TV is My Way to Another World

Monday, April 23, 2012

When it comes to obsessions in my life, watching television is second only to reading. Growing up, my family called me the Walking TV Guide. They didn’t need to consult a magazine to know what was on; they just asked me. My interest in television has only deepened as I got older. I have loved many shows, but nothing has ever approached the devotion I felt towards a daytime soap opera that went off the air over a decade ago.

Another World followed the lives and loves of the residents of the fictional Bay City, Illinois. The series premiered eight years before I was born, but I didn’t get hooked into the show until my early teens. What I loved most about Another World was the continuing nature of the drama. The story didn’t end. It kept growing and building and moving in new and different directions. There was comedy and drama, romance and mystery. A serial killer storyline hooked me into the show, but love triangles and corporate takeovers kept me around long after the murderer was revealed. Not all the stories were winners. The acting was hit or miss. The production values weren’t impressive, until you considered that they filmed a new episode every single weekday. None of that mattered. I was invested in these characters and their lives. I wanted to know more about them and their world.

This is why television is my favorite form of entertainment, beside reading. I’m a much bigger TV fan than moviegoer. My interest in music doesn’t even come close. TV series, with their multiple episodes over (hopefully) many years provide the longer form of storytelling that I enjoy. It allows for a deeper connection to the characters as their world expands far beyond the confines of my own.

Prime-time television was a bit different when I was a child than it is today. Most series consisted of self-contained episodes with a beginning, middle, and end that wrapped up the drama and cleared the way for an entirely new story the following week. Sure there were soap operas with serialized stories that carried over from episodes to episode, but those were in the minority. With most shows you could tune into any episode over the course of a season and pick up on what was happening. Today there are a lot more shows outside of the soap world that have intricate mythologies like Lost or Fringe or most anything J.J. Abrams produces. These shows require a deeper immersion into their world than, say C.S.I. But while the serialized structure is tailor-made for me, I still enjoy episodic television because even the most self-contained episodes of a show tell the ongoing story of that series.

Episodic television may not be as rich in the development of a mythology, but a show like The Golden Girls—as just one of many, many examples—still had a serialized element to it. Every episode was its own story, but the tale of these four roommates built off earlier episodes and explored more interesting facets of the characters the longer the series was on the air. As the audience became more familiar with “the girls” and the way they behaved it was easier to anticipate their reactions to a given situation. This is the point where Rose will tell a story about St. Olaf or Sophia will start to picture Sicily. Blanche’s southern accent is going to intensify as she gets more flirtatious. It’s time for Dorothy to provide the voice of reason. We knew these characters so well because we’d invited them into our homes week after week for years on end.

The thing I like most about writing media tie-in novels like the Sabrina, The Teenage Witch or Alias books is that it gives me a chance to get to know the characters from my favorite shows more intimately and expand on their stories. It is especially true with the Charmed comic book. Building and growing the lives of The Charmed Ones—lives that I thought were over six years ago—has been an immensely exciting opportunity. But even the shows I haven’t had the chance to write about have stayed with me. The first eleven years of my life were spent watching, and not quite understanding, the racy humor of Hawkeye Pierce. Memories of Fame helped inspire me to try out for the school show years later and eventually study theatre in college. When I moved to Los Angeles the dark drama of My So-Called Life and the light comedy of The Adventures of Lois and Clark kept me company as my own world expanded. Buffy taught me about writing, The West Wing got me interested in politics, and Revenge has become the new, juicy soap opera that has me hooked on mystery, romance, and corporate espionage.

Another World ended in 1999, after 35 years on the air. I’d only been a fan for the last 13 of those years, but that was longer than any other scripted TV show I’ve ever watched. (Sorry. Never been into The Simpsons.) Considering it was on most every weekday, I’d sat through probably thousands of episodes. It got me through college when there were days I was so busy working on a theatre production I’d forget to eat unless I took forty-five minutes to watch the recorded episode (minus commercials). There are popular nighttimes TV shows from the early nineties that I missed out on entirely because I was too busy to watch them, but I hardly skipped an episode of Another World.

What I love most about television is that it allows me to invest in lives that are nothing like mine and expand my own world through the experience. It’s something the creators of Another World said best with the original words that opened their show: We do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand other worlds. 

