The Imagination Will Be
Televised: Showrunning
and the Re-animation of
Authorship in 21st
Century American
Television
David Lavery
Merz Akadamie
Stuttgart, Germany,
January 2010
Quality TV
Cult TV
Fan-scholar
Scholar-fan
Matt Hills (University of
Cardiff)
The Imagination
Will Be Televised
The Imagination Will be Televised
Television Auteurs. A book and web resource,
edited by David Lavery (under contract with
the University Press of Mississippi).
The Imagination Will Be Televised: Showrunning and the Re-animation of
Authorship in 21st Century American Television
Introduction [You are here]
The Death of the Author & the Death of the Auteur
Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny: The Still-Birth of the
Television Auteur
The Showrunner as Author
An Embarassment of Riches: Brief Looks--Fontana,
Gilligan, Kripke, Moore, Olsen & Scheffer, Ryan, Simon,
Weiner; Deep Focus—Chase, Lindelof & Cuse, Milch,
Sherman-Palladino, Whedon
What Lies Ahead: Television Creativity
The Imagination Will Be
Televised
The Death of the Author
David Lavery
Merz Akadamie
Stuttgart, Germany,
January 2010
Barthes, Foucault
Death of the Author
The Imagination Will Be Televised
William H. Gass, "The Death of the Author”
(Habitations of the Word: Essays. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1985. 265-88)
“[W]hen, in 1968, Roland Barthes announced
the death of the author, he was actually calling
for it.”
The death of the author is comic, not tragic; it
"signifies a decline in authority, in theological
power, as if Zeus were stripped of his
thunderbolts and swans, perhaps residing on
Olympus still, but now living in a camper and
cooking with propane. He is, but he is no longer
a god.”
Death of the
Author
The Imagination Will Be Televised
François Truffaut,
"Une Certaine
Tendance du
Cinéma Français"
("A Certain
Tendency in French
Cinema"), Cahiers
du Cinéma (1954)
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Andrew Sarris (US):
Auteurism’s American
champion
The America Cinema: Directors
and Directions, 1929-1968
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Auteurism "implie[d] an operation of
decipherment . . . reveal[ing] authors
where none had been seen before.”
--Peter Wollen
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“In its more extreme incarnations auteurism can
be seen as an anthropomorphic form of ‘love’ for
the cinema. The same love that had formerly been
lavished on stars, or that formalists lavished on
artistic devices, the auteurists now lavished on
the men—and they largely were men—who
incarnated the auteurists’ idea of cinema. Film
was resurrected as secular religion; the ‘aura’ was
back in force thanks to the cult of the auteur.”
--Robert Stam
John Caughie, “Authors and Auteurs: The Uses of Theory.” In Donald, J. and Renov, M. (Eds)
Handbook of Film Studies. Sage (2007).
“[A] theory is also a historical event: it is a discourse that
comes on the scene at a given time, in a given place, and
by its very presence is capable of defining the ambience in
which it appears. In this sense, it is a historical reality,
something that reflects the path (or even the error) of
thought.”
--Franceso Casetti (1999)
“In the effort to win academic respectability, film
scholars could best show their work to have
significance if there were a powerful theory
backing it up. Auteurism was a connoisseurship
that required a staggering knowledge of
particular films. In an academic context, such
knowledge could seem mere buffery, so auteur
studies could not justify studying movies
“seriously.” An analysis of Hitchcock that
purported to demonstrate a theory of
signification or the unconscious was more
worthy of academic attention than an analysis of
recurring authorial motifs.”—David Bordwell
John Caughie, “Authors and Auteurs: The Uses of Theory.” In Donald, J. and Renov, M. (Eds)
Handbook of Film Studies. Sage (2007).
“It was not the author who spoke, but ideology, an ideology which could
be detected in the gaps, ruptures and contradictions of the text. The
method inherited from auteurism remained the same, a detailed reading
to uncover the text’s hidden places, but it was no longer the personality
of the author which was hidden there, but ideology—of which the
author was the bearer rather than the creator. It is at this point that the
author becomes—almost literally—a shadow of his former self, leaving
traces in the text rather than dominating it with his unique signature;
shading into structure, inscription or function; an object of desire for the
cinephile, a subject whose subjectivity is an effect of the text.”
