CliqueClack » Jay Black

My review of Chris Packham’s review of my movie, How Sweet It Is

Jay Black — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:00:17 +0000

I realized that Chris Packham’s review maybe frustrated me the same way my movie frustrated him. I had a brainstorm: since he got a chance to review my movie, well, then, dammit, I’m going to review his review!

So, first, a little context. I wrote a movie with my writing partner, Brian Herzlinger. It’s called How Sweet It Is and it’s out in select theaters this Friday.

Our first review came in from The Village Voice and even though it was less-than-favorable, I was still pretty excited. I mean, The Village Voice! Not only are they a venerated institution, they’re the same people who own backpage.com! That’s where I go to hire all my … ahem. Let’s move on.

Reading Chris Packham’s review of my movie was a letdown, though, and not because it was critical. Listen, I started doing stand-up in Northeast Philly, I wrote for TV Squad, and I’m married to an Italian woman: I can take criticism. The pain receptors in my soul were burnt out a long time ago.

Listen, I started doing stand-up in Northeast Philly, I wrote for TV Squad, and I’m married to an Italian woman: I can take criticism.

I was upset because the review was so … bad. I mean, it was a poorly-written review. Reviewing is something I know about, because over the course of four years at TV Squad, I churned out something like a quarter of a million words of television criticism. Not all of it was good — I remember a really tortured opening sentence that tried to draw a line from Mark McGwire’s 70 home-run season to an episode of Studio 60 that didn’t have Danny Trip in it — but I think my time there gave me some insight as to what good work looked like.

And Chris Packham’s review wasn’t good work.

This frustrated me. Then I realized that his review maybe frustrated me the same way my movie frustrated him. I had a brainstorm: since he got a chance to review my movie, well, then, dammit, I’m going to review his review!

Because, what else is does the Internet exist except for cat videos and endless, narcissistic recursion?

What else is does the Internet exist except for cat videos and endless, narcissistic recursion?

First, take a look at The Village Voice article in question.

And now, reprinted in its entirety from the comments section of the article and my own Facebook page, is my review of Mr. Packham’s review of my movie:

Mr. Packham’s review is a pull-quote in search of an actual analysis. Granted, “extraordinarily undistinguished” is the kind of almost-nonsense that grabs you immediately, but he doesn’t manage to expand on that point at all. What’s striking about this is that the lack of analysis isn’t a result of the small word count — though, to be fair, it doesn’t look like Mr. Packham had more than a few hundred words to work with — but because he felt the need to pad the review needlessly with an overly-long and overwrought lede sentence. The result? Mr. Packham spends literally half the review trying to find a clever way to say that Joe Piscopo is old.

It’s arguable, I suppose, that Mr. Packham didn’t have much else to say about the film — that it was so undistinguished that he couldn’t bring himself to analyze it and decided, instead, to try to whip up something dazzling for his mediabistro resume. Even if we were to accept that premise, what we’re left with is the onus of the analysis being on the reader. Mr. Packham, you want to shout, this is a freelance writing gig, not an English Lit seminar!

Towards the end of the review, Mr. Packham manages to make some light points about the necessity of farce to bring to it “unhinged commitment” and that How Sweet It Is somehow failed to do that. There’s a nugget of a good idea in there that’s left unexplored by the review’s unnecessary, distracting stylistic flourishes. Mr. Packham’s review screams to the world (or, more specifically, to editors with rent checks in their vest pockets), “Hey, look at me!”, but instead of doing so with clear and cutting analysis, he does so with belabored humor and wheel-spinning. One hundred a fifty words shouldn’t take this long to read.

GRADE: C MINUS.

In an ideal world, you will use the comments section to review this review of Mr. Packham’s review. And then, maybe, if Mr. Packham gets wind of this, he’ll maybe come here to CliqueClack and review your review of my review of his original review. And so on until Neo sets us all free from the Matrix.

Thanks for reading! And please, if you’re in New York, Los Angeles, or Northern New Jersey: go see How Sweet It Is!

Or, at the very least, just follow me on Facebook or Twitter.

