decide on anything, I chose to simply crossover what were all of my favourite tv shows of the time and some more. Looking back through what's here it's about what you'd expect. This isn't the first time I've eluded to this epic on the blog, but it is the first time I'm posting the whole damn thing, with all the fragments and whatnot having been inspired by Dr Brooke Magnanti's defense of the form. Here's an illustrative graphic which should give some indication of what's to come.



Yes, indeed.

"I'd generally lost interest"

TV  Oh Dawson's Creek.  If you'd all been here for the germination of this blog you would have enjoyed my love hate relationship with this My So-Called Life placebo.  I might have been fan enough to write this rather epic piece of crossover fiction but as the years went by, well ...  Here's me venting back in 2004 about the opening episode of the sixth season:

"But the problem is that the show has said everything it can about the subjects it's trotting out. I've an idea of the upcoming plotlines and they really feel like reruns of old stories. The very English waitress and musician Emma Jones could have been an interesting character if she hadn't stolen her accent from the potentials in the last season of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, but she's another Gretchen or Amy, someone to buzz around the main characters, create complications, let Pacey save her (possibly), then buzz off again. It's tired and tiring."

Probably due to scheduling and how my consumption of television has changed there are few shows I can become quite as passionate about. Fringe certainly, but one of the results of having to watch such things via the boxset is that your critical faculties find it almost impossible to consider each episode individually and rather judge a series as a whole.

Anyway, Entertainment Weekly have decided to dredge up the past with a short interview with Creek creator Kevin Williamson about the show's central love triangle and how he finally chose who would end up with whom:

"Originally, I really was going to go down that Dawson and Joey route and something didn’t feel right about it. One of the reasons I wanted to write Dawson’s Creek to begin with was to write my version of the teen drama. Back in the’90s when everyone was doing that whole self-aware thing, I was very aware of 90210. The characters in my show were very aware of 90210. They referenced it. They talked about it. This show was supposed to be the spin of the teen drama and if Dawson and Joey had ended up together, that wouldn’t have been the spin."

Having missed much of Season Five due to weird scheduling and a sense that the show had drifted from its original much smarter roots into becoming a more generic relationship show with product placement (the episode set at a No Doubt concert which seemed to consist of mostly the No Doubt concert a particular low), I'd generally lost interest in the story by the end.

I remember being especially angry about the treatment of Michelle Williams's character Jen who was essentially treated as the tragedy magnet in the final episode, her ultimate destination lacking the subtlety that Joss Whedon and his cohorts bring to such things (is it weird I'm trying not to spoil an eight year old television episode?).  In what should have been a celebration, Williams was essentially called upon to cry for two hours.

Leddra Chapman.

Music Leddra Chapman's album Telling Tales may sound like a retro reconstruction of the Dawson's Creek soundtrack via a thirtysomething W. Snuffy Walden, but sometimes that's just what you need. The piano section in Picking Oranges was like being bashed around the head by my teenage years. Available on Spotify. Here's the single, Story. It's untypical of the rest of the album:

geocities rescue

Lost Souls

There is something gut wrenching about the cancellation of a favourite television show, especially a drama. Over the period of broadcast the viewer invests a certain emotion interest in the lives of the characters. So when these characters are left in the middle of story arcs or plotlines we are denied something which he rightly expect in real life. Closure. One show in particular was a particular pain.

For some reason I keep coming back to ‘My So-Called Life’. Every year I get the shows out and watch them again. Every year I see new things. I understand more. I'm twenty-six now. What's going on?

When you're a teenager, and you have those problems, and you know your friends will make fun of you if you tell them, you look to film, music and TV for answers. Living in England, honest to goodness teen shows were pretty thin on the ground. There's 'Byker Grove', 'Grange Hill' and hints of 'HollyOaks' and that's about it. The trouble is that none of them quite has the audacity or time slot to cut to the heart of what its actually like to be a teenager. Most of the time you have to look to US shows like 'Dawson's Creek' or 'Buffy'. But standing above them all was 'My So-called Life' a television programme that answered all of our questions. When the show was transmitted on our Channel 4 in 1995 it was stupidly popular.

No one had seen anything like this. Suddenly you knew what to do about that older boy or girl you fancy. Or if you have feelings for the girl next door. Or if you weren't sure about your sexuality. Or of someone loved you but you couldn't return their feelings. Or if you got handcuffed to a bed. Your heart was broken by it week after week, but you came back before because you knew it was doing you good. A free hour of therapy with what amounted to being your friends.

