Month: May 2013

What If… “The Class” Had Never Been Canceled?

In what will probably become a new series of posts about television, I explore a short-lived show I enjoyed that, had it continued to run for years to come, might have changed television dramatically. Or at least, you know, a little bit.

The Class (CBS, 2006-2007)

All the way back in the Fall of 2006, CBS debuted a new sitcom, about young people, called The Class, to pair with an acclaimed but still on the bubble sitcom about young people, How I Met Your Mother. It focused on a group of seven people in their late twenties who are all connected by the fact that they were all in the same third grade class. After a party thrown by Ethan Haas (Jason Ritter) brings them together, their lives start to intersect once again.

After this cute jumping off point for a hangout comedy, The Class (which was created by David Crane, of Friends, and Jeffrey Klarik) combined entertaining writing with a great cast, giving CBS a solid, but not spectacular (ratings-wise, anyway) one-two punch in the rough Monday Night 8-9 PM slot (other shows that were in this timeslot include NBC’s juggernaut Deal Or No Deal and FOX’s Prison Break.

Despite the difficult competition, the fact that the show was younger than what CBS at the time was pulling (a problem that HIMYM also struggled with at the time), and the fact that they had to spend part of the season launching the night (rather than being protected by an established show), The Class did reasonably well, pulling in numbers similar to the show that has just completed its eighth season and is headed for a victory lap next year.*

Then, despite reasonably good press, solid creative direction, and season-long story arcs that developed over the course of the season, pointing toward an interesting second season, the show was canceled.

But what if the show had endured, and grown into another CBS hit? Paired alongside HIMYM, it’s not hard to envision the show finding a decent amount of success, which means that potentially…

…Andrea Anders would never have gone on to the amazing (but also short-lived) show Better Off Ted.

…Jon Bernthal would never have gone on to embody Shane on The Walking Dead (a job that also likely led to his next, as he’s working again with Frank Darabont on the upcoming Lost Angels).

…Lizzy Caplan probably wouldn’t have had time to show up on True Blood. She definitely wouldn’t have been in Party Down.

…Jesse Tyler Ferguson wouldn’t have become Mitchell on Modern Family.

…Jason Ritter wouldn’t have tried to save the day in The Event, or earned an emmy nomination for Parenthood.

In television, shows are canceled all the time. Roles are recast, characters are brought in or removed. The failure rate is so high, doing any kind of real “what if…” over one’s career would probably drive someone nuts. We always wonder what might have happened, if we had just been allowed to keep doing what we were doing a little bit longer.

But we forget, too often, what wouldn’t have been.

*I have to admit, I didn’t watch The Class when it aired – a friend of mine suggested I catch up on it later and provided me with VHS tapes (yes, tapes! Remember those?). Part of me was very worried that, with the numbers so close, they might keep this show over HIMYM, which was probably my favorite sitcom at the time. Considering that CBS had not yet expanded comedy to two nights, and that the next season’s development brought The Big Bang Theory, it seems like it was always going to be one or the other, but not both. Ultimately it’s hard to argue that CBS didn’t make the right choice.**

**A footnote in a footnote? Yeah, sorry. But it’s interesting to point out that both The Class and How I Met Your Mother did worse that season, ratings-wise, than Rules of Engagement, The New Adventures of Old Christine, and The King of Queens.

Although to be fair, all of those shows spent at least part of the season behind 2.5 Men, which no doubt goosed their ratings up some.

May 17, 2013 Dan 0

The Dangers Of Self-Diagnostic Statistical Analysis, Part 3

This is the third in a multi-part series of short insights that occur to me when I take a look at my life from a statistical point of view.

The Statistic: As a life-long fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, I am, nevertheless, a harbinger of bad luck for them; they lost the first twelve games I attended in person, and, over the course of my life, their record while I am in attendance at the ballpark is well below .500.

How Weird Is That? At first glance, it might not seem that weird. Those first twelve games came between 1999-2002, four seasons in which the Dodgers did not make the postseason – so maybe it was just a case of bad luck.

However, if we dig a little deeper, the statistics get weirder. Considering that the Dodgers were a little above .500 for that period, this is the equivalent of a coin flip coming up the same way 12 times.

If we do consider this a coin flip (which, given the Dodgers record over those years, is a reasonable approximation), the odds are 1 in 4096, or 0.02%.

Those are pretty low odds for any event to come up the same way 12 times in a row. Now again, obviously there are many, many more elements in play here; the caliber of opponent that they were facing, what time of year they were playing (if they were out of the playoffs, they’d be likely to use younger, less talented players), and so on. But still, this rough-and-dirty analysis suggests that this is at least moderately unlikely.

What Does It Mean? Ultimately, very little. I still attend at least a couple of games a season, although those are as much for social interaction as much as for the love of the Dodgers. I understand that it is highly unlikely that my presence has any demonstrable impact on the team or how they play, although as fans, we do tend to believe that we matter, somehow.*

What Have I Learned? Very little, other than that I managed to live through a statistically odd four years. Oh, and to top it off, I’ll share the following story:

In 2004, the Dodgers made the playoffs for the first time since 1996 (and also the first time since I had moved to Los Angeles).

I was ecstatic. The team wasn’t really good enough to get very far – the pitching was suspect (the rotation still included Odalis Perez). Still, just making the postseason was exciting.

My friends and I woke up very early to jump online and get tickets. Frantically working our way through Ticketmaster’s multi-layered ticket purchasing system of doom, we managed to secure tickets to Games 3 and 4 of the NLDS, against the St. Louis Cardinals.

