|
Post by PokerKitten on Feb 25, 2005 23:08:37 GMT
*snerk* You guys! I guess we have our own share of nutters over here, so I shouldn't mock ;D Didn't this group complain about Wes/Lilah action too, back int he day? Man, they were HOT! The only time Wes was ever itneresting! Lol. I digress! The clothed and bitey scene refered to in this news is the Spike/Harmony unlovely fuck in "Destiny" of course, which I also found offensive but for different reasons! And the movement of hips just kills me! LMAO! FCC Rejects 'Angel' Indecency Complaint
Yahoo News
WASHINGTON - A love scene from the canceled show "Angel" that showed a female character turning into a vampire and biting her partner's neck did not overstep federal indecency rules, the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) ruled Friday.
It was one of two scenes from a November 2003 episode of "Angel" that were not "sufficiently graphic or explicit to render the program patently offensive" by contemporary standards, the FCC (news - web sites) said in denying an indecency complaint from the Parents Television Council.
"Angel," which was canceled by the WB last year after five seasons, starred David Boreanaz (news) in the title role of an 18th-century vampire who tried to atone for past evil deeds in present day Los Angeles.
One scene involved Angel in an intimate moment with a female character in which Angel's hips are seen "moving back and forth," the Parents Television Council said in its complaint.
In the scene depicting the female vampire biting the neck of her partner, also a vampire, both characters had clothes on and "their breathing is heavy," the complaint said.
The episode aired at 9 p.m. EST on Nov. 19, 2003. The indecency law bars nonsatellite radio and noncable television stations from airing between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. indecent material such as references to sexual and excretory functions. Those are the hours when children are more likely to be watching .
But not all sexual and excretory references or scenes are considered indecent. The FCC must consider context and its decisions are subjective interpretations of the law.
The FCC said the "Angel" scenes were not patently offensive "as defined by commission precedent" and therefore were not indecent.
The complaint was officially filed against WBDC- in Washington, though the program aired on WB stations across the country. The FCC asks that indecency complaints include the call letters of a television or radio station.
|
|
|
Post by PokerKitten on Dec 10, 2005 11:24:47 GMT
Interesting stuff about Angel etc, from an interview with Dvid Fury: JOZIC: Speaking of characters from the Buffyverse, which would you say were your favourite to write?
FURY: Boy, I think I've answered this differently every time someone's asked it because it really just depends on the circumstances. I used to say Xander because I always found Xander to be the guy I most related to. The guy with the snarky comments who kind of stands outside of everything but wanting to be involved, you know, wanting to help.
As things went along and as the characters developed, I think I began to really love writing Spike. Spike was a wonderful character that went through a lot of changes over the years and those changes were really interesting to incorporate into the character without undermining who that character was. It was really very interesting having him go from villain to anti-hero to hero, which is kind of what happened with him. I think he became the most rewarding character to, ultimately, write but the character most people on the show associate me with was Harmony, for some reason. I seem to have a knack for writing her so I don't know what I'm tapping into there. I did love writing her.
Any character that was funny I enjoyed writing.
JOZIC: Now, does favourite character to write also equate to easiest character to write?
FURY: Uhhh…hmmm, interesting. Yeah, I think maybe for me it does. I think my favourite characters were the ones I just sort of got, that I just sort of understood. When I understand the character then their voices sort of come out correctly. It was those characters that were a little bit trickier, a little bit less defined that, sometimes, were harder. When I say less defined, there were other characters that went through a lot of change.
A lot of our characters went through changes - I mean, Wesley and Cordelia went through enormous changes on the show - and as they went through these changes I began to lose sight of exactly what their voices were. But that was partly because of my involvement with show not being full-time - we're talking about prior to season 5. It wasn't full-time so some of these changes in the persona of the characters were things that I found tricky. And then there were characters that I had never written before that I was loathe to write because I just didn't know if I could nail them - like Lilah Morgan on Angel. I only wrote her once but apparently it was hugely successful. Everyone still talks about that to me. There was a scene in the episode "Salvage", I think, with Faith but it's the one where Wesley is having to decapitate her corpse and her ghost appears to him, or rather his mind. She starts talking to him. That was the first time I'd ever wrote Lilah and I was kind of wary of a character that I had never written before and I wasn't quite sure but I guess I got it. At least the people who seem to know that character say I did.
