Blogocentric Formulations

And the Oscar goes to... & Firefly

PROMPT: Did you watch the Oscars? Tell us about a time in your life that was worthy of being made into a movie/TV show/novel/short story.


I did watch the Oscars. Since I work in the entertainment industry, I kind of have to. Or I at least need to know who won and pretend like I watched it. (But seriously, I totally did watch it this year. Ellen did a great job! )

As far as a time in my life that is worthy of being made into a movie/TV show/novel/short story, I honestly don't think there are any. Perhaps I'm a little more critical than most people because one of my past jobs was evaluating creative material and I found a whole bunch of writers who *thought* their lives would make interesting motion pictures (no they wouldn't!), and so I'm a little reticent to pick a moment in my own life and say, "Now people should be watching/reading about *that*!" I truly don't think that I've had any experiences that are remarkable and outstanding enough to warrant an entire multimillion-dollar motion picture production or a novel spanning hundreds of pages.

Which is not to say that I've led a boring or uninteresting life by any stretch of the imagination; I'm actually quite happy with my life and where it's taken me. But as far as entertainment value to a third-party reader, my life might be better suited in small doses; perhaps a vignette like a short story. Something small and manageable and doesn't expect the audience to devote too terribly much time to it.

In that sense, the time in my life that's probably most worthy of immortalizing in prose would be the death of my friend Kristy in high school. We had known each other since kindergarten and, admittedly, weren't too terribly close by the time we had reached high school, but our families had known each other and interacted through various school activities over the years. When we were seniors in high school, she contracted bacterial meningitis and, after only a couple days of flu-like symptoms, passed away. It was a horrible shock, especially with how quickly she passed after what seemed like nothing more than a nasty flu. To make matters even more uncomfortable, I was a staff writer on the school newspaper at the time, so not only did I have to deal with my own feelings about losing someone I had known most of my life, but I also had to write about it, including interviewing the family and talking with them about their daughter's passing.

It was, without a doubt, one of the toughest things I've ever had to do. I think that the resulting story ended up being pretty good and that it ultimately helped me cope with my own feelings, but if I were to choose a time in my life worth depicting for someone else, I'd be hard pressed to find a slice of it that was more emotional, more conflicted, and more thought-provoking than experiencing the loss of a well-known classmate and being the one to write an article about it for our entire school to read about.

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PROMPT: Which past TV show was canceled or otherwise ended WAY too soon?

FIREFLY
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303461/

This was a hard choice between two great series. The runner-up ended up being VERONICA MARS, and I think that's probably just because there's a VERONICA MARS movie coming out this month, so I feel like I'm going to get my fix of new material for that franchise soon. FIREFLY was the other series, though, that ended *way* before its time. Ultimately, Joss Whedon got to make SERENITY which I suppose was his way of saying farewell to the series in a way he never got to on network television, but only airing eleven episodes (of fourteen total that were shot) of this series is downright criminal.

Yes it's sci-fi, so I'm sure that's going to turn some people off, but the chemistry between the cast (especially Nathan Fillion and Gina Torres) is amazing, and the universe that Whedon created was so intricate and fascinating. I almost wonder if it would have found more success as a series of novels... but this series is honestly everything science fiction (and television) could be... funny, insightful, dramatic, endearing... I didn't get to see the show until it was already canceled and out on video, so I actually saw the entire series plus the unaired episodes all at once, and I'm crushed that I both missed the initial frenzy and that it was over so quickly.

I suppose there's an argument to be made that it's better for a show to end on a high note (leave them wanting more!), but every time I think of FIREFLY, I can't help but think of what they could have done with another season, or even just the remaining episodes of a full season order. We'll always have SERENITY, but it's not really the same.