At the time, I was working for a large, possibly evil corporation (hint: their name rhymes with “Schmelectronic Farts”), and the project I was working on was nearing completion, which meant that we were spending a lot of time in the office. And I mean a lot of time. I had a shift once that was 26 hours. And then I had to work the next day.

Anyway. We were working a lot on this almost complete (and incredibly mediocre) project. But the games were on the weekend. Certainly I wouldn’t have to work the weekend, right?

Wrong. At 5:50 PM, Friday afternoon, my boss called a team meeting and gave us the Full Lumbergh, informing us that we’d all be working on Saturday, October 9th. And so, instead of going to the first playoff game of my life with several of my closest friends, I was at work, listening to the broadcast over the internet, as I continued to work on what was, I cannot stress enough, a mind-numbingly mediocre game.

What ended up transpiring on the field that day is what is now known as “The Lima Game”, where Jose Lima** threw a 4 hit, complete game shutout. By all accounts, it was a beautiful game to see. My ticket went to a friend of mine who had never been to a baseball game before; she proclaimed the day “fun.”

My boss, an overworked but not unkind man (and a fan of the Dodgers himself), told me as we were wrapping up work that night that although everyone was going to be in again the next day, I should take Sunday off and go watch the Dodgers play the next day.

I’m pretty sure I was out the door before he finished the sentence.

So, Sunday, October 10th, 2004. My first playoff game! I was happy to be there, happy to have a day off, happy to be a Dodgers fan.

For about twenty minutes.

It started off innocently enough; Dodgers got out of the first inning without giving up any runs, although Odalis Perez did not look great on the mound. Jayson Werth hit a solo home run to put the Dodgers in front. But the wheels quickly came off, and the Dodgers ended up losing 6-2, in a game that ultimately wasn’t close.

I ultimately left the stadium with my friends, tired and disappointed by what had transpired. In addition, I had lost out on quite a bit of overtime pay by not going to work, which just made things worse.

It would be four more years until I had the pleasure of watching the Dodgers win a postseason game live.

*Monday night, I started watching the Los Angeles Kings play against the St. Louis Blues. The Blues went up 2-0 very quickly, at which point I turned the TV off, because I hadn’t watched the Game 3 game when the Kings won (I had been out at a party). The Kings came back to win the game, 4-3. Did my turning the TV off change the course of the game? It’s hard to prove causality in this case, but the evidence is there for you to draw your own conclusions.

**For those of you who don’t know, Jose Lima was a boisterous pitcher who always played with high energy and celebrated like a little kid, whose appearances were often dubbed “Lima Time.” Although he didn’t have a particularly notable career (other than two pretty good seasons with Houston in the late ’90s), his larger-than-life personality and seemingly genuine joy for the game was infectious. I saw him pitch in 2004 against the Cubs, where he replaced an ineffective Hideo Nomo in the second inning with the Dodgers down 6-0, and went 5 2/3 innings, essentially saving the arms of about four bullpen pitchers. The Dodgers lost the game 7-3, but everyone’s spirits lifted when Lima charged in from the bullpen – he seemed happy to be in the game, and we were happy to see him. It was probably the most fun I’ve ever had at a game where the Dodgers lost, and that is a direct result of Jose Lima’s appearance that day.

Lima died of a heart attack in 2010, at the age of 37. Some personalities are just too big for their mortal coils.

May 8, 2013 Dan 0

A Pretty Good Example Of Letting Your Scene Partner Get His Initiation Out, via Community

Note: This is a post about improv. It also might spoil some plot points of last week’s episode of Community, if you haven’t seen it yet.

On last week’s Community, Troy and Abed lived out a body-switching movie (like Freaky Friday), except, of course, in this universe, things generally have an explanation that sort of makes sense – meaning it didn’t suddenly become a universe where body switching could actually happen, but rather was, essentially, a game being played by the two friends.

Thanks to the setup of the episode, what we end up with is a pretty good example of one person letting the other get his initiation out before adding on/jumping into the premise.

(The action starts at 0:36)

0:36-0:44: Troy initiates his premise to Abed – that their brains have switched bodies, meaning that Abed is Troy, and Troy is Abed.

0:44-0:47: Abed is clearly confused, but instead of railroading his own idea into the “scene”, his response, “…so right now…” suggests to Troy that he needs further clarification as to what the premise is.

0:47-0:50: Troy clarifies his initiation, stating once again that they’ve switched bodies.

0:50-0:53: Instead of rushing to respond, Abed takes a moment to fully process the initiation.

0:53-1:00: Abed buys into the premise and plays his part, his intonation, body language, and point of view representing what he thinks Troy sounds/thinks like.

1:00-1:10: Now that both scene partners have bought in, they can play their game for the rest of the episode.

Obviously, this is a scripted scene, so it’s not as though the two were improvising this (probably), but it still provides a couple of great reminders about dealing with these kinds of initiations in improv – initiations where the person initiating the scene clearly has a specific premise in mind.

In particular, if this were an improv scene, the real reason it works is because of Abed’s patience – he didn’t understand the premise at first, and instead of blowing past the initiation, he asked for a clarification. Then, when he got it, he took a moment to process/figure out what exactly that meant (and what Troy was asking from him), and then he launched into it full-bore.

As a random note, the episode was written by Jim Rash, who plays Dean Pelton on the show, won an oscar for co-writing The Descendants, and is an experienced improviser himself.

Incidentally, if you also to see pretty much a perfect example of a group game (as first pointed out to me by James Mastraieni), look no further than this (NSFW) clip from Django Unchained:

May 2, 2013 Dan 0