Myles McNutt: A Guy Who's On Tumblr

The Nintendo Switch is launching with an embarrassingly light launch lineup, a higher-than-anticipated (if not unreasonable given its hybrid nature) $300 price tag, and no bundled game to offset that cost, all unveiled in this underwhelming and often disorienting presentation. Let’s discuss why.

How are they launching a console with nothing other than Zelda and a weird minigame collection, with almost no third party support?

This is a good question, and there’s a few answers. One is they committed to launching the Switch with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and so they’re forced into it: they’re clearly pushing Arms and Splatoon 2 as two major titles (with the latter being more than just a port, unlike April’s Mario Kart), but neither are ready for launch. So why not delay until summer when there would be a stronger lineup? As StrikerObi notes on Twitter, probably because their fiscal year ends in March, meaning they get the initial sales to meet this year’s profit forecasting, and then can regroup at the holidays.

But how does a $300 console/handheld hybrid with almost no games appeal to a general audience?

It 100% does not, but my feeling is that Nintendo knows this. Right now, the market for the system is “people who want to play Zelda but don’t own a Wii U” and “people who will buy Nintendo systems regardless” (this is me). By the holiday, it’s probable this market will expand: in addition to Super Mario Odyssey, and potentially other first-party software, there’s also some EA Sports titles, and stuff like Minecraft that has become a huge staple of both tablet and console/handheld devices. Essentially, this launch is for the hardcore gamers, hence being organized around Zelda—the holiday season will be when Nintendo has to make its pitch to the mainstream.

But won’t that be too late to garner meaningful third party supp—

Yes, yes, it’s not a great plan: by the time Nintendo has tested Switch’s ability to sustain itself as a console in November/December, it will already be late in development cycle for 2018 games from those developers taking a “wait and see” approach, which means that Nintendo has to REALLY hope porting content over to the system is easy if they’re expecting any type of support in the year that follows.

What pitch will Nintendo be making at that point?

This is my question. Their pitch during this presentation was “we’re revolutionizing the way you play again,” but that is...not true? Yes, the Joy-Cons have advanced motion control options, but we know from past experience that no one buy Nintendo will ever use those features, and so the hard sell on this was inexplicable to me. The pitch is “games you love at home on-the-go,” but Nintendo was VERY wary about overselling its value as a handheld system, focusing extensively on the “take it with you to a party to play with friends” rather than “here are games you’re used to being forced to play at home that you can now play while traveling, etc.” (My guess is because they don’t want to destroy the 3DS market in Japan, where that system still has some life, but we’ll see.) I don’t know how often I really intend to use that feature, to be honest, but the idea of it at least appeals to me, but doesn’t seem to be a significant part of Nintendo’s pitch at the moment. Whether this changes when they actually have games that people want to play remains to be seen, but for the moment Nintendo isn’t even pretending it hasn’t released a Zelda Tablet.

But, you’re still buying a Zelda Tablet, right?

Last year, after having been turned onto the Tufts University TV YouTube account by my time with Jules and Monty, I saw a Tumblr post discussing High Spirits, their latest web output. This was in May, right after I had watched a number of the new fall pilots for last season, and so as I started High Spirits I had a brief moment of confusion: didn’t I recognize the lead?

I did. Niall Cunningham, who starred in High Spirits, also plays Tyler—the teenage son—on CBS’ sitcom Life in Pieces, the network’s first single-camera series to get a second season in a very long while.

It was a fun, “small world” discovery, and one I followed up on this summer when the Television Critics Association Press Tour made its way to the set of Life in Pieces for a press conference with the cast. Speaking with Cunningham after a lively Q&A, I was able to get a better sense of the procedure involved: an audition was put on tape, a trip to L.A. was arranged to read for the part, and then he was back in Boston getting the call that he was a series regular on a CBS sitcom...and about to start production on a web series for his college university television station’s YouTube channel.

