My Life In Television

Newsgroups: alt.kids-talk
Subject: Re: hi again....
Organization: Zygon Invasion Force Advance Scouts


In article <9gme0c$u1i$1@diamond.ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>,
Matthew Skala <mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca> wrote:
>In article <DYrX6.275647$eK2.56942758@news4.rdc1.on.home.com>,
>Chris Reuter <chris@home.com> wrote:
>>It seems that the computer science club is undergoing upgrades.  My home
>
>My fault, probably.  Everywhere I go, I arrive just in time to have just
>missed the good old days.

Hardly.  The good old days ended _years_ ago.




                        --Chris


...currently waiting for my sitcom to be renewed.

See, my life used to be sitcom, one of those ensemble cast things like
Cheers, only it was about a bunch of twenty-something generation-X
geeks sitting in a small, cramped and smelly office and talking about
technology and life while drinking bad flavoured coffee.

It had it all--laughs, relationships, oddball characters, loud music,
romantic tension, cyberpunk coolness and that whole sense of welcome
familiarity that those sorts of shows seem to provide.

Of course, it didn't last.  Everybody got old.  The better characters
graduated to better roles and the ones that stayed behind just got
older and less believable, like a thirty-year-old Gary Coleman still
trying to pull off the old "watchyew talkin' about" schtick.

It should have ended gracefully, I suppose, but you know how network
executives are--they want to milk a franchise for its last dollar.
And so, a once-good show runs on and on like an aging porn star until
nobody can stand to watch it anymore.

I got out once the wrinkles really started to show.  The network
offered me a spinoff and I took it.

It was a romantic "couple comedy" with lots of guest appearances by
characters from the old show.  It did OK for a while, but started
tanking halfway into the second season and got canceled.

C'est la vie.  I really should have seen it coming.  It was one of
those ideas that works really well in the short term but doesn't hold
up to years of weekly episodes.

So right now and for the last four years, I've been in backstory.
These are the bits that I'll look back on in the next series.
Hopefully, that won't be some lame one-time reunion special.  I'd like
to think I have more depth than that.

Actually, I'm shopping around a pitch for a new show right now, one
about an up and coming SF writer.  I'm not sure yet how it's going to
go, whether it'll be comedic or deep or intense or all of the above at
the same time, but that just makes it more interesting.

Heck, I don't know whether it'll get off the ground at all.  I've
gotten some good vibes from the networks over this thing and that's
encouraging, but there's nothing anywhere near certain at this point,
so I don't know.

So right now, I'm guardedly optimistic, which is a lot better than I
used to be.

Hmm. I don't think I can fit this tagline in eighty columns.  Sorry...