Even if you didn't want to admit it, you were one of them. You were Rayanne Graffe, afraid of the world and overcompensating. Sharon Cherski, searching for your own identity beneath the expectations of others. You were Ricki Vasquez unsure who you were but quietly finding an equilibrium. You were Jordan Catalano torn between your friends and something else. You were Brian Krakow, the romantic with so many high expectations of people. You were Danielle Chase, always being kicked out of different rooms. You were Patty Chase fighting to keep your family together. You were Graham Chase fighting to keep yourself together. And you were always Angela, your world falling apart around you, every choice being wrong, every moment a battle, but somehow slowly working it all out.

Then, after nineteen episodes, it was gone. Replaced, I believe, by a rerun of 'Matlock'. The show should never have been cancelled. It wasn't fair goddam it. And not on that cliffhanger. But perhaps it had the right end. The perfect ending. The only ending this show could have had. Making a choice then watching in pain the road not travelled. So like life. So-called Life.

This year we would have had its sixth season (this was written in 2000 -- the older version of me). All of the contracts would have been up for renewal. The teenagers would have been twenty something. Characters would have gone, new characters brought in. The writing teams change. But it would not have been the same show.

The show I keep coming back to.

I skimmed. A lot.

Books It wasn’t until the late 1990s that I discovered that Dawson’s Creek and Buffy The Vampire Slayer were broadcast in the same US network. In the UK, Dawson bounced around Channel 4’s schedules and Buffy rested her stake on BBC Two, even I seem to remember clashing for a few episodes. Not once did it occur to me that they might be stable mates even though, despite genre difference, their DNA was quite similar – articulate teenagers dealing with growing pains both metaphorically and emotionally. But once I’d heard about The WB, I realised that such tonal similarities were part of a channel strategy that’s when I backed off and continued watching the shows for the entertainment that they were, trying desperately not to think of implications of the fact that I was actually being marketed to.

Season Finale is the story of the WB and that marking process and how it compared to the channel it would ultimately merge with, the UPN (United Paramount Network). Susanne Daniels, a television executive with the WB for most of its life, and Cynthia Littleton, a longtime television reporter for Variety describe the launch and life of both of these channels, from their faltering first steps within a television landscape that didn’t want them, through their relative successes and failures through to that controversial merger to form the CW.

For people of a certain age, or in other words me, the book is impossible to put down. Two of the chapters are called ‘Welcome To Sunnydale’ and ‘I Don’t Want To Wait’ and we’re being offered a chance to witness the creation of some of our favourite tv shows from the perspective of the executive who played wet nurse to Buffy and Dawson and also the Gilmore Girls and Smallville and a range of shows that didn’t make much of an impression in the UK, the likes of Felicity and 7th Heaven. The casting, the preview screenings, the stressed out financiers, in other words the gossip which I completely missed during the run of the programmes.

How Joss Whedon’s agent played hardball so that he would be given the opportunity to direct the pilot of Buffy; Kevin Williamson was given My So-Called Life scripts to look out so that he could time out were the commercial breaks should go in the hour and finding himself overworked trying to juggle the Creek and Scream 2, was locked in a hotel room until something was finished, even having to ask permission to go to the bathroom; JJ Abrams’s realisation in hindsight that it was Keri Russell’s haircut that doomed Felicity; UPN’s constant struggle to broadcast something worth watching knowing that if it wasn’t for Star Trek: Voyager and wrestling they’d be sunk.

If only the whole book was like this: understandably, given the source, the rest mostly comes across as an extended Variety article with pages upon pages of demographic statistics, ratings numbers and the details of meetings between executives and creatives that are tricky to navigate even with the glossary at the front. In places, it’s clearly been written by insiders for insiders and the effect is much the same as attending a party where everyone knows each other and you’ve no clue what any of the in-jokes actually mean. I skimmed. A lot.

Yet, this is still an impressive piece of work and a must read for anyone with a passing interest in the business of television and any of these shows. I know that these things were only created to fill the gaps between advertising and the reason I look at them so fondly is because they were designed so specifically to be attractive to my demographic. I don’t care. Their business was our entertainment and I was entertained and still am. through the boxsets and comic books and for that they should be congratulated. So what if I suddenly have the urge to buy the complete Dawson's Creek on dvd?

Meme Me and six thousand other people, though frankly I can't name seven songs like that. So instead, here are the next seven songs I come across on Winamp that I can sing along to:

(1) 'Basket Case (Live)' - Avril Lavigne

Words first learned through shouting sessions at The Krazy House in Liverpool from the time it was new through to the moment it became a matter of nostalgia. This is from the period when the live Lavigne had little or nothing to do with the version who appeared in the recording studio and she pretty much hauls through it too, which is no doubt the proper response.

