Who ever said that domestic violence and sexual assault are hard subjects to talk about? What’s the deal, NFL?

I applaud the NFL for their recent “No More” campaign, targeting domestic violence and sexual assault. I hope they continue to raise awareness and assist victims in every possible way.

But their recent series of television ads baffle me. The ads, which feature prominent football players staring in silence at the camera, end with the message:

Domestic violence and sexual assault are hard subjects for everyone to talk about. Help us start the conversation.

I don’t think that domestic violence and sexual assault are hard to talk about at all.

Does anyone?

Perhaps it would be difficult to talk about these subjects with my children or my fifth graders. Maybe it would be difficult to discuss if I were the perpetrator of these crimes. But what is so hard about discussing these topics with law-abiding adults?

I honestly don’t get it. I can’t think of a single person in my life with whom I couldn't talk about sexual assault and domestic violence.

What am I missing?

These 8 minutes of amateur video are better than any show on television.

Thinking about watching another episode of The Big Bang Theory tonight?

Or one of those acronym shows? NCIS? SVU? CSI?

  

Don’t. They’re all kind of stupid, I’m sure.

It’s true. I’m judging television shows that I’ve never actually seen before, but at the very least they’re formulaic. It won’t kill you to miss one.

Or all of them.

Watch this instead. It’s reality television without the douchebags. It’s serious drama. It’s full of suspense, intrigue, and at least two moments of genuine surprise. Shock, even.

There are heroes and villains. Battles and bravery. 

A life and death struggle. And no commercial breaks. 

Three ideas to increase profitability at ESPN

These three ideas are free, ESPN. You’d be a fool not to use them.

I have many more, and I’d be more than happy to discuss a consulting position within your organization.

Call me.

1. Longer NFL highlights

The National Football League is king. It is by far the most popular sport in America and is routinely the most watched television program each week.

Add to this the scarcity of NFL games: only 16 games a week, spread out over the course of three days, making impossible for the average football fan to watch more than three or four games a week.

As a result, there is a lot of football that NFL fans would like to see but can’t. So please, ESPN, lengthen your NFL highlight packages. Cover more of the action in the game. No one will ever complain about seeing more football highlights. I’d rather see every touchdown from every game than a former football player yap about the importance of minimizing distractions or how special teams often wins or loses the game.  

2. Coordinated commercial breaks

ESPN and ESPN2 should never, ever be on a commercial break simultaneously. On every cable network, these two stations, in addition to ESPN’s other offerings, occupy channels adjacent to each other. I should be able to flip back and forth between the two during the commercial break and maintain nonstop sports programming.

When I flip the channel from ESPN to ESPN2 and find commercials on both networks, I often leave the network entirely, channel surfing for some other distant shore. This should not be permitted to happen. Ever. 

3. Longer B-roll packages

As ESPN analysts and hosts are talking about athletes and teams, B-roll is often running in order to provide the viewer with something to look at other than a talk head’s head. But that B-roll is almost never long enough, which means it eventually loops to the beginning, forcing the viewer to watch the same touchdown pass, the same three-point shot, the same slap shot, and the same homerun again and again.

Is it really that hard to create B-roll packages that are long enough to fill any segment?

My 1992-1994 culture gap: Two years without television, movies, or music

If you haven’t heard, Twin Peaks is returning to television. For me, it will be my first chance to watch the show. Though I was alive and well when the show first aired, I didn’t watch it because it fell between the years of 1992-1994.

My lost years. My cultural blind spot.

I’ve had many tough times in my life, but the period from 1992 through 1994 were probably my toughest. I was homeless for a period of about four months. This was followed by 18 months spent living in the home of Jehovah Witnesses, working two full time jobs – 18 hours a day, six days a week – in order to pay for my legal defense in a trial for a crime I did not commit. I was also the victim of an armed robbery during this time, which resulted years of post traumatic stress disorder. 

As a result, for more two years, I watched no television, saw almost no movies, and listened to very little new music.

For at least two years, I was completely detached from popular culture.

