Who Will Miss the Hall of Famers?

There’s an old expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger.”  Usually it is good advice.  But sometimes the messenger is responsible for creating the impulse to shoot in the first place.

There is a legitimate message to be disseminated about ex-football players and their post-career health and financial problems.  Many players played in the NFL for only one or two seasons, incurred minor to serious injuries, and then had to struggle with finding work in occupations that didn’t pay as well as “pro football player.”  The NFL teaches incoming rookies about financial prudence, but it’s hard to be prudent when you go from an unpaid college player to a pro making 6 or 7 figures a year and then after only one or two seasons you have to enter the mundane workforce.  Few of them can leverage a short and mediocre football career into a seat in the analyst’s booth or secure a high-paying gig as an assistant coach in the NFL or in college.

That said, the demand issued by certain football Hall of Famers that they be provided with health insurance coverage and paid a salary or else they will boycott future HoF induction ceremonies creates the impulse to start firing away with both barrels. 

Those making the demands, led by Eric Dickerson and including superstars such as Joe Nameth and Lawrence Taylor, sent a letter to Roger Goodell contending that they are suffering from health issues related to their playing time, and financial problems, and that the cost to the NFL of providing health care for all living Hall of Famers would be around a mere $4 million per year (if the cost isn't that much, why don't they buy it for themselves?).  I don’t know if they provided an estimate for the cost of the “salaries.”

These players are in the Football Hall of Fame, meaning they are the best of the best; these are elite players who had long careers in the NFL and, at some point, signed lucrative contracts after their rookie deals had expired.  These players certainly earned more money than those rank and file players who, well, AREN’T in the Hall of Fame.  Yet they contend that they, and not the rank and file players, need financial support and health care after they retire.

Okay, maybe there are a good number of Hall of Famers who played the bulk of their careers before television money made the NFL what it is today, basically a license to print money.  In baseball, it is always mind-boggling to go back to when the Dodgers refused to negotiate with Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale simply because they had an agent (and they demanded $100,000), or when the Pirates told the league’s top home run hitter Ralph Kiner that he was getting a pay cut and that if he didn’t report to camp they’d lose just as many games without him as they had won with him.  Many of these older Hall of Famers may be in financial distress because they played when even great players were exploited by the owners and weren’t paid what they were worth.

But still these are, by definition, the most successful football players of all time.  If anyone should have been able to save their money and buy some post-career health insurance, even for people with pre-existing conditions such as former football players, it should have been these people.  These are also the players who could leverage their former celebrity and make money by doing endorsements, making public appearances, and signing autographs.  But instead of doing any of those not-very-taxing jobs, they want the NFL to cut them a check, which would basically an appearance fee for them showing up at the HoF induction ceremony each year.

You could make the argument that what the Hall of Famers are demanding is the tip of the camel’s nose in the tent, that once they get these benefits they can start lobbying to make them universal.  But it’s not the right messenger for this particular message.  Don’t start with the players who shouldn’t need help, start with the ones who do. 

The NFL is immensely wealthy, and legalized sports betting is only going to make them wealthier.  Providing post-career health care and financial support for those players not lucky enough to play for a decade and who didn’t earn huge paychecks would cost million, but the NFL is making billions, and it is making that money on the backs of the rank and file players.  Eric Dickinson was a great player, but he had no-name linesmen blocking for him and unknown linebackers chasing him, and his success is in part due to those other players.

In any context, providing support for former players makes sense.  In the context of ailments like CTE, not to mention the lesser physical traumas suffered by players when 280-pound linemen fall on them, the moral obligation becomes even greater.  Throw in the fact that contracts in the NFL (save for elite quarterbacks) are not guaranteed and that players can be (and are) cut at any time, and the necessity for the NFL to take care of its own is overwhelming.

As for the Hall of Famers?  Let ‘em walk.  Terrell Owens skipped his own induction ceremony, and no one really minded.  Go ahead and let Joe Nameth clear up one weekend on his calendar.  Maybe he can use the time to make some money at an autograph show.

Urban Meyer is who he is

There is a story I recall (I’m not sure it happened; memory’s funny that way) that in 2006 Nick Saban repeatedly denied that he was going to quit as head coach of the Miami Dolphins to take the head coaching job at Alabama.  Then, he did quit and took the job at Alabama.  When he was asked why he lied, he said, “I didn’t lie; I said something that, in retrospect, turned out to be inaccurate.”