(II) 'Someone' -- Astrid Williamson

It's now ten years since I visited the Edinburgh Festival and bought the 'Boy For You' album on which this appears. I remember it being a major release at the time with massive advertising in all of the record shops, though there's narry a person who knows who she is these days. There's a bluesy texture undercut by the sound of rain and the odd thunderclap. The incessant lyric is "You look like someone I should know, I shooould know" and there's certainly a Fleetwood Mac element to some of the sound, Albatross 'specially.

(III) 'The End' -- The Doors

I once dozed through Oliver Stone's film. It was during a screen at my old student hall and I was dolloped on a cushion at the front of the crowd in front of the telly in the common room. Apparently I snored, rolled around, and made gurgling noises. No one thought to wake me up which is good because I can't imagine any other way of enjoying Kilmer's performance and the photography than through a semi-conscious haze. My favourite other story about someone watching the film I heard from my old friend Tris, who said that he'd been talking to a girl he fancied and she'd said she'd loved the film, especially the bit at the end when Jim Morrison fell asleep in the bath.

(IV) 'Wonderful Christmastime' -- Paul MacCartney

In my defense it's impossible not to know the lyrics to every Christmas related song in this consumerist age. But I do think this is one of the best, and certainly one of the few high points of Paul's career since The Beatles split. With all the random noodling on various synthesizer instruments its almost like a three minute festive version of Tubular Bells. Which isn't to say that listening to it in mid-June isn't totally depressing.

(V) 'Runaway' - The Corrs (Unplugged)

Whatever happened to The Corrs? We just fell out of love apparently, but constantly repackaging your songs without much in the way of new material will do that. This was the third different version of Runaway to hit disc having appeared on their first two albums and then here. I was never sure which Corr I fancied the most oscillating between all three girls depending on how well they were lit in the videos, but it was usually Caroline. The rot set in for me with In Blue, in which they pretended to be a mainstream pop band rather than a folksy crossover, but unlike other genre tourism it seemed like an act of desperation rather than an attempt to be interesting. Entertainment Weekly called it "a disheartening example of musical ethnic cleansing"and they were right.

(VI) 'Come See Me Tonight' -- Daniel Johnson

Which might well look like a desperate attempt to look hip after this list has already referenced Lavigne and The Corrs and you'd be right. It is in truth the only Johnson track I own, piggy-backed on the My So-Called Life soundtrack. Only now do I notice its similarity to Ravel's Bolero, the guitar rhythms here paralleling the drum beat there. Has there yet been a better teen series since Life or has it's reputation grown simply because it wasn't given enough time to become anodyne like Dawson's Creek? Either way, I'm not sure there's been an episode of anything as good as 'The Life of Brian' if only because of the cleverness of the title.

(VII) 'Life of Riley' -- The Lightening Seeds

When my friend Chris's brother Tim was married not too long ago, he gave the reception DJ a not list, a bunch of artists and songs sure to ruin the evening. Top of that list was Robbie Williams. The final song he decided to play that night? Angels. Perhaps at most other parties that was a keeper, the one to send the crowd home with a tear in their eye (the saps). Here it caused a near riot as twenty people descended on the DJ's box. Not really knowing what hit him, he grabbed the only record he could find which had anything vaguely to do with Liverpool. This.

The Year of Skipping

TV The slow way. The bizarre tradition of serial dramas and sitcoms is the attempt to mimic real life even though they're clearly set in some alternate reality; so the ensemble cast of The West Wing, e.r., Dawson's Creek, Gilmore Girls, Friends, Babylon 5, even Alias, drift onward on a yearly basis for the length of their run, as we watch five to ten years in the life of the characters, countless Christmases and birthdays. There's no reason for this really - and you can see each series trying desperately trying to fill the time, coming up with decent drama to fill in the gaps between the really exciting stuff. This is the time when most shows fail, because there's a feeling of going through the motions.

The new Battlestar Galactica doesn't do that and unless you've seen up until the end of season two I'd skip the rest of this post. Every now and then a month will drift by between episodes and I've just watched the season two finale on dvd and in a really, exciting audacious move they've skipped a whole year in the middle of a scene. Cylon collaborator Baltar is sworn in as president, the remaining dregs of humanity have been ordered to settle on a planet that can barely support life, he drops his head the table, there's a crossfade and a caption reads 'One year later'. I don't like captions. They tend to be quite distracting and too much of a short hand for lazy programme makers trying all too quickly to set the scene when a bit of dialogue, or I don't know, everything else on screen should suffice.

