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“So, what do you do?”

People respond to this classic conversation starter in a variety of ways:
“I’m a teacher.”
“I work at Initech.”
“I tend bar, and I listen.” (sorry, I couldn’t resist)
“I’m a full-time dad.”

You can tell a lot about a person from the way they answer this seemingly throwaway question. How? Let’s take a look.

Some people respond in the most literal way possible. What do I do? Well, I wait tables. I run a small crafts store. I design microprocessors. In short, I do something. I’ll call these responders activity-oriented, because they describe their professions based on the actual activities that occupy their time

Others recast this question as an inquiry not into their activities but into the circumstances of their employment.
“I work for Texas Instruments.”
“I work at Booz Allen Hamilton.”
“I work in Speaker Pelosi’s office.”
Let’s call these individuals association-oriented. What’s important in their answers is not what exactly what they do, so much as where they do it or who they do it for.

Still others have a different perspective entirely. Work is not merely an activity or an association, but rather a state of being. “I am a writer.” “I am a software engineer.” “I am a pilot.” These people are identity-oriented. Their work isn’t just a thing they do or a place they go; it is who they are.

Now, as with all such deconstructions, the world is not nearly as simple as the three buckets I’ve outlined. Indeed, most real-world responses combine these perspectives in some way, as in, “I write copy at Hill Holliday,” or, “I’m a graphic designer, I sell custom wedding stationery online.” Moreover, sometimes the response you get doesn’t reflect any particular worldview but is rather a grammatical convenience; “I’m a product manager at a software company” just sounds more natural than “I do product management.”

But even with all these caveats, I still think that you can learn something about a person by observing which “orientation” they exhibit when explaining what they do for a living. There’s an especially stark distinction between those who are identity-oriented and those who are not. People who say that they are their profession are telling you that it’s impossible to understand them without understanding their job, and they’re telling you that they’d be different people entirely if they had different careers. Most of all, they’re telling you that their profession isn’t something that fades into the background at 5 PM; it’s a way of life, one that influences everything they do and every decision they make. I think we all, to some degree or another, seek careers that we can be, not merely do.

And it’s clear that some vocations are simply more likely to provide people with this sense of identity. I don’t intend to espouse career elitism by saying this, but we can all name these jobs if we’re honest about it: teacher, doctor, entrepreneur, artist, astronaut…you get the idea. These are the careers we typically associate with making meaning in the world, with doing things that matter in some ultimate sense. There is, of course, nothing wrong with choosing a career that doesn’t lend itself to the identity-oriented perspective, and there are plenty of very good reasons to do so (not the least of which is a preference to find identity outside the workplace instead). But it’s nevertheless hard to imagine someone associating a strong sense of personal identity with their job as, for example, the receptionist at the Scranton branch of a struggling regional paper supply company (sorry, couldn’t resist again). That’s the sort of thing that someone does, not is.

Meanwhile, association-oriented answers can be revealing in their own right. For example, some people say they work “for” their company; others say they work “at” it. Similarly, one person might work “for” his boss, and another might work “with” her. Those who regularly use “for” are, whether they realize it or not, expressing a viewpoint that their work output ultimately belongs to somebody else, not to them. Meanwhile, the “at”/”with” crowd are saying the exact opposite: no matter who signs their checks, they are working to achieve their own goals. I have consistently observed a correlation between heightened ambition and adherence to the “at”/”with” faith (although exceptional loyalty can and does push these people back into the “for” camp). There’s also certainly a generational element at work here; on average, we so-called millennials (if you’ll permit the overgeneralization) are much more likely to harbor a fundamental distaste for the idea doing anything “for” anybody other than, well, ourselves.