Urban Meyer (and the panel that investigated the situation) is exhibiting the same ability at semantics regarding his 3-game suspension at Ohio State.  He released a statement concerning his suspension over his handling of an assistant coach’s domestic abuse allegations, and in it he says that he didn’t lie at media day.  Indeed, the report says he didn’t “deliberately lie” but that he did make false statements.  Lie, false statement, potato, po-tah-to.  The report states that Meyer said things at the media day that were “plainly not accurate,” and Meyer cited this as proof he didn’t “lie.”  Meyer also claimed to have ongoing memory issues, which I would think would be a liability for a head football coach making millions of dollars for leading one f the highest-profile programs in America.

I guess my biggest take away is this—why would anyone expect Urban Meyer to care about a battered woman, any battered woman?  He’s a college football coach, all he cares about is winning football games.  Oh, I guess for a few weeks each year after the season ends he checks in and makes sure that his wife and kids are still alive, but the rest of the year it’s football.  When he was coaching at Bowling Green in 2001 I’m sure his first thought upon hearing about the World Trade Center attack was, “I hope this won’t distract the team . . . .”

There is an old saying, “Never try and teach a pig to sing; you’ll frustrate yourself and annoy the pig.”  Trying to teach Urban Meyer to tell the truth, care about other people, and not hire people who beat their wives is trying to teach a pig to sing.  The bottom line he’ll do whatever he has to (within the parameters of what he perceives to be “the rules”) to win as many football games as possible.

Monomania is often the key to success for some people.  I knew Tiger Woods was done as a dominant force in golf when I heard him say that before his little accident, if he had a choice between hitting a bucket of balls or having dinner with his kids he’d hit the balls, but now he’d stop and have dinner with his kids.  Hitting those extra balls was one thing that gave him an edge over those less devoted parents who went home to read to their kids before tucking them in.  You know, the losers.

Urban Meyer wants to win; so does Nick Saban, Bill Belichick, and for that matter Hue Jackson of the Browns (he’s just not as good as them).  I am not saying Meyer should be absolved of responsibility for not taking the situation of his assistant coach’s wife more seriously; I am saying that people should not be shocked that he doesn’t and shouldn’t expect him to behave differently.  If Urban Meyer ever made looking into domestic abuse allegations regarding his staff a priority, Ohio State would fall out of the Top 25 on the NCAA rankings.

So stop being outraged about Urban Meyer’s three game suspension and his lack of contrition over the events that occurred.  Even if he was forced to go through some sort of “sensitivity training” he’d come out the other end as the same man he was went he went in, namely a highly successful football coach whose main priority is to win games this year and recruit excellent players for next year.  Nothing else will ever matter to him, not global warming, not the plight of indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia, not the prevalence of domestic abuse in America. 

That pig will never belt out a chorus of American Pie no matter how much you try to teach it.

They Give Oscars for this Stuff?

I hate to pile on; in these blog posts I like to take iconoclastic positions that defy the Convention Wisdom (tm John Kenneth Galbraith).  But sometimes something happens that is so stupid, so idiotic, so completely meshugenah that I can’t help myself.

The Academy of Motion picture Arts & Sciences has announced that in the future there will be a category called "Best Popular Film."

God help us.

Here is the problem they are trying to address: several years ago (2008) a couple of really popular films that had some artistic merit, The Dark Knight and Wall-E, failed to get a best picture nomination.  Ratings for the Oscar ceremony were sagging, and the theory was that there was a direct link between TV ratings for the Oscar broadcast and the popularity of the nominees.  The academy then increased the number of nominees to a maximum of ten, expecting the additional five nominees to be what the press would call “popcorn movies.”

Alas, the Oscar voters, in their infinite wisdom, responded by nominating even more artsy-fartsy art house movies.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the Coen Brothers, but A Serious Man (2009) getting a Best picture nomination is just silly. 

Things didn’t improve, and big budget films of reasonably high quality kept missing a Best Picture nomination while artsy stuff like Moonlight and The Shape of Water kept winning.  So, if you can’t make the Academy voters nominate an action film for Best Picture, you create a new category that will force them to.