But this caption was special. This caption made me shout 'What?' indignantly. Yet it made absolute sense. Although watching a year's worth of people settling, dealing with a nuclear holocaust, the fleet being mothballed and the breaking up of civil order might have been pretty interesting, skipping it all is even more dramatic. For one thing it means that these characters and this story which we've all become quite comfortable with becomes a mystery again - the character dynamics have moved on and relationships that were settled are now in the air - I mean why, for example, aren't Apollo and Starbuck not on speaking terms? So the chief and Callie are together now? Adama has moustache?

And the truly great thing about all this is that unlike Star Trek: Voyager which did much the same thing over two episodes in The Year of Hell, there isn't going to be a reset switch. There are no helpful temporal anomalies in the Galactica universe, no benevolent nebula. Creator Ron Moore and his staff have decided it's time to move the story on, treat the narrative as a much longer construct, and make it fascinatingly novelistic. People have been saying this one of the best sci-fi shows ever and watching this past I've begun to understand. This audacious move seals it. I only hope that it isn't all revealed to be a dream or some alternative reality. That would be disappointing. Roll on the dvd of season three.

I don't wanna wait...

TV But whilst I'm on the subject, you can currently buy the whole of Dawson's Creek for the same price as a certain's show's boxset cost just before Christmas. That's doesn't seem right.

"Isn't it entirely possible that he is in fact the Devil, crammed into the body of a handsome musician." -- Jen (Dawson's Creek)

TV ""Being on a show like Dawson's Creek for so long ... you spend so much of the year doing something you are not entirely invested in. So when you devote yourself to nine months of the year to that kind of work, you have to make awfully certain that you spend the three precious months off in a way that's true and not time-wasting." -- Michelle Williams -- my reason for still watching the show all the way through those six seasons everybody...

Not The Real Review 2004: Television

Given that in fact I've hardly watched any television this year, you'll notice this section of Not The Real Review 2004 is slightly shorter than that last two. You may see a pattern forming with the somewhat limited ...

Three TV Bits and Pieces from 2004

The Last One

It was a year in which a number of long running tv shows finished forever (or until someone offers them pure cash to return for the reunion). Certain shows have a habit of becoming part of the furniture so you feel a loss when they're gone. Neither Friends or Dawson's Creek had been half as good as their earlier seasons but because they were ongoing stories and because there was also a germ of something unique, interesting or magical about them, we stayed right through to the end. To a degree, both endings offered something unexpected. No one really expected Ross and Rachel to actually get together at the end there, or that Joey would end up with Pacey. But there they were at the end of everything cuddling together, fictional examples of how great things can happen.

BBC Four

I keep banging on about it, but if there was rationing and I was only allowed on television channel, I couldn't live without BBC Four. Not in my memorable lifetime has a channel had the capacity to surprise, amaze and impress on a nightly basis as consistently as the place to think. As well as The Alan Clarke Diaries I always offer Holidays In The Danger Zone as another example -- how better to discover the heart of the country that to vacation there and try not to get shot. Meet The Stans introduced us to a series of countries we hadn't even heard of, let alone their internal conflicts and America Was Here showed us the wreckage that our wars create. What happens when a people have been 'saved'. Who picks up the pieces? Another impressive film was No 17 is Anonymous in which an investigative reporter scoured Israel looking for the identity of a seventeenth victim of a suicide bomb on a bus. I learnt more about Middle Eastern politics and religion in that hour and a hour than years of anything else because it punctured the surface of the matter.

Shiny

This was the year I met Firefly, the Joss Whedon show not set in the Buffyverse, the most gut wrenching experience this side of My So-Called Life. On the back of the dvd box, The New York Post says it's 'A very funny, very hip, very terrific sci-fi show.' Well yes. So why did it get thrown about by the network to the point of being ignored by the general audience? Who knows. I haven't met anyone whose heard of it and seen it who doesn't love it. It's easy to go over old ground by asking how dreck like Charmed or Andromeda continue broadcasting when a treasure like this couldn't be nurtured. That a film is being made is a miracle. That it means we'll only be spending another two hours with these characters on that ship under this writer is not.

TV So Joey and Dawson have finally done it (for British terrestrial viewers anyway). But they've been talking about it for so long I'd forgotten it hadn't happened already. In the end it seemed cheap somehow. For me, Dawson's Creek has always been about romance, about the magic which surrounds the act rather than the act itself. The most passionate moment of the series up until this point was their kiss at the end of the first series. Perhaps the genius here was that when the central core unrequited love of the series finally became requited it was pretty ordinary, no ice cream, wax or extra bodies involved. At least now, just as the conversation was flagging, they'll have something to talk about for the next five or six episodes at least.

