Television Show Character Quotes

For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.

I'm not normally one to take advice from my fictional characters, but there comes a point in every girl's life where she reaches a crossroads: a night alone with her sweatpants and her favorite television show, or a party with real, live, breathing people.

Boy bands, fan fiction, soap operas, reality TV, most shows and movies with female main characters . . . We’re still so rarely front and center, even rarer when you consider race and sexuality, and then when we do get something that’s just for us, we’re made to feel bad for liking it. We can’t win.

I’ve seen trans people in movies and TV shows, but judging by how unrealistic and shitty bi characters tend to be, I’m gonna assume I know nothing. So what’s okay for me to ask?

I’ve never understood why every character being “hot” was necessary for enjoying a TV show.

Fox is a television character, and she isn’t dead yet. But she will be, soon. She’s a character on a television show called The Library. You’ve never seen the Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.

Life is better than any movie or TV show. In real life there is no plot and there are billions of characters.

I hate those TV shows where characters talk about one thing, such as their patient on the operation table (let's say they're a doctor), then you realize they're actually talking about actually talking about themselves. The patient's open-heart surgery is nothing compared to their own messed-up heart or whatever. It's selfish. And means they're not concentrating, which is medical negligence.

A TV show comprises many departments—Costumes, Props, Talent, Graphics, Set Dressing, Transportation. Everyone in every department wants to show off their skills and contribute creatively to the show, which is a blessing. You’re grateful to work with people who are talented and enthusiastic about their jobs. You would think that as a producer, your job would be to churn up creativity, but mostly your job is to police enthusiasm. You may have an occasion where the script calls for a bran muffin on a white plate and the Props Department shows up with a bran cake in the shape of Santa Claus sitting on a silver platter that says “Welcome to Denmark.” “We just thought it would be funny.” And you have to find a polite way to explain that the character is Jewish, so her eating Santa’s face might have negative connotations, and the silver tray, while beautiful, is giving a weird glare on camera and maybe let’s go with the bran muffin on the white plate. And then sometimes Actors have what they call “ideas.” Usually it involves them talking more, or, in the case of more experienced actors, sitting more. When Actors have ideas it’s very important to get to the core reason behind their idea.

I lived through those books, songs, television shows, and movies - the way the characters talked, looked, acted. I thought that could translate over into reality, that I could make their world my world. I wanted so badly to run away from my life. But you can't bury yourself in other people's pages and scenes. You aren't David Copperfield or Tom Sawyer. Those love songs on the radio might speak to you, but they're not about you or the person you pine for. Life is not a John Hughes film.

I’ve got to get my body back. While I like wearing you, I’d rather wear you as a blanket on top of me and not the skin I’m walking around in. It has this whole Hannibal Lecter aspect that’s really creeping me out.”Jo “Hannibal Lecter?” Cadegan “It’s a TV show and book character. Not really important. Like a wombat in a blender.” Jo “I’m not sure what this blender is, but I think I should be feeling bad for that poor wombat.” Cadegan

It is the story of two men whose sitcom—full of minute observations and despicable characters—snuck through the network system to become a hit that changed TV’s most cherished rules; from then on, antiheroes would rise to prominence, unique voices would invade the airwaves, and the creative forces behind shows would often gain as much power and fame as the faces in front of the cameras. Seinfeld

You will encounter resentful, sneering non-readers who will look at you from their beery, leery eyes, as they might some form of sub-hominid anomaly, bookimus maximus. You will encounter redditters, youtubers, blogspotters, wordpressers, twitterers, and facebookers with wired-open eyes who will shout at from you from their crazy hectoring mouths about the liberal poison of literature. You will encounter the gamers with their twitching fingers who will look upon you as a character to lock crosshairs on and blow to smithereens. You will encounter the stoners and pill-poppers who will ignore you, and ask you if you have read Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, and if you haven’t, will lecture you for two hours on that novel and refuse to acknowledge any other books written by anyone ever. You will encounter the provincial retirees, who have spent a year reading War & Peace, who strike the attitude that completing that novel is a greater achievement than the thousands of books you have read, even though they lost themselves constantly throughout the book and hated the whole experience. You will encounter the self-obsessed students whose radical interpretations of Agnes Grey and The Idiot are the most important utterance anyone anywhere has ever made with their mouths, while ignoring the thousands of novels you have read. You will encounter the parents and siblings who take every literary reference you make back to the several books they enjoyed reading as a child, and then redirect the conversation to what TV shows they have been watching. You will encounter the teachers and lecturers, for whom any text not on their syllabus is a waste of time, and look upon you as a wayward student in need of their salvation. You will encounter the travellers and backpackers who will take pity on you for wasting your life, then tell you about the Paulo Coelho they read while hostelling across Europe en route to their spiritual pilgrimage to New Delhi. You will encounter the hard-working moaners who will tell you they are too busy working for a living to sit and read all day, and when they come home from a hard day’s toil, they don’t want to sit and read pretentious rubbish. You will encounter the voracious readers who loathe competition, and who will challenge you to a literary duel, rather than engage you in friendly conversation about your latest reading. You will encounter the slack intellectuals who will immediately ask you if you have read Finnegans Wake, and when you say you have, will ask if you if you understood every line, and when you say of course not, will make some point that generally alludes to you being a halfwit. Fuck those fuckers.

Years ago, I was yapping to my mother about Buffy and Xena and talking about how great it is that we now have these TV shows about such strong female characters. My mother, who admittedly has never watched either show, asked me if these really WERE strong female characters, or if they were merely male characters with boobs. Having a blonde cheerleader save the world with her martial arts skills doesn't equal feminism, she said. That's a male tactic. How about her saving the day using tactics that aren't all about punching and kicking and killing? I didn't have an answer for her then. I still don't, even now. There's a whole debate to be had that I'm just not ready for, that I may never be ready for. My mother is a pacifist. I am not. We see the world differently, we operate differently, even though we want the same things. We both want equality and peace. My mother is the sort to talk her way to equality and peace. I'm the sort to talk to the point where I reckon more talk won't do any good, and then smash my way through to an understanding. It is not an enlightened viewpoint I hold. It is a crass, brutish viewpoint — but in a crass, brutish world, I believe my way is the way to go. Mum believes otherwise. And that's the difference, I think, between us. We live in a world carved by men, where fear and oppression and violence are a part of our lives. I can't even IMAGINE a world sculpted by women, where other values have taken hold. I'm limited in that way. I could try not to be, but I honestly wouldn't know where to start. That's kind of sad, when you think about it. For all my imagination, I can't even imagine that... ... (turns to stare hauntingly out the window).

I leaned into my computer to give off the impression I was involved in something important, when actually I was reading [IMDB] trivia about the TV show The Wire. I’d ended up on the show page after following a trail of links that began with James Van Der Beek’s headshot. President Obama claims it’s his favorite show, and Omar is his favorite character.

The situation of the Kristang reminded me of an old TV show my sister found and binge-watched; you needed a spreadsheet to keep track of the characters, and everyone dies anyway.

Espenson reflects on parallels between the fic-writing and television-writing processes:        To get a job as a writer in Hollywood—you write episodes of television shows [someone else has created]. And actually, the eventual job you get in television is writing for characters you didn’t create. I write fanfiction every day when I sit down to write something for the characters of Once Upon a Time in a way because I’m writing for characters that I didn’t create. I’m putting myself in Adam and Eddy’s shows and writing in as close to their voice as I can do. And that’s the same thing that fanfiction writers do.

There are simply too many stories, too many characters whose experience is presented in THE WIRE, for the focus on the individual to assert itself, as would be required by conventional representations of tragedy.

Have you ever dated anyone?” Rufus asks. The answer feels obvious. He’s nice for giving me the benefit of the doubt. “Nope.” I’ve only had crushes, but it’s embarrassing to admit they were characters in books and TV shows.

LIZZ WINSTEAD Instead of Jon playing a character—the news anchor, one of the derelicts in a derelict world of media—Jon made a creative decision to take the show in the direction of the correspondents presenting the idiocy, and then Jon is the person who calls out the idiocy with the eloquence that the viewer wishes they had. And he did it in a way that’s not condescending, it’s not smug. It’s funny, it’s emotional, it’s calling out bullshit. So Jon became the voice of the audience.

