What I look for in TV shows

I'm very specific with what shows I give my time to since recently I don't seem to have lot of it. Unfortunately I just finished the episodes of Doctor Who on Netflix and am in this television limbo where I don't have a show anymore. Of course the obvious question now is What should I watch next? I could just passively follow Netflix's intense suggestions and advertisement and watch Orange is the New Black but I don't think Netflix entirely understands my taste. That made me start thinking, what do I look for in TV shows? The past shows I intensely followed were Scrubs, 30 Rock, It's South Park, How I Met Your Mother, Doctor Who, and Arrested Development. The first thing I noticed is that I love shows that can make me laugh. So obviously it'll have to be some kind of sitcom or comedy. All of these shows had very strong characters that I easily Sympathized for. JD from scrubs, The Doctor from Doctor Who, and Ted from How I Met Your Mother are all strong, quirky, but powerful characters. They all have such a passion for people whether they're looking for a wife in Ted's case or they're saving the universe in the Doctor's case. All of these characters demonstrate a passion for people and that's what I think I love so much. It reminds of how we talked about creating a backbone for a character that influences every decision they make. For Ted he's always looking for a wife. For JD it's trying to help the patient. For the Doctor it's protecting all forms of life. That aspect of deeper meaning in shows is what I really love.

The next quality I think the writing. All of the shows I've listed here are so beautifully written. In Arrested Development almost every line is joke that also pushes the story line forward. In Doctor Who there are so many different story arch's beautifully intwined in each other that I can't even comprehend how they do it. For 30 Rock the characters are all so exaggerated but the situations and dialogue they're given makes it all seem like a normal thing.  Southpark still blows me away because they make it all seem so stupid and crude but are still able to make informative statements on current events. That's something I really respect because I have no idea how they do it.

The third quality I think I look for is a show that makes statements about current issues. I feel like it's hard to get a lot of people to informatively look into a current issue and have a stance on it but I think TV can help show people an exaggerated version of both sides. 30 Rock very obviously did it especially during the 2012 election. As I stated about South Park earlier, it does a really nice job on that but it also makes both sides look equally ridiculous so no one group of people feel put off by it. Doctor Who has been involving many characters who represent their stance on same sex marriages. It shows to me that they are paying attention and are really trying to make a difference with their medium.

Going from here and with suggestions from friends I think I will be starting Parks And Recreation this weekend. All I've been hearing about it from friends is how great all the characters are and how good it is.

Karma Catches Up to South Park

It's no secret that the men behind South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, work a tight production schedule. The Emmy-nominated 2011 documentary, 6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park, gives an inside look at how crazy their schedule really is. Like the documentary title suggests, South Park writes, records, animates, and edits each episode in six days. If you know anything about the production process, you'll realize how ridiculous this system is. Most animated shows have the episode written months before the air date. But South Park is unlike any other show out there. This risky set-up allows them to produce topical content, always making a satirical comment on current events. It is what makes South Park such a great show. For instance, the day after President Obama beat McCain in the 2008 Presidential Election, South Park came out with the episode "About Last Night..." Not only do they include the election results, the episode even has excerpts from the candidates speeches that took place the night before the episode aired.

The team has been able to meet each deadline as a result of an absolutely chaotic schedule. On Wednesday, an episode airs. Thursday morning, they enter the studio and brainstorm ideas. By the end of the day, they've thrown together a script. As soon as they arrive on Friday, they begin recording and animating. In the documentary, Parker and Stone admit that Tuesday is usually a 24-hour day. They get to the studio at 9 am and work until they finish, which is often 9 am on Wednesday. Then they send the episode to Comedy Central and it airs that night. Honestly, it's a miracle they went this long without missing a deadline.