The television, film, and music that I missed during that time was vast, but certain things are more prominent than others. Some cultural touchstones and ubiquitous references pop up more than others.

Things that I missed during that time are and have almost no knowledge of as a result of this culture gap include:

• Twin Peaks
• Northern Exposure (which I thought was the subtitle to Twin Peaks)
• Wings
• Saved by the Bell
• The Fresh Prince of Bel Air
• The State
• Boy Meets World (though I doubt I would’ve watched this show anyway)
• Whoomp! (There It Is) and Whoot There It Is (and the fact that both songs were released and played on the radio at the same time)
• Reality Bites
• Glengarry Glen Ross

Some things, like NYPD Blue and The X Files debuted in these years but lasted long enough for me to catch up years later in syndication.

And I eventually watched many of the popular films released in those years and listened to the most popular songs, but when you don’t catch these things in their moment of greatest cultural relevance, they often fall a little flat.

Interstellar should be a TV show

For the record, someone should adapt Interstellar for television. There was about 49 hours of content squeezed into a little less than three hours.

It would be an amazing TV show. Perfect for HBO. A&E. Netflix.

Also, I’m more than willing to be the one to adapt it, in the event that you’re a show runner looking for a writer.

I want to be asked more rhetorical questions

I was watching Homeland last night (season 2, episode 1), and someone asked Claire Danes’ character, “Who do you think you are?”

I was so jealous. I am so ready for this question. But no one ever asks me it. I hear it in movies and on television all the time, and I can recall hearing it once in real life, but never has that question been directed at me.

Unfortunately, Danes’ character failed to recognize it as a rhetorical question, as so many fictional characters do. Instead, she treated the question like an indictment. An attack on her decision to be at a certain place at a certain time. She went on the defensive and ultimately lost the verbal battle. 

What she should’ve said was something like this:

“Who do I think I am? Look, I may be bipolar and no longer privy to this country’s deepest, darkest secrets, but I know exactly who I am. I’m Carrie Matheson, damn it. Former CIA officer who has saved countless lives countless number of times, including the life of the Vice President and other high ranking United States officials, even though even I don’t know that I averted that potential disaster. I also happen to be the only person smart enough to know that Nicholas Brody is an al-Qaeda operative, and by the end of this season or maybe next, I’m probably going to kill him and save more lives. Who do I think I am? Is that really the best you can do?”

Rhetorical questions are sneaky. They can trip up someone even as skilled and savvy as former CIA agent Carrie Mathison.

As I’ve written before, you need to train yourself to listen for them, and when asked, you must answer as quickly, as literally, and as aggressively as possible.

It won’t always win you an argument, but it’s a great way to blunt your opponent’s attack and have some fun in the process.

Saturday morning cartoons are no more. A sad day for someone whose 27 year friendship may have been predicated on a Saturday morning cartoon theme song.

For the first time in 50-plus years, you won't find a block of animation on broadcast this morning. Saturday morning cartoons are over. It's the end of an era.

I’m a little sad.

Saturday morning cartoons were a staple for me growing up. Shows like  Super Friends and The Smurfs kept me entertained for hours.

  

It was also one of my only opportunities to see commercials for products like sugary cereals and new toy lines. With parents hell bent on store brand Cheerios and hand-me-down Gobots, just watching commercials for Sugar Smacks and Transformers was thrilling. 

  

Just as important, Saturday morning cartoons taught me patience.

If I wanted to watch a new cartoon, I had to wait one full week. Immediate gratification was not possible to children of my generation like it is for my own children today. 

My favorite Saturday morning cartoon of all time was Disney’s Adventures of the Gummi Bears. It’s a little odd since the show first aired in 1985, when I was fourteen years old, but I was apparently still watching Saturday morning cartoons at the time. And I fell in love with this show.

The Gummi Bears became an even more important part of my life two years later when I went to work for McDonald’s. I met my best friend of the last 27 years while working the drive-thru, handing Egg McMuffins and coffee to customers through the window. It was on a Saturday morning shift that Bengi and I admitted our mutual love for the show and discovered that we both knew the theme song to the show by heart. 

