Do you (general, as in y'all) find you're more tolerant of a stereotype/trope, when it is used by someone you respect?

Nope. Watching people I know and love descend to stereotypes to portray Jamaicans made me want to kill them all with lots of flensing. Because there's disappointment too.

This. Since you know he's not a racist FUCKO, are you less angry than you would have been, if Tim wasn't involved with this project?

No. I'm disappointed, not angry about it.

Ok, couple of points of possible interest. This is gonna ramble and jump around, so forgive me. And this really isn’t me making excuses, since I actually like this episode and, when all was said and done, I felt it accomplished (more or less) what I wanted it to.

That said, I’ll admit I never wanted to do a Native American story in the first place (Indian? This alone is confusing because my friend who works with Indigenous Peoples in Colorado tells me that her friends don’t care for “Native American” and call themselves “Indians.”)

Anyway, politically and culturally sensitive areas like this never go well. No matter what we did, if we treated the area too reverentially it would be condescending, considering what our show was. But you don’t want to be a dick, either. So you attempt some stab at real world accuracy, you try to make some characters who represent any given group buck stereotypes or end up being right or smarter than your hero (if your hero doesn’t live in that group.) but if you’re a slave to “realism” and try to make it a documentary, then you have no story, because you (generally) have to contrive some things to make a plot serve a theme. I fully expected the kinds of reactions I’m seeing now -- and I’m getting them from people I know and respect. So I don’t dismiss at all what you have to say here. I’m actually very sorry if anyone was offended by this episode. Only, ‘cause, you know, I don’t want you to be.

I had the same feeling when I got the very angry letters from Christians and Catholics after “Wound Up Penguin.” I took some time to respond to them, because I was as careful and mindful of not offending them as I could be when constructing that episode. I pointed out that I was well aware that not all Christians took their religion as lightly or as oddly as Jaye’s family, and that the exorcism by the Nun was a heightened comic “buy” (and also my needed before-the-commerical-break peril.) I made the Priest the most pragmatic of the bunch to try and balance the other stuff. Blah blah blah.

When breaking a story for an episode of any show the first question I always ask is “what do I need?” Emotionally and on a visceral level. When we got to “Totem Mole” (you can already tell how many times the story was revised. There is no “mole” in the episode. We learned that certain birds are sacred to the Seneca, and they were our model, and that’s what the image turned into, though the title never reflected the change) I -- we -- felt it was time to do a story where Jaye is faced with the possibility that she really is special. And what that means.

We’d been playing with the notion that Aaron had a glimpse into Jaye’s specialness and felt cheated. She had a gift that he wished he had. He was trying to get the animals to talk to him, and they wouldn’t. They did talk to her and all she wanted was for them to stop. I love the idea that people are always disappointed -- either they don’t appreciate what they have, or they don’t get to have the thing they want. That seemed real to me. I wanted to explore that idea and maybe even move Jaye closer to a kind of acceptance. If she hasn’t accepted the voices by the end of the episode, she’s at least stopped actively trying to silence them.

The initial premise was going to be Jaye tries so hard to convince someone who is not special that they are special as a way of comically exploring her own denial. She gets him to the point where he starts to believe it, but in the end he’s relieved that he’s not special -- because who wants that pressure? The lesson he learns is that he’s blessed by being vanilla. He had spent his life cursing the fact that he wasn’t special, but learns to be grateful for that very fact by the end. (That notion got tossed because the network didn’t think that was a big enough “victory” for the client, so it sort of became about him finding his place in the Tribe. I understand their concern, but something about the other idea excited me more. It seemed less “tee vee.” But perhaps that was the trouble. Too intellectual.)

I see two main lines of focus in the complaints -- the “noble native” trope or the “connected to the spiritual” native trope, and that certain physical set pieces or traditions were wrong.

I’ll mention that this thing went through more drafts than any other script, and we were hammering on it right up until the last screaming second.

When crafting an episode, I generally arc out what I need to happen emotionally then figure out how to get there. We needed to make up certain things for the sake of servicing the Jaye-in-denial and the Bill-as-vanilla story. Hence inventing a fictional tribe name, inventing things like the “trials.” And the supposed “peyote.” I needed an act two break. I needed Jaye to push this guy so far that he was in physical peril as an act break. She was convincing him of a lie and only when she saw how she was using this guy to his detriment could she be slapped back to her senses. Also, act break. Needed. Drama. I don’t want to pull back the curtain too much here, but this was our standard act break on this show -- peril! Jaye will be cut by the nun! Eric will be brained with a baseball bat! Bill drops dead! All generally diffused in the first scene of the next act.

