A Message From Mr. Bochco

By John Schulian

In the midst of the terror that paralyzed me in my first Hollywood story meeting, I heard a voice from my newspaper days tell me to do what I’d always done when other people were talking: take notes. So I madly started scribbling down everything Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher were saying. And I kept scribbling until the day was done (thank God) and the story was broken (no thanks to me).

The story would become a script called “Gibbon Take.” It was about, among other things, a trust for the poor people of Beverly Hills. Steven sent me off to write the beat sheet for it, so we could see how the story looked on paper and where it needed shoring up. A beat sheet is a scene-by-scene outline that serves as the foundation for a script and a safeguard if a writer (me, for instance) makes a hash of said script. In the movie business, it’s known as a step outline, but movies take forever to make and writers come and go, leaving step outlines trampled and forgotten. But in TV, where the pace is furious-–a new episode is shot every seven or eight days-–a beat sheet is a rock to cling to.

On my way out the door that day, with my head still spinning, Steven’s assistant asked me the magic question: “John, where would you like us to send your check?” I hadn’t done anything to earn it yet, but I’ve never been one to turn down an offer of money, so I gave her my address in Philly and hurried off before she learned the awful truth about me.

I was staying at the Hyatt on Sunset Boulevard–the fabled rock-and-roll Riot House from the 60s-–and I spent the next day or two arranging and rearranging the order of scenes, looking for coherent act breaks, and basically taking baby steps as a TV writer. I worked on the same Olivetti portable typewriter that I’d hauled around the country as a sports columnist.

Steven would make changes in what I concocted, but still what I handed him wasn’t so bad that he banished me back from the premises. Instead, he gave me a big smile, wrapped an arm around my shoulder and asked, “You all right?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “you looked like a horse in a burning barn the other day.”

Then we sat down to do some more work on the story. He wanted to get me writing as soon as he could, just as he had the other two untested TV writers he was taking a flier on. One was a woman whose name I forget. The other was a young lawyer from Boston named David Kelley. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Created “Boston Legal,” “Ally McBeal,” and “Picket Fences,” to name but a few series. Wrote almost every episode himself (to the amazement of even the most prolific and best writers in the business). Won every kind of award they hand out. Married Michelle Pfeiffer. All that and he was a good guy, a certified Boston sports nut who kept asking me what his favorite ballplayers were really like. I told him they were all princes. I was in no position to disillusion anybody.

Anyway, Steven wanted to find out about me as a writer as fast as he could. The woman he’d taken a chance on had just delivered her script, and it was a disaster. If I turned out to be just as bad, he wanted to send me packing as quickly so he and Terry Fisher could do a salvage job.

This wasn’t anything he told me, of course, but I could see it written on his face just as he had seen the fear written on mine. Inspired by our mutual discomfort, I made a proposal: what if I wrote five or six scenes from my beat sheet as a test run? If he liked them, I would finish the script. If he didn’t, I’d go back to sportswriting and we would part as friends. It didn’t take any convincing for him to say yes.

By now I was staying at Mike Downey’s apartment in Marina del Ray while he was on the road for the L.A. Times. Just me and my Olivetti as I tried to bring those great Bochco-esque characters to life. If I had any gift at all for what I was attempting, it was that I was a decent mimic. Steven’s characters spoke with such specific voices that I could imitate them without embarrassing myself. So I wrote and re-wrote each scene, polishing them until they had as much shine on them as I could muster. Then, on a Friday afternoon, I stopped by Fox and handed them to Steven. He said he’d read them and get back to me as fast as he could. Both of us were nervous, though for far different reasons.

I spent most of the next day wandering around and didn’t get back to Downey’s apartment until 3 or 4 in the afternoon. The message light on the phone was blinking. It was Steven, with a verdict: “I don’t know what you’re doing hanging around with sports writers, kid. You’re in show business.”

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

The Deep End of the Pool

By John Schulian

The door to Hollywood was open, courtesy of Steven Bochco, and all I had to do was step through it. As easy as that sounded, I was fully aware of how ill-equipped I was to write for the series that turned out to be “L.A. Law.” I’d never written a script and, uncharacteristically, I didn’t try to once I received Steven’s invitation. Though I’d always been a grind and a stickler for preparation, this time I backed off, as if I were afraid to risk screwing up the alignment of the stars that had shone on me thus far.

