Smallville (Page 1 of 3)

SMALLVILLE, on the whole, wasn't anymore successful than FRINGE or COMMUNITY or CHUCK in terms of a viewing audience.  Its premiere received 8.4 million viewers. The final seasons had about 3 - 4 million viewers. Most major networks would cancel shows with such a low viewership. SMALLVILLE had fewer viewers than LOIS & CLARK when L&C got cancelled for low ratings.

It's actually quite a damning indictment of SMALLVILLE that it was about a universally known American icon and yet, more people followed Chuck Bartowski than Clark Kent. It's like a JAMES BOND movie having the same audience as a student film short.

SMALLVILLE was unquestionably a financial success -- but it has to be said that the demands of the WB and then the CW network were fairly low compared to other TV shows.

Why did SMALLVILLE make it 10 seasons? The budget was low. They filmed inexpensively in Vancouver. They rarely flew writers out to Vancouver and had them script the series at a distance, reducing costs. The lead actors were hired in their late teens and early twenties and accepted low rates with gradual increases that would eventually make them all rich but without ballooning the budget. As the ratings dropped over the years, the studio and network gradually reduced the budget. Some of the lead actors would be hired for only 13 episodes out of the 22 per year to cut costs. Location filming was replaced with soundstages. Warner Bros. was able to sell the series to their own affiliates at lower prices which increased the revenue from advertising.

The ratings were about what you'd expect of a teen soap opera written by two middle-aged men with no sense of youth culture. The ratings were low, the series was watched either by superhero fans grudgingly tolerating poor scripts because of an investment in the Superman mythology or viewers who just liked watching pretty white people angst about romantic problems. It was not a very large audience at all, but due to the network and the actors, SMALLVILLE's revenue was higher than its production costs.

I've nothing to prove this, but my suspicion about Alfred Gough and Miles Millar quitting after Season 7 is because in order to keep SMALLVILLE's production costs low enough to see a profit from sales and advertising, they would have needed to take pay cuts. Season 8 is the start of the most dramatic budget downsizing seen in SMALLVILLE up to that point with location filming reduced to the bare minimum and numerous actors absent for 9 out of 22 episodes.

I'll certainly give SMALLVILLE its due because it was an early adopter of the modern TV superhero format, but it has to be said that it was not as big a success as the hype would claim. SMALLVILLE was successful in the way those cheap slasher movies are successful. They're not exactly masterworks of cinema or visual storytelling, but they keep getting made because they cost so little to make that the small audience who will sit through them is enough to produce a profit.

Michael Rosenbaum is fascinating, a bundle of self-aware neuroticism and bombastic lunacy with a strangely insincere demeanor that is in stark contradiction to a deep sensitivity and compassion. His goofy hipster routine is curiously at odds with Tom Welling being a low-key construction worker who staggered backwards into modeling and acting who had a year or so of partying before deciding to settle down and get married with a steady job in construction -- well, television.

Basically, Tom Welling became, at age 22, what Jerry O'Connell became at age 32. Can you imagine Jerry deciding to get married and settle down during the first season of SLIDERS? Jerry was like Jeff Winger without the smarts.

It's strange to compare Tom and Jerry. They were both athletic, attractive actors playing socially awkward young men. Their characters had exactly the same dress sense in flannel and jeans and moppy hair. The only difference between their clothes is that Clark wore workboots while Quinn wore sneakers.

I once remarked that Tom Welling would have made a god-awful Quinn Mallory because Jerry was, despite his flaws, a very well-trained actor whereas Tom was a cluelessly one-note actor with zero imagination and no ability to play a scientific mind. Now I'm not so sure.

The thing is that Jerry O'Connell was an extroverted being of hypercaffeinated sexual appetites while Tom Welling was and remains introverted and withdrawn and while he partied, he didn't much like it. Jerry was only playing an awkward geek. Tom actually is one, albeit in the body of a football player. Jerry O'Connell saw SLIDERS as his ticket to an open bar at all the good nightclubs. Tom saw SMALLVILLE as his job. But unlike SLIDERS, SMALLVILLE was so well-marketed that Tom knew -- if he did a good job on SMALLVILLE, he'd never have to work again for the rest of his life.

And so, to live up to his responsibilities, Tom blocked out anything that wasn't related to his work on SMALLVILLE (including his marriage). From age 22 to 32, he simply had no personal life. He barely even saw his wife and his marriage failed. Michael notes how Tom started out in Season 5 having put on weight because he had spent the summer eating heavily and realized he could never do that again. Even when he wasn't working, he had to think about work.

Tom Welling committed to SMALLVILLE and engaged with it fully as a creator, producer and director; Jerry may have had those same credits, but he never understood his character in the way Tom got Clark Kent. Could Tom have played a scientist? Jerry O'Connell thinks it absurd that he himself played a scientist. Tom would have given it his best.

It was interesting to hear how Tom regarded modeling and acting: it was simply a job much like construction was simply a job. But he assessed the requirements and impact and handed his whole life over to his character because he knew people were counting on him.