After 17 seasons of this absurd production schedule, karma finally caught up with the team. This past Tuesday, October 15th, South Park Studios lost all electrical power for hours. This prevented them from further animating, rendering, and editing in their primitive crunch time. The unfortunately outcome was South Park's first missed deadline, on the show's 241st episode. It seems the creators were destined to miss a deadline eventually with such a down-to-the-wire production method. They have been tempting the production gods for far too long by delivering episode after episode last minute. Still, you have to give it to the team for never before failing to create a new episode from scratch in six days. To make up for not having a new episode, Parker and Stone live tweeted the re-run of classic episode, "Scott Tenorman Must Die."

Trey Parker and Matt Stone in the studio during the blackout, realizing they won't be able to make their deadline.

Missing this deadline does not damaged South Park's reputation in any way. At the end of the day, they're still the only show that brings us offensive, yet intellectual satirical comments on current events in our society. Though Comedy Central may be upset by the missed deadline, this is my opinion on the whole situation. If missing one deadline every 241 episodes is the price they must pay for maintaining the topical content, they must be doing something right. No other crew would be able to pull off such a chaotic schedule, especially in this industry.

South Park Premiere: Season 17?

Just this past week, South Park aired it's premiere to it's 17th season, Let Go, Let Gov. It's was your typical episode with offensive terms, crude humor, and overall makes a relevant message at the end. The two main story themes that we're taking place in this episode was Eric Cartman trying to take down the NSA via social media and Butters thinking that when Eric says "the government is always watching him" that he meant the government is a god like entity watching over the world. Two very clever spins on the whole NSA thing.

In Eric's story he infiltrated the NSA and was trying to bring them down from the inside. While he's talking to the main guy in charge, investigators keep coming up telling them about leads based off tweets and texts about things like "going to the movies," "Do we need milk?" and other daily unimportant things. I think this is hilarious because it makes you think about all of the pointless stupid things people put up on the internet who are also worried that their precious tweets are being spied on. This is further emphasized when Eric discovers a new form of social media that directly broadcasts your thoughts to the internet called "shitter." Through Eric's investigations we discover that the NSA is using Santa Clause's power of watching over all the good and bad children to locate who are the bad people they should be keeping an eye on. Writing like this is what I think makes South Park so successful.

Now in the other half of the episode you have Butters who believes that the internet is a holy spirit/god like entity. I think this is a really clever spin on the paranoia of the government watching over people all the time. He starts confessing his sins at the DMV and slowly starts gathering followers. He even converts a pair of door-to-door Jehova Witnesses to open up their heart to Barack Obama. In the end Butters has turned the DMV into a happy place. I really enjoy Butter's character because in some episodes they have him make these beautifully profound dialogues. Things that you would never expect to hear from a show as vulgar and crude as South Park. In other episodes he discusses how feeling sad is a part of being alive which allows you to feel happy as well as how bullying only tells people that the bully has a miserably sad life.

When I see shows like this, that have been around for 17 years, it just blows my mind. I mean this show is 4 years younger than I am. How do you create and maintain something for that long as well as have it do well? From looking at it, they do have good characters and they keep it focused on recent events. It's also weird to me how these characters have developed because all of the character's personalities are definitely different from their first season yet the same. It's impressive actually because these boys have been 12 years old for 17 years now but the writers have found ways to have them develop without aging them that much. It's even more shocking that they've made it 17 seasons being as offensive as they are but they've definitely developed this untouchable kind of enigma. Also I'm sure after 17 successful seasons they have enough money for some pretty good defense lawyers.

Overall I love this show because it does make very intelligent opinions on current events in the most vulgar and offensive ways possible.

South Park - 6 Days To Air

Last week I watched a documentary about Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of the hit animated comedy series, South Park. The documentary was titled, "6 Days To Air" and It followed the South Park creators over the six days that it took them to create the season 15 premier episode for the show. The documentary took the viewer through the entire pre-production, production and post production process and explained just how an episode of South Park is created. I think the most interesting thing about the documentary was that Parker and Stone created an entire episode of South Park in just 6 Days! It usually takes similar shows, like Family Guy and The Simpsons, approximately 9 months to create a whole episode and they are doing it in less than a week.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone had just finished making their new Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon. I saw the musical over the summer by winning lottery tickets to the show. I won 475 dollar tickets for only 30 bucks, it was sweet! The Book of Mormon was without a doubt the funniest show that I have ever seen, better than any TV show or movie. The songs were incredible and the acting was great. It was hilarious and I highly recommend it to everyone. I also recommend trying to win the tickets through the lottery because they are very expensive.