Even in the ’70s and ’80s, the television show Happy Days was aware of the irony of “cool.” The cool character on Happy Days was “the Fonz,” and he was ridiculous. His office was in a men’s bathroom. That’s not only not cool, that’s not even sanitary.

Sex is one of the situations where all things submerged in our subconscious come out, all fears, all desires, all the violence, and all the needs. That's why sex, in my opinion, is never as easy as television shows or jokes present it to be. We are often told that taking pleasure, especially from sex, and surrendering to it are things that happen naturally, gestures that come for free. I find it harder, instead, to learn how to surrender than to learn how to resist. That's exactly what my characters suffer from: the difficulty of covering the distance between desires and their fulfillments, the difficulty of doing "easy" things, such as kissing a girl or lying in bed with her, difficulties that are not only due to external causes, but also often to internal ones.

When you watch a TV show or a movie, what you see looks like what it physically represents. A man looks like a man, a man with a large bicep looks like a man with a large bicep, and a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama" looks like a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama." But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm.

During my first few months of Facebooking, I discovered that my page had fostered a collective nostalgia for specific cultural icons. These started, unsurprisingly, within the realm of science fiction and fantasy. They commonly included a pointy-eared Vulcan from a certain groundbreaking 1960s television show. Just as often, though, I found myself sharing images of a diminutive, ancient, green and disarmingly wise Jedi Master who speaks in flip-side down English. Or, if feeling more sinister, I’d post pictures of his black-cloaked, dark-sided, heavy-breathing nemesis. As an aside, I initially received from Star Trek fans considerable “push-back,” or at least many raised Spock brows, when I began sharing images of Yoda and Darth Vader. To the purists, this bordered on sacrilege.. But as I like to remind fans, I was the only actor to work within both franchises, having also voiced the part of Lok Durd from the animated show Star Wars: The Clone Wars. It was the virality of these early posts, shared by thousands of fans without any prodding from me, that got me thinking. Why do we love Spock, Yoda and Darth Vader so much? And what is it about characters like these that causes fans to click “like” and “share” so readily? One thing was clear: Cultural icons help people define who they are today because they shaped who they were as children. We all “like” Yoda because we all loved The Empire Strikes Back, probably watched it many times, and can recite our favorite lines. Indeed, we all can quote Yoda, and we all have tried out our best impression of him. When someone posts a meme of Yoda, many immediately share it, not just because they think it is funny (though it usually is — it’s hard to go wrong with the Master), but because it says something about the sharer. It’s shorthand for saying, “This little guy made a huge impact on me, not sure what it is, but for certain a huge impact. Did it make one on you, too? I’m clicking ‘share’ to affirm something you may not know about me. I ‘like’ Yoda.” And isn’t that what sharing on Facebook is all about? It’s not simply that the sharer wants you to snortle or “LOL” as it were. That’s part of it, but not the core. At its core is a statement about one’s belief system, one that includes the wisdom of Yoda. Other eminently shareable icons included beloved Tolkien characters, particularly Gandalf (as played by the inimitable Sir Ian McKellan). Gandalf, like Yoda, is somehow always above reproach and unfailingly epic. Like Yoda, Gandalf has his darker counterpart. Gollum is a fan favorite because he is a fallen figure who could reform with the right guidance. It doesn’t hurt that his every meme is invariably read in his distinctive, blood-curdling rasp. Then there’s also Batman, who seems to have survived both Adam West and Christian Bale, but whose questionable relationship to the Boy Wonder left plenty of room for hilarious homoerotic undertones. But seriously, there is something about the brooding, misunderstood and “chaotic-good” nature of this superhero that touches all of our hearts.

The smartest kid Justin ever met, back in kindergarten, had told him to pretend his parents were characters in a television sitcom. 'Pretend there's a frame around 'em like the Tube, pretend they're a show you're watching. You can go into it if you want, or you can just watch and not go into it.

The casting of the brash United States Army Air Force officer Colonel Robert E. Hogan and the pompous German Luftwaffe officer Colonel Wilhelm Klink was inspired. For this series—a comedy with the serious backdrop of war—to succeed, the lead players had to be the perfect fit. The dynamic portrayal of this military odd couple had to be articulate, accurate, and precise. For the show to work, for the concept to be accepted, for one of the most outlandish premises in television history to be believed, the actors signed to play the two leading characters not only had to bring these extreme individuals to life with broad, fictional strokes, they had to make them real in the details.

continued. “The solution to almost every problem imaginable can be found in the outcome of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are life lessons disguised with colorful characters and situations. “‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf ’ teaches us the value of a good reputation and the power of honesty. ‘Cinderella’ shows us the rewards of having a good heart. ‘The Ugly Duckling’ teaches us the meaning of inner beauty.” Alex’s eyes were wide, and she nodded in agreement. She was a pretty girl with bright blue eyes and short strawberry-blonde hair that was always kept neatly out of her face with a headband. The way the other students stared at their teacher, as if the lesson being taught were in another language, was something Mrs. Peters had never grown accustomed to. So, Mrs. Peters would often direct entire lessons to the front row, where Alex sat. Mrs. Peters was a tall, thin woman who always wore dresses that resembled old, patterned sofas. Her hair was dark and curly and sat perfectly on the top of her head like a hat (and her students often thought it was). Through a pair of thick glasses, her eyes were permanently squinted from all the judgmental looks she had given her classes over the years. “Sadly, these timeless tales are no longer relevant in our society,” Mrs. Peters said. “We have traded their brilliant teachings for small-minded entertainment like television and video games. Parents now let obnoxious cartoons and violent movies influence their children. “The only exposure to the tales some children acquire are versions bastardized by film companies. Fairy

We know from the work of television critics and from the responses of our friends and from our own that there is little pride in the quality of television programs and less in the habit of extensive viewing. The television viewer’s implication in technology typically takes the form of complicity as defined in Chapter 15. We feel uneasiness about our passivity and guilt and sorrow at the loss of our traditions or alternatives.68 There is a realization that we are letting great things and practices drift into oblivion and that television fails to respond to our best aspirations and fails to engage the fullness of our powers. These impressions generally agree with more systematic findings that show that television is “not rated particularly highly as a general way of spending time, and in fact was evaluated below average compared to other free-time activities.”69

It’s been said that every character in a movie thinks the movie is about them. The first time I heard that, I thought, “Of course! Why should characters in movies or TV shows be any less self-centered than we are?” A villain doesn’t know he’s the villain — he thinks he’s the hero. He believes some good-looking guy with more screen time is simply getting in his way. A romantic interest doesn’t know she’s just “the girl” — she thinks she’s running the show.

This book is dedicated to everyone who has ever loved a story so much they could quote it. There's nothing in the world quite like being part of a fandom. Never let anyone shame you for it. Read those books. Watch those movies. Binge those TV shows. Love those characters. Admire those celebrities. Write that fan-fiction. Draw that fan art. Go to those conventions. Sing that (on-hiatus, totally-not-broken-up) boy band at the top or your lungs. Do what makes you happy.

Today we as a culture are schizophrenic on such matters. We want to say it doesn’t make any difference what we look at or hear. This, no doubt, is because we want to be “free” to show anything and to see anything—no matter how evil and revolting. But businesses still pay millions of dollars to show us something for thirty seconds on television. They do that because they know that what we repeatedly see and hear affects what we do. Otherwise they would go out of business.

I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or a TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters.

The identification of courage with truth pops up often in history, even in our day: talk-show host Bill Maher was kicked off network TV for suggesting that the suicide hijackers of 9/11 were brave. Common decency demands that no positive character traits be associated with someone whose actions and ideas are vicious. Unfortunately, this equation enables people to validate questionable ideas by defending them with courage, as if a coward cannot say something that is true or a brave man something that is false.

