Letters to the Editor
tomreedtoon
Published Letters: 805 Editor's Choice: 81
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Lack of knowledge and understanding.
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is a two-pronged attack (the temptation is to say "Stick a fork in Havrilesky, she's done").
It took Cate Balance to point out that the actress is getting better work. That's knowledge of what's happening in the business and on the show. But Havrilesky didn't bother even reading the most obvious source of this stuff, Ain't It Cool News, to get her facts straight about the show and the actress.
The prong marked "understanding" means knowledge of how the business works. Only rarely, in soap operas and in a few special cases like Bewitched and Roseanne, does anyone replace the actor playing a character with someone else and presuming that the audience will accept the change. It is more usual to kill off the character.
And smart producers even plan for it...and I hate to bring up J. Michael Straczynski's name again, but damn it, he did so many things right. When "Joe" plotted out the five years of Babylon 5, he built in "escape hatches" for all the main characters. If their actors died, left the series or couldn't otherwise perform, he had plot elements to cover their departure. This happened in the first year, when Michael O'Hare worried about being stereotyped as Commander Jeffrey Sinclair, the lead character in the series. With the promise of returning as a guest star later on, he was released, and Bruce Boxleitner jumped in as Captain John Sheridan. In fact, the change even made the series better.
And another thing Havrilesky didn't learn in her correspondence course in writing; a good writer always kills off his favorite characters to give their lives dramatic resonance. A bad writer will also kill off favorite characters, but in that case, it's to give some electroshock to a story that's going nowhere. (She doesn't even read comic books, for God's sake - the recent killing of Captain America, and the killing of Superman a few years ago, are readily available prime examples of this desperation tactic. Guess a comic is more complicated than a Starbuck's menu and therefore out of her reach.)
We will have to leave it to the history of the new Battlestar Galactica to decide if the death of Starbuck is an essential dramatic decision, a cheap gimmick to boost the show, or an regrettable misstep in the series' plotting. But not to know that this happens is typical Havrilesky ignorance at work. Maybe she's too busy being the Arbeiter of Cool and Gauleiter of The Worth of Dog Breeds to try to understand television.
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Daahhling, just Luuuuuvv those witty ripostes!
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The clever idea of dismissing valid criticisms because of a made-up or approximation of a word is so...what's the word? Naah, that would be politically incorrect to say. However, the ad hominem attacks against me might be considered proper revenge, because isn't that what I'm doing to Havrilesky?
Not at all. My Starbucks/Cappucino/New Yorker/cafe-life/fey remarks simply point up her insulation from real life, of which television is a part, and her inability to critique it. She is a stuck-up, snooty...well, there's another politically incorrect term that I can't use. That separation practically drips like a runny sore from every word she writes, and everything in her column in which she describes her fabulous life. As if that had anything to do with television.
I do note that the people who critique me aren't critiquing my ideas. One did, last week, and it was remarkably stimulating to have someone who actually thought about the subjects under discussion. Too often, the critiques are from the slaves in thrall to their vampire mistress whose every latte-splattered command they are compelled to obey. "Attack the interloper!" she says, daring to wreck her salon-polished nail by pointing it in my direction, and the zombie sheep lurch into the fray.