Anyway, initially Bill jumped off a roof, but we couldn’t afford to shoot it. I needed something that seemed like part of the ritual and that I could actually shoot without adding a location. A guy lighting a pipe was doable. A guy throwing himself off a building or wrestling with a bear of whatever was not. I know that peyote isn’t realistic in the Northeast, but Jaye’s the only one that uses that word. A cheat, I know, but still. I have no defense here. I needed something to get me to the commercial and end the trials and change the story flow.

Dingoes ate your post, there.

I’ve seen objection to The Mystic Spiritual Leader “in” to the story. We shouldn’t have even touched on that idea since it’s a trope, the objection goes. (Not unlike going to the Exorcist place with the nun.) Of course, this was the plot engine for Jaye’s journey and Bill’s entire story, so if you can’t get past that, then, well, not sure what to say.

Is it a cliche? Well, yeah. It's not one that I mind yet. I think it's unfair to say that having a shaman-like figure in this story is the same as calling all Jews "cheap." Also, not all the tribe were Shamans or anything close. But a cliche, yeah. That’s why instead of a sweat lodge or the spiritual awakening happening during the traditional rituals, it happens in a steam room at the Family Fitness. And also why instead of Deena Littlefoot having something Touched by An Angel-y to say she’s still going on about imperialism and slot machines. It was a goof. I was actually expecting people to be more offended by her apparent spiritual awakening driving her to embrace capitalism. Which I find hilarious. Though some of the marxists on my staff were less amused.

My point is, this could just have easily been the story of a fortune teller like Whoopie in “Ghost” who teases Jaye with answers to her biggest questions and the fortune teller’s accountant grandson who is not Satsuma but something else entirely. (I hesitate to say a Gypsy, for obvious reasons, but you get the gist. Could have been anything), but you needed that mystical Yoda element in whatever form to drive the narrative. Setting the story with a Tribe gave us more options in terms of involving the other characters (specifically Mahandra and Sharon.) And it resonated with the commercialism of the Maid Of The Mist and our Niagara setting in general.

And now I’m going to do something terribly manly and not at all cowardly. I blame the other possible inaccuracies on other people. My costumer and production designer in Toronto assured me the wardrobe and sets were authentic (these women tend to know their shit, so I’m still not convinced they were wrong.) They had done an assload of research for the pilot (the Maid Of The Mist sacrifice sequence) and returned to it for this episode. Supposedly all the headdress and wardrobe were gleaned from Iroquois tradition. Of course we all know that totem poles are not Northeastern, which is why the totem pole itself says it’s not authentic and was put here for the tourists. And my production designer assured me that the wigwam (not teepee) was an acceptable alternative to a longhouse (which we wanted, but could not afford to build.) The wigwam was rented from an Indian company which comes out to the set and erects it themselves to, so was I told, assure accuracy.

I don’t know if any of this makes anyone feel any better or less disappointed, but the next time -- Gypsies!

Is it a cliche? Well, yeah. It's not one that I mind yet. I think it's unfair to say that having a shaman-like figure in this story is the same as calling all Jews "cheap."

That's not what I said.

That's not what I said.

That's true, I went back and reread what you said. But you were comparing our dead Satsuman spritual leader so some of the ugliest racist sterotypes, and I still think that's unfair.

Thank you, Tim. I just wish I could *see* it, rather than read it. It reawakened my bitterness over the cancelation, darn it.

My point is, this could just have easily been the story of a fortune teller like Whoopie in “Ghost” who teases Jaye with answers to her biggest questions and the fortune teller’s accountant grandson who is not Satsuma but something else entirely. (I hesitate to say a Gypsy, for obvious reasons, but you get the gist. Could have been anything), but you needed that mystical Yoda element in whatever form to drive the narrative. Setting the story with a Tribe gave us more options in terms of involving the other characters (specifically Mahandra and Sharon.) And it resonated with the commercialism of the Maid Of The Mist and our Niagara setting in general.

That's sort of what I was trying to get at with my lameass cheesy vs. harmful comparison. To me, there is a difference in the mystical Indian kind of trope, and the murderous savage trope.

That's true, I went back and reread what you said. But you were comparing our dead Satsuman spritual leader so some of the ugliest racist sterotypes, and I still think that's unfair.

Are there pretty racist stereotypes?

The mystical indian is so pervasive in storytelling. If there's an Indian, they're going to be having a spirit quest and talking to a coyote about the rape of mother earth.

It'd be like always having a Jewish character being a cheap accountant, or a Black character eating a watermellon and getting gold caps on their teeth.

I don't see it. I really don't. Doesn't Bill offset this? Doesn't the shopkeeper? Hell, doesn't Jaye? It's true we weren't satarizing the fact that there was a "Holy Woman." That needed to have some weight to make Jaye's spiritual journey have meaning. And if having that trope and not taking the air out of it is offensive, then we weren't sensitive enough to get that. Still, I quite honestly don't see how our portrayal of Bill's grandmother was akin to an African American character eating watermellon with bad teeth. Ewww.