--John Caughie
The Imagination Will Be
Televised
Ontogeny Recapitulates
Phylogeny
David Lavery
Merz Akadamie
Stuttgart, Germany,
January 2010
John Caughie, “Authors and Auteurs: The Uses of Theory.” In Donald, J. and Renov, M. (Eds)
Handbook of Film Studies. Sage (2007).
After Barthes, the search for the author “was driven
underground for a fairly brief period to the place where
unfashionable ideas regroup.” (Caughie 18-19)
The Imagination Will Be Televised
The Parallel Courses of Cinema & TV
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“[B]ecause of the technological complexity
of the medium and as a result of the
application to most commercial television
production of the principles of modern
industrial organization . . . , it is very
difficult to locate the ‘author’ of a television
program—if by that we mean the single
individual who provides the unifying vision
behind the program.”
Robert C. Allen
TV Authorship
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“[Newcomb and Alley] demonstrated that despite the
gigantic constituent corporate bureaucracies of this most
massive of mass media—networks, advertising agencies,
production companies, ratings organizations, federal
regulatory authorities—the autobiographical visions of
individuals did manage to break through onto the television
screen, just as the personal visions of artists had managed
to reach expression in the older, preelectronic arts. Were
these visions mitigated or, in effect, edited by television’s
trilateral nature of industry, technology, and art? Certainly.
But when and where had an art ever developed
independently of other factors?”
David Marc & Robert Thompson, Prime Time, Prime Movers
TV Authorship
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“A self-conscious creative producer may be able to
take what appears to be a mundane idea, a cast of
no distinction, or writing that seems to be ordinary
and conventional, and transform it into a better
sort of television. When the happy circumstance
arises in which the producer is able to assemble
the best writers, actors, directors, and film
editors, and is able to impress upon them a
central concept that speaks his vision, then the
potential is present for exceptional work. It
can be created because art is mastery, discipline,
and vision. It is the ability to mold constraint into
a creative contour.” (Newcomb and Alley, xii-xiv)
TV Authorship
John Caughie, “Authors and Auteurs: The Uses of Theory.” In Donald, J. and Renov, M. (Eds)
Handbook of Film Studies. Sage (2007).
[S]lowly vanishing from academic debate, the auteur is
everywhere else—in publicity, in journalistic reviews, in
television programmes, in film retrospectives, in the marketing
of cinema.
Sometime around the point at which Film Studies began to be
embarrassed by its affiliation to the author, the film industry
and its subsidiaries began to discover with renewed
enthusiasm the value of authorial branding for both marketing
and reputation.—John Caughie
The Imagination Will Be
Televised
The Showrunner
David Lavery
Merz Akadamie
Stuttgart, Germany,
January 2010
“[W]hat most showrunners really
want is a writer who has a fresh
and distinctive voice; but at the
same time, they want a writer who
can suppress his or her fresh and
distinctive voice and conform to
the voice of the show.”
—Jeffrey Stepakoff (Billion-Dollar
Kiss: The Story of a Television
Writer in the Hollywood Gold Rush)
The Showrunner
The Imagination Will Be Televised
I'm responsible for all the shows. That means that I break the stories. I
often come up with the ideas and I certainly break the stories with the
writers so that we all know what's going to happen. Then once the
writers are done, I rewrite every script. . . . Then I oversee production
and edit every show, work with the composers and sound mixers.
Inevitably every single show has my name on it somewhere and it is my
responsibility to make it good. . . . Every week that show is on, I'm
standing in the back row, biting my nails, hoping people like it, so I feel
a great responsibility. The good thing is that I'm surrounded by people
who are much smarter than I am. So gradually I have been able to let
certain things take care of themselves, because my crew, my writers,
my post-production crew, everybody is so competent, that I don't have
to run around quite as much as I used to.