We were likely to eventually become friends anyway. Though he and I see each other as very different people today, a person who has known Bengi for a long time and recently got to know me said that she has never met two people more alike.

It makes sense. After 27 years, we tend to see our differences more clearly than the similarities which probably drew us together in the first place. 

Still, for a couple of teenage boys, discovering that we had something in common as odd and eclectic as Disney’s Adventures of the Gummi Bears probably helped cement the friendship quite a bit.

I can still remember singing that song together in the drive-thru like it was yesterday. 

I can still sing the song by heart today.

There can only be one explanation for a Republican campaign ad as sexist and stupid as this.

I suspect that the Republican Party has been infiltrated by some undercover Democratic strategists who have convinced them that stupid, sexist political ads are effective. 

There can be no other explanation for the existence of this political ad (and others  like it, which are exactly the same except with different Republican candidate’s names). No right minded (or right leaning) person could watch this commercial and not see it as offensive and inane.

Right?    

Let’s put an end to the Miss America pageant by making anyone who watches it feel small and stupid and uninformed.

John Oliver’s takedown of the Miss America pageant on HBO’s Last Week Tonight was brilliant. The Miss America pageant is admittedly an easy target, but Oliver’s segment is both surgical and hilarious.

I could not stop laughing.

The Miss America pageant and all its bastard step children are like moldering, vestigial organs that should have been excised from the cultural landscape long ago.

Here’s the first step: STOP WATCHING THE GODDAMN THING.

Though the audience for the Miss America pageant was down 22% from last year, it still drew almost 10 million viewer and garnered its best rating in ten years in the category of adults ages 18 to 49 years old.

Who are these people?

Except I know who these people are. At least some of them. I watched friends tweet about the show while watching it. I heard colleagues talking about the show the next day. At least two people asked me if I watched.

I did not watch. Nor should you.

It will be a long time before pageant contestants are no longer willing to be objectified on national television for a chance at fame and profit. 

But if rationale Americans can come together and agree that this organization and its television show should no longer be supported by the general public, the Miss America pageant could be brought to an end sooner than later.

Let’s do this.

Don’t watch next year. If you hear of friends or relatives who watched, shame them. Make them feel small and stupid and uninformed.

Or show them John Oliver’s segment. Not only will they thank you for the laughs, but perhaps they will come away never wanting to watch the damn thing again. 

How could they not?

Stupid yoga may be turning my son into a dweeb. Or perhaps he’s trying to get the attention of women like his father once did.

I’m not sure what’s going on here.

 

Maybe his yoga class is influencing the way that he sits now.

Maybe television isn’t exciting enough anymore, and he’s looking for ways to change it up.

Maybe this is his Dead Poets Society moment. Instead of standing on his desk to get a new perspective on the world, he’s trying something a little less dramatic.

I walked into the living room and found my son sitting like this while watching Dora the Explorer. And not just for a moment. I came back 15 minutes later as the show was ending and found him in the same position.

When I was in middle school, I trained myself to read books upside down in an attempt to annoy my teachers and get the attention of girls.

One of those two things happened. I’ll let you guess which one.

Hopefully this new way of sitting is a temporary thing. As an expert in nonconformity, I am certain that his preschool teachers will not appreciate this one bit next year.

My maybe-girlfriend asked if we could watch The Simpsons. I knew I had found a wife.

When FXX started airing every single episode in a row last week, it shattered the record for the longest-running marathon in TV history.

FXX is airing all 552 episodes of the Simpsons over the course of the next two weeks. Though I have not seen all 552 episodes, I have watched many, and The Simpsons have intersected with my life in important ways.

My best friend and I watched the very first episode of The Simpsons back in 1990. We were living together in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and we had been eagerly awaiting the debut of this new show for weeks. We had seen The Simpsons on the Tracy Ullman Show and couldn’t wait for them to get their own time slot. We watched on a 19-inch color television that was set atop a baby changing table in a living room covered with posters of heavy metal bands and super models.

