He's very generous. He might give a fuck.

From Tim, I demand two fucks.

That...didn't come out right.

That...didn't come out right.

23 years and counting.

You do not care about any of that crap.

So very untrue. Mostly I'm wondering (in a nosy manner) if you talked your son into moving to a monkeyless country and whether he's spawning anytime soon. Also your sassy girlfriend has both the intriguing science brain and the sin inspiring physical person. So naturally I'm just curious.

and that I have a really incredible number of cooler kites than you do is immaterial.

Undeniable. As I have one kite and it is not a cool one.

The Drug Replicator, however, continues to be cooler than kites.

But not as cool as a drug delivery system of kites.

But not as cool as a drug delivery system of kites.

sssssh, Hec! If they're gonna stop the buses to and from Canada, we've gotta keep this quiet!

Allyson, I lurve you. You really needn't protect me so. I didn't find Gus rude. I'm interested to see so many (sf and fantasy) genre fans turning up their noses at the cop/thriller genre. I wasn't really expecting that, and find it kind of interesting. "Oh, another procedural, just what we need" kinda thing. Well, I happen to dig procedurals. I admire the shit out of CSI and Without A Trace, the two I happen to watch. I love Ellroy more than Heinlein and James M. Cain more than anyone. Didn't see the Jolie thing, and I really like Poppy Montgomery. Thing is, I don't know that I'd call The Inside a procedural. I don't really know anything about anything. Which is one reason I've always felt at home in fantasy. You can just make shit up. Angel wasn't a horror show so much as a action/character Douglas Sirk melodrama. My "procedural" is really a character drama disguised as a procedural. I have an FBI agent employed who gives me tech notes on scripts, but the currency I trade in is moral ambiguity, irony, pain, death, hopefully driving the viewer toward a familiar corner, then banking off a cliff. And ho-yay. So it's closer to Angel than it is to, say, Law and Order.

I broke Wonderfalls stories exactly the same way I broke Angel and Firefly stories. And I'm breaking The Inside the same way. For some folks I suspect the FBI violent crimes/John Douglas thing will be what the execs call a "barrier to entry." My uncle found the whole vampire thing a barrier to entry on Angel. And some of my friends found the westernisms a barrier to entry on Firefly. Others the whole SF thing. And let's not even get into the talking animals in Wonderfalls. Hell, in the same way Gus is having trouble because The Inside might smack of something that's gone before it, a whole mess 'o folks couldn't get past Joan Of Arcadia when it came to Wonderfalls.

If Gus doesn't think the thing that the promos represents is something for him, then I suspect the show's not gonna be for him -- this is the first time I've felt like promos were fairly selling a show I did.

Hm. I wonder what my own personal barriers to entry are. Off the top of my head, I'm coming up with makeover shows and Jennifer Love Hewitt. And there has to be something really special to get me to bother with a 1/2 hour format show.

My "procedural" is really a character drama disguised as a procedural.

For me (and I've felt it strongest in "Out of Gas", I think), the science-fiction-fantasy setup was mostly a way to put people in situations. That reads dumb, doesn't it? Oy. I mean that a very-far-away fictional way of seeing things may be the easiest set for a story, a people's story, and that it may be interpreted in such a different vast number of ways, to each their own, that it speaks this way more than one language.

So "Out of Gas" showed a speceship losing its heat and its air, made the danger to the world the characters had built the most immediate and urgent one possible, but every person who watched it could interpret it according to their daily hardships and dealings and dangers, be it losing a job, a set of beliefs, family members, whatever. Until Tim pointed it out, I didn't even realize it could apply to the whole political situation of Israel. So, for me, the setup is just the definition of the playground, and the real important core of things is what game is played. I love science fiction/fantasy, don't get me wrong. But what I love most is the people. A story just about the technical problem a speceship encounters, or the special powers a human being needs in order to fight vampires is much less interesting to me, than the people involved in those situations, their stories, and the way these stories resonate in my life and thoughts.