I recall reading somewhere that once J.D. Power and Associates did a survey expecting a certain make of car to win, and when it didn’t it created a category like “Best new American 4-door SUV with 8 cup holders” that was so narrowly defined that the car they wanted to honor was the only entrant.

Why is this a stupid idea?  First of all, there already is an award for Best Popular Film: it’s called M-O-N-E-Y.  I was amused when, in 2009, people predicted Avatar (a rare money-maker that did get a Best Picture nomination) would win Best Picture over The Hurt Locker because it made more money.  I predicted The Hurt Locker would win BECAUSE it made less money.  Except for Titanic (which is an outlier of epic dimensions), the biggest money-making film of the year rarely wins Best Picture.  It’s like the attitude in Hollywood is, “You made all that money, AND you want awards too?”

Secondly, what is a “popular” film?  Do you base it on total domestic gross?  Then what about films released late in the year that have only a few weeks before the nominations close?  Do you HAVE to nominate the five biggest blockbusters even if one is an Adam Sandler animated film that made $300 million despite being drek?  Does the artistic merit of the film still matter, or are we only comparing box office?  Is there a threshold below which films aren’t considered “popular”?  $100 million box office used to be the sign of a hit; Solo made that its opening weekend and was considered a bust.

Thirdly, what is the aesthetic criterion for judging “Best Popular Picture”?  Does the Oscar automatically go to the biggest money-maker?  If not, isn’t that subverting the point of the category?  Generally speaking, most of a year’s top box office champs are sequels, especially for children’s movies (Star Wars, Marvel, Hotel Transylvania 3, etc.).  What happens if a money-making sequel to a good film is not as good; does it still get consideration just because it made money?

Won’t this hurt the chances of a well-made blockbuster wining Best picture if it is considered a shoo-in for “Best Popular Film”?  Isn’t this creating a “ghetto” for money-making films that will mean they won’t be considered seriously in the “real” Oscar categories, including Best Actor or Actress as well as Best picture?

It’s times like this I recall the words of H.L. Mencken, who once said that “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”  If you think lower ratings of the Oscar telecast is a problem which is understandably ABC's position, and you think obscure (“unpopular”) films being nominated and winning Best Picture is a contributing factor, then come up with a more subtle way of fiddling with the voting then just giving “popular” films their own category. 

You people in the Academy are supposed to be creative; come up with something more imaginative!

The Doctor Is a Woman

We are about to enter a new era, boys and girls:  we can watch movies on our phones, we can watch Ant Man and The Wasp without having seen any prior Marvel movie (other than Ant Man) except for the last two minutes, and The Doctor doesn’t have a penis.  Oh what an age we live in.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that the new Doctor Who debuting this Fall will have actress Jodie Whittaker portraying the venerable Gallifreyan.  A lot of people are making a big deal about this, but I’m sort of meh.

Don’t get me wrong, it clearly is a breakthrough in gender equality casting.  I think the only argument for making The Doctor a man for the past 55 years is that The Doctor frequently fin ds himself in situations where he has to take command and bark orders, and until recently a woman doing that would have had to carry some extra baggage.  It’s the age-old conundrum for women; men are commanding, but women are shrill.  However, we are well past the Margaret Thatcher era, and a woman won the popular election for President in the United States in 2016.  So yay us, we may now accept a woman as a leader.

The reason I am loath to treat a female Doctor with wild abandon is that I always considered The Doctor a rather asexual character to begin with.  Given that the show was originally conceived as a children’s educational program, he’d almost have to be.  During the entire run of the “Classic” Doctor Who series, there was never any discussion, speculation, or recognition of The Doctor’s love life.  He traveled with mini-skirted Jo Grant with nary a leer.  Sarah Jane Smith was nothing more than a good buddy.  Peter Davison’s Doctor traveled with an attractive Australian stewardess and a teenaged girl without any speculation about hanky-panky.  Colin Baker showed no interest in Peri’s, um, attributes, and Sylvester McCoy was nothing but avuncular with Ace.