--Joss Whedon
(From ET Online's 2000 interview with Joss Whedon)
The Showrunner
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Every single word that's on the screen, I oversee. There's nothing that's
shot, I'm not involved in. The scripts go through multiple drafts, and I
work with the writers on all these things. And I'm extremely involved in
the writing process. As far as casting, I'm there for every single person
that's cast. Even if it's one word, I'm there for their auditions. I'm
involved in the props, a lot of which are written into the scripts. I'm
involved in the costumes, which are all shown to me before they go on.
I write some things in, but it's another one of these things where it's
like, at this point, [costume designer] Janie Bryant comes and tells me
"I'm doing this," and unless I hate it, we do it. But I'm involved in it. A
lot of it, these details are written into the scripts. The scripts are very
specific. What kind of drinks people have, where they're sitting, those
kinds of things. I'm involved with the directors. We have tone meetings
where I explain to them the script, page by page and word by word,
and often perform it, which is embarrassing but true. I do a great Joan.
Then on the set, I visit the set for a lot of the rehearsals, and there's
always a writer on set. And then I'm involved in post-production, very
intensely involved in editing, and the sound mix and color timing.
Really, I have about nine jobs.
--Matthew Weiner
(From the Onion AV Club interview with Mad Men's Creator)
The Showrunner
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“[Y]ou have to have thick, thick, thick skin. You can't be a
baby. Don't get upset when people do negative things to
you because they know you're a woman. The only thing you
can do about it is to just be better. Work harder and be
better because, in the end the best script will get noticed. If
your writing is too good for someone to ignore, then
someone will want that product. Also, you have to fight for
your vision and what you believe in. . . . Hands down,
female showrunners do not get the repect or receive the
good will that a male showrunner gets. I am a big girl and I
can take it. You acknowledge it and keep moving forward,
just put on another coat of lipstick and keep walking.”
--Amy Sherman-Palladino to Stephen Priggé 192
The Showrunner
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“David Chase does not have 20 people telling him
what to do on The Sopranos. Bright, Kauffman,
and Crane did not have 20 people telling them
what to do on Friends. David E. Kelley does not
have anyone telling him what to do because no
one can get into his office. . . . When you don't
have a hundred people telling you what to do, it
gives you the chance to do something good.”
--Amy Sherman-Palladino to Stephen Priggé 147)
The Imagination Will Be
Televised
An Embarrasment of
Riches
David Lavery
Merz Akadamie
Stuttgart, Germany,
January 2010
John Caughie, “Authors and Auteurs: The Uses of Theory.” In Donald, J. and Renov, M. (Eds)
Handbook of Film Studies. Sage (2007).
“While it may have been self-evident that film was an art
and that directors were its primary artists, it was not selfevident which directors were artists, the true auteurs;
which were metteurs en scène, the craftsmen capable of
producing meritorious films but without a consistent
personality; and which were mere tradesmen, more or less
competent but seldom rising about the meretricious.”
--John Caughie
Brief Looks
Tom Fontana—The Tailor
An Embarrasment of
Riches
Vince Gilligan—Bad Boy
Eric Kripke--Hellhound
Ronald D. Moore—The Absinthe Drinker
Mark V. Olsen & Will Scheffer—The Partners
Shaun Ryan—Bad Cop
David Simon—The Journalist
Matthew Weiner—Mad Man
Deep Focus
David Chase—The Veteran
Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse—The Odd Couple
David Milch—The Man of Words
Amy Sherman-Palladino—The Impossible Girl
Joss Whedon—Fanboy
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Tom Fontana
Tom Fontana (US, St.
Elsewhere, Homicide,
Oz, The Borgias)
The
Tailor
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Tom Fontana
The
Tailor
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Tom Fontana
“David Chase assumes he’s
an artist. I’m a tailor.”
--Tom Fontana (Thursday
night in Stuttgart)
The
Tailor
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Vince Gilligan
Vince Gilligan (US, The
X-Files, Breaking Bad)
Bad
Boy
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Vince Gilligan
Bad
Boy
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Vince Gilligan
Bad
Boy
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Vince Gilligan
Bad
Boy
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Vince Gilligan
Bad
Boy
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Vince Gilligan
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Eric Kripke (US,
Supernatural)
Hellboy
Eric Kripke
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Hellboy
Eric Kripke
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Hellboy
Eric Kripke
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“I'm sitting in a laundry-mat, reading about myself . . . sitting in a
laundry-mat reading about myself. My head hurts.”