Cunningham framed this convergence as a fortuitous one, and not just for his career prospects, noting that having had the experience of making the Life in Pieces pilot gave him something to bring back to Tufts and the whirlwind production of High Spirits (he estimates they filmed an episode a day). And that’s undoubtedly a huge part of this experience for a young actor, fresh out of a performing arts high school and a year at Tufts, landing in Los Angeles to do a few days a week—thanks to the show’s distinctive, divided story structure—on a network sitcom: Life in Pieces is, for Cunningham, a pretty amazing learning experience.

So this is a pieced together outline that I spent time mapping out in the weeks after seeing Jurassic World, in conjunction with my friend Drew. Ultimately, this probably counts as fan fiction, but it’s less about being a huge fan of Jurassic World and more about being puzzled by how to make a sequel to it. The sequel that Jurassic World Teased—which, dollars to donuts, will be Jurassic War—seemed to me that it would be tough to jump to immediately, and so I was surprised when they announced only one sequel. But now that the first sequel’s director J.A. Bayona has confirmed that it’s being conceived as a trilogy (despite Universal not naming a date for the third film, which is atypical these days), I figured I’d share my proposed bridge film, entitled “Jurassic Duty” because the idea that they’d ever name something this speaks to my level of seriousness with this suggestion.

Jurassic Duty

Act One

[Two years since Jurassic World]

On-Island

Dinosaurs have settled into a new order of sorts. T-Rex and Blue remain alphas, largely unthreatened by other predators. Blue, in particular, has taken on a clear role of keeper of peace, patrolling the island. This is established through a combination of our heroes tracking Blue on radar and then dialogue-free sequences following her through her “patrol.” Lengthy sequence at the opening of the film focuses on this, while also revealing that Rexy is growing old, and gaunt with a lack of food. She is nearing the end of her life. And moreover, the island is running out of food, with clear tensions rising within the equilibrium. (The Mososaurus is near death, being fed what scraps can be salvaged by others). We specifically see Blue run into conflict with a new alpha, and a pack of carnivores—Let’s say the leader’s a Suchomimus (which only eats fish but is making a play at power anyway) and then a pack of Metriacanthosauruses). They respect Blue too much to attack, but they’re pushing boundaries.

It has been too long. Jurassic World is close to closing for good.

Notes on the End of TV Club’s “Cover (Almost) Everything” Era

Over the course of the past few weeks, readers of The A.V. Club‘s TV Club section have gradually seen stray observations at the end of episodic reviews signaling those reviews were coming to an end (Editor-in-Chief John Teti has since expanded on this here). Some were new shows that weren’t connecting with the audience; others, though, had been reviewed for years, and developed intense communities around them.

In each comment thread, the readers expressed dismay, and some anger. For them, these reviews created spaces of community, where they got to engage about a show they cared about (which can, of course, manifest as love or hate, depending on context). They have come to rely on those spaces, whether as a form of self-expression or as a space to discuss a show that none of their “real life” acquaintances watches in the same way.

That’s the value of episodic TV coverage, in my view. It is not a coincidence that the first site built around episodic TV coverage, Television Without Pity, combined its engaging episodic recaps with an extensive forum community. It is also not a coincidence that when critics started turning to episodic recaps, its biggest impact was in expanding the critic’s relationship with their audience. I became part of the “community” of TV criticism by writing my own reviews, yes, but also by commenting on Alan Sepinwall’s, where I would interact with other regular commenters and access a level of TV obsession that I didn’t have access to in my fellow students or coworkers. And when I got to start writing for The A.V. Club, I was thrilled to know that my writing—while not without reader engagement in some contexts on my personal blog—would be part of its expansive—if at times a bit challenging, let’s be real—community.

This focus on community has been lost as episodic coverage has expanded across the web. Sure, most sites have some type of comment presence, but how many of them function as a legitimate community? Some of this has to do with the dispersal of audiences across so many different sites, all doing the same basic thing; yet more has to do with the fact that freelancers writing these reviews have zero investment to manage these communities, as compared to critics like Sepinwall for whom doing so early on was an extension of his relationship with his newspaper readers. And it’s hard to ignore that online comments have become more and more cesspool-like as time has gone on, especially without any type of moderation. Oh, and let’s not forget the elephant in the room: rise of Twitter and Facebook as spaces of community, independent of any specific content. Combine it all together, and the community function of episodic coverage no longer feels fundamental to its existence.

