Way Too Much About The Offer
Part I: Some Thoughts On Violence On Television On Violence On Television & Film
There's something of a pattern on antihero TV shows (especially but not exclusively murderous antiheroes), and that pattern has a lot to do with what the writers think of the audience. It's relatively recently that TV shows could center around a "bad guy," and while The Sopranos didn't create this genre, it certainly innovated it. The pattern is roughly as follows:
1. This show is about a murderer, unlike the other shows on TV that are mainly about horny doctors or angry cops or whatever
2. But! You'll kind of like this murderer, because he's not the one-dimensional monster you see when a murderer shows up on the shows about horny doctors or angry cops or whatever
3. Like: this murderer has panic attacks and is in therapy, or is a lowly high school teacher with cancer, or just realized he wants to be an actor
4. You kind of love this murderer
5. Well uh haha gross you love a murderer. Do you love him if he does this? What about this? What about this? Gross, you do.
6. You, audience, are gross and should feel gross. You are complicit with violence by enjoying the show in a way we, the people making the show, are not.
7. Our show is considered a masterpiece that takes violence seriously in a way no other show does.
Stage 5 (Haha gross you love a murderer, what if he just got worse?) can be the longest stage, often running long after the show's premise is exhausted. HBO's Barry, which recently completed its third season, is on this stage. There is a mini-arc at the beginning of this season meant to introduce other kinds of violence for Barry to perpetrate in order to teach us, the audience, that violent people are violent (I actually really enjoy the show, I don't mean to be too snide about the parts of it that fit this pattern). Barry, a hitman/aspiring actor shows up at his girlfriend (Sally)'s workplace to back her against a wall and scream at her in front of her coworkers and subordinates.
Part of what's making this interesting is the other details of the story - Sally is writing and starring in a TV series based in part on her own experience escaping an abusive marriage. Her show is pointed and didactic, and direct about what constitutes abuse. She doesn't recognize yet that she's repeating old patterns with a new violent man. It is further chilling that the young woman playing her daughter on her TV series seems to be the only person who cares. The young actor talks to a few people who acknowledge that Barry is scary and violent but none of them are willing to rock the boat and do something about it (and what would they do?).
In this, its critique of the entertainment industry post-#MeToo, Barry is being its most incisive. Everyone knows the exact right words to say, but nobody but an actor with the most to lose is willing to step up and fix a work environment made toxic by an abusive man.
It's upsetting to watch but demonstrates something of a shifting tide. For comparison, let's look at a show that ran a few years ago, Epix's Get Shorty adaptation. The show was never particularly good with the huge exception of the love story between cartel queen Amara (Lidia Porto) and movie producer Rick (dramedy king Ray Romano). The premise of the show, similar to the movie and the book (the movie > the book > the series), is about a gangster who decides to become a movie producer. On Barry, Barry's off-kilter personality gives him an edge as an actor; on Get Shorty, Miles (Chris O'Dowd) used gangster violence to be an effective movie producer. Though Get Shorty clearly didn't intend to endorse or celebrate violence, it struggled not to repeatedly underline its demonstrated thesis that gangster violence was a good way to get things done in passive-aggressive Hollywood. This balancing act got even harder as more information came out during the show's run about men like Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin, major players who more or less used gangster violence to get things done in passive-aggressive Hollywood.
Which brings us to Paramount+'s series The Offer, a miniseries about the making of The Godfather, from the perspective of the least interesting person involved. As plenty of critics have noted, The Offer is not very good. This show, starring Miles Teller as producer Albert S. Ruddy, is about how producer Albert S. Ruddy managed to produce The Godfather just by swaggering around and talking about how much he doesn’t play by the rules. For the most part, “not playing by the rules” refers exclusively to his habit of going to talk to people without setting a meeting first.