And I look the same way at what Tim just called a procedural. I like a "who did it" sort-of-riddle and solving a mystery quite a bit, but to me, the most interesting story is about the people who solve these riddles.

the currency I trade in is moral ambiguity, irony, pain, death, hopefully driving the viewer toward a familiar corner, then banking off a cliff.

Which is why I'm really looking forward for the show (and, well, being able to watch it, but let's not make this post another of my whiney ones, OK?). For me, dealing with crimes of a very dark nature, trying to figure out how these criminals work, to get into their heads, to be forced to do things you may have not done in your everyday life, and finding out who you are and what are your values in the process, is just a way to take something that people do every single day, take it to the most extreme possible end, and shed light on it through that. Thankfully, I don't have to deal with straight-up moral questions, life-and-death ones, how-far-you'd-go ones on my daily life. But I'm interested in those questions, and taking things to the edge, to a setup that is so different from my daily life, be it a spacedhip or an FBI crew, seems like the most interesting fictional way, for me, to start looking at things.

So the science-fiction or procedural, for me, is just the setup, the placing of the playground. I'm more intersted in the game itself, the people involved and what they do and what makes them do it. And now I have to run out, before I completely mess up my silly metaphore.

Mmm. Jennifer Love Hewitt.

t /animalistic

Cop shows are generally a barrier to entry for me, though I do intend to check out both The Wire and Homicide eventually. But The Inside promos look super-creepy, which is like a wide-open door at the bottom of a hill just begging me to slide on through to meet up with hot women on the other side. Adam and Katie and Tim are all exciting icing - those promos would've made me watch if I had seen them (questionable, given my Fox intake, but shouldn't Entertainment Weekly be mentioning the show at some point soon? Their 2 sentence blurb convinced me to try Veronica Mars way back in the day.)

Nilly, I adore you when you get all wordy. Well, you are adored at all times, but when you get wordy, you make me smile.

Hm. I wonder what my own personal barriers to entry are. Off the top of my head, I'm coming up with makeover shows and Jennifer Love Hewitt. And there has to be something really special to get me to bother with a 1/2 hour format show.

Mine's medical shows. Unless they are comedies. I think that's pretty much it. No, wait. I'm also violently allergic to shows like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Which I don't lump in with medical shows, because I lump it in with after school specials, those NBC The More You Know spots, and those inspirational stories found in Reader's Digest.

Cop shows are generally a barrier to entry for me, though I do intend to check out both The Wire and Homicide eventually.

You should. Well, the latter, at least. I've not seen the former, but Homicide is pretty far removed from your standard cop show. Much of Homicide is mind-blowingly good, and gutting. (It occurs to me that my new-found love for Spooks/MI-5 is rather a bit like my Homicide love, only stronger and more violent. The love, not the show.)

The Inside sounds like it's right up my alley, though I may have to skip episode 9 for the sake of my sanity. (Assuming the description of it as the feel-good dead baby story of the year still holds. I just can't do bad things happening to babies.)

My main barrier to entry is self defined fine upstanding moral shows, which I think is what Plei means by "shows ike Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman". I don't like anything with a lot of blood either, but I am getting better about that, and now only have to fast forward some of CSI.

The Inside sounds like it's right up my alley, though I may have to skip episode 9 for the sake of my sanity. (Assuming the description of it as the feel-good dead baby story of the year still holds. I just can't do bad things happening to babies.)

Plei is me. It's very weird how things about babies didn't bother me, pre-baby. I started watching a repeat of CSI I had seen and enjoyed involving a dead baby and I nearly hyperventilated. Stoopid hormones.

I love procedurals. If The Inside is a character drama wrapped in the disguise of a procedural, I'm on board.

Even if it ends up being derivative of something else, I've seen good derivatives and I wouldn't be put off by that. If it ends up being mind-blowingly original, all the better.