But I still believe in community. I just spent thirteen days moderating Orange is the New Black comments to maintain spoiler-free comment sections for the community discussing the show at The A.V. Club. I was not paid to do this; doing this took time out of my life that I probably should have spent in other ways; almost none of my TV Club colleagues do the same, nor would I expect them to. But I do it because I was once a commenter, and I once valued having that community, and even with Twitter what it is I want a place where I can have literate discussions of something I care about. And so I engage with the commenters, participating in debates and pushing the trolls to expand on their opinions to make a clearer contribution to the thread. This is not always fun (I was excoriated for being lukewarm on this season’s penultimate Game Of Thrones), but I think it’s important, and will always think it’s important.

What it’s not is “content.” You can’t share a community on Facebook. A community isn’t going to drive Twitter traffic, unless that community is on Twitter. You can’t monetize a comment community, at least not in the current online journalism climate. And so there is no incentive for websites to organize their coverage models around principles of community: there is incentive to create content that can be shared where those communities are forming elsewhere (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). The A.V. Club values its community en masse, with extensive comment sections on all articles, and features like “What’s On Tonight” and “Reasonable Discussions” that are basically open threads for the community to develop. But these niche communities, built around specific shows, are no longer sustainable, and so coverage of even shows that had significant comment counts—Survivor and Adventure Time are two of the most prominent—are being dropped from regular coverage.

These and other shows that are losing out on regular coverage will still be covered in other ways, true, but it’s sad to see the coverage model of TV Club change. That model, as it evolved from the earliest days of the section through to the present day, suggested that the best way to signal a television show was worth the community’s time was to give the community a space to engage with it on a weekly basis. By the site’s writers taking a show seriously week-in and week-out, the message was that the audience should do the same, and that the show would develop a community of its own. I got to write about shows like Awkward. or Elementary at stages when they were not being read en masse, but when writing about them felt like an important form of advocacy for their worthiness. And it was intensely gratifying to see communities build around them, and to be able to have dialogues with those readers that enriched my own experience with those shows. Sure, some shows were being reviewed with almost no comments and certainly viewer numbers that would terrify any analytics departments, but I loved the project of analyzing a show in detail over the course of its season as a way to consider its place within the television landscape, and feel privileged to be able to continue to do it with Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, and Shameless moving forward.

But the model of TV Club had to change. In the current online economy, it does not make reasonable sense to review every episode of a show simply to say that it’s worth people’s time. That model existed before The A.V. Club wrote pre-air reviews, and before the For Our Consideration feature was a near-daily presence on the site, and before there was so much television that even the appearance of exhaustive coverage would exhaust even the most generous of freelance budgets. Episodic coverage still has its place, but it is no longer viable as a legitimizing gesture, especially not when there are plenty of other ways the site can complete the same act.

Those ways won’t be able to create the same focused communities, nor will they give great freelancers regular gigs where they get to hone their skills and develop their writing in a fairly safe environment—so many people got their professional “start” writing episodic reviews of shows with small communities over the past number of years, and those opportunities will be sparser now. When I think about how the project of TV Club brought so many great writers to my attention and helped me appreciate smaller shows that I might otherwise have overlooked, I get sad; but when I realize how much I’ve pulled away from reading reviews as the sheer volume of TV to watch has grown, and how much “Cover ALL the TV” as a philosophy has become untenable, I realize that finding a new method of promoting TV Club’s philosophy of enthusiast TV coverage is realistically the only path forward.

Ultimately, I’m just hopeful that the principles we learned from nearly a decade of “let’s write about every episode!” as a borderline insane, instinctive model are not lost as that model begins to fade away. I think that can happen, and am excited to do my part, but let’s pour one out for the days where we covered nearly everything.

