Men of a Certain Age | Men of a Certain Age

Aug.23.2011 appeasing the muse... The past month, or so, I’ve had a hard time getting back into writing. And a harder time figuring out why. It’s not as though there hasn’t been a lot to write about when it comes to soaps and serialized storytelling. After the deluge of controversy surrounding the first season finale of AMC’s The...	Jul.18.2011 clicking around the digital daisy chain... recent adventures in online research... While researching a longish piece on The Killing (delayed by breaking news in daytime soaps, along with the final episode of Friday Night Lights and the cancellation of Men of a Certain Age), I was scrolling through IMdB to find out when Michelle Forbes...
Apr.04.2011 things are getting curiouser and curiouser… Or maybe it’s just that April Fool’s Day fell while Mercury’s retrograde, but this item from Michael Logan last Friday about the likely cancellation of both All My Children and One Life to Live was an ironic and painful reminder of April Fool’s Day 2009, when CBS announced the cancellation of...	Jan.24.2011 serialized storytelling in flux… not to mention a dry spell, at least for a while… TNT’s Men of a Certain Age won’t return until summer. (Co-creator, Mike Royce, explains the rationale for splitting the season here.) NBC has yet to announce when they will broadcast the final season of Friday Night Lights, which has already...
Jan.03.2011 a few words from soap opera’s single mother… As regular readers know (perhaps, too well), I’ve long believed that the elements of early soaps contained in shows like Friday Night Lights and Men of a Certain Age, to name but two, are one of the reasons – arguably, the reason – these shows are so celebrated by critics. But, describing those...	Dec.20.2010 the future of serialized storytelling, part 1… My focus, of course, has been on the relationship between daytime soaps and primetime scripted dramas – hence the title of my essay for Survival… – “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Operas”. So, it’s no surprise that as my daytime soap viewership came...
Dec.06.2010 a soap is a soap is a soap… or is it? After my presentation at the Popular Culture Association conference this past April, I was asked if it might be better for the future of soap opera if, maybe, soap opera was called something else. My immediate reaction was “absolutely not!” Calling it something else means those who...	Nov.08.2010 what do these shows have in common… besides being “brilliant, but cancelled?” ABC Eli Stone Dirty Sexy Money Homefront CBS Joan of Arcadia Brooklyn Bridge NBC American Dreams Fox Lone Star WB Jack and Bobby CB Privileged An eclectic and idiosyncratic list to be sure, and in some cases, going back more than a few years, these are...