Comfort Food, Rod Serling and Joss Whedon
Jan. 2nd, 2004 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatEveryone has their favorite comfort food, and for some reason the best ones are made by Mom. Mine are "Greek Metballs with Rice" and "Lasagne" and they have to be made by Mom. Over the holidays, Mom kindly made most of my comfort foods - some of which I haven't had since a child. Just the right thing for a recovering chest cold. Still have the remanants of it. (From my quick perusings of Friends live journal entries - I'm not the only one who got sick this holiday season. Boy, when they say it's the worst cold/flu season ever, they weren't kidding. At least 65% of the people I know online and off seem to be sick or have been sick. Frightening. Reminds me of a Stephen King novel.)
Speaking of colds - Comfort drinks included a great recipe for sore throats and coughs: Hot Toddy - this is basically hot water, whisky (Mom used Jack Daniels), lemon juice, and honey. Very nice. Was my grandfather's recipe. My grandmother uses Cherry Herring. Another helpful remedy is peppermint tea. I've also used honey, ginger root, lemon tea.
On December 29th, I watched a very interesting American Masters presentation on Rod Serling, entitled Submitted for Your Approval - Rod Serling. Below are thoughts inspired by the presentation and how much of what I saw reminded me of Joss Whedon's work and the current media climate.
Rod Serling was a television writer in the late 1950's and 1960's. During his tenure, he won 6 emmys, three for Playhouse 90 and three for Twilight Zone. All before the age of 44. In 1975, he died of a heart attack at the age of 50. He had written over 80 teleplays, most of them for Twilight Zone, three screenplays, and created two series, hosting a third.
During those years of success, he was known as the "angry television writer" who continuously fought with network executives. His biggest fight was over a cancelled Western that he poured his heart into - called The Loner. After less than ten episodes, CBS pulled the plug. It starred Lloyd Bridges, featured dark noir themes, and was character driven. CBS wanted action, adventure, and comedy. They wanted gun-fights, chase scenes, people saving people once a week. Serling insisted that as long as the viewers had characters they could identify with and a good story, they'd be happy. Action wasn't necessary to keep their interest. The network disagreed. This fight reminds me a great deal of Joss Whedon's fight over Firefly. Like Whedon, Serling believed the network bought his idea, but the network hadn't. Like Whedon, Serling had spent several years working on an innovative series with little interference from the network. (Serling sold Twilight Zone to the network, by writing a tailor made pilot, carefully focusing on themes and ideas he knew they wanted to see. In interviews, he lied about his intent - stating he wasn't going to address controversial social issues and it would just be a fantasy show. When Twilight Zone got picked up - Serling did whatever he wanted. The network got upset, but ratings were good and Serling's producers got them to back off. Serling was lucky. This experience is very similar to Whedon's with Angel and BTVS.) When The Loner was cancelled, Serling fell into a depression. Unlike Whedon, he did not fight to market the series elsewhere - but he also didn't have the avenues Whedon currently has. In the 1960s - there were only three networks. There wasn't DVD or video tape. And studios rarely turned a television show into a film.
It wasn't the first time a show he was involved with got cancelled - Playhouse 90 was cancelled in 1959 by Jack Aubrey, who believed the era of live television drama was dead - the advertisers and audience really wanted situation comedies not social issues, not gripping drama. Playhouse 90 - was an anthology series - once a week it would feature a new one hour teleplay live. Plays such as Marty, Days of Wine and Roses, Requiem for A HeavyWeight, Patterns, In the Presence of Mine Enemies were featured on Playhouse 90, Kraft Theater, Westinghouse Studio One, and United Steel Hour. The writers ranged from Rod Serling to Paddy Chafesky. If you've never seen Playhouse 90 and live in New York City - check out the Museum for Television and Radio - they may have tapes of it. Days of Wine and Roses was later made into a movie starring Jack Lemon and Lee Remick, the original starred Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie. Requiem for A Heavyweight - Rod Serling's contribution to Playhouse 90, which won him his second emmy, starred Jack Palance, Ed Wynn and Kim Hunter - it was about a prizefighter who yearned for the heavy-weight title, but had to quick fighting before he could achieve it. The story dealt with the fighter's humilating struggle to find work outside of fighting, outside of what he loved to do and was best at. It also dealt with the ways others profited off of the fighter's misery. As stated above - the death knell for this wonderful series of live plays was a man named Jack Aubrey - a new network exec hunting the next big trend - and he found it in the situation comedy. In a way the same thing that happened to Playhouse 90 and The Loner - happened to Joss Whedon, Fox cancelled Firefly and WB reluctantly picked up Angel because they felt the time for sci-fi/fantasy dark character dramas was past - the recent failures of dark fantasy shows such as "Haunted", "The Others",
"Birds of Prey" seemed to prove this. Meanwhile - over on the other networks - Fox noticed a new "popular" trend - reality programs, family oriented situation comedies and dramas. These were not only cheaper to produce they were getting high ratings.