I pored over the “Hill Street Blues” scripts Steven had sent me until the print started to fade, soaking up their rhythms and quirks and humanity. When drafts of the pilot script for “L.A. Law” began arriving, I read them even more ravenously. If I’d been smart, I would have saved them. All I have, however, are my memories of how the script by Steven and the show’s co-creator, a former lawyer named Terry Louise Fisher, hit me between the eyes with its intelligence, irreverence, and heart. Though multiple storylines were being juggled, they never detracted from the luminous writing. Likewise, there would be no caving in to the mill-run blandness that makes the characters on too many TV series sound like the creation of an uninspired ventriloquist. In just a few lines of dialogue, Steven and Terry had me seeing a three-dimensional quality to the womanizing Arnie Becker, the up-from-nothing Victor Sifuentes, and the career-burdened lovers, Ann Kelsey and Michael Kuzak. That’s the way first-class writing works on the screen, big or small: a little begets a lot.

The other significant lesson I learned lay in the number of drafts the script went through. I’d never been one for rewriting – there’s rarely time for it on a newspaper – but that was all Steven and Terry seemed to be doing. And in every draft they made a stunning script better. The question for me was whether I could come anywhere near what they had achieved, anywhere near being within a million miles. Some days, when I was particularly full of myself, I didn’t see why not. Other days, when reality grabbed my lapel and gave me a good shake, I could feel my throat constricting. Either way, there was no ignoring the obvious: I was going to be in the deep end of the pool.

While I waited for Steven to tell me when to show up, I tried not to turn my Philadelphia Daily News column into a public disgrace. I’d promised the sports editor that I’d come back to the paper if I struck out in Hollywood, but no matter how I pushed myself, my heart was far from the work at hand. I felt no more connection to Philly than I had when I was a visiting writer. If there was an out-of-town assignment, I tried to grab it, the farther out of town the better. I made the old “Best Sports Stories” anthology twice while I was at the Daily News, and one piece was written in Chicago, the other in Anchorage, Alaska.

The dateline I was most interested in, of course, was Los Angeles. There are many things I haven’t been smart about in my life, but whenever I was in L.A., I was smart enough to capitalize on Steven’s invitation to call him. We chatted a time or two, and then he invited me to dinner with him and his wife at the time, Barbara Bosson, whom you may remember as the precinct captain’s increasingly unhinged ex-wife on “Hill Street.” We went to Michael’s, in Santa Monica, which was then the hottest restaurant in town. I don’t remember what I ate, other than it was probably more than Steven and his wife put away combined. But I do remember how Michael himself came out and schmoozed with the Bochcos and threw in a quick backrub for Steven. So this was how TV royalty was treated.

Later, I was in L.A. again, this time to cover the Lakers when the Houston Rockets upset them to get into the 1986 NBA finals. Steven invited me to swing by his office at Twentieth Century Fox and watch an early cut of the “L.A. Law” pilot. He wasn’t around when I showed up, but his assistant had everything ready for me. I watched it by myself, thrilled to see how the splendid cast he had assembled brought those characters to life. There was magic involved-–I wasn’t sure how it was conjured up, but more than ever, I wanted to be part of it.

In mid-June 1986, almost 11 months to the day after Steven wrote me the letter that became my life preserver, there I was. I made a silent vow to check my ego at the door, took a deep breath, and walked into the Old Writers Building on the Fox lot. “Nobody here but us old writers,” Steven said. I’d read the scripts he’d sent me, a venerable introductory text called “Screenplay,” by Syd Field, and the script for “Chinatown,” which remains the gold standard of screenwriting. And that was the sum total of my preparation for the turning point in my life.

"Chinatown" by Robert Towne

Steven introduced me to Terry Fisher, who looked at me like she still hadn’t heard an acceptable explanation for my presence. But Steven was the big dog in the room, so my place at the table was secure. After some polite chitchat, we started to work on breaking the story lines for what would become the eighth episode of “L.A. Law.” Ten minutes in, I realized just how far out of my league I was.