To watch the show, one would assume that Albert S. Ruddy decided one day to make TV and movies and was perfect at it because he was smarter than everyone else (and didn’t play by the rules [never got a meeting on the books]). Everyone stood in the way of The Godfather getting made - Puzo, Coppola, Evans, Bludhorn, the mob - but Albert S. Ruddy was gonna make that movie and he didn’t care how many dinners he was going to have to crash to do it. Ultimately, of course, it is only through friendly collaboration with the Colombo crime family that the movie can be made. Even in a miniseries about a movie about the insidiousness of gangland violence, it's so tempting to laud gangsters for keeping Hollywood running.
I'd like to slightly shift gears here to discuss why The Offer was the right series for Paramount+ to make at the right time, even if it’s bad, which it is.
Part II: Bubble Boy
Waist deep in the big streaming wars, it can be very funny to watch companies pay ridiculously too much for content and inflate a bubble that’s bound to burst. It is a fact that there is an upper limit to how much television people can watch, and when we reach it, this part of the industry will collapse. If there was a way to bet on the streaming bubble to burst the way Christian Bale’s character in The Big Short bet on the housing bubble bursting, I’d do it and be a billionaire and finally leave twitter for good. I don’t know of a way to make money off the fact that HBO is bragging that their new Game of Thrones show costs less than $20 million per episode to produce, so what I can do is talk about it here, on whatever Buttondown is.
Working in an inflating bubble is stressful, so it’s funny to watch the streaming platforms scramble to build brand identities before it’s too late. Time Warner is well and truly fucked if they think they can absorb Discovery+ and bundle all their media companies into one thing and have a name that anyone will recognize (even now, if pressed, could you describe what sort of things are on HBONow? Trick question it’s called HBO Max and it has Joe Pera Talks With You.
The one company built to withstand this is Disney, who since being run by Jeffrey Katzenberg (a snake that I cannot quite completely literally accuse of being a literal gangster) cannot not make money. You can complain about which of their properties you like or dislike, but they have a model and it works for them. This is part of why it's ironic that fascists have recently started accusing Disney of being progressive - it's not, it's just looking for ways to make money from people previously alienated by its brand. They know exactly how to spin off every property and are ruthless about eliminating the ones that aren’t profitable enough.
Beyond that, perhaps most importantly, Disney has a brand identity that people inexplicably love. Disney is synonymous with labor suppression, Lost Cause racism in children’s cartoons, and being so tight-fisted that the company has been referred to within the industry as “Mouschwitz” for decades. But also they are so beloved that there is such a thing as Disney Adults. Human adults like you or me who enjoy going to their theme parks and looking at lists of what movies they will release in the future. And by successfully gobbling up IP everywhere they can, Disney has made Disney Adults of Star Wars fans and Marvel fans and countless other helpless lost souls.
Nobody else can do this. Other studios may have some kind of brand identity - my personal favorite is MGM, whose brand identity is “leasing movie premises to be made into TV shows so we can afford to make a new Bond movie and save our company.” I realize, of course, that it’s no great honor, but it’s no shame either. Just know that if each Bond movie doesn’t make a hundred billion dollars on opening weekend the entirety of MGM becomes a Spirit Halloween on Monday.
Now here comes Paramount+, whose main claim to fame is “It’s where Star Trek is.” As discussed in Season Finale, being where Star Trek is can be a great way to make money but it’s an awkward way to build a brand because not a lot of things go well with Star Trek. You may have seen some of Paramount+’s ads, where they pretend that the mountain in their logo is a real mountain where the characters from their properties are hiking and camping together (more or less their version of the “Oh What A Night” ads from my youth). If you want to see SpongeBob SquarePants hang out with a pouting character from The Good Fight, these ads are for you (this can also be confusing for anyone not aware of the very funny ways that CBS, Viacom, and Paramount have bought each other every few years for decades). The ads are decent way of making people aware of what they can find on Paramount+, but not really what Paramount+ is.