Elsewhere in the show as the six and final series begins, it's mostly business as usual. Audrey has been granted regular status after two series (still a great character) and there are signs she'll be getting her own storylines (and her own special episode - how we wish it had been her in that mugging episode last year - no chance of her singing along with the dying man). There also seems to be a new found ability to have fun with the Jack character who seems to be enjoying his sexuality now rather than torturing himself. Speaking of which, favourite character Jen seemed far too sunny but I was always happier when that was the case - I was never happy when she was an Elizabeth Wurtzel knock off - she always worked best with some deadpan humour and nothing more embarrassing than sitting next to your grandmother in a lecture. And suddenly in an attempt to make him seem more mature, Pacey sports a goatee beard which looks a bit wrong but we'll get used to it.

But the problem is that the show has said everything it can about the subjects it's trotting out. I've an idea of the upcoming plotlines and they really feel like reruns of old stories. The very English waitress and musician Emma Jones could have been an interesting character if she hadn't stolen her accent from the potentials in the last season of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, but she's another Gretchen or Amy, someone to buzz around the main characters, create complications, let Pacey save her (possibly), then buzz off again. It's tired and tiring. We're getting into the same territory as late X-Files - how much more can we surprise the audience? But I'm not jumping ship yet like I did with that series. This is something I'll be following to that bitter end, if only to see how Kevin Williamson, series creator, and writer of the final episode, handles his characters all grown up. Plus I'm still 'in love' with Michelle Williams and you have to allow your self some guilty pleasures now and then between the Truffaut movies.

Sport I was entirely disenaged by Wimbledon this year. I just could stand the idea of actually watching Henman lose in the quarter finals again and the Williams sisters playing each other again. This puts things in perspective: "Put it this way: The next time you get tired of Venus and Serena, consider this. There were 128 episodes of Dawson's Creek. There have been 22 James Bond movies, 15 Mark Wahlberg movies, 13 original Weird Al Yankovic albums. There have been 10 Friday the 13th movies, the eighth Halloween comes out Saturday and there have been seven Nightmares on Elm Street. There have been five Rockys and four Jaws. For goodness sakes, Cats played for 18 years on Broadway."This is going to be a long haul ...

TV Big Brother 4 of all things starts on Friday. Still trying to decide if I can be bothered, but for now here is a comprehensive where are they now of all the previous contestants. I'm actually fairly amazed at how many have just picked up their own lives from where they left off (see Sunita and Sandy). Fun for the more bizarre juxtapositions ... Spencer's been dating Sasha Alexander who played Dawson's girlfriend Gretchen for a year on The Creek. Dean and Stuart have a business making a Tea Bag Bin (which does look strangely useful). Sada is waitressing. Oh well.

TV Wierdly, 'Dawson's Creek' is network jumping to Channel 5 in the UK for it's final season, but will still be on E4. I presume this is wrapped up in a general trend for Columbia/TriStar shows going over there. Also, it can't have been easy for the US producers to see what is over there a prime time show dribbling out at lunchtime on a Sunday for the past few years. Good to see they've also got the repeat rights for the far superior (and Kevin Williamson scripted) first season when subtext still occured and the film references were thought through a bit better ...

TV The increasingly bizarre 'Dawson's Creek' (did anyone see Sunday's 100th episode? Gah!) has confirmed that creator Kevin Williamson is returning to co-write a final episode which is set after everyone has left college. Does this mean there might be some closure to the story? As Pacey said, it's not like he hasn't seen everyone naked.

TV Oh and Dawson's Creek has been cancelled ...

TV A bit random, but in what year is ‘Dawson’s Creek’ set? The first season began in the Spring 1998 in the US as mid-season replacement and ran for thirteen episodes and seemed to cover the winter term (Halloween included) of a school year. So was that the previous winter term or the one coming up. This wasn’t really answered when the second season ran through the Fall 1998 – 1999 season, but unlike other UStv shows (which run the breadth of the Autumn, Winter and Spring) just picked up the story from moments after the end of the first season, and takes us up to the end of the year, until the beginning of the Summer. Without a wiff of Christmas or Easter. Then Season Three picked things up at the beginning of the new school year. Now does this mean that Season One was set in the future or that we are behind a year (which references such as a Saving Private Ryan poster would contradict). Someone’s lost a year somewhere – leading the other question about how old the characters are . . . and in the episode were Dawson & Joey are accepted into college, it’s apparently for the fall 2001. Let's see ... official website ... erm ... oh no they actually have a page devoted to this, which comes to the conclusion that they don't bloody know either. I suppose I should just suspend my disbelief ...