JOZIC: I think it was between Season 3 and 4 of Angel when it was still up in the air as to whether or not the show would be coming back, and I seem to remember someone saying that Buffy was in a kind of comfort zone because they had been syndicated since day one, so they had a lot more leeway to ease into things, whereas Angel never knew if it was coming back the next season so it was always balls-to-the-wall, I guess, to try and go as far as you can and push it as hard as you can to hopefully get that renewal.
FURY: Yeah, there was definitely an element of that. Certainly after Season 3, I mean, the biggest issue was Buffy's move to UPN. What protected Angel all those years was [that] it was married to Buffy on the schedule. Because of Buffy's perceived success and the media attention it got, it gave them a reason to keep another one of Joss' shows on the air. Once Buffy moved to UPN after its fifth season, which was after Angel's second season, it did put Angel into a more tenuous place. I don't think it changed the dynamic that Tim and David were looking toward. I mean, they gravitate toward really startling, shocking dark places and I think they just did that.
I don't think they ever had a design for getting picked up. The only time that ever happened was at the end of season 4 when the finale, which was "Home", was to set up season 5 and the move of Angel and Co. to Wolfram & Hart. That was the first time that anything had been done with a concerted effort to get the show picked up. By showing the network what the new design of the show would be. Otherwise we just did what we wanted to do, we told the stories we wanted to tell - or more specifically the stories that David and Tim and Joss wanted to tell - and that's how the show ran its course.
JOZIC: There's been a lot of commentary regarding the change and the taking over of Wolfram & Hart, very similar, in fact, with what you heard with Buffy during Season 6 where it kind of took a long time for the usual story structure to reveal itself. Like who is the Big Bad, where everything is kind of going, and some people have cited that as probably the reason why Angel never came back.
FURY: Oh, that couldn't be further from the truth. Our ratings were actually up.
JOZIC: Oh, really?
FURY: Oh, yeah. Our ratings had actually gone up in the last season and critically we were getting more attention for that season than we did on any other season of Angel. So, if anybody's concerned about the direction of the show, we were making a very valiant effort to do standalone episodes to get away from the big arcs, which is what Buffy fell into. The reason for that was, if we were ever going to build on Angel's audience - we knew we had the people who already liked the show - if we continued on a major arc, I mean, let's face it, Season 4 was one giant arc that I think takes place over two weeks. It was an insane season that anybody tuning in the middle of Season 4 would be completely baffled. So, this was a definite effort on our part, and it didn't undermine the show in any way, as far as I can tell. It was simply an attempt to try to go back to [standalone episodes].
Buffy Season 1 was entirely standalones. Sure, it had The Master trying to rise up by the end of the season, but ultimately these episodes were all self-contained and I think we were attempting to go back to that just to see if that did anything for our ratings [and], quite frankly, it did. Our ratings were up that year.
So, yes, some people may feel frustrated by the beginning part of the season but I thought there were some great episodes. I thought "Life of the Party" was a great episode. I think "Numero Cinco" was a lot of fun. I think Steve DeKnight's episode, "Hellbound", was great. I think that people just have to understand that some people love the standalone episodes and some people love the arcs.
The only reason that Angel didn't come back…it's a very simple thing. Because our ratings were up, because of our critical attention, Joss specifically asked Jordan Levitt, who was the head of The WB at the time, to give us an early pick-up because every year they [would] wait so long to give Angel a pick-up [and] a lot of us [would] turn down jobs hoping that Angel will continue - he didn't want that to happen. So, he was feeling very confidant and he just asked Jordan, "Like, make your decision now whether you're going to pick us up or not," and Jordan, sort of with his hands tied, with his back up against the wall, called him the next day and said, "Okay, we're cancelling you." Jordan's no longer there and The WB has since recognized…I believe Garth Ancier at The WB said that it was a big mistake to cancel Angel. There was a power play that happened that just didn't fall out the way they wanted it to. We wanted to get an early pick-up, we didn't. In fact we forced them to make a decision, and with his hand forced he made the decision to cancel us.