Here were two incredibly smart, savvy, sophisticated people-–one a reformed lawyer, the other a legendary TV writer who had steeped himself in the law and lawyers-–and they were doing something they had done hundreds of times before. They were kicking around ideas and notions and snippets of dialogue the way the Harlem Globetrotters whip a basketball around. I was a bumpkin, unschooled in law and barely conversant with screenwriting. I sat there paralyzed, unable to contribute a single coherent thought. This wasn’t what I’d expected at all. All my life I’d worked alone, and now that I’d been thrust into Hollywood’s collaborative process, I was afraid that if I tried to say anything, I would squeak like a mouse.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

[Swimming Pool Photograph by David Lee Guss]

The Great Escape

By John Schulian

Every writer in Hollywood has a dark corner in his head where he keeps the horror stories of how he was lied to, cheated, betrayed, bullied, ignored, treated like a dim child, abandoned, and left with the short end of the stick. It comes with the territory. But right now I have a different kind of story to tell. It’s so preposterously upbeat that people in this brutal business, especially writers, might insist it is a fairy tale. I promise you it’s not. And I know, because I lived it.

It’s the story of how I, a burned-out Philadelphia sports columnist, showed up in Hollywood without ever having written a script, and four months later had a produced episode of “L.A. Law” to my credit and was happily residing on the writing staff of “Miami Vice.” Even now, with 25 years of hindsight at my disposal, I don’t know what I did to deserve that kind of good fortune.

When this began, I was trying to figure out if I knew anyone in Hollywood and drawing blanks. But Phil Hersh, who had fought the newspaper wars in Chicago and Baltimore with me, had stayed in touch with a photographer named Martha Hartnett after she jumped from the Sun-Times to the L.A. Times. Martha had married a TV writer-producer named Jeff Melvoin, who Phil said was a good guy. Before I knew it, I was on the phone with Jeff finding out that he was even more than that. He didn’t know me from a sack of potatoes, but he gave me 45 minutes of his time, listening to my story, offering a quick introduction to the screenwriter’s life, and generally proving himself to be funny, big-hearted, and smart, very smart. Best of all, he wrapped up the conversation by inviting me to call him the next time I was in L.A.

I got there the day after Marvelous Marvin Hagler put away Tommy Hearns in the best fight I ever covered and maybe the most electric event I ever saw in any sport. Mike Downey, who had hit it big as a columnist in Detroit, and I drove from Las Vegas in a rented car, both of us on the verge of major career moves. Downey was about to take his wonderfully funny act to the L.A. Times, and I was looking for someone to tell me how to go about hurling myself into Hollywood’s gaping maw.

When I called Jeff, he told me we were having dinner, but first I had two meetings he had arranged for me. Meetings are the lifeblood of Hollywood, so much so that sometimes you have meetings just to schedule other meetings. Whatever, my baptism by yakking involved sitting down with the head of development at Geffen Films and a vice president at MTM, which was then the hottest production company in TV (“Hill Street Blues,” “St. Elsewhere,” “Mary Tyler Moore”). Though I didn’t know which end of the bat to hold as far as show business was concerned, I survived. The executives I met were interested in getting fresh blood in the business, people with stories to tell -– and naturally they wanted to talk about sports. They weren’t offering me any jobs, of course, but I liked them and they liked me, and that certainly beat the alternative.

Then I met Jeff for dinner and he paid, so I liked him even more than I had on the phone. Mostly we talked about how I was going to get in the business. “Everybody breaks in a different way,” he said. And I said, “What if I wrote a letter to Steven Bochco?” I’d been bowled over by Bochco’s “Hill Street Blues” from the first minutes of the first episode. I can’t tell you why I watched it – I’ve never watched much TV — but I did and a world of possibilities opened up to me. “Hill Street” was as revolutionary then as “The Wire” is now. It felt real, the characters were mesmerizing, and the stories pulsed with humanity and humor and pain and love. If I could work on a show like that, I told myself, I’d be proud to call myself a TV writer. I told Jeff the same thing. In that case, he said, I should write Steven Bochco.

So I did, and in the envelope with my letter, I enclosed a my boxing anthology, “Writers’ Fighters,” and a copy of the Mike Royko profile I’d done for GQ. It all went in the mail the day before I left to cover Wimbledon. And then I started praying to whatever god it is that looks out for writers in need of a new beginning.