Dean Winchester
Hellboy
Eric Kripke
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Jumping the Shark (according to Chuck)
“The way I look at it, it's really not jumping
the shark if you never come back down.”
--Chuck, author of The Supernatural
Gospels in "The Real Ghostbusters”
Hellboy
Eric Kripke
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Ronald D. Moore (US,
Star Trek: The Next
Generation, Deep
Space Nine, Carnivale,
Battlestar Galactica)
Ronald D. Moore
The
Absinthe
Drinker
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Ronald D. Moore
The
Absinthe
Drinker
The Imagination Will Be Televised
The
Absinthe
Drinker
Ronald D. Moore
The Absinthe Drinker
(Edgar Degas, 1859)
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Moore delivered his usually
brilliant and often too honest
web commentaries on
Battlestar from home, always
announcing his bourbon of
the week. In one commentary
he reveals that he is drinking
illegally imported absinth.
The
Absinthe
Drinker
Ronald D. Moore
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Ronald D. Moore
The Absinthe
Drinker
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Olsen & Scheffer
Mark V. Olsen and
Will Scheffer (US,
Big Love)
The Life
Partners
The Imagination Will Be Televised
The Life
Partners
David Milch
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Olsen and Scheffer
Olsen & Scheffer
The Life
Partners
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Olsen & Scheffer
Scheffer and Olsen
The Life
Partners
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Shawn Ryan
Shaun Ryan
(US, The
Shield, The
Unit, Lie to
Me)
Bad Cop
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Shawn Ryan
Bad Cop
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Shawn Ryan
Bad Cop
Vic Mackey,
The Shield
Bad Cop
The Imagination Will Be Televised
David Simon (US,
Homicide, The
Wire, Treme)
David Simon
The
Journalist
The Imagination Will Be Televised
David Simon
The Journalist
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“We’ve been stealing from the Greek tragedies.”
--David Simon to Terry Gross (Fresh Air)
David Simon
The Journalist
“America was never innocent. We popped our
cherry on the boat over and looked back with no
regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to
any single event or set of circumstances. You can’t
lose what you lacked at conception. Mass-market
nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never
existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive
politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures
as moments of great moral weight. Our
continuing narrative is blurred past truth and
hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set
that line straight. … It’s time to demythologize an
era and build a new myth from the gutter to the
stars. It’s time to embrace bad men and the price
they paid to secretly define their time. Here’s to
them.”—James Ellroy, American Tabloid
“We are bored with good and evil. We renounce
the theme.”—David Simon
One of the definining
characteristics of HBO dramas
like The Wire (and Deadwood,
The Sopranos, Big Love) and
quality drama generally, is a
firm reluctance to separate
the good guys from the bad
guys. The quote from novelist
James Ellroy could be taken as
their mission statement. David
Simon echoes it.
Omar Little, The Wire
The Journalist
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Matthew Weiner (US, The
Sopranos, Mad Men)
Mad
Man
Matthew Weiner
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Mad
Man
Matthew Weiner
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Mad
Man
The Cast of Mad Men
Matthew Weiner
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Jon Hamm (Don
Draper)
Mad
Man
Matthew Weiner
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“The truth is, I think the biggest difference between
[Mad Men] and a lot of what’s on TV now is—and I will
tell you right now, it hasn’t always been this way—TV is
an escape for people in a different way. It’s an escape
that reconfirms [that your life is OK]. I am not
reconfirming that you are OK. I am reconfirming that
you are having a hard time.
--Matthew Weiner, Interview with Maureen Ryan
Mad
Man
Matthew Weiner
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“[W]hen you’re telling people a story that they don’t
know—they find it frustrating if they’re not paying
attention. What I’m trying to do when I draw them in is
say, put your checkbook down, turn off the phone,
watch it on TiVo when you know the kids won’t be
around. And really let yourself go into this world but
take it seriously.”