I think, in retrospect, with their developments not doing very well - they were trying to develop other genre shows, like Dark Shadows with John Wells and Lost in Space with John Woo - they would have loved to have Angel on for another year. It was just an unfortunate thing that they made the decision so soon. I guarantee that, if we waited as we normally did, by the time May had come around they would have picked up Angel. I can guarantee that.
JOZIC: I remember reading that you all thought you had a full order of episodes but in fact you only had a 13 episode commitment from the network.
FURY: For which season?
JOZIC: For five.
FURY: We always had a full order.
Oh, no..no, no…you're absolutely right. Some of us knew and some of us didn't know. I knew, actually. The WB was just hedging their bets. They said, "well, let's try out this new Angel format and see how it's working with Wolfram & Hart and the standalone episodes," and, in fact, it was working gangbusters, so…
The only reason we veered away from the standalones is because we became dissatisfied with telling the standalone episodes. The bread and butter of the Buffyverse has always been the serialization of it and we didn't want to lose that. And Joss was very clear, he said, "I don't know how to do standalone episodes because if you're trying to build emotional depth to these characters they have to carry the events of prior episodes into another episode." If there's something that happens between two people that plays into the next episode it all has to play on those emotions. With standalone episodes you just become CSI all of a sudden, it just becomes about the stories and it's not about the characters and that's something that Joss couldn't stand to do - and rightly so. So, by the time we got to episode 8, which was "Destiny", which I wrote with Steve DeKnight, we decided at that point that we were going to go back into, I guess, mythology serialization mode which is where we reintroduced Lindsay. We brought back up the apocalypse, Spike and Angel, [and] it was meant to basically kick it off.
JOZIC: Somewhere around 2/3 into the season you started doing episodes like "Smile Time" and "Why We Fight" and, again, I've heard criticisms that the shows got very high concept and gimmicky.
FURY: Again, it's the nature of the beast. You can look at Buffy, and people talk very fondly about Buffy's early seasons, and you can pick episodes like "Puppet Show" or "Reptile Boy" - which are very much standalone episodes - and one can argue that it wasn't just high concept. That it was [more] like, "let's do something that's fun. Let's do something that'll bring us out of the mold."
One of the things that was somewhat limiting for us, in a small way, was that our budget was cut the last year. We had a smaller budget to work with and we found a lot of our stories were playing out in Wolfram & Hart and it was becoming a little bit frustrating with us saying, "let's just get out of here, let's break out of here, let's get it to another space." Doing a submarine story, that's just so outrageous to do that and it just seemed like a lot of fun. And those episodes were very successful.
We had an idea in the early stages of talking about Season 5 where we talked about doing an evil Sesame Street show and it wasn't until Joss came around going, "I figured out how to do it - Angel gets turned into a muppet," that we kind of went, "Hallelujah, that's brilliant. That's great." So, people can fault it, but I think that was wonderful television. That was great, entertaining television that, like all good Joss Whedon things, has this great emotional core to it. I mean, as silly as it is, it's got this great little story about self-esteem in there and Ben did a phenomenal job of writing and directing it - and writing those songs!
JOZIC: Now, is that unusual to have your budget actually go down?
FURY: It's not unusual for a show that is on the bubble as Angel was for all those years. The complaint from the network was [that they] couldn't make money off the show. Their bread and butter on The WB were shows like Everwood or shows like 7th Heaven. Shows that didn't require special effects, didn't require monster make-up, didn't require vamping, they just required a living room set with a bunch of people talking. They, somewhat unrealistically, don't understand that to do a genre show you need to invest in it. You need to put real money into it especially if you're going to be doing it in LA. I mean, Smallville is able to do what they do because they shoot it in Vancouver! And the thing about Angel is, he's in LA. He exists in LA, there's really no way around it.