Steven Bochco

When I returned two weeks later, there was a letter from Bochco telling me he’d received my package and promising to read what I’d enclosed. He also warned me that a lot of journalists had tried to make the leap I was contemplating, and failed. But if I were still interested, he’d be glad to send me some “Hill Street” scripts to study. I wrote him back in a heartbeat: please send the scripts. Then I went on vacation for two weeks. I came home to find this letter, on Twentieth Century Fox stationery:

July 17, 1985

Dear John:

Herewith some HILL STREET scripts. I read about half your book so far. It’s wonderful. You’re a terrific writer, and if you can’t make the transition to film writing, I’d be very surprised. Not to mention disappointed. As soon as I get my next project (a series about, God help me, lawyers) perpendicular to the ground, I will send you what we’ve written and invite you to write a script. (For money, of course.)

If you have any questions, or just want to talk, call me. My office number is XXXXXXXXXX.

Best regards,
Steven Bochco

P.S. You also type great. I didn’t spot a single do-over in your letter.

Today, that letter, framed, hangs in my office at home. I’m still amazed by it and still everlastingly grateful for the lifeline it represented. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t guaranteed anything except a chance. A chance was all I was looking for. I would have to write in a different form and a different medium. I would have to navigate a world I knew nothing about. But at last I had something to hope for again. And I owed it to Steven Bochco, a man I’d never met.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

The Duke visits Laugh-In.

[Painting by Cassie Behle]

I have not seen “Justified,” the TV series based on characters created by the Elmore Leonard but from all accounts it is excellent. Over at the Star-Ledger, Alan Sepinwall talks to the Master:

We talk about director Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1995 version of “Get Shorty,” the first truly successful (in both creative and commercial terms) Leonard adaptation after a long fallow period. The conversation quickly turns to how the creative team on the sequel, “Be Cool,” got wrong so much of what Sonnenfeld and writer Scott Frank got right.

“I told Barry Sonnenfeld, ‘When somebody delivers a funny line, don’t cut to someone else laughing or nudging or grinning, because they’re all serious,’” he recalls. “And he knew that. But then when they shot the sequel, they forgot all about that, and everybody’s laughing all the way through. There’s a guy named Cedric the Entertainer (in the cast). Well, I can’t have a guy named Cedric the Entertainer in one of my stories!”

I just happen to be reading “Swag” these days, and am thoroughly enjoying it.

The site will be down for up to three hours today as we flip the switch over to the new design. Bear with us…thanks.

[Picture by Ruth Orkin]

Remember…

Tomorrow night at 10:00 p.m. on the National Geographic Channel:

Break it Down: Yankee Stadium

Happy Easter, Peoples.

[Photograph: Bogdan Cristel/Reuters]

Next Thursday, the National Geographic Channel will air, “Break it Down: Yankee Stadium,” an exclusive look at the demolition of the Stadium.

Looks like a must-watch for us.

Dag…

Gene Kelly and Sugar Ray Robinson tap it out:

I have a friend who is a fiend for public access TV. He lives in Manhattan so I don’t get to see the shows that float his boat (in the Bronx we are graced by the fine North End Liquor ads). But he shared this with me.

Warning: This May So Great it Hurts or So Awful it Hurts (either way, pain is involved):

Check out this fantastic post over at WFMU on the early career of Dave Letterman.

He didn’t come cheap, but the Knicks finally got their man.

Over at ESPN, Mike Wilpon likes the deal for the Knicks:

Anybody who says the Knicks traded away too much is nuts; they clearly upgraded at point guard, and if Gallinari, Mozgov, Wilson Chandler and Raymond Felton were that good, the Knicks would have been better than 28-26 at the break.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting the Knicks are going to represent the Eastern Conference in the NBA Finals this June. They won’t. What I am saying is they’ve got pieces, good ones, enough to be a credible team by the end of March. They’ve got two top-15 players, perhaps two top-10 players, which is something the Knicks couldn’t truthfully say during the Patrick Ewing days and probably since the championship days of the early 1970s, if then.

SI’s Ian Thomsen adds:

Did the Knicks give up too much?

Look at it this way. They weren’t planning to re-sign Wilson Chandler (who went to Denver) as a free agent this summer, because they were planning on using his cap space to sign Anthony as a free agent. So that means Chandler wasn’t part of their future.

They had signed Raymond Felton (who went to Denver) to a two-year contract. And now in this trade they’re receiving Billups as his replacement at point guard for the short term. So that’s a wash.