The brutality of the regime knows no bounds. It does not remain neutral towards the people here; it creates beasts in its own image out of ordinary people who might have been neighbors instead. Even more dangerous was the fact that the fundamentals of humanity and the ABCs of life have been eviscerated from the hearts of many people here. State television destroys human compassion, the sort of fundamental empathy that is not contingent upon a political or even a cultural orientation, and through which one human being can relate to another. The al-Dunya channel stirs up hatred, broadcasts fake news and maligns any opposing viewpoint. I wasn't the only one subjected to internet attacks by the security services and the Ba'thists, even if the campaign against me may be fiercer because I come from the Alawite community and have a lot of family connections to them -- because I am a woman and it's supposedly easier to break me with rumors and character assassinations and insults. Some of my actress friends who expressed sympathy for the children of Dar'a and called for an end to the siege of the city were subjected to a campaign of character assassinations and called traitors, then forced to appear on state television in order to clarify their position. Friends who expressed sympathy for the families of the martyrs would get insulted, they would be called traitors and accused of being foreign spies. People became afraid to show even a little bit of sympathy for one another, going against the basic facts of life, the slightest element of what could be called the laws of human nature -- that is, if we indeed agree that sympathy is part of human nature in the first place. Moral and metaphorical murder is being carried out as part of a foolproof plan, idiotic but targeted, stupid yet leaving a mark on people's souls.

Only an hour in, and already the first temptation: the warmth of my blankets and bed, my pillows and the fake-fur throw Hannah's mom left here after a weekend visit. They're all saying, Climb in. No one will know if you stay in bed all day. No one will know if you wear the same sweatpants for the entire month, if you eat every meal in front of television shows and use t-shirts as napkins. Go ahead and listen to that same song on repeat until its sound turns to nothing and you sleep the winter away. I only have Mabel's visit to get through, and then all this could be mine. I could scroll through Twitter until my vision blurs and then collapse on my bed like an Oscar Wilde character. I could score myself a bottle of whiskey and let it make me glow, let all the room's edges go soft, let the memories out of their cages. Maybe I would hear him sing again, if all else went quiet.

In the roughly one-third of the day that is free of obligations, in their precious “leisure” time, most people in fact seem to use their minds as little as possible. The largest part of free time—almost half of it for American adults—is spent in front of the television set. The plots and characters of the popular shows are so repetitive that although watching TV requires the processing of visual images, very little else in the way of memory, thinking, or volition is required. Not surprisingly, people report some of the lowest levels of concentration, use of skills, clarity of thought, and feelings of potency when watching television. The other leisure activities people usually do at home are only a little more demanding. Reading most newspapers and magazines, talking to other people, and gazing out the window also involve processing very little new information, and thus require little concentration.

The year 1992 was the countdown year for the formation of the European single market, the regional economic entity—utopian for some, dystopian for others—now intended to recenter Europe in a global politics fragmented in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union....The year 1992 was also when the action adventure TV series Highlander first premiered—“the first European co-produced weekly hour to be sold into the US syndication market.” ...My own pleasure in Highlander began with the principal actor Adrian Paul’s eroticized image. I immediately (and somewhat idiosyncratically) “recognized” it as gay (the image, not necessarily the main story character Duncan MacLeod, or the actor Adrian Paul). It was in this “recognition” that I discovered my pleasure in the show. As a lesbian I was surprised: this was really the first TV show since my adolescence in which an eroticized male image seemed so powerfully attractive to me. Perhaps that is why I assumed it was somehow gay....

One TV show I’m not a fan of is this show called Football. This show has been going on for fifty-four seasons, and honestly, I don’t see the appeal. Episodes are repetitive, the writing is confusing, the cinematography is flat, there are too many characters to keep track of, and I can’t relate to any of their struggles. Also, for some reason, they all want to hold this oddly shaped ball. I must have missed the episode where they explained why it’s so important. Football episodes always have a huge live studio audience at the tapings. The audience is so big that a lot of times they can be seen in the shots—which I wouldn’t mind if the audience wasn’t screaming every time the show started to get interesting. Whenever Football airs the season finale, I get invited to viewing parties and people cosplay as their favorite character. I always go because of the free food, but I’m never caught up in the show, so it’s hard for me to get invested. Oh well, at least the commercials are entertaining.

Blaine: THE HAND-SCAN SPECTRUM MAGNIFIER IS A DIAGNOSTIC TOOL ALSO CAPABLE OF ADMINISTERING MINOR FIRST AID, SUCH AS I HAVE PERFORMED ON YOU. IT IS ALSO A NUTRIENT DELIVERY SYSTEM, A BRAIN-PATTERN RECORDING DEVICE, A STRESS-ANALYZER, AND AN EMOTION-ENHANCER WHICH CAN NATURALLY STIMULATE THE PRODUCTION OF ENDORPHINS. HAND-SCAN IS ALSO CAPABLE OF CREATING VERY BELIEVABLE ILLUSIONS AND HALLUCINATIONS. WOULD YOU CARE TO HAVE YOUR FIRST SEXUAL EXPERIENCE WITH A NOTED SEX-GODDESS FROM YOUR LEVEL OF THE TOWER, JAKE OF NEW YORK? PERHAPS MARILYN MONROE, RAQUEL WELCH, OR EDITH BUNKER? Jake: (laughter; guessing that laughing at Blaine might be risky, but this time he cannot help it) There IS no Edith Bunker. She's just a character on a TV show. The actress's name is, um, Jean Stapleton. Also, she looks like Mrs. Shaw. She's our housekeeper. Nice, but not--you know--a babe. Blaine: (silence) I CRY YOUR PARDON, JAKE OF NEW YORK. I ALSO WITHDRAW MY OFFER OF A SEXUAL EXPERIENCE. Jake: (sounding suitably humble hopefully) That's okay, Blaine. I think I'm still a little young for that, anyway.

Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with.” He adds, “It is the only decent way to live.” I completely agree, but there’s more. In addition to delaying gratification, discipline demands that you also make key decisions in advance—relationally, physically, financially and spiritually. Let’s keep going. Relationally. Delayed gratification is important first and foremost in training children. A lot of parents are unwilling to make the sacrifices that are necessary in order to meet their children’s deepest needs. A promotion at work, a TV show or a nap on the sofa may all seem much more enticing than playing Candy Land with a three-year-old. There’s no question about it: it is hard to devote yourself wholeheartedly and regularly to bringing up your children properly. But hard work during the children’s early, impressionable years usually forms strong character in them. Parents who discipline themselves to do this, trusting God for the strength to keep going, are likely to enjoy the payoff of a lifetime of solid relationships with their children.

5236 rue St. Urbain The baby girl was a quick learner, having synthesized a full range of traits of both of her parents, the charming and the devious. Of all the toddlers in the neighbourhood, she was the first to learn to read and also the first to tear out the pages. Within months she mastered the grilling of the steaks and soon thereafter presented reasons to not grill the steaks. She was the first to promote a new visceral style of physical comedy as a means of reinvigorate the social potential of satire, and the first to declare the movement over. She appreciated the qualities of movement and speed, but also understood the necessity of slowness and leisure. She quickly learned the importance of ladders. She invented games with numerous chess-boards, matches and glasses of unfinished wine. Her parents, being both responsible and duplicitous people, came up with a plan to protect themselves, their apartment and belongings, while also providing an environment to encourage the open development of their daughter's obvious talents. They scheduled time off work, put on their pajamas and let the routines of the apartment go. They put their most cherished books right at her eye-level and gave her a chrome lighter. They blended the contents of the fridge and poured it into bowls they left on the floor. They took to napping in the living room, waking only to wipe their noses on the picture books and look blankly at the costumed characters on the TV shows. They made a fuss for their daughter's attention and cried when she wandered off; they bit or punched each other when she out of the room, and accused the other when she came in, looking frustrated. They made a mess of their pants when she drank too much, and let her figure out the fire extinguisher when their cigarettes set the blankets smoldering. They made her laugh with cute songs and then put clothes pins on the cat's tail. Eventually things found their rhythm. More than once the three of them found their faces waxened with tears, unable to decide if they had been crying, laughing, or if it had all been a reflex, like drooling. They took turns in the bath. Parents and children--it is odd when you trigger instinctive behaviour in either of them--like survival, like nurture. It's alright to test their capabilities, but they can hurt themselves if they go too far. It can be helpful to imagine them all gorging on their favourite food until their bellies ache. Fall came and the family went to school together.

