Monday, August 07, 2006

Life on Mars

I have a new favorite show. LIFE ON MARS is a BBC drama that's playing on BBC America right now. It's about a modern-day detective who finds himself in the '70's working his old beat. I love that music, the clothes, and the fact that the word "bastards" is used in the promo trailers. Oh yeah, baby, Manchester is the British Detroit!

It isn't nearly as well written as ROME, another favorite, but it certainly has the best internal character conflict of any show in recent memory. I'd love to hear what you guys think.

P.S. I am working on the manager post. I wrote 30 pages this weekend of my TV pilot and 10 pages of Draft 2 of my feature, so my hands are KILLING me. I'll try to pound out a longer post later tonight after I ice my wrists!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

yay! Diva returns. How's the new material? You happy with it? Or too close to tell?

The Film Diva said...

I'm in that wildly infatuated stage right now. I'm sure once I've sent it out I'll be filled with instant regrets and remorse.... :-) I'm just gonna enjoy the first-draft-high while it lasts. I'm at the top of the 2nd act right now, and unlike most of the other stuff I've written, I sort of boxed myself in by writing the first 15 and the last 12.

And because I'm insecure, I pitched the idea to a friend of mine who works in TV development and she loved the little story arc I had for the episode, had big questions about the world and its rules, and the tone of the thing -- all of which I feel the writing actually answers, even at this nascent stage. So, that's a step forward....

My current fantasy is that I'll finish this, my friend will get this cool job at Network X and then out of the depths of our friendship and her deep excitement about my script, she'll buy it and I'll have a show next year!

See how I set myself up? :-)

Seriously, if I can finish the draft by the weekend and be revising and tweaking I'll be happy, then I'll do backstory and episode arcs and send it out in two weeks for peer-review.

Anonymous said...

Ahhh that first draft bliss - may it last.

And you wrote first and last act - know your destination...very smart...

And the plan sounds perfect until friend moves to uncool job at Network Z just when its about to get a greenlight...(people shuffle and slide around Hollywood so fast)...sorry, I should be more optimistic.

Write on!

Anonymous said...

How do you do it all? I'm glad the writing is going well. The tv pilot sounds exciting. Best of luck!

Anonymous said...

Wow, I never feel bliss after the first draft.

About the third or fourth draft I start feeling cocky though.

Anonymous said...

Diva dearest...I will go into the innards of Blogger and see what I can enable...have no idea exactly - still learning to drive, if you know what I mean...

Anonymous said...

sorry for these showing up in the comments...so I enabled backlinks - now as I understand it, you can click that for desired post, and it gets its own page...which you can copy URL and paste into your post --- or perhaps there is a simpler way yet, I just don't know it.

Cheers.