I thought it was hilarious how Michael Rosenbaum described his resentment and irritation with Tom; it aggravated Michael deeply that Michael had spent years honing his craft and paying his dues with one lousy independent film after another. Meanwhile, Tom did some male modeling and became the lead of a hit TV show based on nothing but his chiseled facial features.

Michael then explains that this resentment vanished when Tom was downright apologetic about his lucky breaks and dismissive of his own talents and eager to learn from Michael's acting ability.

Michael describes an absurd event during the filming of the SMALLVILLE pilot:  Michael approached Kristin Kreuk and apologized in advance were he to sprout an erection while working with her. Kreuk protested, "But we don't even have any scenes together." Michael responded, "Yeah. I know!"

It's the sort of joke where -- if you're not the most socially skillful individual, it will come off very badly. You have to have off-the-charts charisma to make remarks like that and come off as amusing and endearing as opposed to creepy and harassing and Michael has it.

In the movie about the making of SLIDERS REBORN, which would feature me and Transmodiar sitting in a room talking, Tom Welling would play me and Michael Rosenbaum would play Transmodiar and we sound just like them except Tom swears a lot and I don't.

ME: "I'm stuck on this part of the 'Net Worth' Redux script. I've finished everything else, I've fixed all the other plot problems in the story, except -- I can't figure out how Quinn is supposed to survive getting shot at with a bazooka that brings the hotel crashing down around him. I'm really starting to lose hope that I can come up with a solution."

MATT: "Why do they have to fire a bazooka? Is that set in stone? Couldn't the Rovers or whatever the fuck they are called have pirated a piece of tech from the Onliners? Some pulse technology that knocks everyone out without damaging the building?"

ME: "But the bazooka!"

MATT: "I mean, you're trying to reverse engineer a solution to a problem that is fundamentally stupid. So just change the problem to something less stupid. That whole scene is tard-level dumb, you should come up with a completely different scenario. Barring that, change the nature of the weapon and be done with it."

ME: "I didn't want to see it that way, I guess. I wanted to see it as an impossible situation, which Quinn tends to thrive on."

MATT: "Quinn doesn't thrive on that stuff."

ME: "What!?"

MATT: "He is adaptable at BEST. Quinn is not MacGyver. He is not going to engineer a solution out of getting hit by a bazooka."

ME: "MacGyver?"

MATT: "Have you never seen MACGYVER?"

ME: "Is that a TV show?"

MATT: "Are... are you fucking with me right now?"

ME: "I've heard it used as a verb."

MATT: "I am gobsmacked."

ME: "I'm reading the Wikipedia entry on MACGYVER now. But I always thought the best way to handle Quinn was to put the character in insane, impossible, no-win situations. And then come up with some absurd, implausible, nonsensical contrivance that allows him to succeed while using his genius to dismiss any plot problems that may result."

MATT: "See, and that's a problem that was perpetuated by the writers. Each member of the team had a particular skillset. Quinn was the enthusiastic genius. Arturo was the realist, the skeptic. Rembrandt was the street-smart voice. Literally, the voice. And Wade was the devil-may-care element of playful chaos. As time went on more and more things were subsumed by Quinn because he was easiest to write for -- he was the lead, after all. So he became the hacker, the sweet-talker, the fucking lockpick master. But if you are looking at a basics approach, Quinn should be totally out of his element when staring down a bazooka."

ME: "This Wikpedia page on MACGYVER is really inspiring. This reads like the greatest TV show ever made, Matt. 'The clever solutions MacGyver implemented to seemingly unsolvable problems – often in life-or-death situations requiring him to improvise complex devices in a matter of minutes – were a major attraction of the show, which was praised for generating interest in the applied sciences, particularly engineering, and for providing entertaining storylines.' This is totally what Quinn should be!"   

MATT: "I'm telling you -- Rembrandt needs to take center stage for a moment. Arturo needs to be a disbelieving boob."

ME: "Matt, MacGyver is the perfect model for Quinn Mallory! Quinn is going to beat that bazooka even if it kills me. MacGyver will lead the way!"

MATT: "God help us."

There are no two people more opposed to each other than Informant and ireactions. So, when we both agree that Allison Mack has been swept up in a creepy cult run by a con man, we're probably onto something.

The important thing to hang onto in moments like these, I think, is to remember that Allison Mack merely played Chloe. We should separate the art from the artist. I confess, there is a bitter irony in this for me in that Chloe Sullivan taught me how to be suspicious, to demand that assertions be accompanied with evidence and specifics.

On five occasions, people have tried to rope me into multi-level marketing scams. On three occasions, cultists have attempted to recruit me. While I was innocent, guileless and lonely, Chloe Sullivan's influence helped me see right through these people every single time.

It's unfortunate that Chloe couldn't give Allison the same thing.

Mack and Chloe are different. Chloe Sullivan, despite some truly terrible writing , was a practical-minded character (although to say that, I have to ignore her SEVEN YEARS of crushing on Clark and those healing powers I'd prefer to forget). Chloe was fixated on building her career in journalism and then shifted into the Watchtower initiative. Mack subsumed her life into Chloe's existence.