Activity-oriented responses, finally, are probably the easiest to understand. People who give them want to make an impression, so they avoid the potentially sycophantic association-oriented answer, but they may not be convicted enough for an identity-oriented one. (Some people fake it and give the “I am” speech anyway; you can always, always tell.) The more insecure members of this group turn the question into a prompt for a resume, filling their long-winded answers with hyperactive verbs like “coordinate,” “strategize,” and “drive.” Paradoxically, though, activity-based characterizations can also be a vehicle for great humility; I’ve met people who might run the entire widgets business and still introduce themselves with a simple, “Hi, I’m John, I help build widgets.”

Why does any of this matter? Well, for one thing, it’s always useful to be able to make quick guesses about someone’s interests, motivations, and self-image when you first meet them, especially in a professional context. (It is, of course, equally important to be willing to abandon these snap judgments given more substantial evidence.) But more importantly, I think this model allows us to ask ourselves what it is we really want from our careers, and whether our answer to this perennial question means that we have it, or that we need to make a change.

So: what do you do?

I’m home for a few days. One of the things I’ve been doing is helping with some long overdue cleaning-out of the accumulated cruft of our 14 years in this house. You know, the usual — throwing out random receipts and bank statements from 1993, making sure to save the Christmas ornament I made in kindergarten, and so on. (More on that in another note, maybe.) Of course, for children of the 90s, who lived in the age when the volume of data readily available was just beginning to accelerate past readily available hard drive space, one of the key things to clean out is old burned CDs, both audio CDs and data backups.

Bar none, the best find of the evening (besides some saved IM conversations that, delicious as they are, I won’t share here) was “unknown cool midi.mid”:
Click here to listen

I’m pretty sure that Chris sent this to me sometime in middle school. There’s just so many awesome things about it:
1) the fact that neither of us knew what song this was at the time
2) the fact that the music is flat-out wrong in more than one way
3) the fact that this was what passed for “cool” when I was 11

I know people who have old collections of hundreds, if not thousands, of midis — sadly I only came across a few dozen. Maybe the real collection is buried on one of those Zip disks I haven’t looked at yet…

What’s the coolest thing you found the last time you strolled through the digital graveyard of your youth?

So I just finished reading Twilight.

Yes, really.

To be clear, Twilight is not good literature, and so I won’t discuss it as though it is. Indeed, one of my biggest takeaways from reading this book is that, if this could get published, I must be able to write something that can, too. Not that I expect to match author Stephenie Meyer‘s reported $50 million in annual earnings.

(Warning: all links in this post contain spoilers.)

The central question of the novel is a good, if well-treaded, one — what would happen if vampires lived among us? — but Meyer’s execution is amateur and inelegant. You know that dreaded tic of the novice fiction writer, the italicized internal monologue? (I know exactly what he means, because I’ve written that garbage myself, he thought.) Well, this book is five hundred pages of that — and I don’t just mean that it’s a first-person narrative, which is obviously a well-accepted literary technique, but rather that it’s written in a voice that doesn’t exist, one that’s impossible to reconcile with the reality of how people actually think and feel. Meyer also clearly never read Stephen King‘s grim warning in On Writing: “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

It should go without saying that any comparisons to Harry Potter are a grave affront to J.K. Rowling‘s considerable talents.

What is interesting about this book, though, is that it is the first book I have ever read which was written for a woman, by a woman, about a woman (if the generous appellation “woman” can even be applied to Twilight‘s puerile protagonist, Bella Swan). I’ve talked to more than one woman who finds Bella insufferable, so I’ll try to avoid overgeneralizing, but I do have some observations.

The thing that stands out most about Bella is that she is a damsel in distress, through and through, in a way that I actually haven’t seen in many novels written for a male audience. Yes, Meyer does seem to want us to believe Bella is smart, because she figures out that Edward Cullen is not what he seems (though this purported intelligence is hard to swallow when Bella petulantly proclaims that she knows the answers to teachers’ questions, not because she is a good student but because they already covered this at her old school). And she seems to want to us to believe Bella is brave, because she is willing to risk life and limb to get kissy with a bloodthirsty vampire. But Bella’s attraction to Edward is cast, above all, as an abject, thoughtless submission to temptation.

