Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2009

Bad TV I Keep Watching, Part 1

1. Chopped, on the Food Network

Chopped is the Food Network's answer to Top Chef.  Or, better yet, the answer to this question: "How can we make a show that sort of combines the premises of Top Chef and Iron Chef, but in a way that is not interesting at all, and looks like it was filmed in a basement?"

On Chopped, which I will assume no one else in the universe is watching, four chefs I have never heard of are given a basket of mildly dissonant ingredients and 20 minutes to make an appetizer with them.  Three judges I have never heard of evaluate the dishes and eliminate one chef.  The three remaining chefs are given a new basket of mildly dissonant ingredients and 30 minutes to make an entree.  One more is eliminated.  The final two chefs are given a new basket of mildly dissonant ingredients and 30 minutes to make a dessert.  One wins $10,000.  The other does not.  They all go home, and the following week there are 4 new chefs.

Chopped is frustrating because the problems with the show are mostly not about the concept, which I think is fine, but in the absolutely horrendous execution:

-- The show looks like it's filmed in a basement kitchen somewhere.  Maybe it's the lack of natural light, or the lack of a studio audience, but something about the filming makes the show feel so completely irrelevant to anything.  On Top Chef, the chefs go out into the world, they shop at the supermarket, they interact with each other, you get the sense they really care about the competition, and they want to impress the judges, and there are some stakes.  Here, you get the sense they plucked some chefs off the street and forced them to take part in this show.  It doesn't even really seem like they want to be there.  They're all crammed behind a counter and not given enough room to work.  We don't get to know much about them at all.  The show just feels empty.

-- For whatever reason, no products seem to have agreed to let the show feature them, so every ingredient is labeled with a generic, intern-produced label, like "CORN" or "BEEF."  So even when you know it's a bottle of Heinz ketchup, it's been covered with a white sticker and labeled.  It makes the show look really cheap.  This is a tiny nitpick, but it really makes a difference.

-- The chefs don't seem very good.  One week, one of them dropped a piece of meat and served it anyway.

-- Top Chef works in part because we get to see chefs creating food we might like to eat.  Iron Chef works because the chefs are forced to be creative with the secret ingredient.  In Chopped, they occupy the boring middle ground between these two approaches -- chefs are forced to create unappetizing food no one would ever want, because no one would ever mix the ingredients they are given.  Putting canned peaches, rice cakes, tofu, blueberries, and a lamb chop together into a salad is not appealing, and even if the contestants can figure out a way to make it palatable, who cares?  No one will ever make this at home, and they're not really given enough time to do something super cool, so it's just all a pointless exercise in sticking to the rules of the show.

-- The judges then pretend the rules don't really exist, by saying things like "the rice cakes didn't really go with the peaches at all, those are very hard ingredients to use together."  Well, fine, but you forced them to.  Or, "you didn't cook the lamb long enough, lamb needs three hours to get tender."  Well, fine, but you only gave them twenty minutes.  So what do you expect?

-- And contestants seem to do best when they use half the forced ingredients as garnishes and basically get around the rules.  So that's no fun.

This show is no fun at all.  It is a mess.  It is the worst cooking show I can imagine.  And yet I keep watching it.  I should be prevented from continuing to watch it.

Time Stands Still

I saw this Donald Margulies play last night at the Geffen Theater.  I've linked to the LA Times review, but don't read it if you're going to see the play, because it's got spoilers -- I'm glad I didn't read it before seeing the show.  I really like Margulies -- his plays very directly deal with interesting life issues in thought-provoking ways.  This one's about a photojournalist who returns from Iraq with war injuries, and there's some stuff about the merits of photojournalism (taking pictures of suffering as opposed to working more directly to stop the suffering) but the big issue the play deals with is ambition and seeking an "important" life versus finding contentment in routine and stability.  So, definitely touched on some of the career-related angsty stuff I blogged about a couple of weeks ago.

It's been a little while since I've seen a play in a theater -- I went to so many more of these things in New York, partly because of the price, partly because I had more people to go see shows with, partly because there is so much more new, interesting, compelling theater in New York.  I'd forgotten how homogenous the theater audience is.  My friend and I were probably the youngest people there, by ten years or so, and I don't think I saw anyone who'd look out of place in, say, a 1940s corporate boardroom (and their wives).  The Geffen is adjacent to the UCLA campus, but I don't think there was a single student there.  Theater is too expensive, and too irrelevant, and that's unfortunate because a lot of theater is worth seeing.  Certainly more worth seeing than a lot of movies and television.