A Conversation with the Author What was your inspiration for The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle? Inspiration is a flash-of-lightning kind of word. What happens to me is more like sediment building. I love time travel, Agatha Christie, and the eighties classic Quantum Leap, and over time a book emerged from that beautiful quagmire. Truthfully, having the idea was the easy part, keeping track of all the moving parts was the difficulty. Which character was the most interesting to write, and in which host do you feel Aiden truly flourishes? Lord Cecil Ravencourt, by miles. He occupies the section of the book where the character has to grapple with the time travel elements, the body swapping elements, and the murder itself. I wanted my most intelligent character for that task, but I thought it would be great to hamper him in some way, as well. Interestingly, I wanted to make him really loathsome—which is why he’s a banker. And yet, for some reason, I ended up quite liking him, and feeding a few laudable qualities into his personality. I think Derby ended up getting a double dose of loathsome instead. Other than that, it’s just really nice seeing the evolution of his relationship with Cunningham. Is there a moral lesson to Aiden’s story or any conclusion you hope the reader walks away with as they turn the final page? Don’t be a dick! Kind, funny, intelligent, and generous people are behind every good thing that’s ever happened to me. Everybody else you just have to put up with. Like dandruff. Or sunburn. Don’t be sunburn, people. In one hundred years, do you believe there will be something similar to Blackheath, and would you support such a system? Yes, and not exactly. Our prison system is barbaric, but some people deserve it. That’s the tricky part of pinning your flag to the left or right of the moral spectrum. I think the current system is unsustainable, and I think personality adjustment and mental prisons are dangerous, achievable technology somebody will abuse. They could also solve a lot of problems. Would you trust your government with it? I suppose that’s the question. The book is so contained, and we don’t get to see the place that Aiden is escaping to! Did you map that out, and is there anything you can share about the society beyond Blackheath’s walls? It’s autocratic, technologically advanced, but they still haven’t overcome our human weaknesses. You can get everywhere in an hour, but television’s still overrun with reality shows, basically. Imagine the society that could create something as hateful as Annabelle Caulker.

We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing is, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.

1953. It was a world with a war that had just ended and, like a devil that grows a new tail after you’ve chopped one off, another war had begun. With a draft and an enemy just like the one before, only this time there were nuclear weapons; there were veterans’ cemeteries that refused to bury Negro soldiers; there was a government telling you what to look for in a nuclear flash, what kind of structure to hide under should the sirens start wailing—though they must have known that it would have been madness to look or hide or consider anything except lying down and taking your death in with one full breath. There were the subcommittee hearings with Sheedy asking McLain on TV, “Are you a red?” whereupon McLain threw water into his face, and Sheedy threw water back and knocked off his glasses. A world in which TV stations were asked to segregate characters on their shows for Southern viewers, in which all nudes were withdrawn from a San Francisco art show because “local mother Mrs. Hutchins’s sensibilities are shaken to the core;” and beautiful Angel Island became a guided missile station, and a white college student was expelled for proposing to a Negro, and they were rioting against us in Trieste; the Allies freed Trieste not many years ago, and suddenly they hated us … and hovering above all this, every day in the paper, that newsprint visage like the snapshot of a bland Prometheus: Ethel Rosenberg’s face. When would the all clear come? Didn’t somebody promise us an all clear if we were good, and clean, and nice,

PG: Who tends to have an interest in moé characters? HT: Clearly we are talking about those who are marginalized— Japanese men in particular, who seem to be getting weaker. After the Second World War, the value of men in Japan was determined by their productivity at work. The man who earned money was able to spend it, showing that he was a worthy mate. This then became the only way to be a man, the only way to be favorably appraised by women. I call this the era of love capitalism, meaning that dating and courtship were increasingly tied to consumption. Trendy dramas aired on television that promoted going to fancy restaurants or taking a ski vacation. So those men who failed or dropped out of the system looked for love elsewhere, for example in manga and anime. The situation got worse when the economy tanked in the 1990s, which made it harder to get that job and be that ideal man. There were a few men who had love and a lot of men who didn’t. I call this the love gap (ren’ai kakusa). Moé provides a low-cost, low-stress solution to this problem. It is love on our terms. Moé is a love revolution that challenges people’s commonsense notions about the world. You don’t need much capital to access moé, and you can do it in a way that suits you. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that everyone should give up on reality; I’m just pointing out that some of us find satisfaction with fictional characters. It’s not for everyone, but maybe more people would recognize this life choice if it wasn’t always belittled. Forcing people to live up to impossible ideals so that they can participate in so-called reality creates so-called losers, who in their despair might lash out at society. We don’t have to accept something just because people tell us that it is normal or right or better.

For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

do you think Jesus would do if he came back to earth tonight in Bremerton?” C asked, as he spooned some rice onto his plate. “I don’t know,” I said, savoring a mouthful of Mongolian beef. “Would he come in a white robe and sandals, or the dress of this time?” C pressed on. I shrugged my shoulders, forking in the fried rice. “Would he be white, black, Asian, or maybe look like Saddam Hussein instead of Kevin Costner or Tom Cruise? What if he didn’t fit our image of him? What if he was bald? Or, for God’s sake, what if he was gay? “He wouldn’t have any cash, no MasterCard, Visa, Discover Card, or portfolio of any kind. If he went to a bank and said, ‘Hello. I’m Jesus, the son of God. I need some of those green things that say “In God We Trust” on them to buy some food and get a place to stay,’ the bank manager would say, ‘I’m sorry, but I looked in my computer and without a social security number, local address, and credit history, I can’t do anything for you. Maybe if you show me a miracle or two, I might lend you fifty dollars.’ “Where would he stay? The state park charges sixteen dollars a night. Could he go to a church and ask, ‘May I stay here? I am Jesus’? Would they believe him?” As I took a sip of my drink, I wondered just who this character was sitting across from me. Was he some angel sent to save me? Or was he, as the Rolling Stones warned in their song, Satan himself here to claim me for some sin of this life or a past life of which I had no recollection? Or was he an alien? Or was he Jesus, the Christ himself, just “messing” with me? Was I in the presence of a prophet, or just some hopped-up druggie? “‘Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.’ That’s what Jesus said. What doors would be opened to him?” he asked. “The Salvation Army—Sally’s?” I guessed. “That’s about all,” C said. “Unless he saw Tony Robbins’ TV formula to become a millionaire and started selling miracles to the rich at twenty-thousand dollars a pop. He could go on Regis, Oprah, maybe get an interview with Bill Moyers, or go on Nightline. Or joust with the nonbelievers on Jerry Springer! Think of the book deals! He

Washington University found that adding a single extra gene dramatically boosted a mouse’s memory and ability. These “smart mice” could navigate mazes faster, remember events better, and outperform other mice in a wide variety of tests. They were dubbed “Doogie mice,” after the precocious character on the TV show Doogie Howser, M.D. Dr. Tsien began by analyzing the gene NR2B, which acts like a switch controlling the brain’s ability to associate one event with another. (Scientists know this because when the gene is silenced or rendered inactive, mice lose this ability.) All learning depends on NR2B, because it controls the communication between memory cells of the hippocampus. First Dr. Tsien created a strain of mice that lacked NR2B, and they showed impaired memory and learning disabilities. Then he created a strain of mice that had more copies of NR2B than normal, and found that the new mice had superior mental capabilities. Placed in a shallow pan of water and forced to swim, normal mice would swim randomly about. They had forgotten from just a few days before that there was a hidden underwater platform. The smart mice, however, went straight to the hidden platform on the first try. Since then, researchers have been able to confirm these results in other labs and create even smarter strains of mice. In 2009, Dr. Tsien published a paper announcing yet another strain of smart mice, dubbed “Hobbie-J” (named after a character in Chinese cartoons). Hobbie-J was able to remember novel facts (such as the location of toys) three times longer than the genetically modified strain of mouse previously thought to be the smartest. “This adds to the notion that NR2B is a universal switch for memory formation,” remarked Dr. Tsien. “It’s like taking Michael Jordon and making him a super Michael Jordan,” said graduate student Deheng Wang. There are limits, however, even to this new mice strain. When these mice were given a choice to take a left or right turn to get a chocolate reward, Hobbie-J was able to remember the correct path for much longer than the normal mice, but after five minutes he, too, forgot. “We can never turn it into a mathematician. They are rats, after all,” says Dr. Tsien. It should also be pointed out that some of the strains of smart mice were exceptionally timid compared to normal mice. Some suspect that, if your memory becomes too great, you also remember all the failures and hurts as well, perhaps making you hesitant. So there is also a potential downside to remembering too much.