We loved the show immediately. Within a week, we were quoting Bart Simpson and planning Simpsons TV parties. Within a month, a poster of Bart Simpson was hanging in our living room above the television. We watched The Simpsons religiously for three years before my friend left for a job in Connecticut and I moved into my car.

Fast forward to 2003. Elysha and I are on our first date of sorts. We've been colleagues for two years and friends for a year, but our friendship had been shifting over the previous months into something more. We hiked up Mount Caramel in Hamden, Connecticut as friends one day, but on the way down, Elysha reached out and took my hand, signaling to me that things in our relationship had changed.

When we arrived back at my apartment, we sat on an uncomfortable futon, talking about our families, our friends, and our dreams for the future. In mid-sentence, Elysha stopped me. “I’m sorry, but The Simpsons are on in a couple minutes. Would you mind if we watched?”

It was as if the roof of my apartment had split open and the purest,  warmest rays of the sun were pouring down upon me. Never in all of human history has there been a man more certain of his future with a woman.

We watched The Simpsons, sitting side by side, laughing at the antics of Homer and Bart. The show was already 13 years old by then. My TV was much larger, and the posters on the living room wall were gone. I was in Connecticut now, too, and I was sitting beside my future wife.

But The Simpsons played on. And more than a decade after that first date, The Simpsons continue to  play on. Today, Elysha and I are married. We have two children. Our first is entering kindergarten tomorrow. So much in this world changes so fast, and so few things remain as markers of our past.

The Simpsons is one of those few treasures that have endured while so many other cultural icons have fallen. The show began airing in my first year spent living on my own, and it still is airing today, 25 years later, as my daughter takes her first big step outside the home. 

Amber has every right to hate Sophia. I should know.

My daughter loves Sophia the First.

For those of you without small children, this is one of the latest Disney princesses with a television show and a seemingly endless line of merchandise. Other than the fact that her head is three times the size of her waist and her eyes are scary big, she seems harmless.

Clara loves Sophia. When we play with her Sophia the First toys or she dons her Sophia the First dress, she forces me to play with Amber, Sophia’s similarly dimorphic, stereotypically bitchy stepsister.

It’s fine. As an author, I recognize the need for conflict in storytelling. I don’t mind playing the bad guy.

I’m actually great at playing the bad guy, as many of my students would attest. 

Then I gave Clara a Sophia the First book and read it aloud to her. I had never watched the show, so for the first time, I learned the story of this new anorexic Disney princess.

Sophia and her mother live alone. There is no father in the picture, and his absence is never explained. Sophia’s mother marries King Roland, and Sophia instantly becomes a princess. Roland has two children, Amber and James. Their mother is also inexplicably missing.

Maybe she ran off with Sophia’s father.

Take note Disney. That would be an awesome storyline.

As a result of the marriage, Amber and James become Sophia’s stepsiblings.

As a way of welcoming Sophia into the family, Roland gives Sophia the Amulet of Avalor. This amulet allows Sophia to call on any prior Disney princess in time of need. It also allows her to speak to animals and grow a mermaid tale and swim like a fish.

Because that makes sense.

Amber was Roland’s motherless princess daughter long before Sophia appeared, and yet Roland chose to keep the most powerful magical amulet in the world stuffed in some drawer until his new stepdaughter came along.

If I were Amber, I’d be angry, too.

If I were Amber, I’d want to rip Sophia’s oversized head right off her undersized body.

I know I seem a little overly invested in this show. I shouldn’t be so emotionally attached to a Disney princess, but please understand this:

I have been playing the role of Amber, both with plastic Amber figures and in real life, for years now. I’m no great actor, but even an amateur like me, with a smidgen of local theater under his belt, can get attached to a role and begin to empathize for a character.

I feel Amber’s pain. I know Amber at her core.

More importantly, I know Sophia. She is a a spoiled, self-righteous, falsely modest, ditzy jerkface who is trying to steal the love of King Roland and become his favored child.

She must be stopped.

I live in a country where Janet Jackson’s boob receives more attention than net neutrality.

I just learned that the FCC received 1.4 million comments on their website regarding Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction during the 2004 Super Bowl. This is the most comments that they have ever received about an issue.

