Saalon Muyo

I’m not a big podcast nut, but I’ve become hooked on the Stack Overflow podcast recently.  It’s done by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror and Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek and Joel On Software as they work on their new programming message board/wiki/Knowledge Base project, and it’s pretty good.  It’s good even if you, like me, find Joel somewhat annoying in the way that he seems to pick fights just for the sake of it.

Brennen has referred to Joel as a professional troll before and at times like this I have to agree.  On episode 13 of the podcast, Joel - seeking and succeeding to inspire posts like this - analogized ASP.Net to driving a Lexus SUV and PHP to riding a bicycle.  This was to illustrate his claim that ASP.Net is a generation beyond PHP in power, functionality and, I suppose, status amongst the soccer MILFs you may want to hit on.

I’m not going to get into this too far, mostly because it’s a silly comment that has no basis in fact (though ASP.Net does come standard with air conditioning and leather interiors), but also because it’s a worn out, circular, boring topic.  Use whatever platform works for you.  Get your project done and meet your own requirements.  I only want to say one thing.

You may want to be careful with your analogies, lest you come up with one which can be interpreted thusly: So what you’re saying, Joel, is that ASP.Net is inefficient, uses up limited and expensive resources and is purchased more often as a badge of economic success than because it’s actually the best car on the market.  And PHP is the world’s most efficient method of locomotion, destined to become the new standard of transportation once we’ve gone broke keeping our Lexus SUVs running.

Did I get that right?

You know the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the apes find the towering black monolith and are instantly evolved into violent, tool-and-weapon wielding man-apes?  I’m beginning to believe that at some point in the 1970’s, George Lucas, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and a handful of others wandered into the desert in California and came across one of them.  There, like the apes did with the animal bones, the filmmakers learned the secret art of using a camera to bend entire genres of film to their will.

I can think of no other explanation for what began with The Godfather in 1972 and ended 10 years later with Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, E.T., The Road Warrior, Tron, The Thing and, of course, Blade Runner.  Over the course of 10 years, these hyper-evolved directors set about to remake our entire view of film.  Or maybe they never intended to anything of the sort, but under the power of Kubrik’s strange Jovian artifact, simply had no other choice.  Think of a genre of film.  Any genre.  I bet you can trace its modern inception back to that decade, with little to nothing of note added to it since.

Mob movies?  Space opera?  Cyberpunk?  Post-apocalyptic?  Horror?  Action?  Sword and sorcery?

It’s not that there haven’t been important movies since 1982.  There have been dozens.  But for a decade, giants walked the lands of southern California and gave us images we would be unable to escape even 30 years later.

I watched Blade Runner: The Final Cut last night, which is probably only the third or fourth time I’ve seen the film.  But I could remember almost every major beat of the story as if I had watched it once a year, every year, since I first saw it.  I knew its cityscapes and its sets.  I remembered its origami and its plastic coats and its otherworldly music.

Of all the films that burnt themselves into the minds of moviegoers in those years, only Star Wars was as influencial as Blade Runner, and there’s a part of me that wonders if Blade Runner wasn’t actually the more influencial of the two.  Something about Blade Runner crossed internatial boundries in a way that even Star Wars did not.  Look at anime, where they not only wholeheartedly embraced Blade Runner’s aesthetic, but latched onto its story hooks and thematic conflicts like they had been waiting for this final piece of the puzzle the whole time.  Hell, Bubblegum Crisis not only used the idea of hunting down rogue robot servants, but named one of its main characters after one of Blade Runner’s replicants: Pris.

None of this is the film itself, but its legacy.  But part of what makes a film a classic is the legacy it leaves, and on that bsis alone, Blade Runner is one of the great cinematic classics, the likes of which we rarely see.  Is it a good movie, though?

Thankfully, yes.  It is not only a visionary film but a powerful, emotional one as well.  Stripped of its visuals and its music and its production design, Blade Runner is still classic science fiction.  It tells the story of the consequences of making robots so human the distinction is no longer relevant while treating those creations as slaves.  The humans of the world don’t even bat an eye about the preprogrammed life span limit of four years, even though the reason for it is that they are so human that if they were allowed to live longer they might gain memories and a personality of their own.

