not falling down

I will probably never love another episode of television as much as I love Battlestar Galactica, season 3, episode 9, “Unfinished Business.” And not just because it has images like this:

I’ve spent at least the last year and a half (actually, more like seven years, since my undergrad Drawing I class) being obsessed with this limited-tone art style. I called it “rotoscoping” once, and Lisa and Will jumped on me because there’s no animation involved, so I have to admit that it’s actually what people call “tracing.” But selective tracing.

As was likely very obvious to anyone in my family, and as I only realized yesterday, my playing around with tone is blatantly derived from my uncle John’s painting and wood engraving work, especially his portraits of my grandfather (which he often combines with layered collage). Mr. Olmos there has some features similar to his, like the disappearing eyes which Ian and I inherited. I hope I get to look that craggy eventually. Right now people are still asking me what my major is, despite the obvious gray in my hair.

I almost forgot to mention that this is the first thing I’ve ever inked with the brushes I bought in 2003, and although it was a lot slower than my usual pens, I completely get why cartoonists get so excited about it now. There’s a feeling of dynamic control over the line weight that you just can’t get with pens, even the brush pen with which I inked a lot of later Xorph strips. (Not that there are actually any distinct lines in the finished images below. Good.)

So I made a picture and it’s a wallpaper if you want it: the images below link to 1600×1200 and 1600×1000 (widescreen) jpegs. There’s also a browser-sized version if you just want to zoom in a bit.

PS Can Battlestar Galactica be back on now plz

Update 2008.01.26 0001 hrs: Naturally, UJ has a much more cogent post on the subject (the art, not Battlestar), along with one of the portraits I was talking about.

The sitcom is killing sketch comedy.

Maria was emailing around this one Muppets bit from Seth Rogen’s stint on SNL and she apologized if anyone had already seen it, but, as she pointed out, “nobody watches SNL anymore.” This is hardly news. SNL’s function now is not so much to be watched as to give Andy Samberg Emmys for songs that have a penis joke. The only reason I’d even set it playing on the Tivo was because they had Spoon on, marking the first and only time I’ve deliberately watched the show for the music.

The rest of the show was factory standard, a very careful reenactment of the weekly SNL ritual (is it really a coincidence that part of the show actually airs on Sunday?). The freshest joke was a Macgyver reference. Macgyver ceased production before some of you were born.

I’ve mentioned here before that sketch comedy is unprofitably hard; not coincidentally, I was talking about Studio 60 at the time, like I’m about to do now.

Studio 60 had a running thing where one of the writer-performers wrote and led a commedia dell’arte sketch in several episodes, evidently so Aaron Sorkin could demonstrate that he took Intro to Theater History. The focus groups hated it but the head writer heroically kept it in until it could build an audience (”Matt, Matt! This week two guys in Dallas liked it!”). There are a few problems here.

1. Commedia dell’arte isn’t funny.
2. At least, not in and of itself, and not anymore; humor needs context, and a modern audience–even an audience that took Intro to Theater History–doesn’t have the same context as one composed of 16th-century Venetians.
3. Dated and ritualized forms of comedy getting inexplicably more popular every week is the kind of thing that can only happen in fiction.
4. Unfortunately for Studio 60, it can’t happen believably even there.

Now, could you write a funny sketch that incorporated the stock types and exaggerated physicality of commedia dell’arte? I doubt it. What you could do is write a ten-minute play or one-act, which gives you the time to introduce the conventions to the audience, set things up going in a direction that the tropes predict, upend the whole thing and finish with a telling and funny point about the form’s influence on modern writing.

Studio 60 tried to go a lot of places, but that wasn’t one of them. Sorkin, bless him, doesn’t do reexamination; he does reverence.

This is where I get back to SNL, as revered an institution as exists in modern television, nowhere moreso than within itself. Like Studio 60, it can’t bear self-examination; the brand of comedy in which it traffics is built high and shakily on mannerisms that date back to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, or even Abbott and Costello. It persists entirely due to inertia and the occasional breakout YouTube bit (ever noticed, by the way, that those look and sound like nothing else on the show?).

