Over four days last weekend, a small but devoted number of festival attendees spent their time discussing the role that television plays in our lives. Now in its fifth year (or season, as they call it), the ATX Television Festival hosted stars and show runners alike who took part in a number of panel discussions, screenings, and ceremonies — all to indulge and celebrate the medium of television. Having never attended (or even heard of) the ATX Television Festival before, I didn’t know what to expect. Despite a very peculiar start, by the fourth day the festival would end up completely winning me over
Day 1
What better way to celebrate the modern, evolving culture of television with a good old-fashioned binge-watch? An unusual activity as far as festivals are concerned, but binge-watching was one of only two choices that night, the other being the premiere of the USA Network’s upcoming Queen of the South (more on that in a bit).
So, the first night foraging into the festival, I went to ATX Presents: The Path. I’d yet to get around to watching The Path, one of Hulu’s prestige original series starring Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul. With Hulu gearing up their original and exclusive content to keep competitive against rival streaming services like Netflix and Amazon, I understood their want to feature it at a TV festival. I arrived early, and it was sparsely attended, which isn’t unusual when a festival kicks off with a sort-of soft opening.
Now, as far as expectations were concerned, I thought there’d be some sort of MC, or at least a pre-recorded introduction to announce the kickoff of the festival, or at least the four (or five) episode binge-watch. Some kind of sentiment welcoming those of us in attendance. The closest thing we got was a conversation I overheard between two staff members on whether they should start the first episode at 6:30 as planned, or wait until more people showed up (there were about 25 people there).
Then, at 6:45, (they decided to wait a few minutes) they start the first episode of The Path. “You guys are just… watching The Path?” my editor writes me when I tell him I update him on what’s happening. “Yup,” I write back, unable to really engage in the show or imagine how I’m going to write a daily recap watching something that’d been on Hulu for weeks, just with 24 other people.
When the first episode ended, however, it led to one hilarious and awkward moments I’ve ever been a part of. Typically, in a festival situation, there are members of a film’s creative team in attendance — be they cast, crew, screenwriters, producers, what have you. So, when the credits start to roll, it’s customary for the audience to clap out of courtesy.
Here, suddenly, was perfect silence, with some kind of impulse to clap, yet no one actually clapping. Not at first, anyway. Then, after about 10 or 11 excruciatingly awkward seconds, some very pensive applause emerged from the back, and spread partially across the crowd. It died down rather quickly, (along with the crowd) just in time for the second episode to start.
It was also around this same time they started putting up cubicle walls near the door, which I took to be part of some insidious plan to trap us all in the building and recruit us into some kind of cult via subliminal messaging. I’ll never find out the answer. I left partway through the second episode to try and take part in the TV trivia match happening a few blocks away.
As I walked inside and saw the line snaking its way through the lobby, I remembered that trivia is immensely popular. I figured there was little to no chance of me getting in, but I waited it out in line for a spell. It was there I heard a three-person conversation about The Queen of the South. Their consensus: it was the USA Network rebranding itself since the success of Mr. Robot. Take that for what you will.
So, once word became official that capacity for trivia was maxed out, that brought an end to day one.
Day 2
Starting off day two, House of Cards showrunner Beau Willimon, who had recently been given a position on the Advisory Board for the festival, moderated a conversation with Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley. The discussion revolved largely on Hawley’s latest book, Before The Fall, as well as the creative balance one needs to obtain to write fiction while writing and producing a TV show — or as Hawley calls it, a 10-hour movie.
Hawley won over the crowd with his casual demeanor and razor-sharp sensibility. He talked about the diversification of creativity, alternating between fiction novels and fictional television because “if you just do that one thing, that thing owns you.” He’d also speak on two themes that would come up throughout the weekend.
The first was how to maintain being a creative person while you’re beholden to the interests of the networks, and by extension, their sponsors. The second was the complexity of characters throughout the modern TV landscape. It used to be a simple tale of black hats vs. white hats, but these days, as Hawley explains, the line between the two grows hazier, and “the quality of the person is measured by how they use their power.”
The most memorable moment, however, came from the audience Q&A, which took a whopping four rounds before someone finally asked what the deal was with the UFO that factored in so heavily to Fargo’s second season. It was rightly met with a round of applause from the crowd.
“How can I get what I want and make them think they’re getting what they want?”
– Noah Hawley
He explained the pitch behind Fargo’s first season: an adaptation of a movie without its characters or its story. After examining what he was left with, besides the midwestern setting, he had the show’s opening disclaimer that it was a true story. The UFO, which was based on an actual account in Minnesota in the 1970s, he explained as that season’s Mike Naginita story, Marge Gunderson’s old high school acquaintance that tracks her down and tells a fictionalized account of his life.
That moment, which seems completely out of place in an already unconventional crime caper, was the “true story” part of that opening disclaimer. “You have to let the story tell you what it wants to be,” he said. Willimon then likened it to Chekov’s untidiness, a “visual cue that forces you to lean forward.”