In other words, they have to die to keep them from becoming the same as us.  How could you enslave something that you aren’t at least superficially different from?

The plot of Blade Runner is one of those simple science fiction plots meant to give structure to a philosophical conundrum.  The meat of the story is in its questioning of humanity; specifically, what makes something human?  But this is accomplished through a simple, tightly filmed investigation.  Four off-world replicants have escaped and come to Earth, and a Blade Runner named Decker must find them and execute them.

No, I’m sorry, not execute.  Retire.

This is one of Harrison Ford’s classic film performances, though to be fair he carries the least emotional weight of the film.  Decker exists to be changed by the events of the film, to be that unfeeling hunter who finally comes to understand that his prey may be more human than he is.  Because of this, Decker seems to have little emotional range, at least not until the end of the film.  Making a character like this memorable isn’t easy, and Ford’s presence is the difference.

The real star of the show is Rutger Hauer, who plays Roy Batty, the leader of the escaped replicants.  His portrayal gives us a character that changes in our perceptions more than he changes his performance.  Roy seems a borderline psychopath at the film’s onset.  A killing machine built too well to stop, driven mad by his mission.  All of this is true, too, and that Hauer never undercuts the killer within his character but shows us a passion for life that explains it keeps the film from becoming simplictic or trite.  Roy has simply come to the end of a four year lifespan and is desperate to find any way to extend his life.  If he has to kill the humans who created and enslaved his kind to do so, he will.  And if he can show them what it means to live in fear…well, perhaps that’s justice.

Blade Runner is beyond a great film.  It’s a perfect one.  It’s a film so measured, so assured in its construction and intent that it makes the movies around it seem paler by comparison.  There are movies that I love that, when I watch a film like Blade Runner, I’m forced to rethink a bit.  I don’t love those other films less.  I just put them back into perspective.  There are great films and then there are transcendent ones.  Blade Runner is the latter.

See it for the breathtaking visuals, visuals that still look amazing 25 years later.  See it for its characters, for its musings on the nature of humanity and life.  See it for its set design, its sound design, its entire aesthetic.  See it because you’ve probably already seen it, reflected and muted through a hundred other films.  See it because its one of the best films ever made.

See it because you’ll probably love it.

I leave you now with one of the best lines in a film ever.  One of the most heartbreaking and poignient.  The last lines of Roy Batty, spoken to Decker on the roof of a tall building, in the rain:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those … moments will be lost in time, like tears…in the rain. Time to die.

Tailsteak rocks, even if his posting rate is down from the days of 1/0.

Witness the joy here and here.

I’m not here to talk about how awful Highlander: The Source is. Trust me, no words in the languages of men has the power to express that. I can do only this. Show you a picture of the guy above, the villain of this gargantuan pile of…see? No words.

This guy is The Guardian. He has stupid super-speed powers and dresses like a Clive Barker sex fantasy. Whenever Highlander: The Source threatens to become simply boring, The Guardian walks onto the screen to tentacle rape your cognitive functions.

The Guardian, on top of being one of the most insanely, MST3K-could-not-hope-for-better villains ever created, is apparently the human incarnation of fanfiction.

When Joe Dawson, fan favorite Highlander: The Series character shows up and runs him over with a truck, he gleefully squeals “Hey Joe!” even though the two have never met. Later, when facing an immortal, he first inquires and then - realizing that the 4th wall is for pussies - sings “Who wants to live forever?”

The Guardian isn’t here to help the plot along (he doesn’t) or to give us a good ending fight (all the fights suck anyway). The Guardian exists because the sentient embodiment of fanfic arose from the bowels of some Dragon*Con LARP room, put on his wife’s bondage gear and found the first available DTV franchise sequel. Star Trek was getting a theatrical reboot, and even fanfiction incarnate wouldn’t touch the Blade franchise at this point, so Highlander it was.

