Quick Bits: Studio 407, Flight of the Conchords, More...

Arrrggh! There are a lot of these as late, no? Well, that's just the way things are when you've been away for basically two weeks; I'm still getting resituated and back into the swing of things. I don't know about you, but I always feel better when I know what's going on, so I'd rather post a lot of minutiae than just leave you wondering when the next post is coming.

I'll be away tomorrow. I'll be back tomorrow afternoon, but I have to leave really early, so I probably won't get more than one or two things out, at best... of course, you know how that goes - I may get a burst of energy and it'll be the biggest day of the month. But I wouldn't count on it.

I have the Hybrid TPB - received it, in its entirety, a while back - that's just one of the many perks of this job. Another is that I'm about to get a $15 iTunes gift card if no one enters the contest. Anyway, I've already started the review, but it's a 120-page book and I've been gone a while, so it's coming slowly. At any rate, it is coming.

Speaking of Studio 407, Nan Flanagan gave them a shout-out on Twitter today (a Twit-out?) and I thought I would include that:

RT @simondyda: http://studio-407.com/np/np... looks like fun

Both NanFlanagan and simondyda are from the AVL, which we covered a few days back.

Speaking of HBO, did you catch the season premiere of Flight of the Conchords? Relax, they've already shown it about 2340970912093470971097405097029874090784 times since last night, so you aren't likely to miss it no matter how hard you try, but you have to see it! Literally a laugh a minute! (I know they also premiered it online, but I pay for HBO, so I actually opted to wait.)

American TV has become so enraptured by the soap opera concept of "filler" (different from "padding"), which is basically - and literally - the scripting of nothing at specific intervals: the intervals at which viewers are most likely to be doing other things. If you are thinking to yourself, "What about commercials?" well... you're starting to get why there's such a high turnover in TV writer-dom.

This is not a theory of mine, mind you, this is a real practice: "filler" is written into shows so viewers don't miss something important and the practice started with soap operas. Dramatic developments are strictly scheduled to fall in beats and before (commercial) breaks. If you think you are going to "shake things up" by going against this formula, well... you're not. (You'll still get work though, the head writers will just edit your work to match the formula and consider you "slow" - and you'll eventually give-in so you can get an actual writing credit, which results in actual residuals.) Filler has become even more prevalent these days because so many of us multitask.

Because TV in other places of the world do not handle commercials the same way we do here, this is not something they have to deal with (which is why I wanted to work for the BBC or another channel like it), so TV shows are still actual events designed to watch. And Flight of the Conchords is precisely that - even moreso because of the musical interludes: you can "watch" it and laugh at the dialogue and enjoy the music, but you will get much more out of it if you actually sit down and watch it.

Um, what else? Let's see...

Oh! I will be gone tomorrow - wait, I covered that. Contest. Some template editing. About that, Blogger has this whole "gadgets" thing and part of what I'll be doing is trying some of those out in place of the scripts and coding already present, so it may be touch-and-go for a bit on that front. Also, there are so many tags that I am going to add another box o' ads or two. Yes, I'd like to make a few extra cents here and there, but it also looks so... stark when you get toward the bottom of the scroll; I need something to break-up the negative space.

I'll try to schedule a few things to run while I'm away tomorrow, so you won't miss me.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008