In some sense, this is nothing unique: vampires have been leaving knees weak, lips aquiver, and minds blank for centuries. Angel certainly did a number on Buffy. What’s remarkable is the energy of Meyer’s commitment to this characterization. Indeed, her prose is at its strongest and most convincing when describing Bella’s utter helplessness against Edward’s supernatural allure (never mind the other dangerous messes she gets herself into, and has to be rescued from). I can’t help wondering whether the “Bella is smart, Bella is brave” drumbeat was written halfheartedly for the benefit of a 21st-century audience that might be unwilling to accept the head-over-heels, fragile Bella that Meyer wanted to write.

Is this glorification of passivity common to this genre (where by “this genre,” I mean romance novels, because that’s what this is)? I honestly have no clue, but I tend to assume so. And if it is the norm, what is it that makes this idea of complete surrender so compelling?

I just said a minute ago that Twilight is a novel for women, but I don’t actually believe that the appeal of this idea is specific to women at all. We all find thrills in the loss of control; for some, this is physical (like skydiving, say), and for others, like Bella Swan, it’s emotional. Countless pastimes from substance abuse to sadomasochism all get at this same impulse, the desire to release the reins and just live. So while we might find Meyer’s description of Bella’s accelerating heartbeat at Edward’s touch a little unoriginal (okay, a lot unoriginal), we can all relate to that oddly invigorating feeling of powerlessness.

This might be the only reason that these books have legs. Mediocre writing and flat characters notwithstanding, we do want to be thrilled in the way that Meyer aims to thrill us. Even if she succeeds only occasionally, it’s easy enough to breeze through her words, so that we can find those moments and savor them.

And yes, I will be reading New Moon. You had to ask, didn’t you?

My team at work had a nice picnic Friday afternoon in Menlo Park. Like any good company picnic, this one featured a series of friendly competitions, one of which was a hula hooping contest (no, I did not participate).

An engineer on the team started playing around with one of the hula hoops lying around and was suddenly reminded of that classic Tiger Electronics toy, Skip-It, which you might fairly regard as an odd combination of a hula hoop and a jumprope.

I never had a Skip-It — there is little question that it was targeted almost exclusively to girls — but I remember the commercial very vividly (and was reminded of it recently when it was featured by Once Upon a Win, one of my favorite sites on the web).

The clinching couplet in this ad comes about halfway through:

But the very best thing of all
There’s a counter on this ball!

I can’t help but be struck by this sentiment. A kid could have hours of fun just playing around with this thing, sharing it with his friends, getting some exercise all the while, but the best thing about it is that it counts how many times you’ve skipped it? Really? Can you imagine if someone sold a tennis racket and claimed that the “best thing of all” about it was that it counted how many times you’d swung it? Or a pen whose primary selling point was that it showed you how many words you’d written?

Perhaps these pitches wouldn’t work very well, but the truth is that we do have an insatiable obsession with measurement. Everything these days has to have a number on it, a trend that appears ever-escalating. How many of us, for example, now assess a Facebook profile by glancing at the friend count on the left side of the screen? What kinds of judgments do we make based on this number?

This isn’t just about competition with others — after all, the ad does say that we should “try to beat [our own] very best score” — though that’s certainly part of it. What’s really going on here, I think, is that mathematics has become only the latest in a long line of tools we humans use to reassure ourselves that we are, in fact, real, and we do, in fact, matter — a weapon, if you will, against our collective existential dread. It seems that we find our possessions, our dreams, even our relationships somehow less tangible if we can’t measure them, can’t put a number on them that expresses their value. Our self-worth, and by extension the worth of everything in our lives, is inextricably tied to our ability to identify metrics we can use to calculate that worth.