After completing The Book of Mormon, Parker and Stone had to get back to focusing on South Park. The documentary took you into the writers room and showed the viewer how they came up with the ideas for the episode. The documentary also took the viewer through the storyboarding process, voice recording process, the animating process and the distribution process. I thought that it was incredibly how these guys could create an entire episode in under week. They worked day and night for that week but were able to pull it off.

The episode was called, "Humancentipad" and it made fun of Steve Jobs and Apple. I thought that it was one of the best South Park episodes of all time. This documentary was very interesting and I really liked how it took the viewer through the whole process of creating an episode of South Park.

'Tis the Season

I generally dislike how commercialized and lengthy the Christmas season is (like people who decorate immediately after Halloween), however I do love watching Christmas movies. Well, I actually only like some Christmas movies.. they have to be funny - forget the classical and traditional, except for the stop-motion Rudolph movie, and maybe the animated Grinch. However, as much as I act like a watered down version of Scrooge in the month of December, it is actually a goal of mine to create a Christmas movie somewhere down the line. I'm not sure what it may contain yet though. But I will definitely be inspired by movies like Christmas Vacation, Elf,  Scrooged, and most prominently the South Park Christmas in Canada episode (season 7 episode 15). My score will probably include songs from 'A Very Nolan Christmas,' for those of you that don't know what that is, here is the video featuring Ithaca College's own Nolan Berkowitz!

Well, maybe not, but what I mean is that I will probably create a very witty, tongue-in-cheek, non-serious, and hilarious Christmas movie. Possibly in the form of a musical as well if I'm in the mood at the time. I don't altogether hate Christmas, just so you know, I just hate how far people take it these days. The 12 days of Christmas have now expanded to almost 2 months.

But in all seriousness, watch out for a feature-length Christmas movie (probably low budget) by Scott Walle. It will happen.

Heres my favorite clip from my favorite Christmas movie of all time.

How many F**ks Do You Give?

Profanity seems to be increasingly more acceptable in the media as time goes on. The question is, does this help or hurt the final product? South Park released an episode in its fifth season that literally had a "shit-couter" that went up every time the uncensored word 'shit' was used. In total, there were 162 spoken shits, and 38 written shits, making an even 200 occurrences throughout the half hour time slot. This became one of the top ten South Park episodes that changed the world, according to a 2006 exclusive documentary. This pushed the boundaries of uncensored profanity in television, and set a new standard for producers in comedy. Now, in movies, 'shit' is a common word in any movie from PG-13 and up. 'Fuck,' however, is the more controversial word. According to a chart I found on Wikipedia, there is one movie that uses the word 824 times in its 93 minutes. This, however is a documentary about the word itself, so I don't think it should count. Second on the list, though, is a movie called Gutterballs, that uses it 625 times. Now, this is not a widely popular movie, however, if you continue down the list, you'll find some very well-known, and in some cases, award-winning movies.

For example:
Casino (398)
Goodfellas (300)
Jarhead (278)
Reservoir Dogs (269)
Pulp Fiction (265)
The Big Lebowski (260)
Boondock Saints (239)
The Departed (237)
American History X (214)
Scarface (207)
8 Mile (200)
and even Good Will Hunting (154)

The rest can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_that_most_frequently_use_the_word_%22fuck%22

As you can see, these are some very famous and successful movies that gave a lot of fucks (mostly gangster movies). But, in contrast to this, I skipped over quite a few movies that were far less successful, and that you've probably never even heard of. So, the moral of the story is that if you're going to fuck a movie, make sure you fuck it well. Back to my question - how many fucks do you give?