The big event that night (and, arguably, the whole weekend) was the 10th anniversary of Friday Night Lights, and the last tailgate party that would be held on the old Del Valle field, where much of the show was filmed. It brought some life and vitality to that field, tucked away across the street from the Austin Airport, overgrown with weeds are a few backroads to the old Del Valle school system. Only a handful of buildings remain, including the locker room, which was adorned with prop signs from the show, and people waiting in line to have their picture taken with them.
At this point it would be worth noting that I never seen more than about 13 seconds of Friday Night Lights total in my life. Not that I specifically avoided it, and even though I moved to Austin within a few weeks of the show premiering, it was just never on my radar. Not that reveling in the fandom of others isn’t an endearing site to behold. High school football has always been important in Texas, and a TV show about high school football that was filmed in and around Austin was certainly held in high regard.
The event itself, which was open to both festival attendees and the general public, fell on a punishingly hot day with almost no shade available, and the only water seemed to be at the end of very long lines outside the half-dozen food trucks parked on one end of the gridiron. A few local bands played, including Crucifictorious, who’ve since abandoned their sound they were known for within the show into a more clumsy, stargazing kind of vibe (assuming that means not quite being in tune).
I left before the cast Q&A. I’d drank all three bottles of water I’d purchased and rather than standing in line for more, I retreated back into my air conditioning.
The third day began with two of the architects of modern television, Tom Fontana, who created HBO’s Oz, and David Simon, best known for HBO’s The Wire, as well as The Corner, Treme, and most recently Show Me A Hero. The conversation hovered largely around their early days, back when a meeting between three people could get a show greenlit, as well as their collaborative years, when they both worked on the TV adaptation of Simon’s book Homicide: Life on the Street. Once again, Beau Willimon served as the moderator, and kept the conversation focused entirely on the works of Simon and Fontana.
Fontana was already working in television, and Simon, best known as a crime reporter, had just written Homicide. Fontana saw an opportunity to do a police procedural, but destroying the mold. There were no car chases, no gunfights, and the good guys didn’t necessarily win in the end. Fontana took the idea to producer Barry Levinson, who simply said “I’m in.”
While Simon was involved on the peripheral, (he noted his residual checks had been getting bigger every season), he joined Homicide as a staff member in the fourth season, where he learned to develop his skills as a screenwriter, breaking away from the pyramid style that he’d been trained to do.
It was this same “break the mold” mentality to conventional cop dramas that led Fontana to move past homicide when he created the prison drama Oz. “What happens to that guy that goes to prison?” Fontana asked, wanting the story to follow the bad guy that goes to jail after the credits role at the end of the hour.
He then wrote the characters’ stories before he wrote the episodes, folding the stories together and being able to tell them without commercial breaks — a freedom Fontana called more liberating than all the sex and violence he was permitted to get away with on a premium network. “Television watchers will come or they won’t come,” he mused.
“I was doing verisimilitude, and nothing else. I had no narrative form.”
– David Simon
When HBO debuted the show that summer, they most certainly did not come, and when TV Guide pulled its reviewer from his summer vacation, back when there’d be four months with nothing new on television’s landscape for months on end, he called it “an offense to god.”
It was Oz that inspired Simon to write both The Wire and its predecessor, the six-episode mini-series The Corner, a project he said had “no television logic that can sustain this,” until he saw 15 minutes of Fontana’s dark and foreboding prison drama.
The viewers may not have been there in drove, but as both Simon and Fontana said, challenging and unconventional television was the whole of HBO’s brand back then. That is, until another groundbreaking show that came out in the 1990s, The Sopranos, changed the game for everyone. The success, Fontana explained, bred as much fear as failure did, and while the success of The Sopranos subsidized shows like The Wire, suddenly HBO would worry about finding to find its next big hit, instead of telling the story that had never been told.
Simon went on to explain that the success of Game of Thrones allowed him to get a handful of episodes for a mini-series about housing, 2015’s Show Me A Hero, a show that got a round of applause just on its mention. “Game of Thrones is subsidizing all of us,” Simon said with a laugh.
The afternoon panel was devoted solely to America’s beloved genre: the Western. “It’s our martial arts film,” said Anson Mount, star of AMC’s Hell on Wheels, the most traditional of the three shows represented on the panel, the other two being FX’s recently concluded modern-day Western Justified, and HBO’s upcoming re-adaptation of Michael Crichton’s West World.
“If you put down a general footprint, it’s going to be a boring walk.”
– Anson Mount
John Wirth, show runner for Hell on Wheels, started out by breaking down the two basic tropes of the genre: “Guy leaves town, guy comes to town.” Those same two tropes were reused for Justified, Graham Yost’s Elmore Leonard neo-Western. While it may have been set in the modern day, Justified was a Western through-and-through, but admitted he was still able to turn expectations on their head.
