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#WGFestival 2016

#WGFestival 2016

The 2016 WGFestival occurred this past Saturday on 3rd and Fairfax.
Panels were pretty stacked with one about The CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (with Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna), another with the room of Netflix’s Jessica Jones, a third with John August and Craig Mazin talking to Lawrence Kasdan, and a last one with DCTV writers from the Berlanti camp.

I was unfortunately unable to attend, but a few Twitter aficionados were in attendance.
On Sunday, I checked out the event hashtag to see what people tweeted about. This led me into a rabbit hole of compiling interesting/relevant tweets from folks in the audience (most notably from the super-duper Mike Roe).

Here is the curated #WGFestival list:




Granted, there aren’t that many, probably because people were busier listening than typing tweets.

Speaking of, I should probably get back to my spec…

Write on.

Brazil… Which is where we were.

Brazil… Which is where we were.

Tonight, we say goodbye to Adult Swim’s Childrens Hospital after seven seasons and over 80 episodes.

The show started out amid the writers’ strike, in 2008, as a web-series on TheWB.com.
Yes, that WB.

Post-strike, Childrens Hospital got picked up by Adult Swim, making it the first-ish web-show to jump to television. (And still kind of the only one still around.)

It had everything you could want from a live-action night-time 12-minute comedy:
Jokes, hospitals, cameos, non sequiturs, self-deprecating characters, irreverent humor, spin-offs, and Brazil…
Which is where we are right now.
(Fun fact: they actually flew to Brazil just for that running gag.)

As a commenter said over at the AV Club:

I have nothing but love for Childrens Hospital. Not only did it remain hilarious throughout its run, but it did a brilliant, ambitious job experimenting with different storytelling formats, especially given its 12-minute time slot. It got super-meta without ever becoming inaccessible or weird for the sake of weird, and it stuck to its own established continuity, with the history of the show-within-a-show (except for when it didn’t).

You can turn to BBF LaToya Ferguson (also at the AV Club) for great analysis on what made those experimental minutes of television so special.
Just this season, Childrens Hospital had an episode spoofing 1950s variety shows, a black-and-white exploration of one of their meta-characters, and their own take on plots from I Love Lucy.

If you’re a fan (or are becoming one), you’ll be excited to learn of the many interviews posted about the show this week. I highly recommend reading two specific ones:
– The oral history of Childrens, published by WIRED, featuring a bunch of the players & writers; and
– Inverse’s off-the-cuff sit-down with Rob Corddry and Rob Huebel
(How have I not realized until now that they share the same first name?)

As an avid watcher of both Childrens Hospital and Party Down, I must conclude this post by sharing an all-time favorite episode of mine (thankfully available on the interwebs)…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB6J6965WU4

Here’s to hoping they do an inevitable reunion show within the next few years.

Why Academics Love “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

This week, Katherine Schwab from The Atlantic published a great extensive piece about the scholarly interest in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The article talks about the kind of TV studies that’s been happening for years, but I’m glad it’s finally going mainstream after over a decade.

I highly recommend the read, even if you’re not a Whedon fan.

Here’s a short excerpt:

Buffy scholars have taken dozens of different approaches to understanding the television show or using it to further work in other disciplines. In the decade since it went off the air, a Stanford University population ecologist used mathematical formulas to determine potential vampire demographics in Sunnydale, the fictional California town where the show is set. A strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the prominent Washington, D.C. think tank, compared Buffy’s war against the forces of evil to the U.S.’s war on terror and named a new paradigm in biological warfare after the fictional vampire slayer. An English-language historian and linguist published a lexicon of ‘Buffyspeak,’ the insider name for the particular slang and expressions used in the show (Examples include: “Love makes you do the wacky,” “What’s with the grim?” and “She’s the Do-That Girl”).

Read the full article

As a bonus, you can check out this Emily Nussbaum piece (also about Buffy and TV criticism) I mentioned last year.