R.I.P. Creativity
That shit's creative, yo.
I did a lot of the same stuff in middle school, writing what they call “fan fiction”, wherein I took characters from popular video games that I was a fan of and writing fictional stories about them. Sure, it was a cut above the people who write erotic stories about Star Wars, but I was still just playing around with pre-developed characters and settings, which is sort of like playing with Barbie dolls in a really time consuming, lonely way. On the Internet. And you’re a 14-year-old boy. It’s sort of embarrassing when I look back and realize that all that time I’d spent feeling so creative was really just time spent rehashing stuff I’d already seen. Of course, I’ve grown out of all that, and now I’ve written 400 or so pages of a novel that, if not good, is at least original.
This is one of the many reasons that I am infinitely better at everything in life than the tank full of horny, violence crazed sea cucumbers otherwise known as Hollywood. Let’s take a look at some of the new shows debuting in the coming TV season:
Kath and Kim is a new comedy on NBC about a family of self absorbed suburbanites who get into various compromising situations as a result of their own character flaws. This may sound like a fairly bland, stereotypical idea at first, but here’s the hook: It’s the American version of a very popular Australian show. Yes, God forbid we should think of our own shows – creativity is a lot of hard work best left to foreigners. That’s the sort of arrangement we have going in America today – we send our jobs overseas in exchange for their television shows. Big Brother, Survivor, ABC’s upcoming Life on Mars, and considerably more shows that I don’t particularly want to look up were all created out of the country and bought by American producers after they proved themselves popular. The problem with this is that foreign television audiences seem considerably more mature than their American counterparts, so in a lot of cases, buying a popular foreign show and attempting to broadcast it in the US with American actors is like responding to Oscar buzz by staging an elementary school theater production of There Will Be Blood.
The Cleveland Show gains points from me for not being a cheap foreign transplant, but then it loses them again for being a spin-off, and then it loses all possible points for being a spin-off of Family Guy. Now, I make no secret of the fact that I think Family Guy has set sitcom writing back 10 years by lending credence to the idea that you can cobble together 30 or so dirty jokes and maybe the occasional ridiculously long set piece and call it an episode. With a spin-off created by the same production company, I can only expect more of the same – it’s like the guy who punches you in the throat every day just had a kid, and now the kid is going to punch you in the balls every day, and as you massage your sore throat and balls, you slowly start to realize that this sort of thing is going to catch on, and soon there’ll be thousands of unoriginal little tykes coming out of the woodwork to punch you whenever you let your guard down. Sleeping, you realize, will be very difficult. I’d say that The Cleveland Show has no chance, because Cleveland is pretty much a one dimensional character, but then every character on Family Guy is one dimensional, so I’m sure the show will do fine for as long as the writers can keep up a steady stream of gags starting with “This is almost as bad as the time…”
Knight Rider is the worst of the bunch, though, because it’s a remake. I feel that remakes are both an insult to audiences, because they attempt to sell them a story they’ve already seen in a slightly newer package, and also an insult to the creator of the original product. Imagine that you’ve just made a remarkably tasty ham sandwich for your best friend, but then somebody else comes along and says, “What, you call that a ham sandwich?”, and then proceeds to make a new one on ciabatta bread with avocado and Shia LeBouf. Wouldn’t you feel bad? You poured a lot of yourself into that ham sandwich, but then some interloper comes along and starts using your ingredients to make his own kind of sandwich, and… Well, okay, I guess the original creators usually get a pretty healthy royalty check for the use of their characters, and I don’t suppose anybody can really claim to be the original creator of the ham sandwich, but… Look, I just really like using the sandwich metaphor, okay? The point is, when you’re watching Knight Rider, you’re going to be watching a show that had a full broadcast run and was eventually cancelled due to a decline in ratings - the only reason it’s back is because Hollywood has run out of foreign, spin-off, or (God forbid) original cash cows and is now rooting through its own garbage can in search of the fabled “candy bracelet with a little candy left on it, Mom why did you throw that away there was still candy on it”. In fact, Hollywood has gone Dumpster diving three times before now, resurrecting Knight Rider in two movies and another short lived TV show. Perhaps Knight Rider isn’t so much a candy bracelet in the garbage as it is a broken Pez Dispenser: Hollywood keeps shaking it in hopes that a few more bits of chalky, vaguely bitter hard candy will fall out. So don’t get your hopes up, KITT – Hollywood doesn’t really love you again, it’s just rattling you around to see if you’ve got any more candy in you. Yeah, I think the candy metaphor works a lot better than sandwiches.
I can already hear the telltale rustling of my readership putting on their Angry Pants and preparing to debate me into submission, and I’ll beat you all to the punch by saying that there are most definitely some excellent foreign transplants, spinoffs, and remakes. I love The Office in both its British and American incarnations, I think Fraiser is genius without ever having watched Cheers, and I positively worship the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. The problem, of course, is that for all these good examples there are always quite a few more failures. And to be honest, I have a certain kind of respect for a sucky show that is bold enough to suck in an original way where no sucky show has sucked before as opposed to a show that sucks while riding on the coattails of another show’s success, be it a show from overseas, a show featuring some of the same characters, or a show from the past.
Even a show like The Pitts, which many critics consider one of the worst sitcoms of all time, holds a special place in my heart, because it was its own kind of lame and unfunny, not someone else’s. We can't give the creators of The Pitts credit for making something good, but let's at least give them credit for making something original. The Pitts wasn't a foreign transplant or a spin-off or a remake - it was a 100% unique crappy show. The producers were trying to do something new; they risked it all by not following in the footsteps of some previous show and, in the end, wound up becoming the laughing stock of the television community. But it's okay, because bad original shows like The Pitts are the necessary byproduct of a creative process that has led to amazing original shows like Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks, 30 Rock, and, (say it with me, folks), Firefly.
So, should I ever find an ending for my novel, and should I ever be able to find a publisher stupid enough to distribute it, I will have already won. Sure, the critics may pan it, but so what? No other creative achievement will suck quite like mine, and that’s one thing I’ll always have over Hollywood.
Truman Capps will beat you with a sack of Valencia oranges if you try to argue that Family’s Guy’s ADD scripting is in some way original, because really all it’s doing is taking chunks of 80s pop culture and throwing them into a script like so many marshmallows in a disgustingly juvenile carton of Rocky Road.