Drew “skewed too female.”

It’s the detail everyone has pulled from Deadline’s story explaining the death of the Nancy Drew project that CBS chose not to pick up to series over the weekend. But beyond the fact that this isn’t a direct quote from CBS, but rather Nellie Andreeva’s matter-of-fact industry speak reporting on the show’s fate, the controversy surrounding this concern surprised me a little. The Mary Sue reports that “apparently, ‘the pilot tested well but skewed too female for CBS’ schedule’. Whatever that means.” And I think it’s important to talk about what it means, because it’s not necessarily what these reactions are suggesting.

I have my issues with CBS’ programming decisions at the moment, but being concerned about a lack of cross-gender appeal has always been central to their success. And what “skewed too female” actually means in context is that the men who were part of the test audiences for Drew—which for CBS are typically Las Vegas tourists—weren’t connecting with it. It doesn’t mean that CBS executives looked at the show itself and said it was “too female”—it means the data came back suggesting that the show was not successful enough with men to make it onto their schedule, and testing data is for better or worse a central part of pilot decision-making. The data said the show was too female to draw the older cross-gender audience CBS targets compared to the other pilots CBS was choosing from (specifically Doubt, which also has a female lead in Katherine Heigl).

And while it may be disheartening to see a broadcast network be so unwilling to create programming that primarily appeals to women, they’re responding to market conditions. Beyond the competition created by narrowcast cable channels aimed specifically at women, the fact is that ABC has actively courted female audiences, meaning that competing with them on that level would be incredibly challenging. It would be difficult for CBS to convince the advertisers who would want to target women (and thus advertise in a show like Drew that appeals to them) that their show—on a network without a history of programming explicitly advertised to women—is the better buy than ABC, which has actively courted a female audience in recent years, and so from a competitive perspective CBS has been careful with regard to gender balance in its new series.

Shawn Carter is “present” in Lemonade almost immediately, constructed through both the song’s lyrics and the spoken word elements of the visual album as a cheating husband. And so when director Mark Romanek is given the task of introducing Carter in “Sandcastles,” in a section focused on forgiveness, it’s actually an incredibly delicate task. The way Lemonade is structured, the song and the video combine to begin the argument for why she has chosen to forgive him, and forces us to reconcile the characterization in the previous songs with the man himself.

And so I was struck by the way Romanek obscures his identity: first, by showing only his left arm in the bed scenes (with the wedding ring noticeably covered by her hand, before eventually being revealed), and then in silhouette as the camera gradually pans up to reveal their faces in full. Watching in the moment, after having seen Twitter conversation early on during Lemonade that the visual album might function as a divorce announcement, the appearance of the arm—and the Jay-Z-like bald head in the background—played into my doubt that he would be involved in the production of something that carried such rage toward him. Although the lyrics make an argument for forgiveness, the video provides a crucial visual component, including the first image focused on Carter himself: lying vulnerable, almost supplicant as he clutches at her ankle.

Because Hedley is a more successful and bankable musical act in Canada?

I am a well documented supporter of Jepsen, and I certainly understand the underlying frustration of this piece: Jepsen’s album is strong enough to support a solo tour of Canada, and it has to be frustrating for Canadian fans to be paying premium prices to see her open for another act. Kate Robertson’s sentiment here, therefore, rings true: It’s unfortunate that given the lack of commercial success for EMOTION, she’s relegated to support work (where she’s no doubt helping ticket sales for Hedley, functioning as something closer to a co-headliner than a traditional opener, which does distinguish this from opening for Bieber early on in her arrival to America). But as much as the optics might be frustrating from certain critical perspectives, the critical perspective has no bearing on touring. Touring, like the rest of the music industry, is driven by metrics and economics, and so this question as a simple answer: She’s opening for Hedley because this gives her a large platform to create awareness for her music among 10,000 Canadians a night, most of whom only know “Call Me Maybe” and “Good Time,” and most of whom would have probably not come out to a headlining tour (which could still follow at a later date).