This changed in the revived series, when Rose Tyler, an attractive London teenager, joined the Doctor and clearly had a thing for older men (much older, since he was over 900 years old at that point).  The Doctor physically changing into David Tenant only increased the attraction, and eventually it became mutual (there was also the episode where The Doctor became trapped in France with Madame Du Pompadour and the first thing she did was offer to show him her bedroom).  The Doctor’s next companion, Martha Jones, was even more overt in her finding The Doctor to be physically appealing, but he was rebounding from Rose and never reciprocated (personal aside: what an idiot!).  Amy Pond indicated several times that she thought the eleventh Doctor was sexy, and at her wedding she enthusiastically told The Doctor that he could “absolutely, definitely kiss the bride,” but he demurred. 

The only time the Doctor did seem to have some interest in someone of the opposite sex was when Peter Capaldi’s Doctor spent one night with River Song, but they’d been previously married and it was on a planet where the nights lasted twenty-four years, so presumably they found some way to pass the time.

So, to sum up, over the course of 55 years the Doctor has travelled with a number of extremely attractive young women, and until recently there was never any hint that he had much of a libido (to quote the lyric of the song One Night in Bangkok, “I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine”).  Since the character was never defined by his masculinity, the gender switch shouldn’t engender (sorry) much of a change.

The switch is obviously partly motivated by the successful transition (sorry again) of The Master to Missy.  It’s all about the casting; personally, I thought John Simm made a HORRIBLE Master, so anything was bound to be an improvement.   Michelle Gomez was able to embody the qualities of the old Master, a sort of restrained but cheerful sociopathy, that Simm took over the top and then some.  Part of what I disliked about Simm’s portrayal was that his Master had a sexy trophy wife, something no previous incarnation of The Master ever gave a second thought to.  The Master didn’t care about sex; he just wanted to rule the universe.  What’s sex compared to that?

If new Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall is smart, then the scripts for the next season of Doctor Who should treat the new Doctor exactly as the old one was treated. That’s why the show has lasted since the early 60’s; The Doctor, however different each incarnation is, is essentially fungible.  Their MOs may vary somewhat, their senses of humor get tweaked, their physical skills range from klutzy to expert at Venusian aikido, but in the end the Doctor is The Doctor.

Gender doesn’t enter into the Doctor’s persona, nor should it; unless the show wants to get into the nitty gritty of where little Time Lords and Ladies come from, and frankly that is TMI.

Retro Review: Warehouse 13

Retro-review: Warehouse 13

One of the benefits of the all-on-demand all-the-time access to media is that you can revisit beloved shows from your childhood, with the possibility that you’ll realize that your 10-year-old self had lousy taste in television.  Or you can revisit recently departed shows you sort of liked and try and figure out why you only liked them as opposed to loving them.

I recently finished binge-watching the recently departed (2009-2014) fantasy series Warehouse 13.  I liked the series well enough to remain a loyal viewer through its run, but it never was the appointment TV destination I thought it might be.  Re-watching all 64 episodes over a couple of months provides some perspective.  The show was about a team of agents that sought out and captured “artifacts” or common items (usually used by famous people) that gained supernatural powers through the emotions of people who used them.  So the bell used by Ivan Pavlov would make dogs come running (and make the user drool a lot), Lizzie Borden’s compact would force anyone using it to murder someone they loved, and Marilyn Monroe’s hairbrush would turn any woman’s hair blonde.  Warehouse 1 had been created by Alexander the Great, Egypt had hosted Warehouse 2, and subsequent Warehouses were hosted by the dominant world power and eventually America claimed Warehouse 13, which was set in the South Dakota town of Univille.

The commentary track on the pilot episode provided a key insight on a fact that perhaps shaded my perception of the show: one of the main draws was the credit line that the show was co-created by Jane Espenson, the brilliant writer of such Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel episodes as Band Candy, Guise Will be Guise and (my personal favorite Buffy episode) Earshot.  She also took her distinctive comedic touch to other non-Joss Whedon TV series such as The Gilmore Girls and Once Upon a Time.  But she was never mentioned once in the commentary, and I suddenly realized that she seems to have had no creative input into the show during its production, where Jack Kenny was the showrunner.  That certainly explains why the show never matched my expectations in the humor department.

