The 13 competition categories: Series
We bring you the 13 categories featured in this year’s competition along with a precise definition, example videos and an interview with a prominent expert in the field.
7. Category: Series
Definition:
Scripted programmes such as soap operas and drama series with unlimited episodes, and mini-series. Telenovelas are excluded from this category.
Between 1961 and 1992 the Rose d’Or Festival awarded three different prizes: the Golden Rose, the Silver Rose and the Bronze Rose. From 2004 – eleven years after the first categories were introduced – Series became an integral part of the Rose d’Or Competition with a separate competition category. The first Golden Rose-winning Series were Marathon’s Saint Tropez – Sous le Soleil (Golden Rose 2004) and Grundy UFA's Verbotene Liebe (Golden Rose 2005).
The Series Category Interview with Gregory Bonsignore
Gregory Bonsignore was trained in Greek Drama in Athens, TV writing at the BBC, and is an honours graduate from New York University ('05), where he wrote and directed a number of film shorts and short plays. He's worked on many Broadway/Off-Bway shows and in Creative Development for Disney on Broadway - including Disney and Cameron Mackintosh's Mary Poppins, The Lion King, Beauty And The Beast, and rewrites for Tarzan. In London, he was the head writer for BBC's Grierson Awards hosted by Esther Rantzen, and in L.A. worked on BBC's HU$TLE, before joining USA's In Plain Sight, writing for CBS's Three Rivers, and writing for the pilot of ABC's logic-based quiz show, Million Dollar Mind Game. Most recently, he's just completed a screenplay - Gay Chicken - with Jeff Marx (Avenue Q) and Jeff Witzke and is now writing on the Fox series Lie To Me. He has two pilots currently in development and is a member of the Dramatist's Guild and Writer's Guild.
1. Define the Series format.
These kind of broad questions are really dangerous for me, as I love nothing more than waxing hyper-academically and meretriciously on the virtues and vices of television – perhaps most comparable to the Top Chef episodes when they have to make gourmet meals out of vending machine fare. I would venture that series television as an art form is compelling to an audience, for the very same reason I felt drawn to it as a writer – episodic storytelling. With no post-pilot character set-up, it’s quickly established what situations they’re in this week and you jump right back in where you left off. A more sophisticated long-range take on episodic storytelling is often found in dramatic television. Further, when the well-established path of a character is deviated from, within a believable framework – it’s surprisingly captivating in an “Oh, I thought I knew him” sense... like catching a married friend of yours suddenly on a date with a stranger. It’s change, it’s growth.
2. Is there a Series you would have loved to have created yourself?
Night Court. Actually, this is tricky, and a very different question than your “favorite show”, as it’s not the sum of the parts, but the root idea… the construction… the “I should have thought of that”. I think Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow’s The Comeback not only came the closest American television ever has to that gut-wrenching BBC Office tragic-comedy style… but also was able to stylistically, in juxtaposition, show how vapid three-camera network TV can be, better than almost anything I’ve seen.
3. Do you see changes to the business model?
Audiences seem to be moving away from surrendering to a programmed night, and heading more towards pay-by-programme. My boyfriend and I have often discussed skipping buying cable all-together, just running Hulu Plus and Netflix off a PS3, and buttressing that with an Apple TV. That for the five or six shows we watch, it would be cheaper to buy season passes from iTunes than to pay the $100 cable bill 12 months a year. And also wondered – why isn’t there a machine that does it all? Why can you still not pay just for the channels you actually want to watch?I will get a second job if it means I can just turn the TV on and see exactly what I want to see, when I want to see it.
4. Which programme would you currently not miss for the world?
I really only watch a handful of shows that are on; Louie – the most genuine and artful piece of storytelling on TV today, Modern Family: who are part of a lineage of sitcom craftsmen dating back to the Mary Tyler Moore Show and just know how to do it -- like the four Italian guys in overalls who still know how to cut stones for cathedrals, and now, Community, which is so specific and brave in its details. Also Outsourced, which my boyfriend and other friends are on, and I get to watch like a PTA show every week with all the husbands and wives. The rest I do on DVD. Currently in season three of The Wire, season one of Breaking Bad, just On-demanded all of Nurse Jackie season two, and US of Tara season two. Oh, and Mary Tyler Moore Show reruns most nights as I go to bed.
5. In which direction is Series television going?
The way we watch is changing dramatically. What happened last night on The Cosby Show, used to be a common point of reference. Whether it was a hilarious moment, or a moral question… we all had a shared canon, and television operated as such in the lives of Americans for about fifty years. In fact, I can remember caffeine pills coming up in health class, and my entire student body being able to recite a speech from Saved by the Bell – verbatim. This has ceased to be. It’s been replaced with conversations like, “Do you watch Modern Family? Yes? Did you see the one last night? No? Well, this sign that Julie Bowen put up-- Oh, you’re still three behind… Okay. … Well, it was great. … You watch Community?” We’re not only watching different shows, but at different paces. I don’t know if anybody saw The Wire, while it was on TV… but it’s expected, in certain circles to be part of the canon. A new way of giving audience to television storytelling. That your Breaking Bad – Season Two, Disc Three – is coming from Netflix this week, and your friend Rachel keeps forgetting to bring in her Little Britain DVD, but you have to watch it. And you do… And then, we talk about it. And I plan to, until I’m that old washed-up man at those WGA screenings, screaming “I am Big. It’s the TV that got small!”
Series example video: Lie To Me
Watch Lie to Me season 2 on RSI LA1 from April 27th every Wednesday at 9.50 pm.
Picture and video: © 2009-2010 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.
