16jan24

Started the day by smashing the ice on the chickens’ water trough with the end of a bamboo cane.

Glanced over the Emmy winners – tables would have been turned over if Kieran Culkin hadn’t won, I think, but I was happiest to see that Alan Ruck got nominated. He did a thing in the final episode, where he cops to have basically lifted dead dad’s stuff, that is astonishing in terms of craft. The guilty laugh when he says “myself.” Willem Dafoe talks about getting “the stink of acting” off a piece of work, and that laugh is so completely authentic you forget it’s observed and presented behaviour. In any other year he would have gotten a medal for that minute’s work.

I read last night that David Chase, in a paywalled Times interview, seems to view SUCCESSION as the final bell on “the golden age of TV,” which he now conceives of as a “25-year blip”.

“We are more into multitasking,” Chase said. “We seem to be confused and audiences can’t keep their minds on things, so we can’t make anything that makes too much sense, takes our attention and requires an audience to focus.”

That feels like an old argument to me, and on the other side of that, it’s perhaps also worth arguing that the pace of tv storytelling, in the round, has become glacial.

I’m actually looking forward to TRUE DETECTIVE: NIGHT COUNTRY.

But, for today, I am required to focus: assembling a notebook full of notes and a Word document with structural sketches into the full series outline I should have finished last week.