Marketers have long understood this subtle truth about the human psyche. What’s especially fascinating is that Madison Avenue has managed to make us believe in the sublime expressiveness of numbers that we don’t even understand. The horsepower of a car’s engine, the clock speed of a computer’s processor, the number of grams of fat in your favorite cookie — these are all numbers which we’ve been conditioned to believe are the be-all, end-all of these products, even though only a tiny fraction of us have the knowledge required to evaluate these numbers intelligently, let alone place them in the context of all these products’ other important  attributes. Yet our desperate yearning for the quantifiable, the concrete, makes us willing dupes in this unending, multibillion-dollar confidence game.

I don’t believe this was always true, nor do I believe it is equally true in all cultures today. There is something uniquely American about the cold tyranny of the mathematical; I’m no expert on global marketing practices, but I have a feeling that there are many parts of the world where numbers are not such a central aspect of successful advertising. Meanwhile, there is something uniquely modern about the unbridled hubris that has us convinced that anything that matters, we can quantify, a sentiment I doubt was broadly considered before the twentieth century.

On the other hand, many of the world’s biggest advertisers seem happy to ignore this phenomenon. Have you ever seen a single number in an ad by Nike (besides this one, which hardly counts)? Coca-Cola? General Electric? Apple?

My guess is that, if you asked the CMO at any of these companies, they’d tell you that, yes, advertising that emphasizes the measurable attributes of a product is very effective, but only because it exploits a base human instinct, a visceral fear that if you can’t count it, it might not be real. Truly successful brand advertising cannot afford to stoop to this level, which is marred by bogus statistics, exaggerated claims, and the unabashed hucksterism of an industry whose worst nightmare is that you will break free from your stupefying slavery to the almighty Number. It must instead appeal to a higher sensibility: the desire not just to be more, but to be better. Not just to have something, but to mean something.

Perhaps the conclusion I’m driving toward is that the Skip-It, childhood nostalgia aside, wasn’t really that great a toy after all. Or at least they should have come up with a better jingle.

A piece of thrice-folded notebook paper fell on the cafeteria table, next to my Arctic Zone lunchbox. I saw nothing on it but my name, written in a way I’d never seen it before; that is, written in the unmistakable penmanship of a middle-school girl, complete with one of those curvy accents with two short lines across its midpoint (come on, you know what I’m talking about).

I looked up. The mysterious delivery was from Kellie, the girl in my world history class who, as far as I could recall, had never really talked to me, except for one slightly awkward conversation about Frosted Cheerios.

Kellie was pretty, cute-despite-her-braces-and-glasses in that way that only a sixth grader can be. I watched, nonplussed, as she sashayed her way between the chairs back to her table, her friend dutifully looking on. She tucked her shoulder-length brown hair behind her ear and smiled at me. We said nothing.

The cries of adolescent glee began, as my friends around the table realized what they were witnessing. I picked up the note and slowly unfolded it, stealing another glance in Kellie’s direction and honestly having no clue what I should expect to find; after all, it was the first (and ultimately the only) note I’d ever gotten from a girl. The others began to crowd around behind me.

I’m certain that I read the whole thing, but I unfortunately recall almost none of the content, save for one question:

“How can you worship your idols?”

As I wondered, unprepared for this turn of events, how to interpret the hotness in my neck and ears, my friend Drew began to crow, snatching the letter from my fingers and racing to the front of the cafeteria. He accosted Mrs. Hery, the administrator on duty, with the energy of a boy who clearly couldn’t wait to finally see someone else get in trouble. She took the note from him, read a few lines, and began walking toward our table.

I squirmed in my seat as she approached; I did not like the idea of being involved in a conversation with a dean of students. Mrs. Hery smiled at me and explained that I should just tell people, “hey! I’m fine with what you believe, and I’m fine with what I believe!” Still feeling blitzed, I nodded and said “okay” a few times. She left, and we quickly returned to our routine, chatting about whatever nonsense we thought was hilarious and important at the time. I don’t remember giving what had happened a second thought that day, and I don’t remember these events ever coming up in conversation again.