I’m not saying that the world needed to see Janet Jackson’s nipple-covered breast at halftime of a Super Bowl, but do we really live in a country so prudish that more than a million people ran to their computers following the reveal to complain?

It’s just a boob.

But I guess we do.

The FCC is currently soliciting comments on the issue of net neutrality, which is about a billion times more important than a televised boob, and thanks to HBO’s John Oliver and his recent call to viewers to voice their opinions, the FCC has received just over a million comments on the issue.

Not as many as they received for a boob, but still a lot.

Most of us don’t watch Fox News, little ones.

When my children become adults, they will watch the historical footage of Fox News and wonder what the hell we could possibly have been thinking.

I will remind them of this:

The average age of a Fox News viewer in 2014 is 68.8 and climbing yearly.

The average age of the audience for their most popular show, The O'Reilly Factor, is just over 72 years old.

Only 1.1 percent of the Fox News audience is black.

Fox News makes a lot of noise, but their audience is old, white, male, and dying out.  

Most of us, Democrats and Republicans, weren’t watching that nonsense, little ones. 

SportsCenter anchor? No big deal. Actor in a 30 second commercial? AWE INSPIRING.

My friend, Bram Weinstein, is an ESPN anchor. When I first met him, I stood in awe of his occupation and talent.

This is understandable. There was a time in my life when I wore a SportsCenter hat like others wear hats denoting their favorite sports teams. 

I was a SportsCenter junkie.

But over the years, as I’ve gotten to know Bram better, the celebrity-status that I once assigned to the SportsCenter anchor has begun to wane.

I’ve come to realize that despite his occupation, he’s just Bram. Sure, he’s excellent at his job, and yes, he has the opportunity to spend time with the greatest athletes in the world.

But I’ve also seen Bram eat birthday cake. Change a diaper. Shank a tee shot. Play princess with his daughter. Wash the dishes. Dance with his son in his arms.

Sadly, the bloom is off the rose when it comes to ESPN anchors. It turns out that they are just regular people.

The only exception to this rule is when Bram does a “This is SportsCenter” commercial. His second commercial aired this week, and for at least a while, he has once again ascended to celebrity status in my mind.

I’ve been watching these commercials for years. Writing and direction my own versions of these commercials in my head. Dreaming of the day when I could make a “This is SportsCenter” commercial of my own. 

To think that Bram is immortalized in another one of these iconic advertisements is amazing. Unbelievable. Awe inspiring.

At least for now.

Television is so much better today

My daughter heard me mention Asperger's Syndrome to my wife.

She turned to me and said, "Daddy, that's when someone has a hard time with unfamiliar situations."

Credit PBS and Arthur for that bit of vocabulary awareness.

Television today is unbelievable. The vocabulary that my daughter has learned thanks to PBS is astounding.

I spent my childhood watching reruns of Star Blazers (I can sing the different theme songs to the first and second seasons), Tom and Jerry and The Brady Bunch.

The Brady Bunch may have offered some ham-fisted lessons on morality, but none of these shows taught me a fraction of what my daughter has learned in such a short time. 

None of these shows taught me much of anything.

Sometimes I think it’s a miracle that people from my generation aren’t already being replaced by ten year-olds.

Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks determined the plot. My characters do the same.

From an interview with Judd Apatow, I learned that the characters and plot for Freaks and Geeks (a television show I never watched) were designed around actors.

First they found their actors. Then they developed the stories based upon those people. Their predispositions. Their predilections. Their personal histories.

I’m fascinated by this. 

Similarly, the plots of my books are very much determined by my characters. I find the characters (usually a single protagonist), and then the characters strike out and find the plot.

I just write, hoping that they will find a plot sooner than later.

It’s worked so far. In fact, the only book that I started with plot rather than character first was the book that required the most revision.

Most of my novels were exceptionally light edits. Ready to go.

It turns out that if I take Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks approach and allow my characters to dictate the story, things work out better.

Great even.

How strange. It’s almost as if the more control we relinquish over plot, the better our stories will be.