Then again, you think too hard and pretty much everything is irrelevant.  There are TV shows on cable that over a hundred people work on, that writers and actors spend years dealing with, and a relative handful (for TV audience numbers, anyway) of people watch.  There are movies that people spend years on and they never get made, or go straight to DVD.  Can't get sucked into this vortex of thinking virtually everything is irrelevant.  Need to climb out of it.

St. Lucia

Quick question -- anyone ever been to St. Lucia?  My fiancee and I are thinking about honeymoon ideas and have enough airline points to cover the Caribbean and places like that, but not Europe.  Wondering if anyone's ever been to St. Lucia and has any recommendations/warnings about it.

NY Times Magazine

Michael Lewis's article about basketball player Shane Battier is really excellent.  I don't really watch basketball, and have only barely heard of Shane Battier, but the article's still awesome.

Fantasy Baseball

This really neat fantasy baseball league I'm in has an opening, and I figured I'd post and see if anyone reading this is interested in joining... it's an auction keeper league -- every year you get 4 one-year and 2 two-year contracts to assign to players, based on their auction price, and the stats are computed using a points formula that tries to mimic actual real-world baseball value.  30 players per team, 10 teams, we each pay $125 and the top 4 split the money at the end, I can't remember exactly the formula.  Weekly transactions.  It's pretty competitive, the owners are all pretty knowledgeable, Nate Silver from Baseball Prospectus was in the league the first year (this is year 5), it's a lot of fun.  The auction on April 4 will eat up your entire day (either in person in New York or via Skype/cell phone/etc from elsewhere) but after that it's not really any sort of time commitment except keeping up with your team, replacing injured players, responding to trade offers.  If you're already in other fantasy baseball leagues you know the drill.  This one is more fun than the others though, because the auction and the other owners all know what they're doing.  E-mail me if you want more info.  The team that's available has Delmon Young and Joey Votto already under contract, and Mariano Rivera, Joakim Soria, Brandon Phillips, and Jermaine Dye all up for being contracted at very reasonable values given their stats.

Grandma update

A couple of people have e-mailed to ask, since I haven't posted about her in a while.

She's not really getting better, which sucks.  She's not really getting worse, which is good.  For those who don't read regularly: she's 92, she had a stroke in May, roughed up her short-term memory but physically she's doing pretty well.  She gets around okay, she can go places and enjoy things, she knows who everyone is, she can have conversations... but it's not the same.  Nothing sticks, and she gets confused.  I call her every day, mostly because I know she likes to hear my voice, but a little bit so she doesn't forget me.  If she's not reminded of things, and even if she is reminded of them, she forgets them.  A lot of days the conversation is pretty much the same.  Where I am, what I'm doing, some version of "when are you getting married?" and "what month is it now?" and it's like everything is new again every day.  I'm in California, I'm writing, the wedding's in May, yes everything's set for it, and there's a magnet on your refrigerator that says the date, and, yes, the magnet's been there a while, and, yes, I'm feeling okay, and, yes, I'm eating okay, and, yes, I know you love me, and no, I'm in California, and, yes, I'm getting married in May, and, yes, I'm feeling okay.  Some days are better than others, some days I catch her at the right moment and she remembers a lot and she makes a lot of sense and it's almost like she's still herself and we can have half a real conversation.  And then some days she's confused about where she is, and how many people are living with her, and yesterday she was asking if she'd been dead and just came back to life that morning, and whether she's sick, and if she's ever going to be okay.  And today she was saying the house didn't feel like her house, and how come she can't understand what's happening on the television.  She gets bored when she's stuck in the house all day because of the weather, or because she isn't feeling up to doing much.  When she gets out of the house, she's better.  When she talks to people, it seems like she's able to will herself some more coherence, to perform a little bit, to seem like herself in a lot of ways.  And then two hours later she won't remember having talked to them, or who they are.  She's frustrated that she can't read post-stroke, and she doesn't remember she can't until she tries.  She can write -- and she can write perfectly reasonable sentences, that make a lot of sense -- but she can't read back what she's written.  That's as frustrating to her as it sounds like it would be, and it means she doesn't write very much or very often, because as soon as she realizes she can't read it back, it's confusing.  She doesn't remember people she doesn't talk to much anymore.  I mean, sometimes she will, but sometimes she won't.  So I call her every day.  And sometimes she doesn't remember that I call her every day, but sometimes she does.  And when she doesn't remember, she believes me anyway when I tell her, and she thanks me for still thinking about her.  And sometimes she talks about being really frustrated because she doesn't have a purpose anymore, she doesn't see the point.  She can't really do all that much, and she's not getting a whole lot out of what she is able to do, and so what's the reason for even sticking around.  She wants to go to my wedding, when she remembers it's happening, or when someone reminds her about it.  She also wants to make sure we're not sad if something happens and she's not able to.  She talks about dying a lot.  It's sad.  She's not sad about it.  She's resigned to it.  She's lived almost 93 years.  And for 92 of them she was awfully independent and awfully busy.  She misses having meaning and purpose and a reason to wake up in the morning.  She's very aware that things have changed and that she's not who she was.  She's very aware that there's not a left for her to do.  It's very sad.  Sometimes I put off calling her, because, in that moment, I can't bear to be sad.  I'm scared for her.  I'm scared because at some point something is going to happen, and I'm scared it's going to be something that makes this even worse.  Because at least now she's not in pain, she has mobility, she can enjoy the moments even if she can't always remember them.  But something's going to happen, and I worry that she's going to be stuck, even more pointlessly, in pain or in a hospital or in a bed for some amount of time that makes no sense and will just feel like torture to her.  It's sad because it's a slow march to the inevitable, or a quick march, or, I don't know.  And right now it seems she's sort of right at that point in between being herself and not being herself.  Of being able to get anything out of life and being able to get nothing out of it.  She has enough moments of clarity that I think, on balance, right now, she's doing okay.  But it's sad.  It's sad because I miss her, and I miss her most when I'm actually talking to her, or when I'm home and I see her, or when I think about her.  And it's sad because I know that very consciously I'm preparing for when I'm going to end up having to miss her for real.  But it's like every day is practice for that.  And that's sad.  And I wish my grandpa was still here to make it less sad, because all of this makes me miss him even more.