Oh, and the movie is really bad. There’s a reason someone wrote a blog post called “Highlander: The Source” Took a Dump in My Brain. When I found it I laughed so hard I cried. Ah, catharsis.

I can’t claim to have been a huge fan.  I think you need read more than one of someone’s books and seen one of their movies before you can claim to be a superfan, even if that book is one of your favorite ever.  Still, a giant among men is a giant among men even if I can only point to his footprints as evidence of his passing and not my own experience.

Arthur C. Clarke passed away yesterday at the age of 90, an age we are all more likely to reach because of minds like his.  Certainly Clarke’s main contributions were not scientific but speculative, but without a bold imagination able to grasp the current state of technology while not being bound by it, the brilliant men and women who make things happen would have less to spark their own imaginations.  In the world of science fiction, Clarke was a colossus.

He worked in a time when the field had no shortage of great minds, yet still he managed to distinguish himself among them.  His novel Childhood’s End is a classic, even if people inspired by it managed only to steal the first half.  The second half remains entirely his, and it’s here that the challenging brilliance of the novel lies.  And 2001: A Space Odyssey is the granddaddy of modern filmed science fiction, even if - once again - people steal the look and feel but leave its difficult-to-grasp ending alone.  Even when he confused, he still inspired.

It’s difficult to lose someone, especially someone of his caliber.  Let’s remember, though, that we had him with us for 90 years;  his voice was not silenced too early nor were his words ignored.  He lived, I hope, a happy life.  For someone who has brought so much joy to others, it’s the least the world could have done.

The great thing about 70’s exploitation flicks is that the reasons you should see them are the exact same reasons you shouldn’t. Forget the nuanced discussions of plot, theme and character you have after you watch Magnolia or Blade Runner. Pop in The Hills Have Eyes and the guy who likes it is going to love up the same damn things the guy who hates it decries. The symmetry is beautiful.

For instance, take Fight For Your Life, made the year before I was born. Here are some of the reasons given to convince me to see the film:

• A gun is pointed directly at a baby’s head.
• A child is beaten to death with a rock.
• Lots of nudity.
• An insanely, absurdly racist villain.

Can you imagine the reasons someone might give for hating this one?

The exploitation genre was meant to be abrasive. It pushed boundaries simply because they hadn’t been pushed for decades. As the Hayes Code receded into memory, directors wanted to try and use the medium to shock their audiences a little, to address issues most film was too timid to address head on. Think about Fight For Your Life for a second. By 1977 America was already learning to pretend that racism didn’t exist. More artistic, sensitive portrayals of racism married the ugliness to their work delicately. Fight For Your Life had no qualms about giving us a villain who talked about African Americans the way far too many people still did around their dinner tables when no one was there to overhear.

I can’t defend the exploitation genre’s intentions. Even if directors talked high-mindedly about what they were trying to expose in America, and even if they sort of meant it, the real draw was the voyeuristic thrill that accompanies seeing insane shit playing out on your screen. That said, there’s something to be said for work that doesn’t flinch from the vileness of our world. There can be something to be learned from the experience, even if education never crossed the filmmaker’s minds. A good exploitation film can be cathartic, and a bad one can still be an awful lot of fun.

Where modern entries in the genre fail is in their attempt to dress up the old exploitation flicks with deeper themes and character development. Suddenly, it’s no longer a simple formula. The guys who hate babies having guns pointed at them in principle may excuse the film for being “about something,” and those who came for the shocks are going to feel cheated by the cushioning those shocks receive when they’re dressed up with extra plot.

The exploitation films of the 70’s triumphed due to an utter lack of pretension. The film was a guy driving really fast in a really macho car who runs into naked chicks and troublesome cops, or a family of mutated, cannibalistic murders who come upon a poor, helpless family. That was it. The social commentary, when it was there, was subtle; it was a good sear and just the right amount of salt and pepper on an already meaty, bloody - but cheap - steak. Try to dress it up with some kind of mustard brandy sauce, and all you’ve got is a shitty steak that doesn’t know its place.