A Scause for Applause

Earlier this week I stopped by a friends house and walked in on a 8-10 person viewing party. I was delighted to hear that they were all anxiously awaiting the new South Park episode. Having been a South Park fan in the past (recently I have been slacking) I decided to join the party and see what this season of South Park had to offer. This was a great decision.

This epsiode, "A Scause for Applause" touched on a few issues that are currently going on in society today. Right from the first act of the episode It was clear that the focus of this episode would be on Lance Armstrong and his alleged blood doping. The episode started with everyone cutting off their "LiveStrong" bracelets in a ritualistic way. However, It was entirely sarcastic. People were all bashing Lance Armstrong. Then the episode transitioned to the W.W.J.D. wristbands. Everyone was now removing these wristbands because Jesus was apparently under the influence while creating the old testament.

The wristbands became the theme of the episode. Stan decided to not cut off his W.W.J.D. and this caused a national outrage. Not only did it cause an outrage, it started a new wristband for Stan that had "Stan Your Ground" written on it.

The South Park creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, wanted to make this the central theme of the episode. People are always looking for a cause that they can support, but often times do it for show rather than the good of the cause. This leads to a bunch of wristbands with no meaning. This reminded me why I love South Park in the first place. They are not afraid to call out society. Supporting a cause shouldn't be about a wearing a wristband, It should be about actually providing money and service for that specific cause.

I really enjoyed this episode of South Park. My favorite part of the episode was when South Park went Dr. Seuss when Stan and Jesus visited the wristband factory. Hilarity ensues.

Making South Park

6 Days to Air documents the making of a South Park episode from start to finish. This hour long documentary produced by Comedy Central on the animated cartoon introduces us to creators (and voice talent) Trey Parker and Matt Stone as well, detailing their creative habits.

First animated with cardboard cutouts in stop frame, South Park took sometimes weeks to produce in its early days. Shows like The Simpsons and American Dad take months in production. South Park now takes as little as 6 days to produce, now using the power of computers to speed up the animation. It's how South Park remains the most relevant and topical animated show on air.

Even though it's done in a 2D style, it looks like they are using AutoDesk Maya to accelerate the production process.

The documentary takes us through the writers' meeting. SNL's Bill Hader, a couple of other writers help out Parker and Stone develop ideas and a story. Trey Parker is then responsible for the bulk of the script. Co-Executive Producer Anne Garefino also sits in during the writers' meeting to help communicate ideas to animators and to serve as a gauge of ridiculousness/offensiveness.

It's really very interesting watching such a stressful weekly production schedule produce such quality shows. It's the industry we are going into and it's nice to see actual production, instead of just the glossy end-product.

South Park

One of my favorite shows of all time is South Park. What started as an immature middle schooler laughing at little kids cursing and doing other stupid stuff developed into a deep rooted love and appreciation for the genius production that this show has become. They are now half way through there 16th season, a mile stone that most shows don't make it to these days but they have made it this far because they have been able to adapt into a brilliantly written show that stays extremely current with the current state of affairs in the world.

In South Parks earlier seasons, they were more focused on shock humour and poop jokes. Most of there episodes were centered around the four main characters cursing there way through weird school days and crazy situations that not only didn't make sense but would never actually happen. It was a show considered to be a horrible show for kids to watch and was on the brink of being canceled in its early days. As the show went on however the writing starts to evolve into a more clever style. They start to lampoon current events and modern day celebrities.

This is where the show really starts to shine. The way that they go about making fun of current events is hilarious. They also always found a way of making fun of these current events in a very ridiculous but very cleverly written way. One of the other wonderful things about the way this show is written is that they use very common logos and color schemes of very popular products but then they slightly change the name so as to dodge having to pay for the product placement costs. They do this with everything from Dr.Pepper to the made up snack food cheesy poofs. From top to bottom, I think that there are few shows out today that are as cleverly written as South Park is nowadays and that is why it is one of my favorite shows.