Delta Airlines, you might have noticed, does not run negative TV ads about USAir. It does not show pictures of the crash of USAir Flight 427, with a voice-over saying: “USAir, airline of death. Going to Pittsburgh? Fly Delta instead.” And McDonald’s, you might also have noticed, does not run ads reminding viewers that Jack in the Box hamburgers once killed two customers. Why? Because Delta and McDonald’s know that if the airline and fast-food industries put on that kind of advertising, America would soon be riding trains and eating box-lunch tuna sandwiches. Yet every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country—and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

I was not able to watch TV shows because I felt so bad for the characters if there was any drama or danger involved.

The Mike Douglas Show wasn’t the only place to find colored people on television. Each week, Jet magazine pointed out all the shows with colored people. My sisters and I became expert colored counters. We had it down to a science. Not only did we count how many colored people were on TV, we also counted the number of words the actors were given to say. For instance, it was easy to count the number of words the Negro engineer on Mission Impossible spoke as well as the black POW on Hogan’s Heroes. Sometimes the black POW didn’t have any words to say, so we scored him a “1” for being there. We counted how many times Lieutenant Uhuru hailed the frequency on Star Trek. We’d even take turns being her, although Big Ma would have never let us wear a minidress or space boots. But then there was I Spy. All three of us together couldn’t count every word Bill Cosby said. And then there was a new show, Julia, coming in September, starring Diahann Carroll. We agreed to shout out “Black Infinity!” when Julia came on because each episode would be all about her character. We didn’t just count the shows. We counted the commercials as well. We’d run into the TV room in time to catch the commercials with colored people using deodorant, shaving cream, and wash powder. There was a little colored girl on our favorite commercial who looked just like Fern. In fact, I said that little girl could have been Fern, which made Vonetta jealous. In the commercial, the little girl took a bite of buttered bread and said, “Gee, Ma. This is the best butter I ever ate.” Then we’d say it the way she did, in her dead, expressionless voice; and we’d outdo ourselves trying to say it with the right amount of deadness. We figured that that was how the commercial people told her to say it. Not too colored. Then we’d get silly and say it every kind of colored way we knew how.

Our family rejected materialism and popular culture and yet we also produced it. The show, which by then had been called many things but was currently airing with the title Six for Hicks, paid for the SUVs Mother and Daddy drove, the lake house, the “spiritual retreat” that was actually a villa in Saint John. It paid for the car seat I rode home in from the hospital, the muslin blankets I was swaddled in when I slept. It paid for my first backpack when it came time for me to go to school, Mother having by then completely abandoned giving lessons in the living room, not just because her time and energy were better spent promoting our brand but also because marketing said that what our audience wanted at that point was a character who was “normal.

The Blacklist If you’re unfamiliar with Caillou, he is the leader of the toddler community. He is the Dark Lord from whom they take orders. Caillou is who every toddler aspires to be. He’s a whining shit stain of a kid who, despite having no redeeming qualities, not even physical attractiveness, still gets everything he asks for. If most of us were Caillou’s parents, we would have dropped him off at Grandma’s house and not looked back. He is a demon’s spawn. His whine could strip paint. His cries generate no sympathy in parents, only rage. Parents, have you noticed that as your child watched Caillou he began whining more? If you have not gotten your child addicted to this degenerate of a television-show character, proceed with caution. No animated child in history has angered parents like Caillou has. If you Google his name, you will find images of him walking through flames like a demon and YouTube channels dedicated to discussing his assholery.

Jeremy has wondered about what kind of television shows the characters in television shows watch. Television characters almost always have better haircuts, funnier friends, simpler attitudes toward sex. They marry magicians, win lotteries, have affairs with women who carry guns in their purses. Curious things happen to them on an hourly basis. Jeremy and I can forgive their haircuts. We just want to ask them about their television shows.

7. To Be Brave, You First Must Be Afraid Being brave isn’t about not feeling scared. Real courage is all about overcoming your fears. There is little courage involved in setting out on a journey where the destination is certain and every step in between has been mapped in detail. Bravery is about leaving camp in the dark, when we do not know the route ahead and cannot be certain we will ever return. While I was serving in the military, I suffered a free-fall parachuting accident in Southern Africa, where I broke my back in three places. I then spent 18 months back in the UK, in and out of military rehabilitation, desperately trying to recover. It was the hardest, darkest, most frightening time I had ever known. Nothing was certain, every movement was agony and my future hung in the balance. No one could tell me whether I would even walk properly again. It had been a jump that had cost me my career, my movement and almost my life. The idea of ever jumping again was almost impossible for me to face. Yet over seven seasons of Born Survivor and Man Vs Wild, I have since had to jump out of almost every aircraft imaginable: hot-air balloons, military C-130 cargo planes, helicopters, bi-planes, old World War Two Dakotas. You name it: the list is long. And each time it is still hard for me. I never sleep much the night before, and I have recurring nightmares from my accident, which predictably surface just before a jump. It is a real mountain in my mind, one that induces a dep gnawing fear. Heart racing, sweaty palms, dry throat. But I have to force myself to feel that fear and do it anyway. It is my work. The crew on the adventure TV shows I have done know that skydiving is hard for me. And I know there will always be a hand that reaches across to my shoulder during the few moments before that plane door opens. The team know I am busy facing demons every time we go up, but it is the job, and I don’t ever want to let my demons win. Bravery is about facing up to the things we fear the most, and overcoming and conquering those fears…or at least quelling them for a while. And the greater the fear, the greater the bravery. But one thing I know for sure: it is only by doing what we fear that we can ever truly learn to be brave.

Imagine the cocktail party raconteur who captivates his listeners with some adventure story while taking dramatic sips from a gin martini. Chances are he is not a writer. This seems counter-intuitive. After all, writers create characters that are so darn interesting. A good writer can hold you spellbound through a two-hundred page story. Why aren’t all writers scintillating, life-of-the-party types in person? Some are. But many are not. Part of the answer is that writers are not required to think on their feet. Spur-of-the-moment wittiness is a necessary quality for improv actors, talk-show hosts, and politicians. But writers don’t think or work in real time. They create at their own pace, spending hours or days on clever dialogue, or crafting a scene in which they get to micro-manage every detail. Real life doesn’t work like that. And that’s okay. There is really only one place where a writer needs to be absolutely charming and irresistible; not at cocktail parties, not on television, not in front of a live audience -- but on paper.

Byrne,” I said. Cops answer phones like cops even when they’re home. “They f—d us, Gary! They f—ed us!” “Whoa, whoa. Calm down. Who f—ed us? What are—?” “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! Are you watching? They f—ed us, Gary! They released the g-ddamn tapes! Our depositions are playing on the damn television. We’re all over the g-ddamn news! They’re showing our faces!” She kept repeating

Many people think of a narcissist as someone who perhaps names hotels after himself or always wants to be in the spotlight—maybe a character on reality TV.

14. Pack Light This brings us to the stage of our journey where I can begin to equip you with some of the key ‘know-how’ to help you survive the many obstacles that lie ahead. Now, there is ‘good’ kit we need to carry and then there is ‘bad’ kit. The ‘good’ is the list we are going to start compiling. The ‘bad’ is the stuff we are going to drop. Ultimately I want you to be empowered with a super-efficient, totally functional kit list made up of solid principles on which to build your life and adventure. And here is the reason why we want to keep our kit list light: On an expedition, obviously you never want to carry more gear than you need. Unnecessary kit is just extra weight - and too much baggage slows you down. Part of the appeal of the TV shows I do is that they show how you can survive with just a bottle of water, a decent knife and some key know-how. The message is that attitude is king and the greatest resource we have is inside of us all. Pack the right skills, and the right attitudes, and you don’t need much else.

