Mike McPhaden‘s first post from Montreal: Comedy is serious business. It can make people rich, famous, and sometimes, even laugh. Which is why some of the comedy world’s most serious funny people are decsending upon Montreal for the first annual Just Comedy Conference. The two day conference, set smack in the middle of the 26th [...]
Just when I thought the leak season was over, two new pre-airs have showed up. The Mentalist is about a mentalist (what else?) turned private eye and is created and written by Bruno Heller who wrote Rome. East Bound and Down is about a pro-baseball player who returns to his hometown to teach phys ed. [...]
When I go to the cottage next week, I’m taking Writing the TV Drama Series by screenwriter Pamela Douglas. I bought it on the recommendation of Scott McEwen and even though I haven’t started it yet, I have peeked ahead to her interviews with some of the great showrunners. Douglas calls them guest speakers and [...]
Karen Hill is our guest blogger today with a review of the 90210 pilot script: Forget the 20th century Darren Star series where Brenda worried about a lump in her breast, or Kelly tangled with a date rapist, or Donna’s graduation is jeopardized by her failure to respect the Beverly Hills High dress code. No [...]
Image via WikipediaDMc tagged me with the latest music blog game going around: “List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now.†There’s a generosity about those instructions, isn’t there? An [...]
Just when I was getting ready to complain that none of the pilots were being leaked this season, the torrents are starting to appear: True Blood, Fringe, Pretty Handsome, Do Not Disturb, Life on Mars are out there now. True Blood, Fringe and Life on Mars seem like major properties to me and I find [...]
J.J. Abrams‘ series Fringe has been picked up by Fox, probably for mid-season. The series is a sci-fi cop show with elements of romance and plenty of action. The female lead is an FBI agent who investigates Fringe science phenomena: OLIVIA: They gave him the resources to do whatever work he wanted, which was primarily [...]
I’m presenting Story2Oh! tonight at CaseCamp. CaseCamp is a marketers-meet-technology forum in which four cases are presented and discussed. On tonight’s bill: TD bank, RedFlag Deals, a cool little YouTube project to help with Sick Kids fundraising and of course, my dirty little storytelling project. There are a bunch of rules for how to present [...]
I’m feeling a little sad for you right now because there’s a good chance you’re never going to see my favourite pilot of the year. Sabbatical created and written by Peter Mitchell is not just a perfect little piece of screenwriting, it’s also the foundation for what could be a creepy and story-rich television series [...]
quarterlife is premiering on NBC so maybe it’s time to take a look at what they’ve been doing on the web. quarterlife is the product of writer-heroes Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick who gave us two landmark tv series: thirty-something and My So Called Life. Their web drama series has been available since November. There [...]