The sci-fi stuff they discovered was wicked expensive and it wasn't family oriented. Shows such as Everwood, Survivor, The Bachelor, Everybody Loves Raymond, were getting higher ratings. So they cancelled Firefly and purchased programs like The Simple Life, Hotel Paradise, The O.C., Tru Calling, and Arrested Development. Each program had one thing in common - it was either a reality program or more importantly "family oriented" in some way. The age of gothic, noir, supernatural, or sci-fi cult programs was over - these had been popular in the 90s, but the tide was turning. Now the market demanded cheaper to produce reality programs and family-oriented dramas - a la Joan of Arcadia, Everwood, The O.C. Like all trends, we'll see a steady pro-lification of these programs, until ratings drop and people stop watching them. I give the reality trend two more years before it gets killed off and goes the way of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire and its assorted rip-offs. Every product has its life cycle - this one is now in the maturation stage - give it a year or so and we'll see the decline. Ratings are already beginning to drop off. They've almost run out of ideas. In two more years? Most of them will be gone.
Okay, a bit of a confession - I despise reality shows, but understand the public's compulsion to watch them. I think it's a combination of curiosity factor and sadisim. But there's only so many variations before people begin to get bored. I get bored pretty fast. The only reality shows I like or deign to watch are the home improvement, food demonstration, make-over shows - but even those get really boring after a while. There's only so many ways you can give someone a make-over or re-do a house before you start repeating yourself and your audience flips the channel.
People have a short attention span.
What hit me about Serling - was here's a man who has it all - a great childhood, early success - and he felt unfulfilled as if something was missing. This is where he seems to veer away from Whedon, although I get the feeling Whedon is also unsatisfied. Wanting more. Serling wanted to be Eugene O'Neil or Arthur Miller - he wanted to have written a play, yet never threw his hat in the ring. He felt he was mediocre - yet is remembered as one of the best television writers we've had. A true Master. He wanted to be Hemingway instead of being happy with being Rod. Of course there were other pressures - pressures that make me appreciate those Twilight Zone episodes a bit more - 1) Having to churn out so many scripts at such a rapid pace. He went from writing a script every 6 months for Playhouse 90 to writing a script every 42 hours for Twilight Zone. 70 scripts in a two-year period. That's 70% of the series. He also executive produced it.
2.) He was constantly trying to better himself - prove he was better than his last script, that this wasn't all he had, while combating the fear that he would lose the ability to write all together.
Serling described writing as an obsessive compulsive desire - that is solitary and selfish in practice, so much so that you don't so much choose it as succumb to it. It would take him days to pound out his first teleplays and he received over 40 rejection letters before one person - an agent took pity on him. He was represented by this agent for an entire year - before he produced and sold his first script - Patterns to Playhouse 90, which was an overnight success and won him an emmy. In this way, he differs from Joss Whedon, who has yet to win an emmy, yet has won a Hugo and a Saturn.
It was the rigor of the Hollywood lifestyle - the cigarettes and booze that killed Serling at 50. By that time, he'd more or less left Hollywood for Ithica New York where he taught screen-writing to a bunch of students. Serling was seduced by the lifestyle of the celebrity. He loved being onscreen. Onscreen he looked tall and slender, in real life he was a small man at 5'5. Yet on the screen he looked 6'. And he did sell out - doing commericals and talk shows.
Before he left Hollywood - Serling wrote a couple of films - the best known were the original Planet of The Apes and Seven Days in May - both noirish in tone and existentialist. He felt they were mediocre.
Serling seems to be a man who never really appreciated his own success. His works reflected his fears, anxieties, and desires. He liked two types of characters - those who could be saved and those who couldn't. His teleplays for Twighlight Zone which included The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, Eye of Beholder - dealt with themes of redemption, second chances, and prejudice. They were in essence short noir films. Much like the episodes of Angel The Series or Whedon's cancelled Firefly. Each demonstrated a wry sense of humor and an ironic twist. Serling's love of irony colored his work. Anyone who has seen the original Planet of The Apes - won't forget the irony of the ending - where the astronaut played by Charlton Heston discovers the planet ruled by the apes is actually Earth - just many years in the future. The nightmare world he's been attempting to flee is in fact his home planet, Earth. He has realized his own worst nightmare.
