The Extratextuals

I found clips of some of the new shows, and I’m embedding them after the fold

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ads, new shows, previews, upfronts FOX, upfronts

FOX went first, and James Poniewozik says it was an odd presentation, in that it wasn’t so much about the brilliance of FOX, but of TV. As he writes:

it spent most of its time, before screening clips of its new shows, defending the medium of television itself. Despite what pundits in the media are telling you, they told advertisers, the vast majority of TV watchers still watch on a television set, and not online. And they do so watch the ads! […]

But when you’re working this hard to persuade a room of advertisers of the basic efficacy of your medium—you are nervous about something. And mind you, this is the network that has American Idol. What the hell is ABC going to say tomorrow?

Anyways, down to business, after the fold:
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ads, new shows, previews, upfronts FOX, upfronts

The upfront presentations are this week. For those unaware of this ritual, it’s a week during which the networks trump out their Fall schedules to advertisers, often involving lavish parties and hoopla, as a prelude to a massive ad spot buying binge that follows.

The schedule: FOX kicks it off on Monday, NBC and ABC do Tuesday, and CBS and The CW are on Wednesday.

I’ve already discussed NBC’s new shows, since they had an early “infront,” though a few choices remain for the Peacock, including whether to keep Chuck (though reports are now suggesting that my favorite spy, is indeed back, albeit for an abbreviated 13 episode season) and My Name is Earl. But I’ll try to comment on each day’s activities as and when I can.

In the meantime, I’d point readers towards Alan Sepinwall of the New Jersey Star Ledger. Discussing the leaked news that Scrubs, Chuck, and Dollhouse, amongst other existing shows on the bubble, are returning, he offers an interesting thought:

The idea that a new show automatically has a better shot to draw viewers than a marginal returning series may not be the case anymore, and in this scary environment, a steady number is a steady number.

For more signs of what the networks think is going to make life better for them, stay tuned this week.

ads, new shows, previews upfronts

It’s upfront time. Or, NBC is calling theirs “infronts.” I don’t know why and don’t plan to find out – it sounds about as cute as adding “N’ Stuff” in a store title, so let’s leave it there. [EDIT: okay, I lie, I did go looking, and it turns out they're still having an upfront; they just want to get a headstart with this. Still a silly title]. Indeed, I’m mad at NBC. They haven’t renewed Chuck. In theory, this could happen latter, though with a third of primetime given up to Jay Leno (!), and with renewals already announced for many other shows (yay, 30 Rock and The Office!), real estate is in high demand.

In this supposedly DVR-filled world, schedule still matters a heck of a lot. Try telling any creator whose show got a Friday night slot that it doesn’t. I’m particularly interested, though, in how a show’s competition frames one’s view of it, not just when one is asked to pick sides when shows are on opposing channels at the same time, but also when an axed-yet-beloved show is replaced. Right now, I look at the proposed additions and say, “hmmm… not Chuck,” and if it’s culled, whichever show gets its slot will suffer a dark aura.

Nevertheless, below the fold I introduce you to the contenders:

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ads, new shows, previews Chuck, Day One, Jay Leno, Jesse Alexander, NBC, Parenthood

The Paley Center for Television and Radio in New York is once more doing its Fall Previews, showing pilots for new shows, and, because some networks don’t have many new shows, showing the premiere of some returning new-ish shows. I’m skipping The CW’s tonight, since all they had on offer were 90210, which I saw (and will comment upon below) and Privileged, which is on next week. But last night was FOX’s night, showing the premiere of this season’s Sarah Connor Chronicles, along with pilots for Do Not Disturb and the much-anticipated J. J. Abrams show, Fringe. I’ll discuss the new shows below the fold …
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previews 90210, CW, Do Not Disturb, fall previews, FOX, Fringe, pilots

Thanks to Jason Mittell for drawing my attention to this, thereby absolutely requiring that I come out of a mass grading-induced blogging break. As Jason said in his email, it’s paratext and parody together: all the things I like in one small clip.