I have fairly specific sensibilities when it comes to fantasy and science fiction films.  It leaves me a crankier and far more picky critic of them than I would  be otherwise.  It’s not that I demand great storytelling out of every genre entry,  just that I expect a lot for the trade if you’re not going to bother.  Also I hate pretension, and the ghettoized genres of science fiction and fantasy ironically produce more self-important nonsense than those nauseating Oscar Films that come out on Christmas Day.

After hearing tons of praise about Night Watch, the blockbuster Russian urban fantasy film, I finally got it from Netflix and popped it into the DVD.  My friends love it.  A lot of critics I respect love it too.  Knowing that, please imagine my surprise at kind of hating the thing.

Look, there are a lot of good things about the movie.  I mean, it is a high budget urban fantasy film, and the simple fact that someone made a film in that genre and got money for it deserves respect.  I love urban fantasy.  It’s manna from heaven to me.  Yet every time someone tries their hand at the genre, they make something like Underworld and cause me to weep.  Night Watch, to start with, is not filmed entirely in blue monocrhome, so it’s already better than Underworld.  So bully for it there.

That’s not all, either.  There are a lot of strong aspects to the production, from set design to cinematography to the feel of the world.  This is not a piece of crap in the way many  movies are pieces of crap.  It is, though, exemplary of the kind of failures you find in most fantasy storytelling.

Night Watch manages to be both too big and too small at once.  It opens with one of those bombastic infodump prologues where we learn, basically, that there is good, there is evil, they are at war and that the war is at a stalemate until some bullshit prophecy comes true.  We’ve seen this plot hundreds of times; if you’re going to use it, at least trust us get it without your ten minute explanation. Anyway.

There’s this thing that happens in fantasy stories that’s hard to describe.  The plot revolves around the end of the world, which is a premise that carries with it some sort of scope.  This isn’t about stopping bank robbers.  It’s about saving the lives of billions of people and stopping the forces of pure evil.  That’s big.  Or, it should be big.  Night Watch is trying to tell a story with serious scope, but it fails miserably at it in a way that is not at all uncommon.

Scope consists of two parts.  One is the setup.  Your story needs to exist on a stage large enough to give the impression of Big Things Happening, even when they’re not happening on screen.  The other is the story itself.  This is where things get tricky, and it’s easier to understand what doesn’t work than what does.  When you get down to it, the story needs to travel.  It needs to move.

Night Watch is a classic example of what doesn’t work.  Sure, the story is about the battle between good and evil and the coming of a super-being who will unbalance the world, winning the war for the side he chooses.  That’s a big stage.  But from there, everything is both straightforward and small in scale.  The story takes place over what feels like 2 days and visits maybe a half dozen sets.  We open with our hero trying to save a boy from vampires, and we end with pretty much the same thing.  The first battle takes place in a run down apartment and the final one takes place on the roof of a different apartment with little in between.  That’s it.  That’s as far as we go.  That’s as far as we travel.

Night Watch plays like a two hour prequel to the second film.   We meet our hero, and we follow him as he does next to nothing other than fight the same vampire twice and protect a single boy in a single apartment.  The danger never escalates and the stakes never change.  What we know at the outset is almost exactly what we know ten minutes from the end.

It’s like being told, at the start of a movie, that China and Russia are in conspiracy to destroy the Western world.  We see armies gathering, helicopters firing up and nuclear missile silos opening.  Then we cut to a dock in downtown Manhattan and are told that if the hero can’t get a briefcase to the U.N. building uptown in an hour, war will break out.  We’re also shown a single Chinese villain with his Russian villain girlfriend who intend to stop the briefcase from arriving.  The rest of the film has two car chases and a fight in the garage underneath the U.N. before the hero brings the briefcase into the General Assembly and the world is saved.

Wait a second, what happened to the armies?   What happened to world destruction?  This was a battle for the lives of billions and it came down to a car chase and a fistfight?  No plot twists?  No moments of valiant heroism?  No helicopters with nuclear missiles flying into Taiwan?  What the hell happened?

