Comic-Con: The Visionaries

So, Comic-Con is one of the crazier places I’ve ever been. We tried to prepare ourselves for the impending bizarre hilarity, but nothing really prepares you for walking fifteen minutes just to get to the end of a line, and passing five women dressed as Slave Leia in the process. Unfortunately, we only had tickets for the first two days, which means I missed several of the awesome TV panels on Saturday and Sunday, but did manage to make it to a few really great panels, including the Girls Gone Geek panel I mentioned in my post last week, and the nerd-stravaganza that was the Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams panel on Thursday.

The Whedon/Abrams panel was probably the panel highlight of my Comic-Con experience, and it particularly stood out after the long string of much less exciting movie release panels that we had to sit through in order to guarantee we’d have seats. This is of course a severe reduction, but my impression of the big name movie panels we saw (including RED, Battle: Los Angeles, Salt, MegaMind, and Tron Legacy) is that most actors are pretty boring (except for Will Ferrell and Tina Fey for MegaMind), most of the screened questions from the audience are repetitive (“What kind of fight training did you have to do?” “How are you dealing with this as an adaptation?”), and although the idea of using Comic-Con as a platform for previewing new things is a good one, everyone has a higher level discussion when we see enough from a preview to actually talk about it. (“So, we really didn’t see any glimpse of what the evil aliens will look like in this film, but… could you talk about them?”)

Seriously, look at Mary-Louise Parker's face as she listens to Bruce Willis.

Which is why it was such a relief, and so completely awesome, to have Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams come out and be able to talk about well-known work, about narrative and storytelling, about inspiration and the production process, and about their own experiences as fans. It was fascinating to hear both of them talk about the differences between making movies and making television, and to hear Joss Whedon say that although movies are hugely satisfying because they have firm and final endings, he feels that long form storytelling is more rewarding and much harder. The moderator, Doc Jensen, also asked about serialization on television, and both men admitted to understanding the financial motivation for non-serialized shows but having absolutely no creative interest in them. “Stories imply time,” said JJ Abrams. “Stories imply inevitability and some kind of progress.” “I don’t think the networks will ever, ever ask for that,” added Whedon. “The networks will never admit that people want that, because they do see the cash cow of ‘The Mentalist! Let’s all do The Mentalist!’ And when Lost first hit and was blowing up huge…they were still like, ‘We don’t want that. That successful, Emmy-winning thing? No, we don’t want that.’…And it’s very weird, because ultimately, the serial is always going to be the thing people remember. What do they remember about Cheers? It’s Sam and Diane, not a great joke from Cheers.”

What came out of their discussion of serialization, including Joss Whedon’s trials with the cancellations of Firefly and Dollhouse and the unrepeatable structure of a show like Lost, is a huge disconnect between the stories people like Abrams and Whedon want to tell on TV and the capacity for network television to produce those shows. Recently, Abrams has been more successful than Whedon in creating television for the networks, but as he mentions in his descriptions of both Fringe and his new show UnderCovers, it’s because he’s been careful to balance the standalone aspect of an episode and his own dominant interest in longer story arcs. One of the most interesting moments for me was when Joss Whedon admitted that in making Dollhouse, he just had not realized how much the networks have changed, and had not come to terms with the idea that he has a cable rather than network mentality. “I definitely was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.”

Whedon did talk about preparing to do The Avengers, and insisted on describing to JJ how fully he loved Star Trek. “I have had actual moments of sheer fucking panic because I love Star Trek so much.” In turn, Abrams talked about the process of rewriting, and when Whedon mentioned that he doesn’t really write second drafts, Abrams shot back “You bastard!” But however much fun they had joking around and teasing each other, it was hard not to come away with a sense of how tricky the television landscape is right now, and how swiftly the networks are changing. I can only hope that when Joss Whedon is done with that silly Avengers movie project, there will be a new Whedon show on cable.

I can also hope that next year, after we figuring out some of the basic Comic-Con ins and outs this time around, we get to attend more panels like this one.