I love how it plays with precisely what drew my interest to paratexts/extratexts, testing the limits of how much we’re prepared to see something that we’ve been told is peripheral as the core of the thing itself. So, here, it’s the trailer as the original text.

Yet, of course, it’s actually a bit more complex than that, since the clip doesn’t purport to make the trailer precede Iron Man as comic book character. Thus, in its play with the idea that the trailer’s “active fan base” are expecting to be let down by the actual movie “adaptation,” it brilliantly captures the odd paradox of many paratexts, namely that since many of them sell anticipation and small flavors, oftentimes the text exists in its purest and best state when being anticipated, and before actually being made.

This makes me think, then, of a chapter I wrote for Will Brooker’s The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic (Wallflower, 2006), for which I interviewed several active fans of Blade Runner about their hopes for the release of a Final Cut of the film (a cut that has since finally hit the market). There, I found the seemingly odd situation of several fans, who had loved this film for over twenty years, so much so that they were still on BR list-servs and discussion sites … and yet who felt that they had never seen the full and proper version of this object of love. Using the language of BR, I said that the text they’d fallen in love with was something akin to a replicant, and just as BR examines Deckard’s love for someone that both is and is not a human, so too did this project show how fandom can be (or, I’d argue, is always) for both a real text and an absent, second, idealized text. With the BR study, several of the people I talked to therefore both wanted a Final Cut and didn’t, since while the Final Cut remained hypothetical, it could perfectly approximate their ideal text, whereas they seemed quite worried that once it became real, that text might fail to live up to their replicant beauty.

Herein lies the dilemma with almost any textual proliferation, right? I went through the exact same crisis of faith before the release of the new Star Wars trilogy. I was intrigued to know more of the story, to have the world filled in, and yet at the same time, the world – I feared – was better in my head than in Lucas’s hands. Ditto with the announcement of the Lord of the Rings films. And many other films, television shows, and so forth. And yet in each case, the pleasure of anticipation is wonderful, so that imagining what a Lord of the Ring film might look like, for instance, is a better game when you know it’s actually going to happen, as the stakes go up.

This is about anticipation, but it’s also about what the text is, at its core. All that anticipation, after all, feeds into the consumption of the eventual text, and all that anticipation is part of the joy that the text provides. Thus the paratext or extratext as an absolutely vital, often central, part of the text. And The Onion’s example here is wonderfully apt, since the Iron Man trailer is indeed very enticing (see below), thereby raising the bar for what I expect, and what I hope for. Somehow, come summer, I’ll need to square away that idealized text and the replicant text (or, perhaps, that big hunk of scrap metal) in front of me.

There’s so much more I could say about this Onion clip. Very amusing, and well done. But I’ll call it a day here.

previews, trailers Blade Runner, Iron Man, Onion, parody

Every time I set foot in the city, I tend to walk into another film or television show. By which I don’t mean that I see a lot of filming: I mean that the storyworlds of multiple films and shows are forever poaching on New York.

Recently, it’s the cool viral campaign for Forgetting Sarah Marshall that’s everywhere. Taxis announce “You DO look fat in those jeans, Sarah Marshall,” “My mom never liked you, Sarah Marshall,” and “I am SO over you, Sarah Marshall,” as do the sides of buses. Bus stands, meanwhile, add to the mix, large posters stating simply, “You suck, Sarah Marshall.”