That's the update.  I need a tissue.  Also, now it seems I can't watch hospital shows without tearing up, which is frightening, because if there's any emotion I should be feeling when I watch Grey's Anatomy, it should be incredulity, not sadness.

How Not To Run An Internet-Based Business

My fiancee and I are looking for wedding invitations.  She met with a local dealer yesterday, found a few she liked, wrote down the serial numbers and got the prices.  I searched online and found a site with much lower prices for the same invitations.  Which made enough sense, since things can be much cheaper online, sure.  So I called the site up today, to find out how the online process works -- do we get a proof, etc.  The woman was very friendly, seemed very nice.  I told her I found her site because my fiancee got some prices from a local dealer and hers are much lower.

She said, "Oh, yes, but I should check the current price for you.  The prices on the website are from when I made the site 7 years ago, so they may have gone up since then."

Sure enough, she checked the prices, and they're the exact same as the ones my fiancee got yesterday, because this woman is also a local dealer, and simply decided to expand her business, 7 years ago, by making a website.  And never changing it.

No big deal, we'll just use the local dealer -- but, really, never changing your web site seems like a terrible way to run your Internet business.

Happy Almost Birthday To Me

My birthday's on Wednesday.  I'll be 30.  That sounds so much older than I feel like I am.  That's like really stop being able to pretend I'm not an adult age.  I mean, the wedding in about a hundred days does that too, or at least it should, but, I don't know.  I'm not feeling particularly bad about turning 30, even though it sounds old -- I feel like I've accomplished a decent amount and it's not like I feel some sense of regret or unfulfilled childhood promise that could bum me out about it, the upcoming wedding feels pretty good in that respect too.  Yet I haven't actually planned anything to do for my birthday, which will sort of suck when it's actually my birthday and I have nothing to do, but at the same time I feel like I've been reasonably social the past couple of weeks and have also been fighting a cold I can't completely shake, and so even though most of me is like, yeah, I should send out an e-mail to some people and say we should grab dinner or something, I haven't actually sent that e-mail.  Maybe after this post.  Indeed, I'm going to force myself to do that right after I post this, because I really should not force future-me to have nothing at all to do on my birthday if there's no good reason for it.