--Matthew Weiner, Interview with Maureen Ryan
Mad
Man
Matthew Weiner
Mad
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Man
Matthew Weiner
“I loathe and despise almost
every second of [network
television].”
—David Chase, Interview with
Allen Rucker
“I’m not bashing TV. I have
every kind of Law & Order on
my TiVo.”
—Matt Weiner, Interview with
Maureen Ryan
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Written By: Will it be possible to replicate [The
Sopranos’] writing experience?
Weiner: That’d be insane to think there will ever be
another Sopranos. I will tell you this: I have tried to
take everything good that I can about it. I got to sit
here and watch how good ideas happen. I’d like to
think that in some ways I will carry as much as I can
from The Sopranos, but The Sopranos is a beacon.
Mad
Man
Matthew Weiner
The Imagination Will Be Televised
The
Veteran
David Chase
(US, The
Rockford Files,
Almost Grown,
I’ll Fly Away,
Northern
Exposure, The
Sopranos)
The Imagination Will Be Televised
David Chase had
worked in network
TV for over twenty
five years—for
series like before
HBO took a chance
on him.
The
Veteran
“I had a bad reputation. ‘He’s very talented
but he’s too dark. His material is too dark.’
You know, it’s that thing out there that once
you’re in the club it takes you a while to
wash out. And so even though I had deal
after deal after deal, in which nothing
happened, I still kept getting hired because
something had happened once.”
--David Chase, Interview with Mark Lawson
The
Veteran
“[Northern Exposure was] propaganda for
the corporate state . . . it was ramming
home every week the message that ‘life is
nothing but great,’ ‘Americans are great’
and ‘heartfelt emotion and sharing
conquers everything.’”
--Interview with David Chase on National
Public Radio
The
Veteran
Bonnie: Livia, ever hear the old Italian
saying my aunts used: col tempo la
foglia, di gelso divena seta?
Carmela: What does that mean,
Bonnie?
Bonnie: Time and patience change
the mulberry leaf to silk.
From “46 Long” on The Sopranos,
written by David Chase
The
Veteran
“[A]ll of us have the freedom to do
story lines that unfold slowly. We
all have the freedom to create
characters that are complex and
contradictory. The FCC doesn’t
govern that. We all have the
freedom to tell stupid, bad jokes
that may actually turn out to be
funny. And we all have the freedom
to let the audience figure out what’s
going on rather than telling them
what’s going on.”--David Chase on
National Public Radio (responding
to network complains about The
Sopranos’ unfair advantage on
HBO)
The
Veteran
“You know,” Chase insisted to
Martha Nochimson, “when it comes
down to it, I just try to entertain
myself and solve creative problems.
My major impulse is to try never to
do the same thing. To run away from
what was done. To run away from
what other people are doing.”
The
Veteran
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“I’m still . . . too angry. I . . .
shouldn’t be this angry. I
shouldn’t be this volatile for
my age and for the . . . for,
basically what’s been a really
great life. I have a great family.
I have a great career. And I . . .
you know, and what am I so
pissed off about?” (Lawson
220).
The Veteran
“Darlton”—
Damon
Lindelof &
Carllton
Cuse (Lost)
The Odd
Couple
Lindelof & Cuse
Crossing Jordan
(NBC, 20012007). Cuse and
Lindelof both
worked together
on this series
created by Tim
Kring (Heroes)
The Odd
Couple
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Lindelof & Cuse
Damon Lindelof
(left) & Carlton
Cuse (right)
The Odd
Couple
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Lindelof & Cuse
The Odd
Couple
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Lindelof & Cuse
The Odd
Couple
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Lindelof & Cuse
The Odd
Couple
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Lindelof & Cuse
The Odd
Couple
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Damon Lindelof
The Odd
Couple
“I write because I can’t help but make things up.
I write because I love to tell stories.
I write because my imagination compels me to do
so.
I write because if I didn’t, I’d be branded a
pathological liar.
Oh, and also because I’m still trying to make my
dead father proud of me.
But that’s none of your goddamn business.”