It’s a really effective ad campaign, since it seems to capture the central mood of the film. The dire need to perform one’s dislike post-breakup, and to announce it to the world, so clearly labels itself as protesting too much, as a sad ploy of the broken heart. Moreover, while Sarah Marshall’s name needs to get into all the ads so that people will know what the ads are referring to, the repetition of her name has the side effect of sounding like an incantation from a guy who just can’t stop thinking about Sarah. It’s a cringe-worthy campaign, since it shows us Jason Segel’s character as hopelessly still in love and unable to deal with it maturely, yet we’ve all probably been there, right? All that’s different here is the scale, which invokes the other salient aspect of the film: that Sarah Marshall is a star. Telling all your friends that your ex sucks is one thing, but if she’s a star, so goes the rationale, you need to use taxis, bus stands, and so forth to get the message across. Meanwhile, that scale just blows up the emotion ten-fold for us, promising us a very identifiable emotional base to the film, but also a level of exaggeration and excess that will allow comfortable comic distance and cathartic pleasure.

My lone complaint, though, is that I sort of wish they would up the ante a bit and start tagging Sarah Marshall slogans in public places. In some sense, after all, it would all be more in-frame if the Segel character’s messages were scrawled in public washrooms, on building sides, etched into subway car windows, etc., than on expensive ads. Mind you, if Time Warner can get done for being would-be terrorists, I guess Universal might want to avoid being labeled as vandals.

I’m also intrigued that the film has a restricted trailer (in addition to a general one), thereby being one of the first films I’ve heard of to realize this loophole in the MPAA censorship of trailers.

Finally, too, it should be noted, the film has a strong blog entourage, with one supposedly from the Jason Segel character, another from a supposed fan defending Sarah Marshall, and – quite amusingly – it seems as though a real-life Sarah Marshall out there has tired of the site traffic to her www.sarahmarshall.com, and has thus dropped whatever else was there, replacing it with a photocopy of her (?) ass, and a counter acknowledging that I was the 18468th person to hate Sarah Marshall.

poster art, previews Forgetting Sarah Marshall, poster art, posters

I had intended to post another installment of the awards, this one on movie posters, but in researching, I found a wonderful site, The Internet Movie Poster Awards. Not only does this site have awards dating back ten years, but they also boast a staggering 17,000+ movie posters in their galleries. I’ll wait till later to post more thoughts arrived at from browsing their galleries, and on some all-time favs, but first a taste of their 2008 award winners:

Best Poster went to Sweeney Todd, with the explanation that “A menacing looking barber, razor at the ready, sitting in his blood-red barber chair, waiting for his next victim. The poster for Sweeney Todd is dark, disturbing, and surprisingly beautiful. A very rare combination. Little details like the family portrait in the background, the red coming from the floorboards, and the splash of blood across the title makes for a very memorable design.” It certainly has an alluring quality that makes me want to look at it multiple times. And though it announces itself as a Tim Burton film, it does so in a neat way.

Meanwhile, bringing up the rear is Charlie Wilson’s War: “Perhaps the worst thing about this poster is simply that it is bland. Three Oscar winning actors looking very awkward, especially Hoffman, who appears to have accidentally walked into the wrong photo shoot. People are more likely to see the movie in spite of the poster than because of it.” All the intrigue, excitement, comedy, and glamor of a stucco wall. If the critique errs anywhere, though, it’s in being kind enough to suggest this is the product of a photo shoot: looks more like a crappy frame-grab to me.

Best Blockbuster Poster Award goes to I Am Legend: “A powerful image that conveys the plot of the film. The last man on earth set against the disturbing sight of a destroyed city in the background.” I still remember seeing a scene from this movie being filmed, and it was the oddest site: I walked into Washington Square at night and there was a bright white light. Moving closer, I saw about 300 people in silver green-screen suits running around. Think Cirque du Soleil meets Mean Streets. Luckily, this poster captures the gravity of the situation a little better.

Other categories (without winners listed. I don’t want to spoil them all, especially since each of the main categories has 5 nominees) include Best Teaser Poster, Worst Teaser Poster, Funniest, Bravest Poster (for posters with no faces of actors with big names), Creepiest, Best Character Set, Best Funny Tag Line, Best Serious Tag Line, and a spate of Not So Serious Awards, including Best Poster Ruined by Floating Heads, and this image from a Revenge of the Nerds remake teaser poster, winner of Best Poster for a Movie That Ceased to Exist. A poster without a movie? A true extratextual.

