'The Lobster' filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos reveals what lies behind his dark satire about love, society and relationships; The SFMOMA reopens with a new wing and new art but something is still missing; Broadcast TV networks cancel shows and rearrange line-ups ahead of next week's Upfront presentations to ad buyers.
'The Muppets,' 'Castle,' among TV shows canceled ahead of 2016 Upfronts
If you're a fan of "Castle," "The Muppets," or about a dozen other TV shows, we've got some bad news for you: they've been axed from the airwaves.
A bevy of shows have been canceled in the past few days as TV networks prepare to present their lineups and schedules to advertisers next week in New York. In addition to "Castle" and "The Muppets," the list of other recently canceled shows includes "Agent Carter," "The Grinder," "CSI: Cyber," and "Nashville."
The presentations known as the Upfronts are where ad buyers and journalists gather to see what the broadcast networks have in store. In past years, ad buyers have chosen to spend up to $9 billion of ad time based on these presentations.
Margaret Lyons is the TV critic for the New York Times' newsletter, "Watching," and when she joined us on The Frame today she talked about ABC's rash of cancellations, The CW's increasingly strong grip on quirky dramas, and what one should expect might they end up at an Upfront presentation.
Interview Highlights:
The Upfronts haven't started yet, but we've already got a lot of news to talk about. First of all, ABC has canceled a lot of shows — "Castle," "Galavant," "Nashville," "Agent Carter," "The Family," and even "The Muppets." What do you make of all those changes in terms of the direction of ABC? Are you going to miss any of those shows?
I'm going to miss "Nashville," even though I don't even like "Nashville." [laughs] I feel like it's been such a disaster, but it's also a show that I watch so adamantly. There was some talk about having new show runners next season and I was excited for a revised, revamped "Nashville," so I'm a little disappointed to see that get the axe. But creatively, I think it's probably the correct decision for the show.
This is a signal that ABC's excited about new shows and they're not just going to keep middling performers around. Their hope is that one of their new shows will blow up, but that's a tough gambit — it's harder to make a new show than it is to keep making the shows you have, so when someone really cleans house like that, it's a sign that there's a lot of network anxiety, I guess.
The other news that stuck out to me is that CBS sent "Supergirl" to what is essentially its Minor League affiliate, The CW. The CW has done pretty well with superheroes, but is this any kind of indication that superhero shows don't really work on the big networks and are better suited to either smaller networks or streaming services?
I don't think it's that they don't work, it's just that they may not be a good fit. Given CBS's viewer profile, I think "Supergirl" makes much more sense as a CW show. It skews very young, and I don't think there are other shows on CBS with that kind of tone and style, while The CW has a lot of shows like that. Of course, it has "Arrow" and "The Flash," but it also has quirky, female-led dramas like "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" and "Jane the Virgin," and you can imagine "Supergirl" being part and parcel with those shows.
As for "Agent Carter" being canceled, I think the issue was that it just wasn't that good of a show. If a show fits within a network's sensibility, there's no reason it couldn't succeed, and I think examples like "Jessica Jones" and "Daredevil" demonstrate that there's a huge appetite for grittier, more adult-oriented shows that are more akin to prestige dramas.
I don't think the path for a superhero show on network is necessarily bleak, but it's hard to make good shows. If everyone knew how to do it, we'd do it all the time.
Were there any shows on the bubble that you loved that will make it back for another season?
Yeah, I was extremely relieved that The CW kept three of my favorite shows from this year, "iZombie, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," and "Jane the Virgin." I think the last two are two of the best shows on TV right now — they're interesting, they're different, they have unique storytelling styles, and they're always about more than just what's in the show itself.
I think they have so much to say and I find them thrilling, exciting, and emotional every week, and I look forward to those shows more than anything else I watch. But they're not ratings hits, and I thought The CW would be within its rights to cancel them, because they don't do that well.
Margaret, I've spent almost all of my professional life covering and writing about the movie business, but I'll be at the Upfronts for the first time this year. Anecdotally or from personal experience, do you have any tips that I should follow to make sure I survive all the presentations?
[laughs] If you dislike forced applause, take a Xanax. When I was a kid, I hated when birthday party magicians would say, "I can't hear you!" and they'd make you clap again. I hate that, and the Upfronts are a lot of that.
'The Lobster' is a darkly comedic look at a society that harshly penalizes single people
“The Lobster” is clearly a dystopian satire and a dark comedy, even if the characters in the film aren’t laughing about their predicaments.
But it’s often uncomfortable humor, which is the intention of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos.
Prior to this, he’d made “Dog Tooth” and “The Alps” both were in his native language. The Lobster is not only in English but it also takes place and was shot in and around a hotel on the grey coast of Ireland. When Lanthimos came to The Frame studios I had him give his elevator pitch for what The Lobster is about:
This film is about a world that doesn't tolerate single people. They're incarcerated into a hotel where they have to find a mate in 45 days and if they don't succeed they are turned into an animal of their choosing.
Interview Highlights:
What were the things that you were observing in the world that were the original seeds of this idea?
It does start by wondering about love and if there's real love and how do you find it? What happens when you're single and how people view you when you're single and what kind of pressure there is on you by society or yourself when you're single. So thinking about these things and trying to make something that would explore it in an extreme situation so we can reveal the absurdity of things that we encounter in our every day lives and consider normal or just accept or we're born into...So that's the starting point.
So Jonathan Swift, who is the father of modern satire, would say that within satire is the germ of truth. That satire, when it works, it reacting to things that are present all around us. Obviously The Lobster is an extreme situation of the penalty that somebody faces for not finding a partner, but you're also talking about a modern society that puts a huge premium on that.
Yeah, it's an enhancement of reality. It's our way of being able to create a structure, which allows us to explore those kinds of themes with a different point of view and hopefully tap into something more substantial and elemental.
This is your first English Language film, do you think this story itself was especially well suited to be told in English?
It was that I am just going to start making English-language films and this happened to be the first one that we came up with. I think it's more contemporary because you have actors speaking in English with their own accents. Not necessarily more universal, but I think the story is universal anyway. It was probably reach a bigger audience, that's because it's in English.
Something that is very noticeable in this film is the tone in which humor is delivered and in which characters speak. This is a movie that is darkly funny, but the characters in the film don't themselves laugh.
I think that's the funniest part. First of all, in order for the audience to believe in the world we're creating you have to really believe in it and you have to take it very seriously. Taking something so seriously might appear to be absurd to an observer, I think that's what creates a comedy and makes it very funny. Otherwise it just wouldn't work.
One of the hallmarks of dystopian literature is that within the dystopia there is often a parallel utopia...yet once you escape one for the other, the rules are not dramatically different in terms of the authoritarian nature of their set up. Are you consciously thinking about that? That they're just different versions of authoritarian rule?
Yeah, I love the irony of that. That you escape from one world and you enter into another just because you think you're able to be more free, but this other world or society is created with very similar rules. They appear antithetical but they end up being as oppressive...the irony of that and wondering whether you are actually ever free to make up your mind and be your own person is something we were interested in asking.
Shiny, new SFMOMA a ‘who’s who’ of 20th Century art. So what’s missing?
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art reopens Saturday with a new $300-million wing that makes it the most spacious modern art museum in the country.
KQED Arts Reporter Cy Musiker takes us into the galleries to hear about the art that’s on display, and what’s missing.