TV Wisdom Applied to The Huffington Post: Pilots Always Suck

I collect TV show pilots.  I haven't been good about it the last few years, but down in the basement I have tapes of a generation of TV pilots.  They're fun because the long-familiar background stuff and character traits have to be established.  So we have, in the pilot for MASH, one observer explaining to another that Hawkeye and Trapper John are surgeons so brilliant the Army has to put up with them, that Major Burns is a doofus, and that the horrible tragedy of war is never far away. 

All that background information is called "exposition," and a year later the writers don't have to mess with it anymore.  The audience knows that Kramer is wacky and Raymond's brother has psychological issues and that Fish has hemorrhoids.  Looking back at the pilot of a long running show is enlightening because, no matter how good the show ended up being, all that necessary exposition meant one thing: The pilot sucked.

Which brings me to Arianna Huffington's gangblog.  The immodestly titled Huffington Post debuted a couple of days ago and may not be the disaster Nikke Finke says it is, even though it's pretty bad.  It's bad for the perfectly understandable reason that it's basically a pilot: All the voices and themes and characters have to be established, so for a while the characters are all going to stand there and tell us about themselves instead of doing something interesting.

I accept that because every new medium takes a while to sort out what works and what doesn't.  Back in my TV days we used to figure it took about three episodes to "find the show," as we used to say, and it's not different in magazines or anything else. 

That said, The Huffington Post may be bad for other, less curable reasons.  Those reasons are: Famous Hollywood People and Serious Journalists. Famous People and Serious Journalists are the basis of Huffington's business plan, and are slated to provide most of The Huffington Post's content.

First of all, Famous Hollywood People.  Famous People are, generally, confused.  They imagine that they're interesting because no matter what they're talking about people listen and no one ever tells them that what they're saying is stupid. That's because you don't get to hang around with famous people for long if you tell them theyr'e stupid, and it's fun hanging around Famous People.  Famous people get into good restaurants and don't have to pay for things the way normal people do.

For example, I was hanging around with a moderately famous friend a few years back, bar hopping in Chicago.  At one particularly crowded place, a waitress approached my friend and asked if he was who he looked like he was.  She said if he was, the manager wanted to buy him and his party a drink.  I, being a Not Famous Person, would have said, yes, I'm he, and accepted drinks for my party of two.  My friend, being famous, entertained himself by pretending he'd come in with an entourage, and got drinks for about ten people who happened to be standing near us in the crowd.  It was, if you think about it, kind of an ass hole move, taking advantage of the generousity of a complete stranger.  But it was, for those of us who got drinks, really funny and proof that my moderately famous friend is clever and charming.  Which, by the way, he is.

My moderately famous friend, like lots of Famous People, can spout off on all kinds of subjects and no one tells him he's stupid, even though he sometimes is.  People don't tell him he's stupid because when we're hanging around with him we sometimes get treated as if we, ourselves, were famous, and there really is nothing better than being treated like you're famous.  After years of living in that kind of reinforcing world, my friend occaisionally thinks he's smarter than everyone around him.  Or he would, except for the fact that he has two brothers who don't put up with any of his shit.  They keep him honest.

Apparently, not all Famous People have that kind of support system.  Take, for example, Haim Saban, who contributed this complete entry to The Huffington Post, somehow thinking it adds value to people's lives:

What is happening in Iraq is much more an issue of Sunni and Shiite conflict than it is about America. Decade-long conflicts have been reawakened. Whether we should act like a police state is a legitimate question for us to ask. If we don't build military bases, and we leave Iraq, what kind of chaos would ensue? This is no longer about whether we should have gone to war or not, it’s about what’s the right thing to do now that we are there.

Uh, great, Haim, but, uh, the first part of your posting is factually wrong -- the Sunni/Shi-ite thing goes back way further than a decade -- and the second part is pretty much the point half the blogworld has been making for about the last 18 months. So it's not interesting, really, except that it's being said by Haim Saban, who thinks he's interesting because no one tells him he's not. Certainly, Ariana Huffington isn't going to tell him, since her business plan is dependent on keeping famous people like Haim Saban on board.  So Haim Saban, who really must have better things to do with his time, opines a few banalities about Iraq and Huffington gratefully posts them.

Unfortuantely for Saban, out here in blogworld, removed from the context of his 3,000 square-foot corner office, his private jets and his access to elite restaurants, banality enjoys no camouflage.  What he wrote doesn't seem interesting or insightful at all, and there are lots of kibbitzing nobodies like me who are perfectly willing to say so.

The other half of Huffington's content plan for The Huffington Post shows little additional potential.  To balance the Hollywood vacuity, Huffington has coaxed a subgroup of Serious Journalists to post on her groupblog.  That's a bad idea, too.  Everything that's wrong with Real Journalists Blogging is evident in this opening paragraph by Newsweek Senior Writer Charles Gasparino:

Eliot Spitzer, the New York Attorney General has become America's No. 1 corporate crime fighter. But he's also been hammered recently for publicly attacking his latest target: former AIG chairman Hank Greenberg. Spitzer along with the SEC and the Justice Department have been investigating AIG, a huge insurance company, and Greenberg, its long-time CEO for possible accounting violations that may have improperly boosted the company's earnings.

Gasparino is no doubt a talented and accomplished journalist who went to way better schools than I did.  But you can tell from his first sentence that he has no idea how blogs work.  Successful blogs shred journalistic convention first by assuming that readers aren't stupid.  And then, because an awfully lot of readers really are stupid, successful blogs use the power of the medium to provide the kind of background exposition that weighs down both Gasparino's lede and TV pilot episodes.  Gasparino, in his text, should have assumed that we know who Elliot Spitzer is, since Spitzer has been in the news for the last five or six years.  But then, for those people who don't know who Spitzer is, Gasparino should have included a handy hyperlink to a bio of Spitzer. 

Blogs, like movie stars, don't do exposition.  The first rule of screenwriting is that the star never gets stuck giving background information.  The star doesn't explain that the cavalry is massing because Billy Bob over the hill kidnapped the Platt twins from over t' Abilene.  Some bit player gets that boring job, and when he's done he usually gets shot and killed because he's not needed anymore.   

Stars, in movies, do action.  The star waves his sword and shouts, "Charge!" 

Blogstars do the blog equivalent of action, which is attitude.  Or, to put it in more conventional terms, point-of-view.  Here's how the above paragraph would have read if the writer had been a real blogger:

Corporate arch-nemesis Elliot Spitzer is after another generation of book-cooking CEOs, and the forces of evil are massing to take him down.

That's really all it needs.  No bullshit background to slow things down, no belaboring the obvious for a few rubes who don't know who Spitzer is, and no convoluted sentence structure.  (Though, to be honest, I'm a big fan and self-indulgent user of convoluted sentence structure.)  People read blogs quickly; filling them with exposition is a lot like serving appetizers wrapped in complicated plastic.  No one will bother.

For now, I'm giving The Huffington Post the benefit of the doubt.  I'm assuming the site is suffering from pilot-itis.  But we'll see, in the next few weeks, if Arianna and her menagerie can go from being a bunch of big-name amateurs to actually putting something up that someone will go out of their way to read.  To do that, she's going to have to get both her pampered Hollywoodians and Big Time Journalists doing what they're not doing now: Writing interesting things about interesting things.

Comments

[NewMexiKen]

You really are a smart guy. No exposition required, right?

[michelle]

I'm not complaining. My other blog hangout, MemeFirst, is on the blogroll which is no doing of mine, I'm just a contributer.