Serling like many sci-fi and noir writers, specifically Whedon - wrote about his own fears and anxieties, he explored what scared him most, what troubled him, and how he viewed the universe. The fears he explored were universal fears - fears of the unknown, the future, loss of control, realizing your own potential. By exploring these fears he was able to guell them, to make them less overwhelming for himself and his audience. Yet at the same time - he forced us to see ourselves and our fears in a new light, to see the murkiness of our nature. Serling did not explore the safe corners of the human psyche, he explored the murky ones, the ones that lay in shadow. He like Whedon wasn't interested in simple themes or the battle between good and evil or black and white, he was interested in grey and the complexities of the human existence. Serlings characters were more often than not anti-heros. They were flawed. And because of their flaws, they were more real. More human. Serling's brilliance lay in his ability to make his characters real. To make his fears actual and in doing so, force us to look at ours. Twilight Zone is not an easy series to watch, it's not comforting, it's a series you watch from the edge of the sofa - it's like Buffy The Vampire Slayer or Angel the Series - dark, pulls out your heart, stomps on it. No easy answers are given. Only questions.
So if Serling was so brilliant (he won six emmys), why did he write so many teleplays about failure, about not reaching his potential - the most famous being the Twilight Zone episode The Velvet Alley - starring Art Carney and Jack Klugman. In that episode the television screen writer sells out to Hollywood, dumping his agent in the process. He reminds me a bit of the character Saleri in the movie Amadeus, a composer who is so envious of Mozart's greatness that he attempts to destroy Mozart. Yet is unable to see his own greatness, his own potential, which was the ability to see greatness in others and to mold that greatness, to teach and to advance. A gift Saleri takes for granted or saw as cursed. Serling seems to see his own gifts as mediocre - why am I not like Arthur Miller, he thinks. But we already have an Arthur Miller - what we don't have is a Rod Serling, whom I personally preferred.
While walking with my Dad on the beach, December 31 - I asked this question: "I wonder if we miss our own potential, our own gifts, due to the emotional tendency to envy others?" Dad responded that it was part of human nature. Everyone envies or wants what they don't have - we're all constantly comparing ourselves to the other guy. He compared himself to his more atheletic and whom he perceived as brighter - younger brother, just as I compare myself to mine. From a distance they look that way but they aren't not really. Hemingway wanted to be Fitzgerald. Twain - Dickens...the list goes on. We envy that which we think we want - gifts we perceive are better than our own. Whedon envies Sondheim or Peckinpaugh or Speilberg. We envy Whedon. It's sad in a way to waste so much time and effort on envy.
Speaking of colds - Comfort drinks included a great recipe for sore throats and coughs: Hot Toddy - this is basically hot water, whisky (Mom used Jack Daniels), lemon juice, and honey. Very nice. Was my grandfather's recipe. My grandmother uses Cherry Herring. Another helpful remedy is peppermint tea. I've also used honey, ginger root, lemon tea.
On December 29th, I watched a very interesting American Masters presentation on Rod Serling, entitled Submitted for Your Approval - Rod Serling. Below are thoughts inspired by the presentation and how much of what I saw reminded me of Joss Whedon's work and the current media climate.
Rod Serling was a television writer in the late 1950's and 1960's. During his tenure, he won 6 emmys, three for Playhouse 90 and three for Twilight Zone. All before the age of 44. In 1975, he died of a heart attack at the age of 50. He had written over 80 teleplays, most of them for Twilight Zone, three screenplays, and created two series, hosting a third.
During those years of success, he was known as the "angry television writer" who continuously fought with network executives. His biggest fight was over a cancelled Western that he poured his heart into - called The Loner. After less than ten episodes, CBS pulled the plug. It starred Lloyd Bridges, featured dark noir themes, and was character driven. CBS wanted action, adventure, and comedy. They wanted gun-fights, chase scenes, people saving people once a week. Serling insisted that as long as the viewers had characters they could identify with and a good story, they'd be happy. Action wasn't necessary to keep their interest. The network disagreed. This fight reminds me a great deal of Joss Whedon's fight over Firefly. Like Whedon, Serling believed the network bought his idea, but the network hadn't. Like Whedon, Serling had spent several years working on an innovative series with little interference from the network. (Serling sold Twilight Zone to the network, by writing a tailor made pilot, carefully focusing on themes and ideas he knew they wanted to see. In interviews, he lied about his intent - stating he wasn't going to address controversial social issues and it would just be a fantasy show. When Twilight Zone got picked up - Serling did whatever he wanted. The network got upset, but ratings were good and Serling's producers got them to back off. Serling was lucky. This experience is very similar to Whedon's with Angel and BTVS.) When The Loner was cancelled, Serling fell into a depression. Unlike Whedon, he did not fight to market the series elsewhere - but he also didn't have the avenues Whedon currently has. In the 1960s - there were only three networks. There wasn't DVD or video tape. And studios rarely turned a television show into a film.