Now, when every network ran three or four sitcoms and they all made use of the same stylized rhythm as sketch, that was enough: they supplied each other with context. But sitcoms don’t work that way anymore. Poetically, it’s due in part to Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night that shows like Arrested Development, The Office and My Name is Earl were able to take hold and eventually shatter the studio-audience / three-camera format.

I misstated my thesis at the beginning; it’s not so much that sitcoms are killing sketch as that sitcoms have been its life support, and now they’re pulling plugs out, one by one. If the dependency holds, SNL has about as much time left as Two and a Half Men. Both of them are rigid guardians of their genre and flagship shows. Personally, as Matt Boyd once said about syndicated comics, I want to punch a hole in that boat.

When you make a show about kids in high school, you are making a show about people who are almost always more clever, brave, and resourceful than any adult, but who are surrounded by authority that limits them, ostensibly in their best interest: teachers, parents, prurient laws and condescension. You are making a show about the struggle against that authority. You are making a show about the agency of disenfranchised people.

And that’s why it’s so hard, and maybe impossible, to make the leap to college–the conflict is gone. Despite some nice moments, Veronica Mars hasn’t handled it well, and my understanding is that Buffy couldn’t either. Let’s not get into Dawson’s Creek. Even Six Feet Under had to keep Claire off campus except for (apparently) one class. And this is the same logic that started killing Scrubs: once JD, Turk and Elliot became residents and gained some authority of their own, the show began drifting from drama-with-jokes-in toward straight comedy.

I’m afraid for the last Harry Potter book, if he really doesn’t go back to Hogwarts.

Me: (scrolling through Tivo) We have a couple of Novas…

Maria: What are they on? …No, I’m not interested in those.

Me: But this one has lemurs!

Maria: No. No. You know what they should make one about?

Me: What?

Maria: Unicorns.

I’m only posting this so I can talk to people on the LJ comment feed about tonight’s Battlestar Galactica.

Okay, Sorkin. That time you set the bar.

Now clear it.

To do meta well, you must first do well the thing within. Checkerboard Nightmare did metahumor and it worked, because Kris Straub was already a skilled humorist; by contrast, almost all webcomics attempt it within their first couple of weeks and fail, because their creators haven’t developed any skill at comedy. So you can see why I’m worried about Studio 60.

Not that Aaron Sorkin’s not a funny writer–with Mitch Hurwitz out, he’s the funniest writer on network television–but he’s not a sketch writer. Sketch comedy is hard, and even harder to do consistently. The best writers in the history of the format have had a hit rate of maybe one in five; even in the age of viral video, the only success Saturday Night Live has found on the intertube was a fluke that relied on hip name-dropping and the tired joke of white guys and gangsta poseury. And that’s out of what, three hundred skits a year? William Hung has a better batting average.

Even if Studio 60 focuses mostly on the weekly downtime and not the show proper, eventually it’s going to have to back up its premise that Matt Albie is good at his job. That means showing us a sketch at least every few episodes. Last night they went as far as showing us the cold open, and it was just a joke they made five minutes earlier repeated to music. It was a nice dramatic moment, with the orchestra and the bold statement of purpose. But it wasn’t funny the second time through, or the third, or the tenth.

A special case of the Law of Meta is the Law of Writing A Character Who is a Writer. The law is: don’t. Doing so almost invariably turns into massive self-indulgence and, worse, annoys me. Even Sports Night couldn’t escape that toward the end. And given that Studio 60 is already nicking from SN (homage to Felicity Huffman, fights with Standards and Practices, I understand next episode the power goes out), well, you understand why I’m worried again.

But I want to see the next episode now.

Rob Thomas has been invited to my birthday party since 1998, of course, but I’m a little surprised myself that Jason Dohring is the first actor from Veronica Mars to be invited. Okay, that’s all. I’m done! I promise not to post about Veronica Mars anymore, even though it’s ALL I THINK ABOUT WHERE ARE THE NEW EPISODES WHERE WHERE

Also, added “my birthday party” to the War on Clarity.

Tonight, pizza at 7, show at 8. Our place. You’re invited. Arrested Development: The Wake.

The shooting scripts for Firefly. I borrowed a book on television writing a while back and never read it; I think these will be more valuable.