That’s Night Watch.  It’s also Reign of Fire and Underworld and His Majesty’s Dragon and countless other films and novels.  Simple, straightforward stories are awesome, provided you don’t set them up by promising global carnage.   The Warriors is about nothing more than getting from point A to point B, but it doesn’t pretend to be about more than that.  And, frankly, it gets more out of its simple premise than things like Night Watch get out of the end of the world.

If you want to be a simple, vampire-hunting urban fantasy about saving a 13 year old boy, that’s fine!  Just be that thing, and be it well.  Dump the eternal battle between good and evil and let your characters do more than be vessels of exposition delivery.

I like screwed up horror films.  I admit it.  I watch flicks like Hostel and Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes and The Night Train Murders and enjoy the heck out of them.  They’re a little sick and maybe a touch depraved, but they’re sick and scary and usually a wild ride.

So in that spirit I got out Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, on the advice of Flick Chick Maitland McDonough and am currently watching it.  I expected fun.  I received boredom.

I’m so bored that I started reading reviews of the film to see if other people had also fought oncoming coma while watching it, hoping for some helpful advice.  That’s not what I found, so instead I’m keeping myself alive by writing this post.

People divide neatly into two camps: This Film Is So Screwed Up It’s Offensive, and This Film Is A Dark Mirror On Humanity.  Interestingly,  horror fans seem to go for the former, while real movie people fall into the latter.  They’re both wrong.  This movie isn’t good enough to be either offensive or insightful.  For a film about the torture, rape and murder of a 13 year old girl, it strikes me as downright silly.

Anyway, I needed to take one crack at the people praising this movie as important, because that’s what I do.  A lot of people who enjoyed this dumptruck loaded with boredom like to note how much less icky and graphic this movie is compared to Hostel and it’s like, insinuating that, as a horror film, this one is less seedy than its contemporaries.

Yes, yes, folks, you heard it right.  The film about tying up a naked 13 year old girl and burning her girl parts with a blowtorch is less inappropriate than Hostel, which keeps its depraved eye fixed firmly on adults.  I’m properly educated.

And bored.  Really bored.

In honor of a holiday I don’t even like, I bring you the Top Ten Movie Romances that Aren’t in Romance Movies. Because Romance Movies are lame. Of course.

10. Paprika

You won’t know that you’re watching a romance develop until you’re almost at the end, but somehow the sweetness of the thing will overwhelm you if you let it. After a movie’s worth of slightly too much anger over her coworker Tokita’s lack of care for himself, we suddenly realize that Chiba really does care for her overweight friend. And Chiba’s really hot.

After a million Beauty’s-on-the-inside-but-can’t-be-seen-unless-you-get-a-makeover stories pouring out of Hollywood, seeing a romance blossom between a hot girl and an obese man simply because he’s a really good guy will make you heart melt. Unless you’re a hot guy who’s angry because the cool fat dude stole your girlfriend. In which case: Nyah-nyah!

9. Heavenly Creatures

Ok, so it’s a bit twisted. I mean, these two 16 year old girls become completely obsessed with each other, and end up killing one of their parents out of fear of being separated. But before all of that madness, there’s just a brief moment of the two of them showing the kind of maddening love that only two teenagers can feel for each other. Anyway, Valentine’s Day is way more twisted than simple matricide.

8. Magnolia

Somewhere in the middle of pt anderson’s sprawling, 3 hour opus about crisscrossing lives in Los Angeles, an incredibly touching relationship between a cocaine addict and a loser policeman begins. You keep waiting for the thing to end in some kind of train wreck, because the girl is just so screwed up and the guy is almost anti-social. But it doesn’t.

Even if you ignore the hopeful feeling this guy’s pure (if slightly pathetic) love for this damaged woman gives you, you can’t help but swoon when the two share one of the awesomest movie kisses ever.

7. The Empire Strike Back

Do I really need to go into this? Ok, ok, I’ll give you something:

Leia: I love you

Han: I know.

See?

6. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

What’s better than a movie romance where the couple in question never kiss, let alone consummate anything? One where they also do lots of flying kung fu and have goofy hairdos. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon manages to portray an unrequited romance that never comes off as melodramatic or contrived, even though one of them dies in the other’s arms by the end. I can only attribute this to Ang Lee’s superior kung fu magic.

Ok, in all seriousness, this film’s romance between Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien is both delicate and subtle, portraying a couple in love but separated out of the kind of honor and duty that you only see in martial arts films. Because Shu Lien is the widow of Li Mu Bai’s brother, they can never be together. That doesn’t stop Li Mu Bai from refusing to center himself at the moment of his death, though, thereby forsaking an eternity of enlightenment for one more moment with his love. Makes me to cry.

5. Batman Returns

Another twisted mess of a relationship, only this one has the added fun of latex bodysuits. Terminal headcases Batman and Catwoman fight in costume while their headcase alter-egos Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle fall in love and make out. The scene where they fool around on the couch, trying to avoid the other touching their battle wounds is wonderful. The scene where they repeat lines last said to each other in costume, and realize who the other is, is even better. It’s the only Batman romance that ever worked, but it worked like a charm.

4. Jackie Brown

Just like Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien, Jackie and her partner in crime Max Cherry never seal the deal. That doesn’t stop them from making your heart thump just a little bit harder when they get to flirting, though. While Crouching Tiger’s protagonists stayed celibate out of duty, Jackie and Max stay apart out of necessity. There’s just too much to worry about with all that money at stake, and once the crime is committed, there’s just that little bit of worry that maybe Jackie was using Max to pull off her scam.

Maybe if Max had taken a bigger share of the money, Jackie could have felt less guilty and stayed. And maybe if there had been no money, Max would have asked her. But as it was, all we get is a single kiss before Jackie drives off into the sunset. It’s all we need.

3. 12 Monkeys

Insanity! Time travel! Weird dreams! It’s a Terry Gilliam movie, for sure. Only this time, apart from all of his surreal madness, Gilliam throws us genre-loving closet romantics a bone.

It may start in kidnapping, but by the time Cole and Kathryn, the film’s stars, find themselves in a theater watching Vertigo and finding the eerie parallels in their own lives, you should be hooked. Or you should watch The Notebook.

And speaking of Vertigo…

2. Vertigo

Hitchcock had a lot of great romances stuffed into his thrillers, but none of them were as screwed up and passionate as the obsessive affair at the heart of Vertigo. I’m sure it has something to do with Hitchcock’s own personality flickering before our eyes, but Vertigo has a romantic tension unequaled in thrillers. The fact that it ends in a nun scaring the confused heroine off of the roof and to her death is besides the point. This love affair has some teeth, that’s all.

1. Terminator

“Come with me if you want to live.”

All great romances start with a great one liner, right? And what’s more romantic than saving someone’s life and impregnating them with the future savior of humanity?

I can’t really defend putting this one at the top of the list, except to say that the order of this list is arbitrary as it is. Still, Sarah Conner and Kyle Reese’s love affair has the kind of burning, desperate passion that’s born of life or death struggles, minus any attempt to translate it into a long term relationship. Cameron’s script keeps our lovers in the fire from start to finish, so when Kyle Reese finally buys the farm at the hands of the endo-skeletal terminator, you can only wish the two had more time to experience the kind of bitterness and disappointment the rest of us feel in our real love lives.

Wait, is my wife going to read this? Crap…um…

Happy Valentine’s Day!

The strike has made it so.

At least, that’s what the studio heads are saying in an attempt to make it sound like this writer’s strike has finally unshackled them from their mountain of obligations, allowing them to remake their networks into the lean, mean entertainment machines they are destined to become. The public glee of the programming chiefs might lead you to believe they wanted this strike, that having writers around creating shows for them was putting an unfair strain on their corporate wallets. It couldn’t be spin, could it? Multinational corporations don’t spin!

It’s no secret that the Big Networks are struggling and have been for some time. Numerous articles have been written about the slow bleed of the network audience into cable, and there was a great deal of fear that this strike would be all the motivation the rest of America needed to leave network television for good. Is there any surprise that, once the strike actually occurred, that the VPs of programming start to talk like this was a good thing for them? And is it any surprise that the ratings are not backing them up?