I'm going to celebrate my birthday on this blog by finally posting the post I started in draft form about a month ago.  It was going to be my New Years resolution post, but I got cold post-feet about it, so we'll call it my birthday post.  Because a birthday is just as good a time as the New Year to take stock and force some thoughts out of my head and onto the Internet.  Blogging is weird that way -- it's like I've become conditioned to not be able to really let go of something I'm thinking until I type it into a box on my computer screen and press post, even if no one's out there reading.  In any case:

I'm asking the universe for a favor.  I figure this is a good place to start.

I think trying to be a writer is giving me less to write about.  I think I miss getting to be smart.  I think I miss feeling passionate about something and working with other people who are also passionate about it, whatever it happens to be.

I had lunch with a physicist friend this afternoon and, look, I know very little about physics, but I was totally envious that he gets to spend his days thinking about stuff that not everyone is equipped to think about, and gets to try and solve problems that actually matter to the world (he's doing something with carbon dioxide and turning it into a liquid so that it can be turned into a gas again -- the point being to save the Earth in some way, the details beyond that have escaped me but he used the word hydrogenation a couple of times).  The actual details of what he spends his day doing are not my thing -- but they're his thing, and he seemed pretty jazzed about it, and I thought that was pretty cool.

If I was smarter than I am -- really it's if I was bolder than I am, boldness more than smartness, I think -- I would not be in LA doing whatever I'm pretending I'm doing to try and be a TV writer.  I would be doing something else, something inspiring for its own sake, something I could feel passionate about, and then the happy byproduct would be that it would also give me something cool to write about and I'd have something real to say.  But, like with Anonymous Lawyer, the writing would be the happy, inspired byproduct, and the real stuff would be something totally different.

It's no one's fault but my own that I can't manufacture awesome new inspired material out of my own head without experiencing more stuff.  Some people can, and do, and they write great things.  I knew throughout the Anonymous Lawyer novel-writing process that I didn't feel like a novelist, and that Anonymous Lawyer didn't feel like fiction.  Some of you have seen the list of books I read -- I don't read many novels, for whatever reason.

And while I'm awesomely proud of Anonymous Lawyer, and awesomely grateful to the universe for that opportunity, I can't help but feel like it's leading me down a path I'm not terribly suited for, and that's not making me particularly happy.  To be as frank and honest as I can be about what I'm working on right now: Anonymous Lawyer the TV show continues to live in development at Sony, lots of rewrites (including a bunch of work on it the past few weeks -- their option expires in a few weeks, and this is their final push to get it to see some life somewhere, hopefully, although enough time has passed that it feels silly to still have any realistic hope it gets to go any further in the process).  And I'm also working on two other TV pitches that are at various stages in the process, although neither is too far along and it's hard for me to know whether it even makes sense to have any expectations at all with either of them, given just how many projects are out there at any given time, and how many writers are out there, and production companies, all competing for not that many ultimate opportunities.  (It boggles my mind -- and I believe it *should* boggle anyone's mind -- that TV shows are generally sold with a 15-minute sales pitch describing the setting and the characters, rather than with a script.  The script comes after someone's bought the pitch.  This seems crazy to me, since the end result *has* to be a good script for it to be a good show, and just the idea doesn't seem to get you very far toward something necessarily worth watching.  But I may just be overwhelmingly biased by the realistic truth that I'm a better writer than salesman, and that I'm a lot more comfortable executing and delivering than I am pitching and selling.)  I've also written a bunch of TV pilots in the past year and a half, ranging from "I think this one's actually pretty good, I guess" to "I think with this one I'm trying to write what I think people would buy, and in doing so I've written something that's pretty uninspired and soulless and isn't as awesome as I wish it was."

But it's lonelier work that I expected it would be -- you don't get a lot of "let's get a bunch of people in a room and be creative and make this thing awesome" unless you're on staff of a show with a writer's room, and there aren't many staff jobs out there, and there are a lot of awesome writers who have the experience and material to get staffed before me who aren't working, so it's just tough to feel like that path is anything close to a sure thing.  Would be awesome to be on a sitcom staff, but, more than I thought before coming out here, that seems like a really hard thing to try and count on happening, and even if it does happen for someone once, most shows get cancelled pretty quickly and then you're back at square one.