With Hell on Wheels and Justified both using the same playbook set over a century apart, West World looks to subvert the very fiber of the Western itself, bringing in themes of science fiction as well as the meta-adaptation of the creative process that exists between actors and writers. The husband and wife team of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy spoke freely about HBO’s ambition for the project, harkening back to Simon’s remark about HBO looking for its next big thing, and with Game of Thrones starting to bring itself to a close, the show Nolan sites as his primary influence, it’s clear that they want West World to be the next big reason to tune in on Sunday nights.
“You get to define who you are because the rules are incomplete.”
– Lisa Joy
While Joy, the daughter of first generation Americans, didn’t have the inherent love for Westerns like most of her co-panelists, she did find herself drawn to sci-fi space operas, and seeing the overlapping films once she was introduced to the genre. It’s this sensibility that she brings to the table could actually make West World everything HBO hopes. We also got a look at a two-minute-and-45-second sizzle real, and it looks fantastic.
Finally, closing out the day, the the first episode of the second season of Denis Leary’s latest show, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, which is kind of like happens when the characters from Light of Day grow up (if you swap out Cleveland for modern-day L.A., where Leary’s show is set). Leary’s Sex smolders with all the usual on-edge dramedy that’s become his post-standup reinvention.
“If you say that about me, Aaron Sorkin is never gonna hire me, and he’s in town, asshole.”
– Denis Leary
It would make sense that a show where the strongest aspect is the interplay of the cast would have the most riotously funny post-show panel, with most of the principal cast (minus John Corbin, who had injured his foot, we were told), spent most of the time give each other shit, which quickly spilled out into the audience. Particularly the poor guy who sat in the front and was eating a salad. It was a hilarious exchange to watch unfold, and as the moderator commented near the end, their publicist warned him he wouldn’t have much to say, as they’re known to hijack publicity forums like this.
Which is great, and it’s this kind of lighthearted recklessness we need more of in television today.
Day 4
With the tragic events of late Saturday night into early Sunday morning weighing heavy on everyone’s mind, I sat reading news updates debating whether or not to head down for a morning panel. As the news seemed to grow worse every time I refreshed the page, a notification was sent out announcing they’d cancelled the “Parental Guidance Advised” panel, which dealt with on-screen violence and how to explain it to children.
“While it’s important to have this conversation, today doesn’t feel like the right time.”
– ATX Festival
I absolutely understand why they made that decision, but it’s hard not to wonder what kind of discourse could’ve happened that day outside of a social media comment section. Despite the news, I elected to head down and see an upcoming episode of The Jim Gaffigan Show’s second season, deciding to re-engage in the discussion of television’s cultural relevance.
The episode itself was a welcome revelation for a number of reasons on Sunday morning. Not just for the genuine power of good comedy, but the episode itself was a semi-biographical tale involving today’s outrage impulses and social media saturation. It was a note-perfect execution, abundant with guest stars and cameo appearances, holding up a mirror to today’s meta culture.
“We’re all one tweet away from career suicide,” explained Gaffigan in the panel afterwards, featuring his wife and executive producer Jeannie, actress Ashley Williams, who plays his wife on the show, and co-star Michael Ian Black. Gaffigan’s stand-up has defined itself by being particularly autobiographical and sardonic, and his work behind-the-scenes is no different. “I do all my own food stunts,” Gaffigan says, referring to a collage of fast food visits partway through the episode.
Capping off the event was another panel featuring Noah Hawley, but this time focusing on the music Fargo’s brilliant second season. Joining him were the composer, Jeff Russo, and producer Maggie Philips. Hawley again comfortably led the conversation, talking about out the overall lack of commercial appeal to television soundtracks, particularly when that soundtrack is an original score.
“This is artisanal television. We make it with our hands.”
– Noah Hawley
Hawley, of course, approaches things much differently, and when he decided to set the second season in 1979, and that unlike the visions of New York and L.A. during the same time period, the midwest is all at once 1972, and 1964, and 1945. The character of Ed Blumquist (Jesse Plemmons), with the most picaresque vision for the American dream.
Alternately, they were exploring what sounds were going on globally in 1979, including the sonic landscapes of places like Japan, before playing the clip of episode three’s opening sequence to illustrate how that played out on screen.
After the discussing the importance of scoring, and the epic sensibility that’s ignited when you hear a popular song play in a movie, with Hawley citing Scorsese as a specific inspiration for this technique, Hawley and Russo were joined by Austin’s own Ruby Jane, along with a backing band, who started the festival’s closing festivities with some covers from Coen brothers films, something they’d used at length in Fargo’s second season.
Their closing number, a deeply stirring rendition of “Go To Sleep, Little Baby,” better known as the siren song from O Brother Where Art Thou?, showed not only Hawley’s delightful singing voice, but the diverse creativity and attention to detail that Hawley put in one of the most innovative television shows of the last 20 years.
Epilogue
In the end, what started as a seemingly misguided endeavor proved itself repeatedly throughout the weekend, with an earnest dedication to the medium of TV, its complicated role in our culture, and allowing attendees to explore how every genre handles its responsibility differently. A truly enriching experience, and one that I would highly recommend to anyone who wants to immerse themselves in the celebration of an oversaturated, under-appreciated medium.
6 Responses