The Guiding Light is the longest-running serial in broadcast history. Still seen on CBS television, its roots go back almost 60 years, to radio’s pioneering soaps. Though its original characters have been swallowed and eclipsed by time, it still has faint ties to the show that was first simulcast July 20, 1952, and in time replaced its radio counterpart with a daily one-hour TV show. Its creator, Irna Phillips, was often called “the queen of soaps.” She was so influential in the field that she was compared with Frank and Anne Hummert, though the comparison was weak. While the Hummerts employed a huge stable of writers and turned out dozens of serials, Phillips wrote her own—two million words of it each year. Using a large month-by-month work chart, Phillips plotted up to half a dozen serials at once, dictating the action to a secretary. Mentally juggling the fates of scores of characters, she churned out quarter-hour slices of life in sessions filled with high drama, acting the parts and changing her voice for the various speaking roles, while secretaries scribbled the dialogue that flowed from her lips. She gave up teaching early in life to enter radio as an actress at Chicago’s WGN. She was 25 that year, 1930. In 1932 she began to write. She discovered that cliffhanger endings were surefire for bringing those early audiences back to their sets each day, but that slow and skillful character development was what kept the audience for years. She decided that the organ was the ideal musical instrument for those little shows and that the instrument should be played with pomp and power, with all the authority of a religious service in a great European cathedral. The music gave weight to the dialogue, which was usually focused and intense.

Hollywood insider Roger D. McGrath was a consultant on the TV series The Young Riders, produced by MGM television. The program was supposed to be about the youthful and daring white horsemen of the Pony Express who delivered mail on the American frontier. McGrath writes: "There were no black Pony Express riders; however...it was decided one of the principal characters would be black. He would be one of the riders. He was named Noah and he was just like the white riders except--he was perfect...He was God. "It was also decided that there should be some Mexicans in the show. A Spanish mission suddenly appeared in Wyoming...That the nearest Spanish mission was actually in the upper Rio Grande Valley, 600 miles south, did not seem to matter. Now we could have Mexican heroes... " I probably do not have to tell you that our Indians were always perfect... Only whites perpetrated atrocities... Story lines that had Indians chasing Pony Express riders were rejected out of hand, although there are several true stories of lone Pony Express riders being chased by dozens of Indians, suffering terrible wounds.

Over the past three decades I’ve appeared in nearly a hundred movies and television shows. I’ve been a leading man and a supporting actor and worked in almost every genre. But whatever else I’ve done or whatever else I might do, The Princess Bride will always be the work with which I am most closely associated; and Westley, with his wisp of a mustache and ponytail, the character with whom I will be forever linked. Not Glory, which earned higher critical praise upon release and won more awards; not Days of Thunder or Twister, both of which were summer blockbusters. Not even Saw, which was shot in eighteen days on a budget smaller than most movies spend on catering, and earned more than $100 million; and that’s just fine by me.

Suppose you’re sitting at home watching TV. You’re enjoying the program until the two main characters fall in love. Suddenly you feel loneliness, but there’s no one around to give you attention. Interestingly, you were fine just a few minutes ago. This example shows that the thorn is always in your heart; it’s just not activated until something touches it.

Kunal Nayyar: Just like Simon, I went through my own anxieties. Mine were not related to my performance on the show. The anxiety for me was how to navigate this new world where everywhere I turned, someone wanted something from me. And for the first time in my life I had to build a cage around myself. And in that cage, I was going nuts. I was having panic attacks while driving on the highway. All my worst fears of claustrophobia and heights sort of rose to the surface. And I think it’s because I began to believe an identity that didn’t really exist. When you begin to play a character on television, people want to meet that character; they don’t want to meet you. So I’m meeting people with love and adoration and respect, thinking that they want to get to know me and spend time with me. And what broke my heart was the realization that, No, they want to meet the character, and Kunal is no longer really an identity. Now you’re Raj. I had to be careful about the people I was allowing into my life, and it was difficult for me. My naivete dissipated quickly. It was hard to not be able to say hi to everyone, to hug everyone, hang out with everyone. You have to find your balance.

Most TV characters experience their first I love yous as teens or twentysomethings, not as thirtysomethings. What Big Bang was showing was that it’s perfectly normal to have your firsts—whether it be a kiss, or an “I love you,” or sex—come later than the cultural and societal norms we’ve grown up with. And that mattered.

We find happiness in a kaleidoscope of stories: in books, in comics, in dance, in podcasts, in film and TV shows and video games. We find happiness in cosplaying as our favorite characters, and going to meet-and-greets with our favorite celebrities, and Dimension Door-ing onto the back of an Ancient Black Dragon, and finger-gunning Magic Missiles with our murder-hobo friends in a weekly session of Dungeons and Dragons. We all deserve to be happy, and love what we love, and be unironically enthusiastic about it. There is a magic in fandom that there rarely is anywhere else—where you can raise a TV show from the dead, and un-fridge a favorite character, and write fanfic that becomes canon. It is the kind of magic that brings our far corners of the world together.

Did I forget to mention I’m that guy? Totally uncoordinated. Socially inept. Supergeek. Walking cliché. The kind of “character” people see on TV shows and call “unrealistic.” I thank the driver, who, since he got over his moment of horror that I might injure myself and get him in trouble somehow, has been struggling to choke back laughter, and hustle inside where I can finally drop the façade of being an ubercool, sophisticated, wealthy technology mogul.

Intelligent and ambitious people want to be challenged, and someone having high expectations of you is a turn-on. High demand is a motivator, success is a drug, and before you know it, you're rationalizing anything in order to meet the demand and get your high. The demand has become your god. There <\i>is one indisputable way to identify a cult, one characteristic they all share. It is not a belief in alien spacecraft or a plentiful supply of Flavor Aid. It is the notion that anyone who does not agree with the group's beliefs or choices, who expresses concerns, who simply dares to ask questions, is deemed "unsafe." Every good thing about that person must be subsumed by the fact that they disagree with me, so I can boil down their character into something vilifiable. For mind control to work, there has to be heroes and villains. It has to be us versus them. In a cult, it isn't good enough for you to say "I love you, but I disagree with you." You must affirm my choices and beliefs. Only then can you be considered "safe." In a cult, safety means agreement. The irony, of course, is that while you are not allowed to have your own opinion about my beliefs, I am allowed to have an opinion about yours.

Logan is a character on one of my favorite TV shows, Veronica Mars.

There is one indisputable way to identify a cult, one characteristic they all share. If is not a belief in alien spacecraft or a plentiful supply of Flavor Aid. It is the notion that anyone who does not agree with the group's beliefs or choices, who expresses concerns, who simply dare to ask questions, is deemed "unsafe". Every good thing about that person must be subsumed by the fact that they disagree with me, so I can boil down their character into something vilifiable. For mind control to work, there has to be heroes and villains. It has to be us versus them. In a cult, it isn't good enough for you to say, "I love you, but I disagree with you." You must affirm my choices and beliefs. Only then can you be considered "safe". In a cult, safety means agreement. The irony of course, is that while you are not allowed to have your own opinions about my beliefs, I am allowed to have an opinion about yours.

No, read it now, Tom.” The article was titled “Magnum, the Champagne of TV?” In a typical television series, the professor wrote, “Each episode stands by itself. Characters and situations develop only slightly, if at all.” But Magnum was different. “Its creators have established and refined a new television form that stands between the traditional self-contained episodic forms and the open-ended serials. Call it the ‘cumulative narrative.’ One episode’s events can greatly affect later events, but they’re seldom directly tied together. Each week’s program is distinct, yet each is grafted onto the body of the series, its characters’ pasts.” Magnum was all about memory and storytelling, according to Newcomb. He singled out the show’s voice-over narration, which he said provided “a central perspective and permit[ted] Magnum’s ongoing moral dialogue with himself.” And all of it, the professor said, was true to the post-Vietnam world that Americans found themselves living in.

