Archive for April 6th, 2023

Notes on popular culture.

Thursday, April 6th, 2023

These tweets are a few days old, but I think they are still relevant.

Here are some links for background:

“Inside Amazon Studios: Big Swings Hampered by Confusion and Frustration“.

“Hollywood Focus Groups Choose Fake Show Over Woke Show“.

This is for Lawrence:

I had Amazon on the other day so I could watch a couple of episodes of “Judy Justice”, and caught a trailer for “Citadel”. I watched the whole thing. “Citadel” looks like an expensive, beautifully produced show about “hot spies”, with excellent production design…

…and after watching the trailer, I have zero interest in watching even one second of the show.

The “Fake Show” article cites a story (not attributed to Amazon in the original article, but tied to Amazon by other sources) about an A-B test of two shows.

The A show was a proposed real show about a lesbian POC law enforcement officer who breaks up with her girlfriend, moves to a southern town, and “is shocked by the racism, sexism and abuse of power of her new colleagues as well as their poor relations with the communities they serve. With few friends, she doesn’t know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys anymore and has to watch her back on and off duty while she tries to initiate change both in her department and in her community.”

The B show:

Two young detectives (two white guys, one Ivy League and the other a good o’l boy) are partnered in Vegas where they cultivate informants, recurring girlfriends, every episode includes a fistfight with chairs and bottles flying, every second episode has a car chase, alleys with blowing newspapers, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, unnecessarily overpowered firearms, muscle cars on the strip, Vegas location used to the hilt – from grungy and run down to full on glam, an explosion per episode, tough police chief who supposedly hates the two rookies but he really has a heart of gold, good natured camaraderie among officers, helicopter unit heavily featured along with a K9 as a semi regular. Vegas is Vegas, cops are good, bad guys are the bad guys and they either get shot, blown up or caught and go to jail.

…

The production house went on to pitch show A to a couple of streamers (one was Netflix) with a few modifications. It was always their intent to pitch show A, show B was only there as a control, an assemblage of classic cop show beats to learn from. Here’s the kicker: While episodes for show A where adapted outlines done by the real writers of the proposed show, show B episodes where quickly hacked up adapted old episodes of Starsky & Hutch, with the car swapped out for a Dodge Challenger. Very little effort was put on the audio and the animatics (we objected at the discrepancy in quality of the presentation materials)… but it didn’t matter…. Show B popped huge, just huge! The leads, the chief, Vegas, the women, explosions, the helicopter, the Car, the Dog! All!

I have two thoughts on this:

1. I would watch the crap out of “Vegas Detectives”.

2. I’ve written before about the “Mannix” episode “Death in a Minor Key” (season 2, episode 18) which has the same theme of detective goes to a Southern town and confronts racism.

Without spoiling that episode (much) it goes in a different direction than you’d expect from the initial setup. If the producers of “Mannix” knew in 1969 that the “Southern racist” plot was already cliched, and did interesting things with it instead, why didn’t the producers of “Show A” figure that out for thenselves?

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