So now it comes down to forward Danilo Gallinari, Mozgov, the Knicks’ 2014 pick in the first round and a pair of second-round picks in 2012 and 2013 to Denver for Anthony (along with Shelden Williams, Anthony Carter and Renaldo Balkman). Is that such a bad deal?

Awww, look out now.

The Great Hank Kingsley.

Hey, Now.

Head on over to Details for the complete oral history of the funny show, “Party Down.”

Over at The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn tackles the “Mad Men” craze:

Since the summer of 2007, when Mad Men premiered on the cable station AMC, the world it purports to depict—a lushly reimagined Madison Avenue in the 1960s, where sleekly suited, chain-smoking, hard-drinking advertising executives dream up ingeniously intuitive campaigns for cigarettes and bras and airlines while effortlessly bedding beautiful young women or whisking their Grace Kelly–lookalike wives off to business trips in Rome—has itself become the object of a kind of madness. I’m not even referring to the critical reception both in the US and abroad, which has been delirious: a recent and not atypical reference in the Times of London called it “one of the…best television series of all time,” and the show has repeatedly won the Emmy, the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, the Writers Guild of America Award, and the Producers Guild of America Award for Best Drama Series. (A number of its cast members have been nominated in the various acting categories as well.) Rather, the way in which Mad Men has seemingly percolated into every corner of the popular culture—the children’s show Sesame Street has introduced a Mad Men parody, toned down, naturally, for its tender viewers—suggests that its appeal goes far beyond what dramatic satisfactions it might afford.

At first glance, this appeal seems to have a lot to do with the show’s much-discussed visual style—the crisp midcentury coolness of dress and decor. The clothing retailer Banana Republic, in partnership with the show’s creators, devised a nationwide window display campaign evoking the show’s distinctive 1960s look, and now offers a style guide to help consumers look more like the show’s characters. A nail polish company now offers a Mad Men–inspired line of colors; the toy maker Mattel has released dolls based on some of the show’s characters. Most intriguingly, to my mind, Brooks Brothers has partnered with the series’s costume designer to produce a limited edition Mad Men suit—which is, in turn, based on a Brooks Brothers design of the 1960s.

I’ve only seen a few episodes. I’ve talked to some people who say the show is spot-on; others say it is contrived.

What’s all the hubbub…bub?

“All in the Family” debuted 40 years ago today. Over at Salon.com, Matt Zoller Seitz writes about why the show still matters:

TV today is inhospitable to series like “All in the Family.” This is only partly due to TV’s splintering from a handful of channels into hundreds. An equal or larger part of the blame can be laid at the feet of broadcast network executives and their marketers, who figured out (sometime in the late ‘80s) that they could make more ad money by junking the “Big Tent” model and appealing to white college graduates with loads of disposable income – a description that rules out anyone who looks or sounds like a character from “All in the Family” (even Mike or Gloria). Except for certain corners of cable – specifically channels that thrive on shows about violent crime and/or revolve around working-class or poor characters – you don’t hear people talking about race, class, religion or politics unless the dialogue is jocular and sarcastic and “just kidding” (like the banter on “Glee” and “Community”) or the earnest centerpiece of a Very Special Episode. And can you remember the last time a broadcast network built a sitcom around fiftysomething, pear-shaped, working-class married people — of any color? Pretty much every modern sitcom lead is under 40 (or trying hard to look it) and fashionably thin or buff.

Since the early ’80s, the networks have done their best to gentrify prime time, banishing demographically déclassé characters and subjects while retaining elements that marketers call “sexy” (code for “flashily empty”). Little remains of Lear’s legacy but cursing, innuendo, and the sound of flushing toilets. The template for most modern network sitcoms is “Friends” — which, contrary to the “Seinfeld” mantra, truly was a Show about Nothing. Modern network sitcoms are mostly about dating, parenthood and office politics; they deal with hot-button issues in a glancing, glib way if they address them at all. Some are lame. Some are amusing. A few are brilliant. None is the equal of “All in the Family.” Those were the days.

That’s what Mel Brooks yelled at a nun one day when he was walking down 57th street (get Kenneth Tynan’s book, “Show People” or “Profiles”  for his great piece on Brooks).

Here’s a 1982 Rolling Stone Interview with Brooks conducted by Michael Sragow:

How did you first react to ‘My Favorite year’ ?

