July 9, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:In the lobby of The Economist's office building in New York, there is an enormous square mirror on one wall, so placed that as you walk out of the elevators and turn towards the door, you watch yourself walking towards it.
It so happens that about three years ago, three of my colleagues and I all purchased leather jackets within a few days of each other. One day, as the four of us walked out to lunch in our new jackets and sunglasses, I suddenly looked into that mirror and saw what looked like the final shot of the opening title-sequence of a one-hour television drama. All young, all tall, all thin, and with the exception of myself, pretty hip and good-looking. I pointed this out to my colleagues, and they laughed, and we spent twenty minutes or so making up characters and plot points for a show about a bunch of hotshot young journalists working at an international magazine in New York.
We quickly realised, however, that the show would never get made.
Law shows have dramatic courtroom sequences. Medical shows have that electric heart-charging thingy. Cop shows have interrogations.
A show about journalists could generate a fair amount of human drama as one calls up the subjects of a story--but only for a few job descriptions. Film my job, on the other hand, and it would go something like this:
ME: So let me get this straight. You're saying that the income elasticity of demand for gasoline is only .2? Doesn't that contradict the recent findings from the massive study the Department of Energy funded at the University of Illinois? PROFESSOR OR THINK TANK WONK: If you look more carefully at their results, you'll find that their controls were inadequately specified for the target group. RANDOMLY CHOSEN VIEWER: Shoot me now, Vern! It burns! It burns!
But even if you rely heavily on political or human-interest plotlines, there is no way to make a whole show about journalists work on television. That's because the most dramatic moment is singularly undramatic. Consider your typical law drama, which has a dramatic resolution in the courtroom, with people shouting at each other. Compare that to the culmination of any journalist's work.
I'm typing!
Now I'm typing really fast!
Oops, spelled the subject's name wrong. Frantic backspacing!
My fingers are tired. I need a cup of coffee.
Okay, just three hundred words to go.
I wonder how much it costs to go to law school? Let's check the web.
One hundred and fifty words to go. Obviously, I need another coffee.
Time to call the guy from the Arkansas State Sanitation Commission to make sure I got his title correct.
Oh no, I'm over my word count! How did that happen?
No more typing--now I'm deleting!
Then comes the frantic excitement of arguing with your editor over the controlling metaphor in your lede, and trying to convince fact-checking that it's all right to use non-seasonally adjusted figures in paragraph three.
This post brought to you courtesy of Daniel Drezner's equally elegent exegisis of the joys of professorhood.
Posted by Jane Galt at July 9, 2007 10:59 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>Law shows have dramatic courtroom sequences.
Which, in seven years as a lawyer, I have never personally seen. I can go a year without setting foot in a courtroom. Even lawyers who actually go to trial have spent hundreds of hours outside the courtroom for every hour inside the courtroom (looking over documents, preparing written motions/responses/interrogatories/etc., doing legal research, interviewing potential witnesses, negotiating with the other lawyers). None of the latter is good television. Lawyers on TV shows resemble real lawyers about as much as James Bond resembles a real intelligence agent.
All of which is to say, if you took the same incredible degree of dramatic license, why couldn't you have a TV show about journalists? Every week, the journalist for the Economist would uncover the truth about the JFK assassination, identify a serial killer, discover who has really been poisoning the city's water supply, etc.?
Posted by: Stuart Buck on July 9, 2007 11:37 AMI think they use the paddles once a year in the ER. Couldn't you keep yelling "stop the presses!" every show?
Posted by: Klug on July 9, 2007 11:45 AMWe don't even have presses any more. It's all outsourced to three continents . . .
Posted by: Jane Galt on July 9, 2007 11:57 AMHmmm. _Lou Grant_ made it through 5 seasons, totalling 114 episodes. Link
Posted by: Brent Buckner on July 9, 2007 12:00 PMOf course, you are right. A show about journalists would flop. On the other hand, however, a show about C.P.A.s.........
Posted by: creech on July 9, 2007 12:56 PMIndiana Jones 4 is presently in the making, and the way I heard it, they made three of them before that. Who said that screen portrayals of academia are always boring and dreary?
Frankly, I think you could do for journalism what TV has already done for court drama. All you have to do is show the stuff that happens only rarely in real life: journalists making extended on-location reports from dangerous, newsworthy places and constructing insightful analyses in between news filings.
Posted by: anony-mouse on July 9, 2007 1:21 PMYou know, Shonda Rhimes (creator and executive producer of Grey's Anatomy) has a show about journalists (female war correspondents, IIRC) in the works. Jeffrey Dean Morgan was supposed to star, before it got sent to the back-burner in favor of the Kate Walsh spinoff that will debut this fall.