Even away from the set and in Joseph, Walter Brennan continued to police his performances—as Louise Kunz observed when he visited his wife in the hospital, where she was recuperating from an operation. At the only television set in the hospital, everyone gathered around to view The Real McCoys. Louise and a group of teenage kids watched as Walter said, “Oh, I did that okay. Oh, I’ve got to work on that, that’s terrible.” When the episode ended, a boy asked him how he remembered to limp. Walter said he put a tiny pebble in his shoe; otherwise he limped on the wrong foot. Diane Turner remembers the times Walter would enter the local drugstore, sit down at the soda fountain, and entertain everyone with his Grandpa Amos routines. When his granddaughter Tammy Crawford watched The Real McCoys, she would get upset because every episode the characters would get mad at her Grampy—although by the end of the show he would have learned his lesson.

More recently, a publicity campaign for a late-night cartoon show backfired when it aroused fears of a terrorist attack and temporarily shut down the city of Boston. The “guerrilla marketing” effort consisted of 1-foot-tall blinking electronic signs with hanging wires and batteries that marketers used to promote the Cartoon Network TV show Aqua Teen Hunger Force (a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries, and a meatball). The signs were placed on bridges and in other high-profile spots in several U.S. cities. Most depicted a boxy, cartoon character giving passersby the finger. The bomb squads and other police personnel required to investigate the mysterious boxes cost the city of Boston more than $500,000—and a lot of frayed nerves. 99

One of our housekeepers called him Eddie Haskell. We’d never seen that old TV show Leave It to Beaver, but years later when I saw a couple of reruns on late-night TV, I realized that our housekeeper really hadn’t liked Roger. Eddie Haskell was an unctuous, conniving brown-noser. He was the two-faced character who’d politely compliment Mrs. Cleaver on her lovely dress while instigating some evil prank that would inevitably get her son, the Beaver, in trouble.

Car insurance,” said Serge. “Watch any channel on TV for any length of time, and every other commercial is a British lizard, an upwardly mobile caveman, a calcified chick named Flo, the anthropomorphic jerk named Mayhem who tricks you into accidents, the guy in a hard hat who hits cars with sledgehammers, the character who played the president in the show 24 saying, ‘That’s Allstate’s stand,’ ‘Nationwide is on your side,’ ‘Fifteen minutes could save you some shit.’ ” “I like Mayhem,” said Coleman. “He makes me not feel so bad about breaking stuff.” “And yet we’re still not manufacturing anything you can hold in your hands,” said Serge.

Howard Hawks took the credit for goading Brennan into a great performance: [H]e amazed me with the first scene he did. I said, “What the hell is going on here? Are you going to play that goddam television show that you’ve been doing, for me. Do you think I’m gonna make a Real McCoy out of it? This is supposed to be a crabby, evil, nasty old man.” “Oh God,” he said. I said to Wayne, “Come on, Duke, let’s go over and play a game of checkers and let this dumbbell think up what he’s got to do.” So for fifteen minutes we stayed away, and he just sat there. Then he came in and he was really a bastard. It was easy the rest of the time.

The show was shot on an enormous sound stage, the largest one in Hollywood, and the same one used for Gone with the Wind. A complete house for the McCoys was built on the set. In those days, the all-consuming grind of doing a television series meant that actors spent their downtime in little huts called “knockdown greens.” They were like tents, said Kathleen Nolan. “Now you have a trailer outside, but then it was an efficient way of keeping the talent close at hand. They did four shows a week, and then took a week off, so that Brennan could rest.

I've never understood why every character being 'hot' was necessary for enjoying a TV show. It's the same reason I don't get Hooters. Why do we need to enjoy chicken wings and boobies at the same time? Yes, they are a natural and beautiful part of the human experience. And so are bobbies, But at the same time? Going to the bathroom is part of life, but we wouldn't go to a restaurant that had toilets for seats... or would we? Excuse me while I call my business manager.

This book scratches an old itch. Despite being the level of government that is closest to the people and has so much impact on our quality of life, most people don't know too much about how their local governments operate and even less about what it's like to manage a city or county. Occasionally, a city manager character appears in a novel, movie, or TV show but almost always in a mocking or denigrating fashion that belies the professionalism that is more the norm.

to [David] Simon and his partner, Ed Burns, The Wire was explicitly a piece of social activism. Among its targets, large and small, were the War on Drugs, the educational policy No Child Left Behind, and the outsize influence of money in America's political sytem, of statistics in its police departments, and of Pulitzer Prizes at its newspapers. The big fish, though, was nothing less than a capitalist system that Burns and Simon had begun to see as fundamentally doome. (If Simon was a dyed-in-the-wool lefly, Burns practically qualified as Zapatista; by ex-cop standards, he might as well have been Trotsky himself.) In chronicling the modern American city, Simon said, they had one mantra, adapted from, of all sources, sports radio personality Jim Rome: "Have a fucking take. Try not to suck." Neither Burns nor Simon would ever seem entirely comfortable acknowledging the degree that The Wire succeeded on another level: as beautifully constructed, suspenseful, heartfelt, reasonant entertainment. [...] "It's our job to be entertaining. I understand I must make you care about my characters. That's the fundamental engine of drama," Simon said dismissively. "It's the engine. But it's not the purpose". Told that The Wire had trascended the factual bounds that, for all its good intentions, had shackled The Corner, he seemed to deliberately misunderstand the compliment: "I have too much regard for that which is true to ever call it journalism." The questioner, of course, had meant the opposite: that The Wire was too good to call mere journalism. As late as 2012, he would complain in a New York Times interview that fans were still talking about their favorite characters rather than concentrating on the show's political message.

Seven o'clock and you watched it and then you turned it off. The Fifties. It's like that in movies and television programs, but its plot there. The characters get some information from the newscaster and then they turn it off so they can speak. But we were the characters then. We still are, I guess, so it's only a matter of time before we start seeing television shows where the people turn on the news to get some information and then, instead of turning it off so they can speak, they leave it on, and we get swept into some endless video vortex, some film loop, which has us by the eyes and won't let us go.

Your own life starts the moment you're born. Before that, even." "I just, I feel like as long as I live with you, I won't... I'm not... It's like George Jefferson." "From the TV show?" "Right. George Jefferson. As long as he was on 'All in the Family', he was just somebody who made Archie Bunker's story more interesting. He didn't have anything of his own. He didn't have a plot or supporting characters. I don't know if you ever even got to see his house. But after he got his own show, George had his own living room and kitchen... and bedroom, I think. He even had his own elevator. Places for him to exist in, for his story to happen. Like this apartment. This is something that's mine.

Every morning, walking to work, I dodge a river of hipsters in skinny jeans and chunky eyewear riding skateboards—grown men! riding skateboards!—while carrying five-dollar cups of coffee to their jobs at companies with names that sound like characters from a TV show for little kids: Kaggle and Clinkle, Vungle and Gangaroo.

In the Bible, the word hypocrite shows up 33 times. Interestingly, hypocrite was a common Greek term for an actor who worked behind a mask. Stage players in antiquity wore masks to hide their true identity as they played the part of their characters. We live in a society today where people are paid millions of dollars to be hypocrites. A friend of mine, before he passed away, built movie sets for a living. Many movies are filmed on studio lots, but these designed sets are not the reality you might think they are when watching a movie. Actors and actresses play the part of someone they really are not. The better they are at pretending or lying, the more convincing they will be as an actor, and typically, the more money they make. I rarely darken the door of a movie theatre because I don’t want to give those liars my money, and I don’t want to support the totally ungodly world of Hollywood. This is also why I don’t own a television. I don’t want my cable or satellite fees funding that wicked industry. In the time of the Greeks, it was easy to figure out the real identity of the actors. You could walk up to them, take off their masks, and see their faces. Jesus is doing the same here. He is unmasking the Pharisees. He is showing us their real character. He is revealing their true colors. Don’t live a lie. Don’t be a hypocrite. It is not a healthy way to go through life, and you will have regrets when the time of unmasking comes.