I have no idea what Mrs. Hery did, if anything, after talking to me — I wonder if she said anything to Kellie, or if she just dropped it — but I’ve always regretted deeply that I didn’t take control of this situation. The response I’ve often daydreamed about would have been to walk over to her table, tear up the note, and drop the pieces in front of her. Even a stern rebuke or a mere honest conversation would be more satisfying in retrospect than my utter inaction.

On the other hand, this was, in some sense, only the most extreme example of a seemingly endless line of challenges to my beliefs during my middle school years. I can’t tell you how many times I was asked to defend a religion I wasn’t even sure I believed in, simply because I was its lone representative in the room. The questions were neverending:
“Why are you vegetarian?”
“Why does your mom have a red dot on her head?”
“Do you think I’m going to come back as a cockroach?”
“If I sneak this pepperoni into your pizza and you eat it, will you come back as a cockroach?”

I of course found it tiresome to deal with these often puerile discussions, but at least people were asking the questions. What made Kellie’s note so frustrating, looking back, was that she had never made even a cursory attempt to learn about my background or my beliefs; she instead preferred to engage in drive-by missionary work, passing judgment without comprehension or even investigation.

(As an aside, I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time, but I was reminded again by a YouTube video that’s making the rounds; it’s obviously staged, but it’s unsettling nonetheless.)

On balance, though, I’m actually glad to have had these experiences. Unchallenged beliefs rarely carry as much weight as those we’ve been asked to explain, and although I wouldn’t call myself particularly religious today, I’d argue that these conversations during my formative years actually made me more attuned to my own culture than I might have been had I eaten lunch in a school cafeteria full of Hindus.

I still can’t help wondering, though, what kind of person Kellie (whom I’m obviously not in touch with) grew up to be. Is she a truly good Christian, or did her adolescent zeal become adult zealotry?

I suppose I’ll never know.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/movies/15harry.html

How does this review embarrass its author? Let me count the ways:

1) It says that director David Yates “does a fine job…nimbly shifting between the action and the adolescent soap operatics.” There is nothing nimble about Yates’s direction in this plodding, perpetually-missing-the-point effort, whose pacing is at best poor execution and at worst mind-blowing incompetence. That Yates did slightly better in this latest installment than in its predecessor is hardly saying much.

2) It says that screenwriter Steve Kloves “has done an admirable job” of adapting the source material. The truth is that every Potter script Kloves has penned has been weak to one degree or another — something I’m happy to forgive, considering the difficulty of the task — but this was by far the weakest of his efforts, filled with baldly irrational departures from canon and clumsy writing of pivotal character scenes.

3) It refers to actor Michael Gambon, who plays Albus Dumbledore, as “invaluable.” In fact, it would be hard to overestimate how thoroughly Gambon has failed to grasp the essence of the character he plays. (It’s really too bad that Richard Harris, who did a substantially better job with Dumbledore in the first two films, died before he could play out this critical part for the series.)

4) It calls young actors Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Frank Dillane, who play Tom Riddle, “excellent.” It’s hard to blame them for what is likely Yates’s and Kloves’s fault, but really, nearly every detail of their portrayal of this character is wrong. Christian Coulson, too old for the part now, was far better.

The funny thing is that the review isn’t a positive one at all — but it seems that the reviewer felt compelled to throw the filmmakers a proverbial bone while concluding that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is “an afterthought” and “filler,” while its stars “have grown up into three prettily manicured bores.” Indeed, the review perhaps undersells the series’s anchoring trio just a bit; I agree Rupert Grint is a waste of screen time (and has been for years), but Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson have developed a decent on-screen chemistry, and their scenes together are among the few bright spots in this otherwise tedious and uninspiring endeavor.

I’m watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie. It’s everything I could possibly want from it, and more. (I’ve seen it plenty of times, of course, but not since the late 90s.)