Damon Lindelof, “Why We Write”
The Odd
Couple
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Lindelof & Cuse
The Odd
Couple
The Adventures
of Brisco County,
Jr. (Created by
Carlton Cuse,
FOX, 1993-1994)
The Odd
Couple
Carlton Cuse: [Dickens]'s getting
a lot of play on Lost, isn't he?
Damon Lindelof: He is indeed.
He's a favorite writer of ours.
He wrote serialized stories
just like we did. He was
accused of making it up as he
went along, just like we are.
Cuse: That's right. . . . He didn't
even have a word-processor.
Official Lost Podcast, Oct. 3,
2006
The Odd
Couple
Cuse: And Charles
Dickens was also a
wonderful inspiration,
because here he was,
writing these great,
wonderful, sprawling,
serialized books . . .
Lindelof: Also, Dickens,
the master of
coincidence. Y'know. . . .
His stories always
hinged on the idea of
interconnectedness. . . .
in a very strange and
inexplicable way.
(Official Lost Podcast,
Nov. 6, 2006)
The Odd
Couple
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Lindelof & Cuse
The Imagination Will Be Televised
David Milch (US,
Hill Street Blues,
NYPD Blue,
Deadwood, John
from Cincinnati)
The Man of
Words
David Milch
The Imagination Will Be Televised
David Milch
The Man of
Words
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Robert Penn Warren
David Milch
The Man
of Words
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)
(left), who predicted that Milch
(below) would become one of the
great novelists of the 20th
Century.
David Milch
The Man of
Words
Narrative Genres on Television: Police Series
The Man of
Words
The Imagination Will be Televised
NYPD Blue
Created by Steven Bochco &
David Milch
Began: 9/21/1993
Ended: 3/1/2005
Aired on: ABC (USA)
The Man of
Words
The Man of
Words
David Milch (above) and
Steven Bochco (right),
co-creators of NYPD
Blue
The Imagination Will be Televised
NYPD Blue
and
Controversy
The Man of
Words
The Imagination Will Be Televised
David Milch
The Man of
Words
The Imagination Will Be Televised
David Milch
The Man of
Words
The Imagination Will Be Televised
The Man of
Words
David Milch
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“David had more miles on him the day I met him than
I'll probably have the day I die. He'll wrestle his
demons forever, but I've never known anyone else who
has learned to put his demons at his service in quite the
way he has. I think that's his real genius. And David is a
genius in the literal definition of that word. He is truly
unique, truly original. NYPD Blue allowed him to
exorcise some of his demons or, certainly, to turn a
light on in the room where they reside. None of this
was done from a distance. He took on addiction,
alcoholism, racism—things that are just so fundamental
to our nature and things that are dangerous in society
he found a way to explore cold-bloodedly. In a medium
that is utterly fearful, he has been a fiercely brave
writer.”
Steven Bochco
The Man of
Words
David Milch
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Amy ShermanPalladino (US,
Roseanne, Gilmore
Girls, The Return of
Jezebel James, The
Late Bloomer’s
Revolution)
Impossible
Girl
Amy Sherman-Palladino
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Impossible
Girl
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Impossible
Girl
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Lorelei’s Dad:
“Impossible girl!”
Lorelei: “”That was my
native American name!”
--from “Twenty One is the
Loneliest Number,” Season Six
episode of Gilmore Girls
written by Amy ShermanPalladino
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Impossible
Girl
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Impossible
Girl
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Impossible
Girl
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Impossible
Girl
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Impossible
Girl
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Let’s face it: I’ve peaked. This is it. It’s all down hill
for me or after this show. To be able to create a
show that they let you do what you want to do,
they let you write what you want to write, they
let you put your crazy references in, to be able to
work with really top-notch actors . . . it happens
once. Once! Seriously. It’s all over. . . . It’s just me
under a bus after this.
--Amy Sherman-Palladino, “Welcome to the
Gilmore Girls,” Season 1 DVD
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Impossible
Girl
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Many people in the business
will refer to a woman who did
something or acted a certain
way as "crazy." I then say, "You
have to define what 'crazy' is."
To me, crazy is not someone
who has a creative vision and
will fight for it.