The ship had already played a short-lived but memorable part in the early days of the conflict. On February 24, during the initial invasion, the crew of the Moskva famously demanded that a garrison of thirteen border guards on the Ukrainian-owned Snake Island—right at a crucial military and shipping access point to the Black Sea—lay down their arms and surrender. Their response, roughly translated as “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” went viral. Barely six weeks later, the ship was aflame in the same sea it was protecting, hit by a pair of Ukrainian-made Neptune missiles. The photographs that followed were yet another embarrassment to Putin: There was the pride of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, christened after its capital city, burning brightly. In state media, the Russian government claimed the ship had caught fire and sunk in bad weather—an excuse that even some of its own state TV hosts didn’t buy. The death toll remained unknown. The successful attack became the first of many stories about Ukrainian inventiveness and pluck. “People are using the MacGyver metaphor,” observed Ben Hodges, the former United States Army commander for Europe, referring to the popular 1980s TV show in which the lead character constantly improvised to get out of impossible jams. “With the Moskva, they MacGyvered a very effective antiship system that they put on the back of a truck to make it mobile and move it around.” More importantly, the war’s narrative was changing. The Russians had retreated from Kyiv. They had lost their warship. For the first time it looked like Ukraine might survive. There was even talk about Ukraine winning—if you defined winning as forcing Russia to retreat back to its own borders, the borders that existed prior to February 24, 2022.

Drew talks about her school friends as if they're cartoonishly unreal characters in a beloved television show, one where I should know every single member of the cast despite never having seen an episode.

God, you two drive me crazy. It’s like watching a TV show where the two main characters are clearly in love, but the writers draw that shit out just to torture us. Like Mulder and Scully. Or Buffy and Spike.” Her lips twist. “I’m calling you guys ‘Spuffy’ from now on.

Autistic behaviour in men is better accepted, or swept under the rug with a dismissive “ah well, men…” This can also be seen in TV shows, Anna de Hooge argues in her thesis. She watched shows like Sherlock and The Big Bang Theory and concluded that the “autistic” characters get away with exceptionally dickish, aggressive or inappropriate behaviour, such as spying on the girl next door or completely ignoring someone else’s authority.

Fringe (2008–2013) and Counterpart (2017–2018)— In the twenty-first century, two popular TV shows demonstrate the idea of a single parallel world that has somehow split off from this world, but retains many similarities, including a shared history. The source of the divergence is never explained fully, but the existence of a parallel world with alternate versions of the main characters is a key plot point in both. Both shows reveal that some physics phenomenon was responsible for either (1) breaching a way into the other universe or (2) causing a branch off the main universe to create the second one.

Stories can be incredibly powerful and beautiful devices that form and assist our perception and understanding of the world. However, according to twentieth-century American author Kurt Vonnegut, stories rarely tell the truth. After studying stories from an anthropological standpoint, examining the relationships with various cultures, Vonnegut found that stories and myths across many cultures share consistent similar shapes that can typically be broken down into just a few main categories. These shapes can be found graphing the course of a protagonist’s journey through a story along an axis of good and ill fortune. In all stories, someone or something starts somewhere, either in a good place, bad place, or neutral place. Then things happen related to that person which is conveyed as good or bad, bringing the character up and down the axis of fortune as they traverse forward through the story. Then, the story ends and its shape reveals itself. Vonnegut discovered that many popular stories follow common, consistent curves and spikes up and down the good/ill axis and that most end with the protagonist higher on the axis than where they started. However, what’s perhaps most interesting about Vonnegut’s analysis is this argument that these shapes, and consequently most stories, lie. Vonnegut proposed that a more honest, realistic story shape is simply a straight line. In a story of this shape, things still happen and characters still change, but the story maintains ambiguity around whether or not the events that occur are conclusively good or bad. According to Vonnegut, Hamlet is the closest literary representation of real life. “We are so seldom told the truth. In Hamlet-Shakespeare tells us that we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and the bad news is and we respond to that.” One story medium that seems to inadvertently coincide with this idea, is the medium of the television series. The goal of TV series is to keep viewers watching as long as possible. Each episode must be an engaging enough story to keep the viewer watching until the end, but each episode must also be left unresolved enough so the larger season-long and series-long stories continue and the viewer is interested in watching all the following episodes. In order to keep the whole thing going, none of the stories can reach a conclusion, and thus, the main characters can’t find ultimate peace or freedom from the uncertainty between good and ill-fortune. Of course, most shows don’t qualify as the straight-line shape in Vonnegut’s analysis, because most shows attempt to convey conclusively good and bad fortunes within them. However merely by the requirements of the medium TV series are forced to self-impose the same sort of universal truth that Vonnegut suggests. That neither the viewer nor the characters in a series can ever know what anything that’s so-called “good” or “bad” in one episode might cause in the next. And that on a fundamental level, the changes in each episode are futile because they are a part of a never-ending cycle of change through conflict and resolution, for the mere sake of its continuation, with no aim of a final resolution or reveal of what’s ultimately good or bad. Of course, eventually, a show reaches its series end when it stops working or runs its natural course. But the show fights its whole life to stay away from this moment. A good TV series, a series that we don’t want to end, is only a series that we don’t want to end because it can’t seem to resolve itself. In this, the format of Tv series also shows us that there is meaning, engagement, and entertainment within the endless cycle of change, regardless of its potential universal futility. And that perhaps change in life can exist not for the sake of some conclusion or ultimate state of peace, but a continuation of itself for the sake of itself. And perhaps the ability to be in this cycle of continued change for the sake of change is the actual good fortune.

In the mid-twentieth century, the image of the masculinized Black woman found an identity in the form of “Sapphire,” a character in the Amos ’n’ Andy radio and television shows. By then, the stereotype had evolved into a rancorous nag—the stock angry Black woman.31 Sapphire doesn’t know a woman’s (submissive) place and is therefore emasculating and repellent to men.

Most screams heard on television and in the movies are created by doubles and voice actors. One stock scream is so well used it has a name, the Wilhelm. Originally created for the 1951 film Distant Drums, the scream was used in 1977 by Star Wars film sound designer Ben Burtt, who named it after character Private Wilhelm from the 1953 movie The Charge at Feather River. To date, the Wilhelm has been heard in more than four hundred films and shows, including the book-related movies The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Planet of the Apes (2001), The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 2 (2012), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), and Jumanji: The Next Level (2019).

Not surprisingly, the exchange of wives from couples who are often polar opposites has led to the show’s fair share of scandals. An Oklahoma man sued the show for misrepresentation and distress when his “wife” turned out to be a gay man. A man on the UK version of the show committed suicide after being humiliated when his sexual practices were made public. A participant who lost his job and received death threats after being labeled “the worst husband in America” accused the producers of manufacturing a character for him to play. He claimed that, under duress of constant cameras and the threat that he was not being entertaining enough, they persuaded him to amp up his hostility toward his swapped wife. Another participant, who was a teenager when her show aired, sued the show, claiming that she was represented in such a false light on air that she suffered bullying at school that ruined

Not surprisingly, the exchange of wives from couples who are often polar opposites has led to the show’s fair share of scandals. An Oklahoma man sued the show for misrepresentation and distress when his “wife” turned out to be a gay man. A man on the UK version of the show committed suicide after being humiliated when his sexual practices were made public. A participant who lost his job and received death threats after being labeled “the worst husband in America” accused the producers of manufacturing a character for him to play. He claimed that, under duress of constant cameras and the threat that he was not being entertaining enough, they persuaded him to amp up his hostility toward his swapped wife. Another participant, who was a teenager when her show aired, sued the show, claiming that she was represented in such a false light on air that she suffered bullying at school that ruined her confidence. The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed sum.

At work, Anders became quieter than he used to be, less sure of how any action of his would be perceived, and it was like he had been recast as a supporting character on the set of the television show where his life was being enacted, but even so he had not yet lost all hope that a return to his old role was possible, to his old centrality, or if not centrality, then at least to a role better than this peripheral one.

I felt like I was in the TV show and I was the main character, but I'm the only one who doesn't know about it. Everyone's playing their role, but not me. I'm just simply living my life.

The novel is presented in a screenplay-like format, reflecting the characters' experiences as actors in a TV show called "Black and White." It offers a thought-provoking exploration of race, assimilation if you want to related to interior or theme go the

Oh, same. No exes or school bullies. No cringey television show characters. No shitty coworkers or mean customer service reps.” “That last one was very specific,” Bo says, pouring two cups of water from the bottle left on the table. “Brittany from Staples knows what she did.

As Jake the Dog from Adventure Time says: "Sucking at something is the first step to becoming sorta good at something.