Neat site. Good picks. Spared me the work, too, so I’m happy.

awards, poster art, previews Charlie Wilson's War, I Am Legend, poster art, posters, Revenge of the Nerds, Simpsons, Sweeney Todd

First, a shout-out: the doctor is in. Elana Levine has started a blog, Dr. Television (no, that’s not the doctor above!), and already I’m really liking it. Dr. T has some neat posts on soaps and the writers’ strike in particular, but also in her first post insists that she wants her blog not to be so serious all the time. Thus, a brief post of hers about catching up on The Wire that I really relate to reads:

I’m having dreams about Frank Sobotka and cans missing from the stacks. I can’t fall back asleep at 2 AM after replacing the blanket of an almost-4-year-old because I’m too busy thinking about Stringer Bell. Am I really supposed to be able to work with these characters marching through my brain all day and night?

Which struck home today, as I spent a lot of time on the subway, without a book, and thus spent most of it thinking about The Wire’s minisodes released prior to Season 5. No real spoilers below, for those who worry.

Releasing the minisodes was a neat idea, and the concept behind each is kind of cool too. One takes us back to Baltimore in 1962 to see a young Proposition Joe, another to 1985 to see a young Omar (below), and the third to 2000 to see how Bunk and McNulty met. The best sequels nearly always involve prequel (think Godfather II to Godfather, or even the info gleaned about Luke in The Empire Strikes Back), so I like this idea more than the 24 direct-to-phone clips that create a different agent with a different case. If 24 had given us mobisodes that examined how Jack joined CTU, say, then I’d actually be interested. And the long-promised Lost mobisodes focusing on the other Lostaways pique my interest because they could perhaps tell me more about how everyone got to the island (symbolically speaking). So The Wire’s attempt to take us back in time is interesting.

But in thinking about them all day, I must object to the Omar minisode in particular (see below, and I promise this spoils nothing about the show). Clip and objection after the fold.
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previews Omar, prequels, The Wire, webisodes

Derek’s first part is a hard act to follow, but I decided to focus on trailers, teasers, hype, and TV opening credit sequences. I’ll wage in later about the TV opening credit sequences, but for now, should the clip embedding work:

Best Movie Trailer
Trailers are one of the most underrated, under-appreciated art forms in the contemporary media environment. Indeed, it bears reminding that amidst enthusiastic discussion of YouTube debates, political satire, reporting, virals, etc., many of the most viewed videos on YouTube are trailers. Moreover, as media companies try to saturate our daily lives with trailers, so that we see them somewhere, they also need to be aware that many of us will see many trailers multiple times, and so there’s a fine art to making a trailer that hasn’t sickened you by the time you see it for the tenth time.

Runner-Up: Juno. Ideally, I’d have loved to pick two excellent trailers for bad movies here, but (a) I didn’t see many movies in 2007, so I don’t have much to work with, and (b) the point is that Juno’s trailer had me convinced that I’d like the film. The crispness of the script jumps out at you, and it offers a supremely recognizable (ie: real, not Saved By the Bell-ized) high school life. Ellen Page’s performance announces itself as fantastic, and the trailer chooses wonderful scenes to showcase two great cult properties in Rainn Wilson and Michael Cera. Plus it has Allison Janney/CJ Cregg in it. It pandered to everything I wanted, right down to being filmed in my hometown, Vancouver (which I can nearly always tell visually. No bullshit. It’s the quality of the green. All that rain. And the sky. And the houses).

Winner: Vantage Point. I already blogged about this, so let me just link to it here. But I haven’t seen it, and even if I don’t, or don’t like it, I think the trailer rocks.

More below the fold

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awards, previews Cloverfield, Dark Knight, Dirty Sexy Money, Funny Games, Juno, previews, Simpsons, trailers, Transformers, Vantage Point