Let me begin with the shows problems, which can start with the casting of the two leads.  The duo of Secret Service Agents tasked with “snagging, bagging, and tagging” mystical artifacts were played by Eddie McClintock and Joanne Kelly, two physically attractive actors who had proven to be more or less competent in other roles.  The main problem here is that they have no chemistry what so ever.  It’s like they are the anti-Mulder and Scully.  The show realized this early and decided to steer into the skid, so to speak, making a plot point of the fact that they had no chemistry.  In one episode an artifact affects them so they will pass out and lose their memories, so they take off their clothes and get into bed together because they knew that when they woke up, they would be certain it was impossible that they slept together so they would seek an alternate explanation.  Spoiler Alert: this entire plot line is abandoned in the final 6 episodes and at the end of the series they realize they love each other.

McClintock and Kelly were both problematic in their roles.  McClintock played Pete Latimer, an ex-alcoholic ex-Marine who worked for the Secret Service, but McClintock’s broad comic skills made him seem like an undisciplined, semi-literate, overgrown child.  Kelly, as Pete’s partner Myka Bering, is a stunningly gorgeous actress who seems embarrassed by her looks and awkwardly tried to hide her light under a bushel.  I swear that during season 4 she told the producers of Warehouse 13, “You know what, I’m just going to come in an hour later, so don’t worry about my hair or make-up, and I’ll just wear an oversized t-shirt for my costume.”

As I said, the plot of the show was that everyday objects gained the ability to affect people’s behavior in ways related to their origins.  Sometimes this was overly-literal, like the mirror used by Alice Liddel (the model for Alice in Wonderland) would suck people into an alternate dimension; sometimes the effect was rather random, like Harriet Tubman’s thimble giving people the ability to assume the appearance of other people (huh?).  Towards the end of the show’s run the artifacts became deus ex machinas, doing whatever was convenient to resolve the plot.

What was good about Warehouse 13?  Let me start with two words: Allison Scagliotti.  She joined the show early in its first season and quickly became the emotional fulcrum for the remainder of the series.  Also, unlike the principal pair of actors on the show, she had great platonic chemistry with her partner, played by Aaron Ashmore (they made the relationship platonic by establishing that Ashmore’s character was gay early on).  I stuck with the dismal show Stitchers primarily because of Scagliotti (and her co-star, Salli Richardson-Whitfield from Eureka).

Saul Rubinek did great work on Warehouse 13 as the curmudgeonly Artie, boss to everyone but a father figure to Scagliotti’s character.  The show did display a lot of imagination in its plotting, and did an excellent job of working out intricate seasonal arcs that were resolved reasonably well.  The show got some good guest performances from the likes of Anthony Stewart Head, Roger Rees, and especially Jamie Murray as the female H.G. Wells (she had the ideas, her brother wrote the books).  The show generally had good special effects given the small budget they had to work with.

Warehouse 13 is a minor entry in the history of science fiction on television, pleasantly diverting but mostly just empty calories.  I don’t mean to sound too disapproving; it is difficult to do mediocre science fiction on TV and Warehouse 13 was far better than mediocre.  But I can’t help wonder what the show might have become had creator Jane Espenson stayed on as the showrunner.  Warehouse 13 is another example of the importance of casting in the creative process of television production; Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, conceded that David Duchovney and Gillian Anderson’s chemistry was a gift he couldn’t have manufactured. When it came to chemistry, Warehouse 13 was not visited by Santa Clause.

Let's shift again

In one of the best scenes in the movie Moneyball, a crusty old scout tells A’s GM Billy Beane, “You can’t build a baseball team with a computer.”  Beane thinks for a moment and then replies, “Adapt or die.”

A lot of GM’s and other baseball people have adapted to Beane’s use of analytics, mostly because you can’t argue with a team having a microscopic payroll winning division titles.  But the anti-analytics people have dug their heels in again, refusing to adapt to one of the more recent uses of Big Data.  They refuse to adapt, so they want the use of defensive shifts to die.

I've talked about this before, but there continues to be a push for eliminating defensive shifts in baseball. The logic goes that fans like offense, defensive shifts reduce offense, therefore they should be eliminated.  Of course, the managers advocating for this usually are those who rely on left handed power hitters for offense, and they are the ones most disadvantaged by the shift.  Hey, I’m losing, so the rules that have stood for 150 years must be changed!

Players have always been free to position themselves where ever they want on the diamond; only the pitcher and catcher are restricted to designated spots.  The defensive shift started back in 1948 as a way of negating the impact of Ted Williams, possibly the greatest hitter of all time (if he hadn’t lost 5 seasons to military service it wouldn’t be debatable).  The shift started 70 years ago, so why is it being debated now?