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The Book That Changed My Life

Sunday, April 15, 2012

The book that changed my life wasn’t Catcher in the Rye or Lord of the Flies or any of the classics that are supposed to have an effect on a young man. It wasn’t even The Chocolate War, though I do love that book and all of Robert Cormier’s work. The book that changed my life was one that I’ve never seen on any school reading list. I can’t even find it in a bookstore these days. It’s called Eyes of the Tarot and it was written by Bruce Coville.

The story follows a girl named Bonnie who stumbles upon an ancient pack of tarot cards with a mysterious connection to her family. Bonnie immediately understands how to read these cards and becomes consumed by her newfound ability to foretell the future… “even if it means facing a horror beyond death itself…” I know, right? Pretty awesome.

I devoured this book. Decades later I still recall the sensation of sitting on my grandparents’ couch on a sunny afternoon completely enthralled. I was already an avid reader. I’d solved mysteries with Encyclopedia Brown, stalked the celery at midnight with Bunnicula, and commiserated with the Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. But this was different. I was voracious for this young adult book set in that exciting age I was approaching at roller coaster speed. For a sheltered kid with a father who didn’t want him on a ride as dangerous as a Ferris wheel stories with teenage characters fighting demons and monsters was exactly the kind of excitement I craved.

Up until then, I couldn’t sit through Halloween. Didn’t even attempt Poltergeist. Jaws was manageable, but I can’t tell you the number of nights I spent trying to convince myself that there was no way a shark could attack me in bed a hundred miles from the ocean. Even Ghostbusters gave me nightmares. But there was something about Eyes of the Tarot that inspired my imagination without overwhelming it. Reading the story allowed me to control the horrors in my mind’s eye. Please don’t think it was about the search for depth in genre fiction that used figurative monsters to expose ugly truths in the human condition. These were not those kinds of books. I was in it purely for the adrenaline rush.

Another draw of the book was that it was part of a series. Eyes of the Tarot was book 9 in a collection of Bantam books called Dark Forces. Different writers wrote the various books in the series. The books were not linked in any way beyond the subject matter. They didn’t need to be read in order, but most conveniently had a number on the spine so I knew what was missing from my collection. The series was similar in concept to the Simon Pulse Romantic Comedies I would contribute to decades later (minus the numbers on the spines).

I can’t properly explain the disappointment I felt when I saw book 15 on store shelves and came to the slow realization that no matter where I looked I would never find 16. This was long before the internet where a simple Google search would tell me that my passion had come to an end.

Getting these books replaced collecting Star Wars action figures in my life. I was no longer visiting the toy store with pockets empty just so I could plot out which figure to buy with my next allowance. My new toy store was Waldenbooks and each week brought a new kind of figure with imagination-action and edge-of-my-seat grip. Did Swamp Witch look scarier than The Ashton Horror? Did I want to read about a rock band that sold their souls to the devil or a gymnastic cult of impossibly attractive teens? What kind of horrors did these characters have in store for them? What kind of excitement did these writers hold for me?

Not only did these books inspire my reading, they inspired my writing. They made me want to write. They made me want to write for teens, because these were the exciting characters to write about.

In ninth grade my English teacher gave the class the most incredible assignment ever: to make a book. We were to come up with the story, write it, and bind it together in cardboard covers decorated with contact paper so that we each had our own hand-crafted work. I wrote a horror story about a group of kids terrorized by a demon in the New Jersey beach community (a.k.a. The Jersey Shore) where I most feared running into the shark from Jaws. When it came time to bind the book, I was the only kid in the class that cut up a manila file folder instead of cardboard. To me, books weren’t hardcover. They were paperbacks.

Here I am writing that book. My first book.

From the Dark Forces books I moved onto Christopher Pike and then grew into Dean R. Koontz (he’s since dropped the “R”) and Anne Rice. Each step an evolution of the person I was becoming. But it wasn’t just about horror. The subject matter grew into fantasy and action, techno-thrillers and mysteries. Stories about lives so much more thrilling than mine. Genres that had their own sections in the bookstore beyond just “fiction” or “literature.”

I admit, I became a bit of a mass market snob. That’s harder to be these days since the mass market has changed so much in the past decade. Unlike literary snobs, I don’t judge the books that others choose to read. I also don’t rush out to buy the next great work of literary genius. But I would never think less of a person who gravitates towards books that challenge the intellect. Just don’t try to engage me in a conversation over the symbolism of Gatsby’s green light. I’ll most likely annoy you by saying that I believe Daisy just ran out of bulbs and stuck a Christmas light in there until she could find a replacement.

 

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