Time Flies - 100th Post!

This is my 100th post, yay!  I know I haven’t been blogging every day, I guess I’ve just been trying to focus on writing that new pilot right now.

Speaking of…writing this pilot has been a new and interesting experience.  For starters, the show is a lot more “cable” than what I usually write, which is cool with me…I like to watch cable shows and I'm trying to stretch myself after all.  It’s also my first time tackling a “period piece.”  That is to say, the pilot isn’t set in 2011.  The experience has been fun, but before I can really get into the writing of the actual script, I’m having to do a lot of research…library here I come!

Google Classic: For researching your retro TV show

Like I said a few posts back, I wanted to do something more out of the box for this pilot since the last one I wrote was much more mainstream.  As it happens, I had this seed of an idea I’d kicked around a while back, but I thought the premise was too “out there” or rather there was just something about it that did not work.  I came back to it recently and realized that the real problem I had with the idea was that it wasn't convincing as a modern story.  By setting it in a different time period, it suddenly became plausible to me.

So yeah, I guess you can say I’m getting on the Mad Men/Boardwalk Empire train.   And why not?  Period piece type shows are very hot right now.  Both of those shows (Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire) are magnets for awards, and more importantly, even though both are cable shows, they seem to be the type of shows that networks want.  There were several “Mad Men effect" shows as I called them this pilot season and 2 of them, Pan Am and The Playboy Club, got picked up.

I do worry that my sample will look stale if both those new network shows fail and people cool to the idea of retro set shows, but I’m trying not to think about that right now.  After all, even if this trend does briefly end next year, I don’t think period pieces will stay gone for long.  Before we could time travel with Mad Men there was Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Wonder Years, Homefront, I'll Fly Away, American Dreams, Swingtown, and That 70s Show just to name a few. I think there will always be a place for shows that either feed our love of nostalgia or that take us back to a different time we didn't get the chance to experience.