Because now it’s not just the greatest hitter of all time that pulls everything, it is every left-handed hitter.  Of course, any logical, rational person would simply start hitting the ball in the other direction, and after a while teams would stop putting on a shift.  But these are baseball players and managers, so logic is a rare quality.  They don’t want to hit the ball the other way because a) it’s kinda hard, and b) it isn’t manly.  So they try to beat the shift by hitting the ball “over” the shift for a home run.  Yet, even though they have accepted the shift and don’t take steps to combat it, they still maintain it is hurting offense, which is bad for baseball.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat myself—the shift isn’t hurting offense, failing to adapt to the shift is hurting offense.

Baseball is a little schizophrenic at the present time.  People in the Commissioner’s Office will likely tell you that the two biggest problems in baseball are a) games take too long, and b) there isn’t enough offense.  If there was more offense, games would take longer, so the whole thing is a catch-22.  But anti-shift people are betting that the desire to increase offense will get a perfectly reasonable adjustment based on data banned simply because it is bad for offense.

The fact that defensive shifts diminish offense (something the stats aren’t exactly clear on, but let’s not quibble) is not, by itself, a reason to ban the shift.  Lots of things diminish offense: fielding gloves, the slider, 105 MPH fastballs, declaring a batter out when he gets three strikes.  MLB did fiddle with the offense/defense equilibrium in the late 1960’s when ERAs plummeted, Carl Yazstremski won a batting title hitting .301, and 21% of the games played ended in shutouts.  But MLB didn’t outlaw wholesale defensive strategies, they just tweaked the strike zone and lowered the mound by 5 inches.

If baseball has a problem, it is the mentality that calls for the elimination of defensive shifts; that is the mindset behind all of the “all or nothing” swings batters take even when they have two strikes.  The philosophy of modern baseball was exemplified by the 2018 all-star game, in which 13 of the 14 runs were scored via a record setting 10 home runs.  An increasing percentage of at bats are resolved via “three true outcomes,” namely strikeouts, walks, and home runs. 

To quote another great baseball movie, in Bull Durham catcher Crash Davis told his pitcher, “Strikeouts are boring.  Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls, it’s more democratic.”  Walks are also not terribly interesting, and home runs are only interesting for about five seconds.  What baseball needs is more offense, meaning singles and doubles, long multi-hit rallies leading to crooked numbers on the scoreboard, not more guys taking home run trots.  Other than moving the fences back to match the dimensions of center field in the legendary Polo Grounds (which was nearly 500 feet away from home after 1963) I’m not sure how you fight all the modern swingers who upper cut everything and who find no shame in striking out (Joe DiMaggio once struck out 14 times in a season; Aaron Judge once struck out 8 times in one day). 

Maybe if we made players do something humiliating after striking out, they’d concentrate more on making contact.  Thanks to defensive shifts all they have to do is make contact for a sure base hit, yet they prefer to swing for the fences.  People have been predicting the downfall of baseball for over 100 years, but a game that focuses entirely on strikeouts and homers might just be what is needed to kill the sport.

Oh no, they're rebooting Buffy

In this blog, I usually try and find a position that is new, and not just a drumbeat with others in the blogosphere.  Sometimes I try and take the exact opposite opinion than the “conventional wisdom” if for no other reason than to challenge the accepted operating paradigm.  But sometimes the accepted operating paradigm is so right that I can only add my assent.

Reboots suck.

Reboots are lazy, unimaginative ways that “creators” who are bereft of inspiration continue to cash a paycheck in Hollywood.  If the original was good, why make it again?  If the original sucked, why make it again?  With the lone exception of Battlestar Gallactica no reboot has ever even moderately improved upon the original (remember the reboot of The Prisoner?), and only a washed-up has-been would stoop to creating a reboot of their own creation.

What’s that?  Joss Whedon is rebooting Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a Black actress? Crap.

Okay, maybe a creative genius like Whedon has a few tricks up his sleeve that he never got to try out on the original Buffy.  Maybe he wants to do an episode with no dialogue for 30 minutes, or kill off the main character’s beloved mother for no reason.  No, wait, been there, killed that.   But still, he could have some good ideas.