I found the article above while writing this. If you go there, you’ll find them saying the same thing I’m about to say: the demise of network television has nothing to do with the strike, but is only hastened by it. I’m also going to say something they aren’t saying. In their attempt to punish the writers and lessen their control over the creative process by ordering less shows and relying on the “gut feelings” of business minded programming executive, network television is handing cable outlets a bigger win than the strike ever could have.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I know the networks are owned by the same big media conglomerates as who own most cable channels, and the big daddies will be getting their payday one way or another. But if you read between the lines, you start to see how the network’s entire model of programming has become toxic, and only their broadcast affiliate monopoly has allowed them to survive.

For instance, the networks will spend $10 million on a pilot for a show that’s budgeted to cost $2-$3 million when on. Yet that same show, which they’ve spent in excess of $40 million on by the time the show is going to air ($10 for the pilot, plus 10-13 episodes at $3 million a pop) has a reasonable chance at being canceled by the fourth episode. I don’t have a count of the number of shows which have been pulled from the air before the already shot and paid for episodes have been shown, but it’s a lot.

What this means is the networks have built a business model where every major dice roll will cost them tens of millions of dollars, but in which they will not even release all of the work for which they’ve paid. This has two effects. It means your overall profit for the shows that do succeed is reduced by the expensive failures. It also means the viewers who spent an hour a week for the past month becoming invested in your show get to see it suddenly canceled, knowing full well you have another 6 episodes you can’t even be bothered to show at some garbage dump time in the early morning.

So you’ve: A) wasted money and B) alienated the people you need to make money. Shows on cable channels run for the full production slate. They might get canceled at the end of a season, but they don’t yank a show when there are still episodes to burn. The networks have turned unaired episodes into a business model, slapping them on ironically named “Complete Series” DVD sets in an effort to get back their money.

Even if they do, they haven’t lessoned the anger felt by their audience. That anger, building for at least a decade, has left the increasingly unprofitable networks reaching for a solution. Like always, they’ve misunderstood the problem. The strike is indeed giving them the opportunity to rework things. But canning production deals with writers and constricting the development process won’t do the trick. Things are changing. Even if the same corporations are the ones rolling in the dough, they won’t be doing it through their affiliates for long.

A broadened market, full of specialty outlets can only be good for creative types. Writers may not see millions heaped onto their untested shows anymore, but they’ve got a better shot at finishing a full season on fX and ABC Family than they did on the big brothers of those networks. The Wire, Weeds, Big Love and The Sopranos are proof that networks using a subscriber model, rather than an advertiser model, are capable of producing more adventurous shows without risking a sudden drop in income due to failing one of network television’s most artificial tests: Sweeps Week.

As for the studio’s noise that canceling upfronts - the time when advertisers are given a chance to buy into upcoming shows - is some kind of solution: yawn. You’re losing viewers because you produce crap that looks and smells the same as last year’s crap, and you can’t even be bothered to give that crap a shot at a full season. The insinuation that reality television - a format not coincidentally free of pilots and the upfront process - is the magic bullet may also be wrong in the long run. After chasing off viewers like me, what you have left are the 5-10 million people in the audience who only want the showiest, most degrading thing they have to offer. Do you think that audience will be there forever? Do you think the law of diminishing returns only applies to Frisbees and scripted television shows?

Will American Gladiators make you more money, over the next ten years, than Seinfeld has?

Broadcast affiliates aren’t going anywhere. They’ll still be broadcasting Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and Deal or No Deal and Moment of Truth long after the strike ends. The death they face is the death of irrelevancy. They’re losing to cable outlets, and cable outlets aren’t even the future of distribution. When people, desperate for something new, are defecting to the Hallmark Channel, how do you expect to stand up to YouTube when it starts getting pumped directly into people’s 50 inch televisions?

Oh, right. No pilots, no upfronts and the gut feelings of 50 year old white guys. Sorry. You win.