It wasn't the first time a show he was involved with got cancelled - Playhouse 90 was cancelled in 1959 by Jack Aubrey, who believed the era of live television drama was dead - the advertisers and audience really wanted situation comedies not social issues, not gripping drama. Playhouse 90 - was an anthology series - once a week it would feature a new one hour teleplay live. Plays such as Marty, Days of Wine and Roses, Requiem for A HeavyWeight, Patterns, In the Presence of Mine Enemies were featured on Playhouse 90, Kraft Theater, Westinghouse Studio One, and United Steel Hour. The writers ranged from Rod Serling to Paddy Chafesky. If you've never seen Playhouse 90 and live in New York City - check out the Museum for Television and Radio - they may have tapes of it. Days of Wine and Roses was later made into a movie starring Jack Lemon and Lee Remick, the original starred Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie. Requiem for A Heavyweight - Rod Serling's contribution to Playhouse 90, which won him his second emmy, starred Jack Palance, Ed Wynn and Kim Hunter - it was about a prizefighter who yearned for the heavy-weight title, but had to quick fighting before he could achieve it. The story dealt with the fighter's humilating struggle to find work outside of fighting, outside of what he loved to do and was best at. It also dealt with the ways others profited off of the fighter's misery. As stated above - the death knell for this wonderful series of live plays was a man named Jack Aubrey - a new network exec hunting the next big trend - and he found it in the situation comedy. In a way the same thing that happened to Playhouse 90 and The Loner - happened to Joss Whedon, Fox cancelled Firefly and WB reluctantly picked up Angel because they felt the time for sci-fi/fantasy dark character dramas was past - the recent failures of dark fantasy shows such as "Haunted", "The Others",
"Birds of Prey" seemed to prove this. Meanwhile - over on the other networks - Fox noticed a new "popular" trend - reality programs, family oriented situation comedies and dramas. These were not only cheaper to produce they were getting high ratings.
The sci-fi stuff they discovered was wicked expensive and it wasn't family oriented. Shows such as Everwood, Survivor, The Bachelor, Everybody Loves Raymond, were getting higher ratings. So they cancelled Firefly and purchased programs like The Simple Life, Hotel Paradise, The O.C., Tru Calling, and Arrested Development. Each program had one thing in common - it was either a reality program or more importantly "family oriented" in some way. The age of gothic, noir, supernatural, or sci-fi cult programs was over - these had been popular in the 90s, but the tide was turning. Now the market demanded cheaper to produce reality programs and family-oriented dramas - a la Joan of Arcadia, Everwood, The O.C. Like all trends, we'll see a steady pro-lification of these programs, until ratings drop and people stop watching them. I give the reality trend two more years before it gets killed off and goes the way of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire and its assorted rip-offs. Every product has its life cycle - this one is now in the maturation stage - give it a year or so and we'll see the decline. Ratings are already beginning to drop off. They've almost run out of ideas. In two more years? Most of them will be gone.
Okay, a bit of a confession - I despise reality shows, but understand the public's compulsion to watch them. I think it's a combination of curiosity factor and sadisim. But there's only so many variations before people begin to get bored. I get bored pretty fast. The only reality shows I like or deign to watch are the home improvement, food demonstration, make-over shows - but even those get really boring after a while. There's only so many ways you can give someone a make-over or re-do a house before you start repeating yourself and your audience flips the channel.
People have a short attention span.
What hit me about Serling - was here's a man who has it all - a great childhood, early success - and he felt unfulfilled as if something was missing. This is where he seems to veer away from Whedon, although I get the feeling Whedon is also unsatisfied. Wanting more. Serling wanted to be Eugene O'Neil or Arthur Miller - he wanted to have written a play, yet never threw his hat in the ring. He felt he was mediocre - yet is remembered as one of the best television writers we've had. A true Master. He wanted to be Hemingway instead of being happy with being Rod. Of course there were other pressures - pressures that make me appreciate those Twilight Zone episodes a bit more - 1) Having to churn out so many scripts at such a rapid pace. He went from writing a script every 6 months for Playhouse 90 to writing a script every 42 hours for Twilight Zone. 70 scripts in a two-year period. That's 70% of the series. He also executive produced it.