The Godfather was, of course, a Paramount movie. The action takes place largely on the Paramount lot, and it’s probably the only dramatic story that can be told whose characters include executives at Gulf + Western. By telling a story set at Paramount in the 70s, does The Offer retread material found in Robert Evans’s The Kid Stays in the Picture? You bet your ass it does. But that’s when Paramount really was at its most romantic, for a certain type of person (like the nerd writing this). Unlike Disney+, Paramount+ doesn’t need to focus on children and adults who think like children. Unlike Apple TV, Paramount+ doesn’t need to have content restrictions based on a tech company culture. Paramount is free to build out from the freewheeling coke-snorting 1970s, when the New Hollywood was reinventing film by making slightly better movies than a generation prior, this time with cursing and boobs. Paramount seemed poised to make a movie about the making of Chinatown, but it looks to be stalled. Perhaps a miniseries is in order.
While The Offer is unoriginal and hearkens back somewhat to Get Shorty, it is most like the Disney movie Saving Mr. Banks, wherein Tom Hanks plays Walt Disney trying to convince Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers to let Disney make Mary Poppins. Initially she says no because she’s a cranky Australian, but once Tom Walt Disney Hanks shows her around the Disney lot, a magical place where dreams come true, her walls come down and she is transformed from cranky Australian to Disney Adult (not unlike Russell Crowe's casting in Thor).
For a few years many years ago I was an aspiring TV writer living in Hollywood. Like a lot of aspiring TV writers living in Hollywood, I took various menial jobs within the entertainment industry as illusory stepping stones to a writing career. My favorite parts of those jobs were the days spent on studio lots. For one thing, you could often sneak onto soundstages and watch filming or wander around empty sets, as I did often when I worked near Parks & Recreation. But for me, what was really exciting was just walking around. Some lots, like Universal, have small cowboy streets, short areas that look like the Old West on film and in person look like flimsy cardboard. Many have New York Streets - the Fox lot has a great one. CBS Radford has a small pond that allegedly was once the shoreline on Gilligan’s Island. I once had a job interview on the Warner Brothers lot (I didn’t get the job) and afterwards I just wandered the lot. Rounding a corner I looked up and suddenly knew exactly where I was. The set dressing had hanged, but the large open space I had stumbled upon was once Stars Hollow's town square. As a matter of fact, it was a magical moment for me and a treasured memory from an otherwise lackluster career. Luckily there's no such thing as a Warner Brothers Adult. Just an HBO Max one.
SCREEN TIME: SOME THOUGHTS ON AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF CHILDREN'S MEDIA
I've been very interested in dialogue around Bluey's parents and how parents at home feel watching it. It certainly speaks to a dearth of involved fathers in children’s television.
PBS Kids’s The Cat in the Hat is interesting. It’s not a great show, but the Cat is voiced by Martin Short. But more to the point, it’s much tamer than the book as I remember it. The kids always ask parental permission to go on adventures, an idea that makes sense to me but I wonder if we’re missing something without the freewheeling anarchy of some of Dr. Seuss’s work.
WHAT'S NEW ON GH LATELY
Carly sold her half of the Metro Court Hotel so she could do a lot of insider trading. Her insider trading went wrong (but she hasn’t faced legal repercussions), and Nina bought Carly’s half of the hotel. She offered to gift the hotel half back to Carly, but Carly was like “I’ll never take anything from you.” And now everyone is mad at Nina for being like “Well I guess I’ll co-run this hotel that I co-own now!” Sorry to be a Nina apologist so often but what do people expect her to do?? The hotel half was for sale!
TAGS
This broadcast's theme song is the Bob James Trio recording anew James's all-time great theme song from Taxi, "Angela": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqw3UNXUdbU It really is beautiful.
Live in Front of a Studio Audience, a show I often like but have some ambivalence toward (and might write more about soon), may be recreating the episode Maude's Dilemma, in which Maude (Bea Arthur) gets an abortion. If they do, Rhea Seehorn should play Maude. Someone start a campaign.
Abbott Elementary, a great network sitcom that I wrote about previously, redirected some of the show’s marketing budget to buy supplies for teachers. The show's second season will have 22 episodes!
I still plan to write the thing based on interviews soon, but before then I might have to write about what a Quibi show has in common with a 1997 semifictional memoir.
"'Take care of yourself and each other.' - Jerry Springer" - Harry Waksberg