Indeed, MMPR:TM seems to have many of the key features you want in a feature film version of a beloved television show:
–noticeably better production values
–a villain who is a clear step up from the villains in the show, played by an earnest actor with personality (think Alice Krige in Star Trek: First Contact)
–a serious threat to a primary character (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, probably the best film adaptation of a children’s television show ever*, featured a double whammy: Splinter and Raphael)
–a newly created supporting character with serious sex appeal (interesting tidbit: in MMPR:TM, this character, Dulcea, was nearly played by Mariska Hargitay; one can only wonder what irreparable damage this would have done to her then-fledgling, now-thriving career)
–new technology and/or weapons (like, say, Rocky’s Power Scope or Kimberly’s Pterodactyl Thunder Whip; I think the Enterprise-E takes the cake here)
–pseudo-memorable one-liners that children are guaranteed to repeat when they act out scenes from the movie (“Yo fossil man! I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” — it is an immutable law of nature of that >90% of these lines must be puns)
–a big-budget score
–big-budget costumes
–big-budget effects (this one, especially, is relative)

But MMPR:TM also suffers from some shortcomings, many of which are again common in this genre:
–a homogenization of the members of an ensemble cast (Billy Cranston‘s trademark geekiness and Deanna Troi‘s empathic ability, for example, are nowhere to be found on the big screen), rendering most characters little more than narrative placeholders; this happens because a 90-minute film can often only accommodate details that drive the narrative without leaving uninitiated audience members confused, while a ~10- or 20-hour season has plenty of room for character development (though TMNT, admirably, managed to strike a balance)
–little snafus, like having the Rangers morph out of order
–little things that production constraints demanded would be just different enough from the show to annoy you, like Goldar‘s face or Alpha 5‘s voice

The final point I’ll make is that there’s a reason I kept having to repeat the same examples in this post; the list of television shows that have made the jump to the big screen is quite a bit smaller than the list of films that have been adapted for television (hell, they’re even doing this with 10 Things I Hate About You). It’s not easy to do at all, let alone to do it right. Power Rangers in particular must have seemed risky because the source material was uncommonly economical (at least half of every episode was dubbed, reused footage from the show’s Japanese progenitor), but if IMDb’s financials are to be believed, the movie was a very strong performer for Saban Entertainment. The next attempt we’ll likely see is Fox’s upcomingArrested Development movie, which I think we can expect to do fairly well at the box office without being much of a good film (as I heard was true of Sex and the City).

So, do you have a TV show, present or past, that you’d like to see as a feature film?

*I had to add the qualifier “children’s,” because the best overall is almost certainly The Fugitive, with Mission: Impossible being a close second.

On Saturday night, I saw a billboard in San Francisco for the Longines brand of men’s watches. The endorsing celebrity on this billboard was Andre Agassi. The accompanying slogan?

“Elegance is an attitude.”

I couldn’t help but stop and think about how incongruous this seemed at first glance. Not so long ago (well, I suppose it’s over a decade now), Agassi was the face of the Canon Rebel line of high-end consumer cameras. Television ads for the Rebel took advantage of Agassi’s well-known image as something of an iconoclast to promote the Rebel brand. Agassi was unkempt, unbridled, unpredictable. Now his is a face meant to exemplify elegance?

The truth is that Agassi is indeed a paragon of elegance, and he has become one of the true elder statesmen of the tennis world, despite his beginnings as a relentless challenger to convention in a community deeply bound by tradition. The transformation of the marketing thus appears to parallel a transformation of the man.

What makes such transformations possible? I have long believed that there are certain things in a person which are fundamental to his character, and I have often classified attributes like Agassi’s storied rebelliousness among the group of traits that are ultimately inalterable. People may change in superficial ways, I will say, but there is a level below which they will always be the person they were born to be. (The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment is perhaps the most visible example of our implicit conviction in this idea that our essence somehow transcends the ebbs and flows of everyday life. I am an INTJ, and I tend to believe that I always will be.)