So, as far as getting budgets cut, it happens on shows that are on the bubble. They say, "well, can we do it for a little less money than we did it for last year?" The thing about our show that Joss is very proud to announce, we never went over budget. Every year we brought our show in on budget. Unlike other shows, we didn't go over budget. We always stayed exactly, and delivered shows exactly, on budget so their need to drop it was our way of saying "look, we'll try to make the show for less money if you feel like you can make more money off of us." They still didn't feel it was enough and that's part of the problem with being on one of those weblets like The WB or UPN - they have very little play in terms of the money. They have to make money everywhere, they can't offset costs of quality shows with other shows that are making money for them because they just don't make that much money.
JOZIC: So, while some people may have thought you guys were getting lazy on the show, you were, in fact, working even harder than before.
FURY: I never heard that people thought we were getting lazy. [laughs]
JOZIC: [laughs] Well, I meant it more in terms of what I said earlier with how the storyline seemed a bit more wayward and plodding…
FURY: Here's the thing about it. Ultimately, a lot of the direction of the series went by Joss' whim , as it should, it's his show. He was busy writing the Firefly movie but he would still come in and he would say, "I want to do this, I want to do that, I want this to happen." Unlike early Buffy seasons, or even seasons of Angel when there was a consistent hierarchy like with Greenwalt and Minear, we weren't really able to map out the season the way we really wanted to. Jeff Bell and I pretty much mapped out a season where we could see how it would work and we were planning on doing that but once Joss came into the mix Joss put his own mark on it and when he put his own mark in it, unfortunately, it blew a lot of our stuff out of the water. So, there might be some erratic quality to it but to suggest we were lazy is crazy.
I would argue that most people think our last season was the best, just because that's what I've heard. I'm not saying that I disagree with that, I'm just saying that a lot of people, and certainly critics have often said, that it was reaching a creative high in the fifth season. But if some people were disappointed because it wasn't quite the heavy, dark mythology of Darla and Angel of Season 2, or Conner in Season 3 or whatever, I understand that. We can't please everybody but we're trying to please the network, trying to please the show's creator, trying to please the audience and trying to please ourselves. All we can do is the best we can and I would still argue that episodes of Angel in the fifth season were as good as episodes in other seasons. There were some great episodes. I'm very proud of "Your Welcome", the 100th episode with Cordelia coming back. I'm very proud of that, I think that's a really strong episode. And "Smile Time", like I say, I think it's one of the best episodes of Angel we ever did.
JOZIC: I agree.
FURY: The problem is, when you do a good show, whatever comes after it is always never quite going to live up to it. I already anticipate with Lost that people are going to start, "awww, this isn't as good as the first season," or, "awww, these episodes aren't as good as the first few episodes," or, "aww, it's going in a direction I don't like." It's a very tricky thing to try and do series television. It's hard to please so many people.
JOZIC: I heard a rumour that you guys had planned to bring Seth Green back had you gone to a sixth season.
FURY: We had talked about bringing…Oh…for Angel?
JOZIC: Yeah.
FURY: Well…it's possible. You know, we talked about a lot of things. I don't know where you would have heard the rumour.
The really cool thing about Season 6, we knew how Season 5 was going to end very early on and we knew what it was going to launch into with Season 6, which was a post-apocalyptic show [and] which I thought was going to be great. It was going to be Angel in The Road Warrior, which I thought would be awesome. In the ruined city of LA or out in the desert or something, it was just going to be kind of a really cool, different, show. Bringing Seth into it? I could see that.
There were lots of talks about who could we load in here, who would be great to return and, if there is an apocalypse, who would survive it? Who will be in the show next season? And I'm sure Seth's name was brought up because he was brought up for the end of Buffy as well, he was going to return for the finale. So, it's very possible, but again, Seth's got a pretty successful career without the Buffy shows.
JOZIC: Speaking of returning characters, could you comment on all the ballyhoo at the end of Angel about having Sarah come back for one of the final episodes and then not coming back and all the speculation that followed?
FURY: Could you rephrase the question? You mean about speculation as to whether Sarah was coning back?