--Amy Sherman-Palladino
(Prigge 192)
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Impossible
Girl
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“Now that there's so much cable, so many different
outlets to go to—FX, Showtime, HBO—it's becoming
a different world, because there are so many levels
on which to compete. . . . It's kind of an interesting
time to be in TV, because if you have an idea you love
and it's not right for a network, there's actually a
place to take it now, and there didn't used to be. You
can go to cable, not just to say ‘fuck,’ but to do other
things that the networks aren't as hip to do.”
--Amy Sherman-Palladino, Onion TV Club Interview
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Impossible
Girl
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“To be really good, you have to be willing to have
everybody in the world [of Hollywood] hate you.”
--Amy Sherman-Palladino to Virginia Heffernan
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Impossible
Girl
The Imagination Will Be Televised
“Audiences are as smart as you will
allow them to be.”
--Amy Sherman-Palladino, “I Jump,
You Jump, Jack” DVD Commentary
Amy Sherman-Palladino
Impossible
Girl
The Imagination Will Be Televised
The
Fanboy
Joss Whedon (US, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
Angel, Firefly, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,
Dollhouse)
“I didn’t want to say ‘Look,
we’re better than a TV show.’ I
wanted to say ‘You can do all of
this in an episode of television.
It just depends on how much
you care.’ . . . I love TV. I love
what you can do with it. . . . It’s
not better, it’s just TV in all its
glory. The way I celebrate
musicals I celebrate this
medium.”
--Joss Whedon, DVD
commentary to “Once More with
Feeling,” Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (Season Six)
The
Fanboy
The Imagination
Will Be Televised
The
Fanboy
The Imagination Will Be Televised
The
Fanboy
The Imagination Will Be Televised
Whedon (and Jeanine Basinger)
The
Fanboy
The Imagination Will Be Televised
The
Fanboy
The Imagination Will Be Televised
The
Fanboy
The Imagination Will Be Televised
The
Fanboy
The Imagination Will Be Televised
The
Fanboy
The Imagination Will Be Televised
The
Fanboy
I am the fan that gets to have
the most fun. I get to walk the
set every day. I totally get to
be there when the story's
broken. I get to do all of the
fun bits. Every day is fan day
for me. That's who I am. I'm
the fan that got the closest.
—Joss Whedon (“Pop Culture
Q & A”)
The Imagination Will Be
Televised: Television Creativity
David Lavery
Stuttgart, Germany, January 2010
The Imagination Will Be Televised
The Imagination Will Be Televised
John Caughie, “Authors and Auteurs: The Uses of Theory.” In Donald, J. and Renov, M. (Eds)
Handbook of Film Studies. Sage (2007).
“A theory of creativity and the
creative imagination in film and
cinema is complicated, of course, by
technology, industry, commerce
and collective production, but
without it film and cinema are
impoverished and it is difficult to
account for those cinephiliac
moments which give us glimpses of
the ‘kingdom of heaven’ and which
make studying film an ‘affair of the
heart’ as well as a quest for
knowledge.” (Caughie 32)
John Caughie, “Authors and Auteurs: The Uses of Theory.” In Donald, J. and Renov, M. (Eds)
Handbook of Film Studies. Sage (2007).
“There still remain fields, however, which
require a more sophisticated theoretical, as well
as historical, understanding. One of these is the
constantly shifting field of imagination and
creativity, raising issues of art and authorship
which the anti-humanism of earlier film theory
has constantly avoided and for which Bordwell’s
systematic rationality has not delivered
satisfactory answers.” (Caughie 32)
John Caughie, “Authors and Auteurs: The Uses of Theory.” In Donald, J. and Renov, M. (Eds)
Handbook of Film Studies. Sage (2007).
“The significance of authorship theory for Film Studies lies
in its productivity: its production and institutionalization
not simply of a ‘knowledge field’, but also of a community
within which that field could be shared and contested: a
field on which sides could be taken, theoretical battles
fought, and solidarities formed and reformed. It was a
field of debate in which the members of an emerging
community began to identify themselves and define their
studies and their terms of engagement.” (Caughie 6)