But count me skeptical.  The main reason is this; for ANY show or movie too succeed, there have to be about 5,000 decisions that ALL have t be made correctly.  Plot structures, tone, casting, should this character be gay, should that character have blonde hair or dark hair, should the comic relief come from a single-parent family, and so on and so on and scooby dooby do on (as Sly and the Family Stone once said).  The odds of doing it once are astronomical.  Twice?  That’s like winning the lottery five times in a row.

Here are two specific things about the original Buffy that will be hard to replicate (I am going to assume that Joss will be too busy with his other projects  to have the writing input he had on the original Buffy (in one DVD extra writer Jane Espenson said the most frustrating thing about working for Joss Whedon is that fans come up to you and say, “I loved that episode you wrote!  My favorite line was . . . .” and they invariably name a line Whedon added).  One is the writing room, which Uproxx included as one of the 10 most influential writers; rooms in modern TV drama.

First, there was Joss Whedon, who was Emmy-nominated for the show’s episode Hush, which famously did without any of his trademark pithy dialogue for half its run time (he also got an Oscar nomination for Toy Story).  The show’s writers include Drew Goddard (Oscar winner for The Martian), David Fury (Emmy nominee for the Lost episode that revealed Locke had been a paraplegic), Jane Espenson (Warehouse 13, Gilmore Girls), and Marti Noxon (Dietland, UnREAL) to name just a few.  To think you can replicate an amalgamation of writing talent like that a second time is an act of unmitigated hubris.

Second, there was the cast.  Casting is a notoriously unscientific process; you have to find good actors, good actors who are right for their roles, and good actors who are right for their roles who have chemistry with the other actors.  That’s a tall order.  Buffy lucked out in spades (of course it wasn’t all luck, as luck is the residue of design).  Sarah Michelle Geller brought a gravitas to Buffy that few photogenic actresses her age could match.  After Cruel Intentions came out during her stint on Buffy, there was anticipation about her film career once she was off the show, but after marrying Freddie Prinze Jr. she seemed content to make bad Scooby-Doo movies and mediocre remakes of Japanese horror films.

The supporting cast included Allyson Hannigan, who went on to a successful post-Buffy career on How I Met Your Mother, and David Boreanaz who went from being a professional dog-walker pre-Buffy to now being a TV mainstay for the last 20 years thanks to Angel and Bones.  Even the cast who didn’t go on to major success were excellent, evidence to the proposition that it isn’t enough to succeed in Hollywood if you have looks, talent and luck.  Charisma Carpenter did the cliché move of posing for Playboy post-Angel, not that it helped her career (it never does); Emma Caufield was gorgeous and great at comedy, but that is such a rare combination there are no roles for actresses like that; and Nicholas Brendon had some personal problems and no other roles showcasing his great comedic timing (the episode he starred in, The Zeppo, is one of my favorites).

The idea that a writing team can be assembled that is as talented as the original one, and that the casting process hits as many home runs as the last one did, is not impossible but is inconceivable.  I wrote a post a while back about Whedon’s career blues since he got some unfortunate publicity, and I had thought to suggest he go back to TV where he had success but then I realized something: he never had that much TV success.  Buffy had abysmal ratings and only survived for 7 seasons because it was on weblets; Angel had unspectacular ratings and was killed off because The WB got mad at Whedon for taking Buffy to UPN; Firefly, despite the legendary post-run success, was cancelled after a few episodes, and Dollhouse’s best episode was the season one finale that was never broadcast. 

The word is that Whedon will have input on the writing of the new Buffy but the voice of the show will be that of showrunner Monica Owusu-Breen, who wrote for Alias, Lost and Agents of SHIELD.  Buffy was so much Joss Whedon’s baby that I can’t imagine anyone capturing what he gave to Buffy.  Heck, they had some incredible writers and producers working on Buffy after Whedon turned over showrunning duties in seasons 6 and 7 and the show was a disaster (compared to seasons 1-5). 

Rebooting Buffy the Vampire Slayer is yet another attempt of someone trying to improve perfection.  If Joss Whedon wasn’t on-board, I’d write it off, but then lots of critics wrote a show with a stupid title like Buffy the Vampire Slayer off 22 years ago and yet it survives.