So, I was just listening to the latest episode of the Slashfilmcast, wherein they review Tarsem Singh's, Immortals. At the start of the podcast, they mention the NBC show Community has been removed from the mid-season schedule, which is not a good sign. However, they also mention that the show may survive for at least another season, making it viable for syndication, which is good business sense.

I bring all this up because in that discussion, co-host Adam Quigley said almost verbatim the same sentiment I expressed just a few days ago. "It's so frustrating we live in an age where we're still using the Nielsen ratings. It's so horribly archaic! Just seeing how passionate the fan following is for Community, I know that the Nielsen families that they're using are not accurately reflective of the amount of people watching this show."

I immediately wanted to direct them to the episode of The Intermission that deals with this topic, so that Trey and company can educate them, just as I had been. Since it's not out yet, I hopped over to Down In Front's Justin.tv page, in the hopes of downloading it and ripping the audio (I've done this before for Scott Pilgrim, Iron Man 2 and Tron Legacy). Unfortunately, it was not there. In fact, none of that block of Intermission episodes were present. My question is, does The Intermission have it's own, separate page on Justin.tv, or do you guys record that show a different way?

Heh, thanks. You should see a doctor about that cough, by the way. I know a guy, goes by the name of Submarine. "He's a good man, and thorough."

The community looks really really popular if you're only paying attention to the internet. If the opinions of people on the internet were the norm, we'd be somewhere in the fifth or sixth season of Firefly right now, Minecraft would be the highest selling game of all time and sites like The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks would be revered and not demonized in the media.

Besides, The Community isn't exactly an unpopular show. It's the #3 show in it's time slot. It's only slightly less popular than "Let's Misrepresent Nerd Culture For Mass Consumption" and "Stupid Human Tricks". How is that bad?

If anyone is upset about The Community getting canceled, you can blame the same people who gave Transformers 2 a billion dollars and decided that Rebecca Black deserved a million bucks for effort. IE: the 99% of the US population who will cock their head like a confused puppy if you try to explain to them how the internets work. The 99% of the population who just don't give a shit and only want to watch something that will amuse them for an hour in between eating and sleeping and pooping and working and screwing. The 99% who have no idea in the slightest that "the 99%" is a thing on the internet.

Yeah, there's a lot of factors to it. Honestly, I wouldn't know the show existed at all were it not for the internet. I don't watch it, cause I don't watch TV at all, but it's a thing on the internet, along with The IT Crowd, Game of Thrones and some other stuff.

And I think I sounded really angry in that last post. I just got off work and my poor tired brain is going off on some weird tangents to nowhere. Anyway, sorry for the angry-sounding post. I'd edit it, but then this apology post would make no sense at all.

Hey, what's with the trend of blurring out signs, T-shirts, and other stuff on TV shows shot "in the wild"? I mean stuff like American Chopper* will feature the cast out and about in public and have stuff blurred all over. Who decided that should be a thing?

* A show about bad parenting with occasional shots of fancy custom motorcycles being built

Disclaimer: I am not Eddie.

The short reason as I understand it is that the various company logos and trademarks have not been "cleared" to appear on the show. So they blur it out because, on the one hand, a company may not want to have their logo or other branding associated with the content of the show, and having it appear in said show can give the appearance of endorsement. So the production company staves off a lawsuit. Same reason they have to blur faces on COPS or in the background of man-on-the-street interviews -- they didn't get permission to show those peoples' faces on television. This also, I believe, extends to artwork and graphic design. Just like if you want to use a stock photo or video, you need to pay for the license, if you want to display someone else's visual IP -- even something like a KFC menu -- you have to either get permission or blur it out. Additionally, the production company doesn't want to give anyone free advertising -- especially if the brand in question is a competitor of the show's actual sponsors -- so it behooves them to blur out any identifiable branding for that reason, too.

If you're seeing branded signs or T-shirts that are not blurred on American television, you can expect to see ads for that brand at the commercial break.

But nobody was blurring faces and logos in the 1960s. Isn't public display covered by plenty of case history?

Yes, and probably the blurring has increased as those cases came through the courts. That is, if nobody was suing in the 60's then there was no reason to blur faces. At some point, though, a nobody saw themselves in a movie that was making millions and said, "why shouldn't I get paid?"

Listening to the episode, you had a good talk about today's continuing story lines being made possible by DVR's and such. This is actually the second wave of such shows. As Babylon 5 came to an end, there was a brief fad with "5 year story arcs" and several shows made it to air with that intent. However... it was too soon, and all failed to survive more then a year. Also, Roseanne did some incredible story arcs in its middle seasons. They managed to make each episode self contained, but watching in daily syndication you see all these plot threads coming together. It's amazing. Call it "stealth continuity".

I prefer the word "Ninja" in place of "Stealth".

Dollhouse and Supernatural are two other examples of shows with preset, 5-year plans. Dollhouse was forced to skip ahead to the end, while Supernatural actually had its "last" episode at the end of season 5, but by then it had become pretty popular, at least in terms of The CW and Smallville was already set to end in a year.

in 1995 there was a show called Murder One.   On the surface it was just another lawyer show, except the entire season dealt mostly with just one case.   At the beginning of the season there was a murder, with multiple suspects.  The law firm defended the suspect who was eventually charged, but as the season progressed and they prepared for the trial, they kept flipping back and forth between being convinced their client was innocent, and wondering if he was in fact the murderer.  Of course, if their client was innocent, then their case would be made if they could conclusively prove which of the other suspects DID do it.    The final episodes of the season were about the trial, and the verdict, and the aftermath.

In the second season they scrapped the one-case format, because... well you already know why.   Audiences had to see every episode to keep up.  I gave up on the second season, and the show never got a third, but I sure did love season one.  Unlike every other lawyer show, Murder One was a true procedural, it showed just how much time and effort goes into a major case.

Another example, the 2003 Battlestar Galactica show bible (written a year before Lost debuted), specifically states that the series would have an overall arc, multi-episode sub-arcs, and individual episode arcs.  As it turned out they were pretty successful at that.

So Lost wasn't the first out of the gate with that idea at all, but it was such a phenomenon that ever since, it seems like every show HAS to have some kinda big mystery at its core.  Except Lost didn't start out by pushing that idea overtly.   It just let its story unfold, and left it to the audience to ask "WTF is going on with this frickin' island?" 

Now every show that wants to be the NEW Lost seems to start with the promise that there's a big mystery to be solved.   Flash Forward, The Event, and now Terra Nova come to mind, I'm sure there are other examples.   There's a big risk to making the audience AWARE that a big twisteroo is coming... they might not be all that impressed by the rabbit you finally pull out of the hat.  Already Terra Nova's  hyping their season finale as some kinda game-changer, and I wish them luck with that... but it better be good.

The lesson I take from this is that there are open-ended uber-arcs (how will the trial end?  Who will win the human-Cylon war?) that allow you to tell a story where the twists can occur organically... and too-specific uber-arcs (What is the Event?  What's REALLY going on at Terra Nova?) that can quickly become creative straitjackets.