Photo Credit: Factory Entertainment Group

CliqueClack Hungry Trolls Podcast – Episode 10

Jay Black — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 01:21:11 +0000

Let’s go back in time and listen to Vinnie and Jay discuss the impending strike of Hurricane Sandy to their beloved New Jersey!

Friend, contributor and comedian Jay Black has brought his Hungry Trolls podcast here to CliqueClack. Jay joins friend and comedian Vinnie Nardiello in what he tells me will be a twice-a-week deal!

Make sure you tune in and make your friends tune in as well, and comment and rate us on our iTunes page! We’re also on Stitcher!

Please keep the comments coming and let us know what you think. Got suggestions? Questions? We’d love to hear ‘em! Make sure you get everyone you know to subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (and rate us, please!) or via some other feed — we feed Jay’s ego a careful diet of traffic numbers and subscriber count, so let’s not let that sucker die of starvation. You can also check-in via GetGlue!

Thanks for listening! And please visit our new sponsor, Audible.com!

(Here’s a direct link to the podcast — enjoy!)

Photo Credit: Hungry Trolls

CliqueClack Hungry Trolls Podcast – Episode 8

Jay Black — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 22:51:03 +0000

Hey, did you know it’s possible to say one thing, but actually mean another? Jay and Vinnie talk satire in this release of CliqueClack Hungry Trolls.

Friend, contributor and comedian Jay Black has brought his Hungry Trolls podcast here to CliqueClack. Jay joins friend and comedian Vinnie Nardiello in what he tells me will be a twice-a-week deal!

Make sure you tune in and make your friends tune in as well, and comment and rate us on our iTunes page! We’re also on Stitcher!

Thanks for listening! And please visit our new sponsor, Audible.com!

(Here’s a direct link to the podcast — enjoy!)

Photo Credit: Hungry Trolls

Let’s blow the system up: How to fix the fall TV season

Jay Black — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 17:17:58 +0000

Using my patent-pending multi-tiered approach to television show promoting, shows that might otherwise wind up in an early grave could have new life breathed into them.

So here we are, right, knee deep in the first few months of the TV season, and all the new shows are tiny little turtles being picked off one by one by hungry, circling seagulls.

It’s a shame. Believe me, all the people involved in the shows are upset about it. Do you think that the people who made Animal Practice wanted the show to suck? Do you think they wanted it do be lambasted for six weeks, the careers of all involved being soaked in criticism? Do you think they wanted to be cancelled?

The system we have for picking network shows was invented 75 years ago and never updated.

The people who made Animal Practice aren’t demon spawn. They’re good people, I bet, who wanted simply wanted to make 100 episodes, and then retire into sacks of money and super models.

The problem is that the show never had a shot. This is for two reasons:

1. It was terrible. Really.

2. The system we have for picking network shows was invented 75 years ago and never updated.

Now, to the first point, I only have this to say: the people who work on Hollywood Entertainment are the greatest people on earth, and when they make a misstep it’s probably the fault of Chinese currency manipulators. (And I say this in no connection whatsoever to the impending release of my first movie, How Sweet It Is.)

The second point, though. That’s worth thinking about.

(And yes, this is a topic I covered once before on TV Squad. Before you think I just Jonah Lehrered myself, understand that if you made a Donal Trump offer of $5 million to anyone who could produce actual memories of my original article, all you would get is me in various degrees of fake mustaches.)

Here’s the way a network picks its shows: it looks at all the pilots that it commissioned, picks the ones they think people will like, then puts them on the air.

That’s it. That’s the whole system. This is trickle-down entertainment and it just doesn’t fit the world we’re living in.

My idea:

Each network owns several baby networks. FOX owns FX. NBC owns Bravo. CBS owns MTV and VH1. ABC owns ABC Family. And on and on. You’d be surprised just how many channels all share the same corporate parent.

As it stands now, the fuzzy-logic rules of the broadcast world are this: the over-the-air networks like CBS try to put out home-runs that appeal to everyone. The baby networks are free to try to develop an identity, and then pick niche shows that fit that identity.