When SMALLVILLE ended, Mack felt at a loss without writers to script snarky one-liners for her and felt like Chloe was a fully defined person while Mack was a blank template. And, because SMALLVILLE had made her rich, Mack went a different route from Chloe, focusing on intangibles like self-actualization, identity, emotional authenticity -- and this search for ephemeral (and therefore extremely vague) meaning led her into what looks to me and Informant to be a cult.

I would define a cult in this sense as an organization that promises insubstantial, non-material validation in exchange for vast sums of money and the notoriety of their members. Mack, who was desperate for validation, seems to have fallen head-first into this scam.

Cults like these tend to work best with people who are insecure but don't worry about where their next meal is coming from. They target rich but troubled people with emotional needs that cult leaders can salve in the way you saw in that video. Mack expresses her need and this Keith Raniere fellow parrots back her question in paraphrased terms but with no actual specificity.

There's a lot of gossip around Raniere, some of which has been substantiated and some of which hasn't. We can be sure that he ran multilevel marketing schemes and executive coaching workshops that charged people $25,000 a day.

You say that Mack isn't engaging with him, but she seems completely swept up professionally and personally. Mack blogged about how Raniere is her mentor, how he encouraged her to take a step back from acting and figure out who she'd be if she weren't being Chloe, and how she was getting involved in his (high priced) workshops and programs which have been described by cult investigators as flattering people's egos while brainwashing them into Raniere's control.

She now runs some sort of vaguely defined acting school with him that charges $10,000 a year to young performers.

The part where unsubstantiated rumours come in: former followers have claimed that the end goal was to acquire a large pool of young girls -- including Hollywood actresses -- to engage in sexual relationships with Raniere.

The story going around (which may or may not be true) is that Allison Mack is hopelessly in love with him and is now recruiting young actresses into Raniere's harem -- of which Kristin Kreuk was briefly a member but left after breaking up with a cultist boyfriend and after a threeway with Mack and Raniere -- and that Mack's been brainwashed into believing that all this scamming and seduction is some process of self-realization.

I cannot emphasize enough, however, how everything in the above two paragraphs is unproven hearsay. I would be sorry to think any of it true. It is entirely possible that Raniere's former business partners (victims?) have sought to smear him and used Allison Mack's public standing to attack him (with exaggerated claims?). There isn't anything resembling a verifiable source in these claims.

But Informant and I both agree (!!!!!!!!!) that Raniere is a con-artist.

And I just think it indicates that Chloe and Allison aren't the same person; Chloe's bullshit meter is a highly tuned radar for nonsense whereas Allison is deeply susceptible. Cult leaders are bottomless wells of charisma who target people's innate longings and weaknesses; the only reason I'm not a victim myself is because, um, I already had an all-consuming obsession that required absurd amounts of time and investment (SLIDERS, it was SLIDERS).

That said, we are assuming innocence on Mack's part and thinking of her as a victim -- because we love Chloe Sullivan and we don't want to think that this woman who represented everything we'd like to be and like to date could be a willing accomplice to a con-artist and predator.

**

I confess to a certain level of, shall we say, professional admiration for Raniere. I run a book club and one challenge is to keep the conversation going. One technique is to paraphrase what somebody else said in the form of a question to get participants to question, explore and debate what's been said and them transition into something new, while making everyone feel like what they've said was heard and is being considered. It's a terrific conversational approach for a book club.

When Raniere talks with Mack about authenticity -- I've actually used that topic in some of my friendships with actresses. Acting is the art of being natural in highly unnatural circumstances in counterfeit realities. I consider my actress friends to be experts in the art of naturalism and the subjective nature of reality and it's a subject most performers could talk about forever and it's a great resource for conversations in a book club.

And I can (grimly) appreciate the social skills to engineer a position of trust with Allison Mack. I imagine Raniere presented himself as someone who was beyond the rat race, pursuing higher goals of personal definition and Mack latched onto that, thinking this already wealthy man of high ideals couldn't be after her money or her body. I'm kind of like that with women too. I try to communicate that I'm interested in their opinions and unique perspectives formed by their specific life experiences and professions and skillsets -- largely in terms of what it can bring to discussions in my book club.

I am somewhat interested in how my book club could benefit from brainwashing, domination over submissives, psychedelics to induce suggestibility and inducing wealthy members to hand over all their possessions and funds -- or I would be except that seems like a lot of time, effort and energy and I don't need such complications for my book club.

I guess the upshot of all this is that we can respect people's skills and talents (Allison's acting, Raniere's leadership) while being appalled by how they choose to use them... ?

I cannot stress enough in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit that Informant's views do not represent the views of Sliders.tv and our current moment of agreement is clearly an abberation.

I don't think Allison Mack started evil. I think she just learned really fast.

A lot of the time, people unconsciously see themselves as pawns and well behind the line of being perpetrators.

They tend not to realize it never takes much to cross that line.

This may be my asexuality, but --

I think it is really pathetic that a man goes to such insane lengths to procure, dominate and control women for sex. Every part of this cult is designed simply so that Keith Raniere can have sex with skinny women and maintain an inflow. What sort of ridiculous affectation is that for an adult especially as a full-time focus, a complete and all-consuming fixation for an entire life?