If "teen girl detective" can make a not-lame TV show (Veronica Mars), I'm convinced anything can.
Posted by: Amber on July 9, 2007 2:06 PMWasn't Superman about journalism? Well, journalism, capitalism, free presses, and the American way. Maybe we don't believe in freedom of the press anymore, and that's why we don't have TV shows about newspapers. But wait, we don't believe in the cops, or the doctors, or the lawyers either.
Posted by: jurisnaturalist on July 9, 2007 2:57 PMOn a somewhat serious note, Aaron Sorkin's "Sports Night" managed to extract some drama out of an SportsCenter-type wannabe. It can be done, maybe.
Posted by: Klug on July 9, 2007 3:13 PMBut what about Deadline with Oliver Platt?
Of course it was canceled after only one season.
Posted by: Rob on July 9, 2007 3:14 PMThere is at least one recent show about journalists, an anime series called 'Hataraki Man' (Working Man). It was fairly popular in Japan, but I doubt it's got much chance of getting licensed for US release.
Basic info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hataraki_Man of course.
Posted by: Xellos on July 9, 2007 4:16 PMI note that television journalism climaxes in a visual presentation, which is much easier to film than . . . people silently reading.
Posted by: Jane Galt on July 9, 2007 4:19 PMI agree with Stuart Buck - a little (OK, a lot of) dramatic license could generate at least a couple of watchable episodes about the glamorous life of journalists at the world's most prestigious international newspaper.
By contrast, my segment of the legal profession proved so deadly that not even the combination of David E. Kelley and three eye-candy actresses could make it to three episodes.
Robert Redford was really all about journalism, wasn't he?
And a show about CPAs should definitely mention the word Enron.
Posted by: Tom on July 9, 2007 5:35 PMMurphy Brown
Broadcast News
Drop the Dead Donkey (UK)
Frontline (Australia)
Superman
Spiderman
The list is long and widespread.
Posted by: doctorpat on July 9, 2007 10:53 PMBack in the eighties, some of us working on the Shuttle at Rockwell International thought about doing a show called LA Aerospace. It never got very far.
Posted by: Rand Simberg on July 10, 2007 10:46 AMTV shows are rarely focused on the occupations of their characters. They are almost always focused on the interpersonal relationships between their characters. The notable exception being Law & Order, the original.
So with that in mind there is no limit to what occupations could be dramatized, as long as the stories and characters are entertaining.
My sister and I still joke about the lone Baywatch episode we watched in which the police detective deferred authority in a criminal investigation to David Hasselhoff's lifeguard character. Ever since then we realized that writers will create all kinds of improbable plots to ensure their stars are leading the action. This results in absurdities like Gil Grissom or Horatio Caine questioning witnesses and Bobby Goren poking around in crime scenes. Or worse yet, a doctor played by Dick Van Dyke solving crimes all by himself!
Megan, if ever there was a show created about journalists at a major news magazine, it would be as full of silly plot contrivances as any other show. The reporters would be incredibly competitive with each other, to the point of stealing each others' stories, sources, and lovers. There would be a philandering columnist, a hardnosed editor constantly yelling at people that they are off (or on) the story, and an eccentric publisher who shows up once per episode to get everybody all nervous about their job security.
In regards to the above comments, the show I mentioned is actually focused on print journalism. The characters all work for a big weekly magazine. And the primary focus of the series is their jobs. The workaholism of the lead drives much of the conflict of the series, for that matter.
I understand the manga it was based off of was one of the more popular in Japan during the run. Perhaps not too surprising given the salaryman culture.
Posted by: Xellos on July 10, 2007 1:47 PMAm I the only one here that remembers before 1970?
"Mary Tyler Moore"
I think "Lou Grant" was a spin-off from that.
These were set in TV news back rooms, as are most of doctorpat's list. If you restrict it to print journalism, the list is much shorter.
Posted by: markm on July 10, 2007 2:47 PMWhat, did you never see "His Girl Friday"? I could see that as a really good TV show...
Posted by: Kim Scarborough on July 10, 2007 11:18 PMBesides the obvious ones like Mary Tyler Moore and Murphy Brown, or shows where at least one of the main characters was a journalist, like the Odd Couple or Everybody Loves Raymond, there are plenty of more eccentric treats about journalists in TVLand history. Like Kolchak the Night Stalker!
Posted by: R.J. Lehmann on July 11, 2007 7:03 AM