My husband survived Preview Night, met up with lots of fans and friends but his very most favorite thing this year is the couple he knows from Las Vegas. Heather and her partner are so much like the people who left him with good memories of his brief flirtation with the carnival that his happiness radiates over the phone. They’re good people with challenges in their backstories, as are we.
Here’s to all the survivors of all the things that can chew a person up and spit them out. You make America great.
Right. So, his books are selling, my books are selling, his second-most annoying ex-girlfriend’s books are selling. He’s getting commissions, connecting with readers from his Ninja Funnies days, and then staggering home to his hotel room exhausted at the end of each night. He doesn’t get Hall H goss unless his relative Wanda (Hi Wanda! You are THE BOMB!) rolls by and shares the tea. He doesn’t get cool merch, just his badges. They don’t even give him a bag anymore. Exhibitors don’t have nearly as much fun as you might think. At least, he doesn’t.
It’s Saturday as I type this, and the whole thing will be over in about 28 hours. He’ll take a few days to wander back up, and then me and the cat will both meow at him, demand to be fed, and curl up to sleep with him. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. Not like that other consummation Hamlet mentions. While not actually counting the hours, I have reached the “talking to myself to hear the sound of another human voice” stage.
Anyhoo, the headline is simple: he left, I missed him, he’ll be back soon. Comic Con had medical emergencies and near-fist fights this year. I think that second thing isn’t a common occurence. It was hot this year, and money is dear, so I’m guessing tensions are high, even in Nerdvana. Wishing everyone well.
While he’s been gone, I’ve tackled a few house projects but also watched the Pilot and then the Actual Episode One Season One of the old BBC show Sherlock, which I only discovered this month (Thank you, PBS). The script keeps most of the scenes and most of the dialog, but revised the dickens (sorry) out them. Each change focused the style and characterization as well as sped up and intensified the suspense. I notice that it also pulled back on “on the nose” dialog that told the viewer what to think in many spots.
Fifteen years after it aired, it felt fresh as hell to me. And to my writer friends, if you’ve ever wondered “should I do one more draft?”, watching the pilot & broadcast versions of “A Study in Pink” will convince you that there can be great benefit in one more draft.
It’s great fun to watch the creators of this show use tools like movie directors (Wes Anderson, David Fincher, and, God help us, heads up display so popular in the MCU), but to much deeper emotional effect. To have words on the screen AND the most 19th century-looking apartment ever in the same series is so much fun!
I have many questions still unanswered. Did Cumberbatch have to starve himself for the role? Can Freeman break even a stone’s heart with just one look? Who noticed that if Watson throws his gun into the Thames, he won’t have it for later episodes and then changed the line (or was it edited out)? I loved each choice they made, every single one. I heard that they got “a better camera” the second time round, and it shows. They went from Midsomer Murders+2 to a crime-drama series like no other.
Now that I’ve done screen captures I realize that it might have been his acting and not a starvation diet? What do you think?
I’m still working out the story structure of the episodes, which is my favorite thing. Recall that sixty-minute American episodic drama tends toward four acts, built around commercial interruptions, or at least it used to be that way. Columbo episodes used three acts for their 90 minute episodes. The second “Pink” had four roughly 20 minute acts, usually ending on a cliffhanger or near a cliff (sometimes literal! screenwriters having fun?), and then that last 10 minutes was the climax and a long unwinding that didn’t feel long because the story had moved so quickly, and we really, really wanted to know how the relationships would resolve (this time between Sherlock and Watson). Totally satisfying, but I don’t know that any American crime dramas have the confidence to do 20-minute acts these days. Do we even make 90 minute episodes of anything?
Also a caveat–I don’t know exactly how it all works, still studying. Would love to hear from anyone who has fallen down this particular rabbit hole and compare scars, er, notes.
You can really tell that the show’s creators loved the original work, and spent a long time figuring out how to exploit the hell out of the premise and the characters and the viewer’s relationship to crime and morality. And then hired actors and crew who could execute like machines. OMG I am so in love with the acting and the sound and the editing and the writing choices.
There’s one more thing I’m still thinking about. In the show itself (in the beginning, anyway), and in SM commentary by viewers about the show, there was a lot of nervous conversation about the sexual orientation of the two characters. Some of this undoubtedly comes from the times, as the UK passed their Equality Act in 2010…but I also wonder if viewers just weren’t used to the male gaze being turned on men instead of women. Because that camera loves the hell out of the leads’ faces and bodies in this show. Freeman in particular does such wonderful work with posture and gesture and it’s easy to overlook. But the filmmakers did not.
Sorry, I was meant to talk about Comic Con. It’s a big show, and Marvel Studios is back (yay?). If I’d known Michelle Yeoh was going to be there, I might have made the trek down with the husband. Now the show is almost over and my house projects are only half done, thanks to the Sherlock deep dives, but I’ve got about four days left to get busy. Hie thee hence, Sherlock DVDs, until my job is done.