Stories like Agassi’s, however, make it difficult for me to hold fast to this view, especially as similar examples arise in every sector of our society. The vagaries of his life, as he wandered from victory to ignominy to victory again and to fatherhood, seem to have changed him in ways that really matter, at least to the extent that we as distant observers can judge this. Meanwhile, I would be fooling myself if I claimed that the changes I have undergone as I have matured into adulthood are purely superficial. It seems that I have generally underestimated, as perhaps many others do, the impact that the arcs of our lives have on the content of our characters. While Agassi’s transformation may be unusually extreme — many would say that he has done a 180 — the truth it demonstrates is nevertheless incontrovertible: we are not who we are, so much as who we become.

Perhaps this is why the rhetoric of change has such a powerful grip on our collective imagination, whether in science or in art or in politics. Knowing on some level that change is inevitable for us, we seek to understand it, to harness it; we yearn to be its master and not its slave. Indeed, our society’s iconoclasts — an Agassi in every town, in every discipline — are our vanguards in this quest: in pushing the boundaries all around us, they also will us to push our own boundaries within, to become masters of ourselves. And as they, like Agassi, settle into the maturity which is inevitable for those who have embraced change and made it work for them, their successors become the new standard-bearers for our ambitions and march the flag of our dreams yet forward.

So the question becomes: are you following that flag, or are you carrying it? Is change happening to you, or does it belong to you? Are you merely being, or are you becoming?

Desperate Networks, by Bill Carter, is an incredibly fascinating read for anyone who, like me, loves watching TV and wants to learn more about the high-flying world of network programming. It’s filled with interesting stories about the most successful shows of the past decade, including Friends, Survivor, American Idol, Desperate Housewives, Lost, and CSI. I thought I’d share the top five things I learned from this book:

1. Network program executives are routinely punished for their aversion to risk. To an extent, this makes sense; taking a show from script to pilot to a scheduled series is extremely expensive, lead times are long, it is very difficult to predict audience reactions, and the opportunity cost of putting an unsuccessful show in the schedule is high. But the bets they are too afraid to place, as when Fox let a relatively small licensing fee scare them away from picking up Friends, seem to cost them far more than the bets they lose. The one exception is the launch of Lost and Desperate Housewives in 2004, which was very risky but happened nonetheless, mostly because ABC was so down-and-out that it had nothing left to lose. (Incidentally, I believe that, against their own instincts, networks will be saved from irrelevance by the rise of web-based television, which can dramatically reduce the cost of taking risks on new programming.)

2. The root cause of this risk aversion is that these executives often have no clue how to tell the difference between a dud and a hit. It’s astonishing how many of the most successful shows of the last decade were lucky to get on the air at all, being passed on by multiple networks, often multiple times, while these same networks doubled down on much-ballyhooed alternatives that quickly became unmitigated failures. It’s no wonder that once they stumble onto a success — like ABC’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — networks run it into the ground, squeezing every last dollar out of it and leaving viewers wondering why TV always seems like more of the same.

3. The way networks and studios are organized often undermines their decision-making. For example, the creator of Desperate Housewives, Marc Cherry, had many doors slammed in his face because he first pitched the show to comedy departments. He only made headway once he realized he should pitch to drama departments instead, many of whom ignored him at first because his past writing experience was in comedy, not drama. Housewives straddles these two genres; the wall between comedy and drama prevented many from having the vision necessary to recognize its unique appeal. Meanwhile, the extremely hierarchical cultures of these organizations often mean that good shows don’t get a fair chance.

4. The business of TV program development and scheduling is personal. Rivalries run deep, and they run all the way to the top. Many of the decisions that make or break seasons are more driven by individual personalities than I might have realized, and even the best shows can’t get on the air without an advocate who has strong relationships.

5. Just like on the web, content is king. You can pull all the promotional stunts you want, load your programming with big names, and maneuver your schedule like crazy, but there is simply no substitute for good stories, compelling characters, and top-notch production. Networks who prioritize long-term quality over short-term hype always win.