That makes a kind of sense until you realize the following:

1. It’s nearly impossible to figure out what will be a home run.

2. The niche channels tend to engage in “Channel Drift”. (A term a super-talented blog writer from a now-departed website once coined. I believe that writer was stabbed for some trucker meth, but when he was alive, he was something else!)

What I’d like to see is a move to a more strict and tiered system with a bottom-to-top approach. (Incidentally, this exact sentence was in the personal ad that Zed from Pulp Fiction placed when he was trying to find the Gimp.)

What I’d like to see is a move to a more strict and tiered system with a bottom-to-top approach.

Let’s say that has three levels. A bunch of niche channels and the first level, a few basic cable channels next on the next, and a single broadcast channel at the top.

One of the executives at a niche channel devoted to pets decides to greenlight a comedy called Animal Practice. It’s not that great, but no one really expects it to be great, because, shit man, it’s on channel 5031 and it’s about an animal hospital.

But guess what? Some people start watching it and after a season, the writers work out some of the kinks that strangled the earlier episodes. Soon it’s the most popular show on the niche channel and it’s getting some notice at the network level.

Here’s what happens: the network PROMOTES it to the basic cable level. It moves it from Single A to Triple A. Animal Practice gets a bigger budget, some actual publicity, and a second season.

You can see where I’m going, right? By the end of the second season, maybe everyone is in their groove. All of a sudden, Animal Practice is being talked about as the new Cheers (partly because Rhea Perlman was hired to play a gibbon midway through the year). Then there are 20 posts a day about it here on CliqueClack, and in the most obvious signal of its success, hipsters everywhere are saying it was a lot better back when it was on channel 5031.

Everyone says the show is ready for the majors, and boom, in its third season it debuts on NBC, right there in the world for everyone with an antenna and an opposable thumb to see.

You tell me what makes more sense: developing a show from the ground up like this or having a 29-year-old network exec shrug and point to a DVD pile.

Could you imagine how much fun it would be to argue about which shows are ready to make the leap? Or how great it would be to argue that a show would be better not to move up. Louie might make Twitter have a stroke all by itself!

But more than that, it would do something that hasn’t happened in a very long time: it would give every show the chance to develop both itself and its audience. That’s good for the creators. It’s good for the networks. And most importantly, it’s good for the audience.

Photo Credit: ABC

Talking about How Sweet It Is

Jay Black — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 01:40:42 +0000

So, I’ve been with CliqueClack since the very beginning of the site. I love it and, at least three times a day, I have a thought that I think would make a wonderful post for it. But despite all this, I haven’t written for CliqueClack like I’ve wanted to. There are a few reasons this.

1. I’m doing the CliqueClack podcast, which is like “voice-writing” (which is what I’m sure it would have been called if Isaac Asimov had predicted podcasting in the 1950s).

2. I have a wife and kids who, despite my many protestations that I will most likely be like Judd Nelson’s dad from The Breakfast Club, still want me to “do stuff with them.”

3. I am lazy on a scale that can’t be fully comprehended via the written word (try listening to my voice-writing in the above link!).

4. I’ve been writing movies.

Now, it’s to that last point that I’m writing this little post. I won’t go into the whole history of the thing as that would take this thing into “full-fledged public masturbation” mode, but here’s the highlight: there will be a movie released next year that I wrote with Brian Herzlinger and that he directed. It stars Paul Sorvino, Joe Piscopo, Eddie Griffin, Erika Christensen, Michael Pare, Louis Lombardi, Steven W. Bailey, and Erich Bergen. You can check out the trailer above.

Hopefully you’ll like it. If you do, please post many comments to that effect (under several aliases!). If you don’t like it, please disconnect your keyboard until the urge to destroy my soul goes away. (Ah, you know what, now that I think about it, go ahead and post. My soul is already pretty destroyed from years of stand-up comedy. I don’t even know what my own laugh sounds like any more.)

Thanks for your time and hopefully I’ll be able to do my writing for CliqueClack soon!

Photo Credit: Factory Entertainment Group