I guess what's been kind of disappointing for me is looking around and realizing people doing this kind of stuff don't necessarily seem more fulfilled or content or happy than people doing all sorts of other things.  Like anything else, it's a job.  And at the same time, I think having things working on the personal side of my life has made me realize that the career side doesn't have to be the thing I have to rely on for all of it -- if I'm not the absolute most successful whatever in the world, I can still be awfully happy and satisfied, and in fact probably more so if I'm not so consumed with worry about the career stuff and am just doing something that I'm reasonably enjoying and is keeping me reasonably engaged.

I feel like during law school I was putting an absurd amount of pressure on myself to figure out how to not end up miserable, and how to not feel like I was wasting my life.  And the fact that I got amazingly lucky with Anonymous Lawyer -- luck I did a lot to create, and luck over a creation I will stand by and say I'm honestly proud of, but still lucky compared to what all sorts of other much more likely outcomes look like -- and got to see that process through, I think has actually taken away some of my ambition.  Having a book published, getting to write a TV pilot, a lot of cool stuff happened with Anonymous Lawyer... but, honestly, it didn't make me any happier than I was before, it didn't change anything about the kinds of things I think about or the kinds of things I worry about.  A lot of the process was neat enough to do once but did not make me terribly hungry to do it again, if I'm being honest with myself.

Which all leaves me sort of mildly curious about whether I should really be trying some other stuff out and seeing what else I could be doing.  If nothing else, to make me appreciate the mere possibility of making a life for myself as a writer, and motivating me to get a lot more serious about what I'm doing and about forcing good material out even when I don't know if it's there, and about chasing down freelance work, and about all sorts of other things I should be better at doing.  Or even to maybe see if there's something out there that might be a better fit, long-term, and not make me feel guilty for every minute I'm not writing, and not make me wonder whether there's really a career path here, and not make me want to idly browse mediabistro job listings some nights.

So from the rambling back to my point: I'm asking the universe for a favor this year, even though I've already gotten my share of favors from the universe and am probably not entitled to ask for any more.  Just for some ideas to push me in a direction.  Can you use me?  Do you know someone who can use me?  For a brainstorm, for a project, for a job?  For ten minutes, for a week, for a year?  

I miss thinking about things, with other people.  If you want help coming up with a name for a cereal you're inventing, that seems like a fun project to work on.  I get strange looks when I tell people this, but I miss working with numbers.  I like numbers.  I like Excel.  I miss using that part of my brain, and I don't know how to use that part of my brain while crafting sales pitches for TV shows that will never get made.  Do you have a project that requires someone to play with numbers?  Maybe I can help.  Do you want to show me your corn field and have me write some web page content about it?  That sounds cool.  Do you want me to riff for 20 minutes about what I think the future of books are, and whether there might be a business opportunity in helping to transform the publishing industry?  That would be fun.  Can I help you train a monkey to open jars?  That seems really cool.

I miss doing things.  I am not bold enough to make myself do things when it is easier to pretend I am working on developing a TV show that will one day see the light of day.  The tiny ray of hope that I am actually doing that keeps me in my chair and leaves me not quite desperate enough to go make myself do something else.  I am scared by the inertia that I cannot overcome, no matter how much I tell myself I need to.

[I'm also a little bit scared that if I can't be satisfied with what I'm doing now -- which is absolutely better than what most people in this world do, and I am absolutely aware that expressing any sort of frustration in my position is terrible and unjustified and lazy and makes me a crazy person (which is why it's taken a month for this post to go from draft to post -- Anonymous Lawyer did nothing if not make me gun-shy about posting stuff like this -- I still haven't read the comments on the last post on the Anonymous Lawyer blog because negative commenters make me sad even when they're right and that's really a good part of the reason why I stopped posting).]

Demetri Martin

These previews of his new Comedy Central show are very funny.  I think he's really funny.  I'm excited for his show.

"The Protestants"

Just wanted to plug a new play written and directed by my friend Eric, called "The Protestants" playing at The Brick theater in Williamsburg (Brooklyn), Thurs-Sat each weekend until February 14th.

It got a really terrific review at NYTheatre.com here, saying the play is "big, funny, sad, unwieldy, messy, frustrating, and poignant. It is also like life—and the best theatre—in that it takes one on a journey that makes the viewer engage head-on. The Protestants is an imaginative, heartfelt, and totally immersive experience that rewards the audience in many ways, including one that is also like life: it is great fun."

(And there's a great interview with him here, which will totally make you want to see the play.)

More information, and a link to buy tickets here.

My fiancee saw it last night and really enjoyed.  I'm disappointed I won't be back in New York again in time to catch it.  Check it out!