Brooks: I said, “Wait a minute, you’re singing my song. What is this – the story of a little Jewish boy from Brooklyn and a guest star on Your Show of Shows? I lived this life.” I looked at Joe Bologna and I said, “That is Sid Caesar.” There’s a certain primitive energy that Joe Bologna and Sid Caesar share, a very basic animal energy . Eat. Go. Sleep. The first thing I wrote for Sid was about a jungle boy who’s been captured and taken to New York City as an experiment to see how he will survive in the big city. He’s interviewed by Carl Reiner. “What do you eat, sir?” “Pigeons. Crave pigeons, go in park, many pigeons in park. Eat pigeons.” “What do you fear?” “Buick, Big, yellow, very danferous. Wait, wait till lights, eyes go out – smash in grille, all night, with club. Kill Buick.” Joe Bologna has the same thing going int he movie.”Send the girl some steaks,” he says, “I’ll send her some steaks.” Nothing romatic, no flowers. To make up with a writer, he sends some tires’ his borther owns a tire store. But they’re very real. I love all the tlittle touches int eh movie. I love when Peter O’Toole realizes that he’s going to be working in front of a live audience. That is the essence of the movie – when he says, “I’m not an actor , I’m a movie star.” There’s a big difference.

Part One of “The 10th Inning,” Ken Burn’s two-part follow up to “Baseball” aired on PBS last night. “The Bottom of the 10th” is tonight.

I reviewed the show for SI.com. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. The Yankee Dynasty is represented nicely though I’m sure most of you wanted more (and there’s no sugar-coating Ken’s allegiance to the Red Sox, though it should also be noted that co-writer, producer and director, Lynn Novick, is a Yankee fan). The focus is on the ’96 Yanks, not ’98, a fair choice in terms of drama, though they didn’t mention Frank Torre.

There’s a ton on the Sox in “The Bottom of the 10th,” but Burns is never vicious–he doesn’t show the infamous slap play by Alex Rodriguez, for instance. I’d forgotten that David Ortiz won both Games 4 and 5 in ’04, man, totally blacked that out. This was the first time I’ve watched replays. Ortizzle’s name is noticeably missing from a list of stars associated with taking PEDS (Manny’s on it).

The baseball stuff is good. Plenty to debate, of course, but that’s fun part. Jonah Keri will be pleased that the ’94 Expos made the cut. I didn’t know from Mike Barnicle before watching the show and enjoyed his talking head interviews, even if they were ham-handed in spots. Then I read up on him and feel guilty for liking him so much.

But something felt off with the filmmaking. The Florentine films style—panning and fading over still photographs–is commonly known as “The Burns Effect.” I was talking to a friend recently who said, “How can you not jump the shark after you become a pre-set on iMovie?” I get his point but the Burns style doesn’t bother me because it works. You don’t look for every artist to be innovator, after all. I wouldn’t want Elmore Leonard to be anything but Elmore Leonard.

But I’m not sure that the Burns style  is ideally suited to journalism. Nothing is more frustating than the music. In “The 8th Inning” and “The 9th Inning,” Burns used period source music as a character in the story. But here, over and over again, I was distracted by the music selections. I thought they got in the way of the story. Most of the tracks aren’t bad pieces of music on their own, but they just don’t have much to do with the topic at hand. And they have nothing to do with what was on the radio at the time.

Burns does use James Brown and Tower of Power. This record from The Incredible Bongo Band opens the show:

P.E. and The Beastie Boys and the White Stripes are used but otherwise, there’s too much smooth jazz and strumming guitars, where songs like “Nothing Shocking,” by Jane’s Addiction or the Red Hot Chili Peppers version of “Higher Ground,” or any number of radio hits would have been interesting choices. There’s cool cuts from the Red Garland Trio and Wynton Marsalis, but Burns misses out on using Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” in the Mariano Rivera segment, an oversight than can only be excused by budget considerations And even when music choices work thematically like with David Bowie’s “Fame,” they are obvious, not to mention dated.

But that’s me. And I expect fireworks from Burns and company every time out. Still, “The 10th Inning” is certainly worth watching.

I’m curious to know what you think. Charlie Pierce weighed in this morning, and here is the Times’ review (which borders on being mean).