No one taught me that in college.  

The greatest source of discontent in my marriage may be this Cadillac commercial, which I adore.

My wife and I do not fight.

It’s not that we are opposed to fighting, and we’re certainly more than happy to argue a point when the time is right, but we just don’t disagree on much at all. When we disagree, we listen to each other and usually reach resolution absent any emotional response.

I don’t think either one of us as ever yelled at the other or even raised our voices.

This commercial, which first aired during the Oscars, might be one of our greatest sources of disagreement in our marriage. At the moment it ended, I turned to Elysha to declare my heartfelt affection for the commercial, only to be stopped as she was already declaring her hatred for it.

We discussed our differences of opinion. We each made a case for our position. She forward me a piece by a writer who supported her view. I watched the commercial again and again, reaffirming and strengthening my opinion each time.

We cannot agree on this commercial.

I won’t attempt to argue Elysha’s position here other than to say that the focus on materialism was just one of the elements that she despises.

Many agree.

But I love this commercial. For years, I have listened to a handful of friends describe the joys of the Spanish, French, Greek or Portuguese lifestyles, complete with long, afternoon lunches, siestas, shorter work days, copious amounts of wine, late night dinners and a slower, much more measured pace.

All of this sounds lovely until the Germans roll into your country with tanks and occupy it for years until those crazy, driven, hard working Americans and their fast-paced, high-stakes, never-stop lifestyle come to save you.

All of this sounds lovely as long as someone, somewhere is busy inventing air travel, telephonic communication, artificial hearts, television, lasers, the cure for polio, toilet paper, space ships, nuclear power, the Internet and everything else that those non-siesta loving countries are not.

All of this sounds lovely until your unemployment rate hits 27% (as it has in Greece and Spain) and your banking system nearly collapses the European Union and requires an international bailout.

I am one of the least materialistic people I know. I am writing this sentence on a hand-me-down table while sitting in a hand-me-down chair and staring into a living room of hand-me-down furniture. My car is twelve years old. My iPhone is at least two generations old. The television in our home is 13 years old and incapable of streaming Netflix. I don’t wear jewelry of any kind and refuse to wear any item of clothing that displays a name brand.

I am not interested in the accumulation of things.

But this is not a commercial about things. It’s a commercial that celebrates the driven, goal-orientated lifestyle that so many Americans lead. It’s a lifestyle that can result in great luxury (like a backyard pool and a Cadillac, which both sound lovely to me), but it’s also a lifestyle that sent astronauts to the Moon. It’s the lifestyle that liberated Europe, invent countless technologies, advanced countless others, cured diseases, halted Communist aggression and made America the wealthiest nation on the planet.

We are certainly not a perfect country. We have many problems and have created many, many more. The American lifestyle has certainly contributed greatly to climate change, and our decisions about where and when to deploy our military might are not always wise or just. We live in a society where the gap between rich and poor widens by the day, and our educational system is failing our children.

We have many, many problems. 

But if an asteroid is suddenly discovered on a collision course with Earth, which country will the world turn to for salvation?

If a nation rises up and threatens to take over the world by overwhelming military force, who will the world turn to for help?

When natural disasters strike, which nation, more than any other, sends supplies, rescue teams and cash?

We do.

We do it because we can. We can because we are not eating long lunches and enjoying afternoon siestas. We do it because we are those crazy, driven, hard working Americans who seem to suddenly make all the sense in the world in times of crisis.

We work hard, we make our own luck and we believe that anything is possible.

Sometimes it works out, and you are able to afford a backyard pool and a Cadillac. I can’t, but I’m working on it, and good for those who can.  

Ginger was a ginger

A ginger, in case you didn’t know, is a word used (oftentimes in a derogatory manner) to describe a red-headed person.

Ginger from Gilligan’s Island was a red head, thus making Ginger a ginger.

Does anyone else find this odd and possibly disconcerting?

Is Jimmy Fallon the coolest man on Earth?

I’ve never wanted to be anyone but me.  Ever.

Jimmy Fallon may be the one exception.