I agree with Robertson’s suggestion that the choice to open for Hedley could confuse the narrative around Jepsen’s path forward as an artist, but her argument that Jepsen is actually more popular than Hedley based on their social media followings has problems. Robertson’s argument perpetuates the idea that Jepsen’s social following (generated in the midst of “Call Me Maybe”) carries any actual weight, but it really doesn’t. She writes about Hedley that “they have just 583,000 Twitter followers in comparison to Jepsen’s 11 million; they’ve earned 41,700 fans on Instagram, while 1.6 million have been salivating over Jepsen’s photos from the sold-out Gimme Love tour all over America and Japan since September.“ But here’s the thing: An impossibly small percentage of those 11 million people bought Carly Rae Jepsen’s record, or her singles, and her American tour was in smaller theatres instead of stadiums. It’s also a following spread globally, whereas Hedley’s following is primarily focused in Canada, which is a far better metric for measuring success on a Canadian tour.

Jepsen’s social following reflects the global spread of “Call Me Maybe,” which on some level remains her primary market: Robertson repeats narratives about the album’s failure (an early Japan release, the choice of “I Really Like You” over “Run Away With Me”), but those choices also reinforced Jepsen’s prominence in that market, with the “Hot Overseas” Billboard leader for 2015 in the country and drawing the type of crowds there that she could never sustain in Canada or the U.S. We need to reconsider the way we talk about EMOTION‘s “failure”: it failed to turn her into a pop star, yes, but it established a viable market in which Jepsen is a critical darling in North America, a pop star in Japan, and a viable global recording artist.

Last year, when E4′s My Mad Fat Diary finished its truncated third season, I tweeted the following: “may it some day be released from the music rights purgatory that keeps it from reaching this side of the Atlantic.”

We don’t know for certain whether the show—which is now on Hulu in the U.S., and which I reviewed for The A.V. Club—was held up exclusively by music rights, but it was undoubtedly part of the problem. With an average of around sixteen songs licensed per episode, the wall-to-wall ‘90s music is a huge part of its identity, but also a huge reason why the show would struggle to sell internationally. And so while I’m very happy the show is finally available legally in the U.S., I’m not shocked that it comes with some pretty substantial gaps in the soundtrack.

If you’re wondering why, let’s break it down.

Why would the amount of music be a problem?

When licensing all this music (the job of a music supervisor), and effectively “scoring” the show with it, the producers would have only licensed music for exhibition/use in the U.K. This is not just because they are primarily using U.K.-based artists: it would also be cheaper than securing global rights (which would probably have to run through multiple labels), which would have been prohibitively expensive.

Why wouldn’t they be willing to spend the money to secure global rights when selling the show overseas?

Because no one would buy the show at that cost. When selling the series, Endemol UK—the producer—wants to be able to make a profit, and they’re dealing with a show that for all its critical acclaim/devoted fandom is still a niche show. Beyond the fact that it’s a ‘90s period teen drama, the very things that make the show distinctive—the focus on mental illness, the honesty and nuanced take on Rae’s weight—also separate it from any type of mainstream sale. Hulu was never going to pay top dollar for it, and so licensing all the music would have likely led to Endemol losing money, and no television distributor sells TV to LOSE money.

How should they ideally handle relicensing?

From my point of view, they should prioritize music that has a story purpose. In the case of episode two, for example, a Stone Roses poster is prominently displayed before Rae goes running to “Love Spreads,” and so it’s important that song remains. The stuff that is simply used for background is, ultimately, more expendable. In the premiere, for example, “Mickey” soundtracking Rae’s list of terrible things she’s said to her mother is distinctive and effective, but losing it does not dramatically alter the scene. From my point of view, you make a list of these priorities, focus on them, and then everything else can fall into place from there (typically replaced by sound-alike muzak, rather than entirely new songs, which would be more challenging to match up to the editing).

Is there evidence to suggest they did this?