Oh, and over at Deadspin, dig this memoir piece I wrote about working for Burns back in the spring of 1994:

Ken got a kick out of turning people on to the things that moved him. When Willie Morris appeared in episode five of Baseball, talking about listening to games on the radio, I asked Ken who he was, and that was my introduction to Morris and his classic memoir, North Toward Home. I found a copy immediately and the book made a lasting impression on me. Ken was an avid music fan and hipped me to Lester Young and Booker T and the M.G.’s. During our car ride north, I tried to get him to dig some rap records — I remember playing him “Passin’ Me By” by the Pharcyde — but he couldn’t get past the lack of melody. Then, he took out a cassette and played what he called the best version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was Marvin Gaye, singing at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game, and Ken was right.

[Photo Credit: J. Parthum]

I’ve had at least ten people tell me that “The Wire” isn’t only their favorite show but that it is without a doubt, “the best Television show ever made.” I still haven’t seen it but plan to tackle it this winter.

Over at the New York Review of Books, check out novelist Lorrie Moore’s take:

Set in post–September 11 Baltimore, the HBO series The Wire—whose sixty episodes were originally broadcast between June 2002 and March 2008 and are now available on DVD—has many things on its rich and roaming mind, but one of those things is Baltimore itself, home of Edgar Allan Poe, H.L. Mencken, Babe Ruth, and Billie Holiday. Baltimore is not just a stand-in for Western civilization or globalized urban rot or the American inner city now given the cold federal shoulder in the folly-filled war on terror, though it is certainly all these things. Baltimore is also just plain itself, with a very specific cast of characters, dead and alive. Eminences are pointedly referenced in the course of the series: the camera passes over a sign to Babe Ruth’s birthplace, tightens on a Mencken quote sculpted into the office wall of The Baltimore Sun; “Poe” is not just street pronunciation for “poor” (to the delight of one of The Wire‘s screenwriters) but implicitly printed onto one horror-story element of the script; a phrase of Lady Day wafts in as ambient recorded music in a narrative that is scoreless except when the credits are rolling or in the occasional end-of-season montage.

…he use of Baltimore as a millennial tapestry, in fact, might be seen as a quiet rebuke to its own great living novelists, Anne Tyler and John Barth, both of whose exquisitely styled prose could be accused of having turned its back on the deep inner workings of the city that executive producer David Simon, a former Baltimore reporter, and producer Ed Burns, a former Baltimore schoolteacher and cop, have excavated with such daring and success. (“Where in Leave-It-to-Beaver-Land are you taking me?” asks The Wire‘s homeless police informant Bubbles, when driven out to a leafy, upscale neighborhood; the words are novelist and screenwriter Richard Price’s and never mind that this aging cultural reference is unlikely to have actually spilled forth from this character; the remark does nicely).

So confident are Simon and Burns in their enterprise that they have with much justification called the program “not television” but a “novel.” Certainly the series’s creators know what novelists know: that it takes time to transform a social type into a human being, demography into dramaturgy, whether time comes in the form of pages or hours. With time as a medium rather than a constraint one can show a profound and unexpected aspect of a character, and discover what that character might decide to do because of it. With time one can show the surprising interconnections within a chaotic, patchworked metropolis.

It is sometimes difficult to sing the praises of this premier example of a new art form, not just because enthusiastic viewers and cultural studies graduate students have gotten there first—”Heroism, Institutions, and the Police Procedural” or “Stringer Bell’s Lament: Violence and Legitimacy in Contemporary Capitalism” (chapters in The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television)—but also because David Simon himself, not trusting an audience, and not waiting for posterity, in his own often stirring remarks about the show in print interviews, in public appearances, and in audio commentary on the DVD version, has not just explicated the text to near muteness but jacked the critical rhetoric up very high. He is the show’s most garrulous promoter. In comment after comment, even the word “novel” is not always enough and Simon and his colleagues have compared his five-season series to a Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes are all named), Homer’s Iliad, a Shakespearean drama, a serialized narrative by Dickens, an historical document that will be read in fifty years, a book by Tolstoy, and Melville’s Moby-Dick. This leaves only journalist Joe Klein to raise the ante further: “The Wire never won an Emmy?” Klein is shown exclaiming in the DVD features on the final episode. “The Wire should win the Nobel Prize for literature!”