2.) He was constantly trying to better himself - prove he was better than his last script, that this wasn't all he had, while combating the fear that he would lose the ability to write all together.
Serling described writing as an obsessive compulsive desire - that is solitary and selfish in practice, so much so that you don't so much choose it as succumb to it. It would take him days to pound out his first teleplays and he received over 40 rejection letters before one person - an agent took pity on him. He was represented by this agent for an entire year - before he produced and sold his first script - Patterns to Playhouse 90, which was an overnight success and won him an emmy. In this way, he differs from Joss Whedon, who has yet to win an emmy, yet has won a Hugo and a Saturn.
It was the rigor of the Hollywood lifestyle - the cigarettes and booze that killed Serling at 50. By that time, he'd more or less left Hollywood for Ithica New York where he taught screen-writing to a bunch of students. Serling was seduced by the lifestyle of the celebrity. He loved being onscreen. Onscreen he looked tall and slender, in real life he was a small man at 5'5. Yet on the screen he looked 6'. And he did sell out - doing commericals and talk shows.
Before he left Hollywood - Serling wrote a couple of films - the best known were the original Planet of The Apes and Seven Days in May - both noirish in tone and existentialist. He felt they were mediocre.
Serling seems to be a man who never really appreciated his own success. His works reflected his fears, anxieties, and desires. He liked two types of characters - those who could be saved and those who couldn't. His teleplays for Twighlight Zone which included The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, Eye of Beholder - dealt with themes of redemption, second chances, and prejudice. They were in essence short noir films. Much like the episodes of Angel The Series or Whedon's cancelled Firefly. Each demonstrated a wry sense of humor and an ironic twist. Serling's love of irony colored his work. Anyone who has seen the original Planet of The Apes - won't forget the irony of the ending - where the astronaut played by Charlton Heston discovers the planet ruled by the apes is actually Earth - just many years in the future. The nightmare world he's been attempting to flee is in fact his home planet, Earth. He has realized his own worst nightmare.
Serling like many sci-fi and noir writers, specifically Whedon - wrote about his own fears and anxieties, he explored what scared him most, what troubled him, and how he viewed the universe. The fears he explored were universal fears - fears of the unknown, the future, loss of control, realizing your own potential. By exploring these fears he was able to guell them, to make them less overwhelming for himself and his audience. Yet at the same time - he forced us to see ourselves and our fears in a new light, to see the murkiness of our nature. Serling did not explore the safe corners of the human psyche, he explored the murky ones, the ones that lay in shadow. He like Whedon wasn't interested in simple themes or the battle between good and evil or black and white, he was interested in grey and the complexities of the human existence. Serlings characters were more often than not anti-heros. They were flawed. And because of their flaws, they were more real. More human. Serling's brilliance lay in his ability to make his characters real. To make his fears actual and in doing so, force us to look at ours. Twilight Zone is not an easy series to watch, it's not comforting, it's a series you watch from the edge of the sofa - it's like Buffy The Vampire Slayer or Angel the Series - dark, pulls out your heart, stomps on it. No easy answers are given. Only questions.
So if Serling was so brilliant (he won six emmys), why did he write so many teleplays about failure, about not reaching his potential - the most famous being the Twilight Zone episode The Velvet Alley - starring Art Carney and Jack Klugman. In that episode the television screen writer sells out to Hollywood, dumping his agent in the process. He reminds me a bit of the character Saleri in the movie Amadeus, a composer who is so envious of Mozart's greatness that he attempts to destroy Mozart. Yet is unable to see his own greatness, his own potential, which was the ability to see greatness in others and to mold that greatness, to teach and to advance. A gift Saleri takes for granted or saw as cursed. Serling seems to see his own gifts as mediocre - why am I not like Arthur Miller, he thinks. But we already have an Arthur Miller - what we don't have is a Rod Serling, whom I personally preferred.
While walking with my Dad on the beach, December 31 - I asked this question: "I wonder if we miss our own potential, our own gifts, due to the emotional tendency to envy others?" Dad responded that it was part of human nature. Everyone envies or wants what they don't have - we're all constantly comparing ourselves to the other guy. He compared himself to his more atheletic and whom he perceived as brighter - younger brother, just as I compare myself to mine. From a distance they look that way but they aren't not really. Hemingway wanted to be Fitzgerald. Twain - Dickens...the list goes on. We envy that which we think we want - gifts we perceive are better than our own. Whedon envies Sondheim or Peckinpaugh or Speilberg. We envy Whedon. It's sad in a way to waste so much time and effort on envy.
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Writing about failure
Date: 2004-01-03 07:54 am (UTC)Great to see you back.
Rufus