Anyway, it’s a good read. If you have any other recommendations for related books, I’d love to hear them!

CBS.com recently posted a number of classic episodes of the ’80s sitcom Family Ties (thanks to Mike for the tip), and I’ve been steadily watching them over the past few weeks. I can remember watching Ties with my mom as a kid, but only very vaguely, and for some reason, I never really encountered the show in syndication while growing up.

It’s fun to watch a show that is dated in so many ways, from minor details, like jokes about “the Russians,” to the show’s very premise: a pair of now-grown-up hippies raising their far more yuppie children in a new era of conservatism and materialism. (Indeed, I wonder what a modern-day Family Ties would be like. Alex P. Keaton would now be old enough to be the dad on the show; what, exactly, would his comically opposite son be like?)

It’s also interesting to explore the development of the situation comedy genre through this lens. In the 1990s, arguably my prime television-watching years, sitcoms were dominated by two generally orthogonal forces: (a) the twin towers of Friends and Seinfeld, and (b) an array of family-oriented sitcoms. The latter group included such well-known hits as Full House and Family Matters (both TGIF stalwarts produced by Miller-Boyett Productions), as well as shows like Home Improvement, which differed slightly in approach but was similar in setup and spirit.

Fundamentally, Family Ties is a family sitcom, and so it’s easy to lump it together with the second group above. The next obvious step, frankly, is to dismiss it, because the Miller-Boyett style that became so emblematic in the ’90s can often be painful to relive, except for the meta-comedic value inherent in such shows. But I think that such a dismissal would be a mistake. Ties really is worth watching, and here’s why:

1) Michael J. Fox is a flat-out great actor. There’s a reason his character, Alex, quickly became the anchor for the show’s success. Fox’s exceptional versatility, which allows him to combine excellent comic timing with capable dramatic acting, put him a cut above the what’s-his-name actors that typified ’90s family sitcoms. Hardly any other show in this genre has benefited from having this kind of megastar at the center of such a highly skilled ensemble cast. Fox somehow managed to make an almost-loathsome character lovable; it’s clear that the writers realized this early on and found ways to make Alex Keaton as complex as the actor playing him deserved. (As an aside, I’ve been listening to Fox’s memoir in the car lately; it’s interesting and engaging.)

2) The drama on Ties is just plain better. The show isn’t weighed down by the schmaltzy music and “awwww” tracks that exemplified the Miller-Boyett modus operandi; as a result, it leaves room for the writers and cast to explore serious situations and their impact on the characters. The Keatons are real people, human and flawed, and they get into real arguments and suffer real heartbreaks that stretch beyond the tidy plot devices of lesser shows. How many family sitcoms have you seen, for example, in which the father figure comes seriously close to an extramarital affair? Or in which the daughter is sexually harassed by her father’s close friend? Or in which the son doesn’t just think about taking drugs but actually does, gets addicted, and suffers the consequences? The degree to which Ties writers were willing to explore heavy situations made for a much higher-quality show than most of the ones I grew up with. (Incidentally, a ’90s family sitcom that does get this right, in many of the same ways, is The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.)

3) The comedy is just plain better, too. Many ’90s family sitcoms relied largely on slapstick and cheap gags for laughs; Ties‘ humor is far more sophisticated. There’s still plenty of cheese, but the show’s writers also drew on political and social commentary for material and made liberal use of sarcasm and deadpan delivery, devices that neither the writers nor the cast of Family Matters were adept enough to employ. It wasn’t just Michael J., either; everyone in the cast, from Tina Yothers’ snarky little sister to Justine Bateman‘s lovable ditz, managed to find their comedic space and exploit it to full advantage.

It always impresses me a little when shows featuring white-collar characters, like Family Ties, The Cosby Show, and Frasier, become successful, because I don’t think most Americans really identify with these characters in any meaningful way. Making these shows work requires both a talented cast and a writing team willing to take risks. I’d say Ties demonstrates both, and so you really should check out a few episodes and see what you think.