Yes and no. “Love Spreads” remains, and they held onto the Oasis songs (which are probably among the most well-known in the soundtrack). But then in the premiere, you lose the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” which may never be mentioned by the characters specifically but needs to be present for the scene—Rae impresses her new friends with a choice jukebox selection—to make any sense. Replacing it with muzak might not create a direct contradiction for new viewers, but it stretches credulity.

But whereas the verdict was out based on the first two episodes, the second season seems to amplify the problem. “Girls,” which is built around Rae’s efforts to purchase Weezer’s Pinkerton, has been stripped of all its Weezer. If they had shared my own priorities, there is no way they would have allowed this to happen, which suggests either the cost of the songs was too prohibitive or they hadn’t prioritized them within their budget and had run out of money by that point.

Just how much music is gone?

I have lots of observations about the Wizarding World of Harry Potter as it manifests at Universal Studios Hollywood, so much so that I certainly was not their ideal visitor: I did not buy a wand, I did not invest in overpriced candy, and none of the house attire (in both “classic souvenir t-shirts etc.” and “upscale branded cardigans and the like” variants) drew my eye, and I spent a lot of my time mentally mapping out the jig of it all.

This was no more apparent than in the attraction that actually has the longest wait during the soft opening: Ollivander’s. In the books, the conceit is that the wand picks the wizard, and so they want to give people the chance to recreate this. And so they have this absurdly long queue that was ultimately barely populated during the soft opening, and yet you still waited close to a half-hour to enter Ollivander’s shop. Based on the length of the line, you could lose three hours waiting for this experience.

But here’s the thing: only one person gets picked by a wand. In my group, it was a college student in this mid-twenties that if I hadn’t been in line behind him as he chatted with his friends I’d have taken for a ringer: he was cosplaying with a sweater-tie combo, and the second he got picked he went into full theater kid mode like he was LIVING THE DREAM. It was infectious, which is good considering that every other person (adult or kid) isn’t going to get the same experience, and will instead be pushed into the wand shop to settle for a wand they have to choose themselves.

It is a dumb show, with cheap effects and not enough content to justify even a short wait. But it’s also a brilliant show, because it guarantees one person will buy a wand (or at least are way more likely to do so - this dude was definitely buying that wand, though) and it also means you’ll have a bunch of kids who didn’t get picked but not might get guilt wands from their parents. It simultaneously makes one person feel special and creates an environment where those who weren’t made special by the park can be MADE to feel special by parents in the “exit through the gift shop” extension of the store.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens has already broken a small village of box office records, and it’s likely more will fall in the days and weeks to come.

However, as much as this will be an unprecedented two weeks in terms of holiday box office, today is somewhat oddly one of the more significant days for the film. See, while it’s significant that TFA has earned the highest opening weekend of all time, that’s a record that was just broken earlier this year by Jurassic World, which broke a record set by 2012′s The Avengers, which broke...you get the picture. Since Spider-Man first broke the $100m barrier in 2002, six films have broken the opening weekend box office record.

And yet through all of this, one box office record has stood since 2004. That record is the highest grossing Monday, a record set in 2004 by Spider-Man 2 (which has a deflated Opening Weekend as compared with its predecessor due to a mid-week opening).

Monday is an odd box office day—nothing has ever opened on a Monday, and so the list of top-grossing Mondays consists primarily of Memorial Day weekends, the one summer week in which the day functions as a holiday. For films like Jurassic World (which nearly beat the record) or The Avengers (which didn’t even come close), the problem is a lack of kids out of school—although opening on a scale that should have allowed both films to easily surpass SM2′s record, they failed due to a smaller percentage of schools on summer break in mid-June and early May as compared with SM2′s early July release date.

There are a number of reasons why this is expected to change with The Force Awakens. December is an entirely different beast: a majority of kids are out of school, in what for most is the first day of winter break, and movies released on this weekend—including current domestic and worldwide box office record holder Avatar—have typically seen the next fourteen days function more like weekends than weekdays. Nothing on this scale has ever opened in December, and it’s likely even a 50% drop—Avatar fell by only 33%—would be enough to topple this 11-year-record.