I woke up at six-ish. there was a nice mounted cactus above my head, and I looked at it all lazy-like while willing myself into the escape velocity I needed to get out of bed. As my coffee brewed I checked out my room’s fragrance chamber, which is the kind of luxury thing that when you get it “for free,” you feel all nobly appreciative of the finer things and also rich enough to buy them. “Maybe I’ll get a chamber of my own when I return home. You can’t put a price on a comfortable spirit.”
Then it was off to the breakfast lodge, which was empty except for a few members of the EW crew – Jeff Jensen of American Horror Story and Fringe, Tim Stack of Emily Owens, M.D., and Peter Hennigan of Revenge. I was about to sit at their table, but as I neared I remembered that Peter struggles with morning-anger, so I went off to the corner.
I wasn’t teaching my workshop until the next day, so I was free to attend any other workshops, but I only did one. I don’t actually like recaps. Not that anybody does, or could. The format is too strange. If you had to guess who they were for by the writing alone, you’d come up with “huge fan of the show who has seen every other episode and knows all about them, but has not seen the episode which aired last night, and prefers to read about what happened and what it means instead of watching it.”
So they’re really just there to draw people to the website/website’s comment section, which, fine, but they’re insanely long for writing not meant to be read. The average length is “Times investigative reporting piece.” So going by word count, for every season of every show somewhere between four and ten “Series of articles about that bad halfway house in New Jersey” are written.
The workshop I signed up for was called “Teller of Tales: Graham Martin.” Graham is the guy in charge of recaps on the Onion’s A.V. Club. He introduced himself as the “reviewsrunner of The Onion,” and then went into a long diatribe against the Onion writers who didn’t move to Chicago. He kept calling them “traitors” and saying things like “When ThingX fails, these dunces, they put all their own money in it, so they’re gonna be out on the streets or worse. And I look forward to that.” Weirdly, he is still in New York. None of the A.V. Club had to move to Chicago.
Of course, everyone had their notebooks with them. So some people were scrambling to take notes. One guy actually asked him to repeat something.
98% of what he said was about ThingX. In fact, he only explicitly mentioned recaps in the last minute. He was saying something about how “it had been a real option on the table to put plague inside the ThingX office,” and then he goes “I only say that to illustrate this point: in the near future, recaps will overtake television shows as the primary source of revenue for the TV industry.”
Then he said that he no longer writes the content of his recaps, just “the tale.” So that was where the title came from.
Then it was over. I got lunch and drove out to see Cactuswood. It was nice but the tour didn’t make me yearn to live inside it or anything. I got back to my room pretty late, and I did some reading and Internetting and went to sleep.