JOZIC: I heard that you planned on having her come back…
FURY: We had approached her about doing the 100th episode. Buffy was going to appear in my episode, the episode that I directed, so we put out the offer to Sarah and she politely declined which, I will say, she had her reasons. I think there might have been a death of an aunt or something that she was dealing with but, regardless, I guess Joss kind of felt a little bit put off about the way it was done. There was a perceived notion, on both sides, I can say, between Sarah and Joss of ingratitude for both parties. Joss doesn't feel like Sarah's ever shown the proper amount of gratitude for what he's done for her and her career, and I think she feels the same way. That she feels she was never afforded the credit for Buffy's success and the gratitude from Joss.
I think they're both crazy. [laughs] They were the right people at the right time, it was a great partnership and it created a great series, and I truly think they both recognize this to some extent. But for whatever reason, I think the fact that she declined to do that put a damper on her coming back later. It provided us with an opportunity, though, because if we couldn't get Sarah, we thought, "why don't we get Charisma back and do that," which turned out to be a Godsend because Charisma was fantastic.
JOZIC: That was a brilliant episode.
FURY: So, that was a lucky thing. A lot of the things that fall-out with us actually turn into gold. Like you think, "Oh, this is a disaster, she won't do it," or, "we don't have him," or, "Seth is leaving," and we go, "Oh, but this gives us this great episode that we wouldn't have otherwise."
As far as Sarah returning later, there was talk of her being in the finale but Joss decided - and I get it - that it's sort of unfair to our cast of characters to bring Sarah in, suddenly, at the end. Angel's [cast and crew] have sort of created their own world at this point and to suddenly infuse Buffy into it…
It's one thing if she appeared in the middle of the season as a guest star, but to appear in the finale sort of diminishes the importance of all these other great actors and characters that we have and I concurred with him. I thought he was right.
JOZIC: But wasn't there talk of her being in "The Girl in Question"?
FURY: There was very, very little talk about that. No, she was never going to be in that. The missed opportunity to see Buffy was always going to be the joke of that. It's the tease of, they're going to see Buffy, and they can't quite get to her. It's sort of the After Hours kind of craziness where it's like, I can't get to her, I can't see her, and that was always pretty much decided.
The person we expected to get and didn't get was Michelle Trachtenberg. We had expected to get her for that episode but she was tied up prepping a movie, I believe, and wasn't able to do it, which is why we brought Andrew back again.
But, Sarah, no. We never expected Sarah to be in that episode. We did think she might be in the second last episode, "Power Play", just like Angel appeared in the second last episode of Buffy's finale. We thought we'd do that but wound up not.
JOZIC: Speaking of the finale, I thought it was a fantastic finale.
FURY: Good. Thanks.
JOZIC: I thought the ending was brilliant, although I know a few people who didn't care for the lack of a tidy resolution. What are your thoughts on the finale?
FURY: Again, we had planned this very early on. The basic idea was to discover who the architects of the apocalypse were and then were going to do this Godfather-like massacre where all of our characters were going to go killing each of them, and the last beat of the episode would be Angel and whoever was left of his crew about to launch into the apocalypse. You know, "Let's go, let's move…whatever."
My thought on that is, that's the perfect way to end the show. The point of Buffy was always girl power and showing that power. The point of Angel was always that the fight never ends. He'll always fight. It's an eternity of fighting. You can't ever win but the fight is worth fighting. That was a perfect 'going out' scene - you know, the Butch Cassidy/Sundance Kid sort of we're going up against impossible odds and probably die? That's the perfect way to end the series, and anybody who says otherwise is dumb.
Any proper resolution of, "Oh, we've defeated the demons, they've gone back to hell, let's get a beer," just would have been absolutely wrong for that show.
JOZIC: I've always perceived Buffy as being that core group of characters - Xander, Buffy and Willow - and that was kind of preserved at the end of that series. They had that scene that was an homage to "The Harvest" where Giles says, "The world is doomed," and they go off. Angel, on the other hand, has always been full of struggle and characters are always dying so I thought the end was very much in keeping with that struggle, that keep on fighting sort of…
FURY: The interesting thing is, all the people Angel started out with are all dead now.
JOZIC: Yeah, a friend of mine pointed that out right after that episode.
FURY: Unlike Buffy who ended up with her three friends and were able to end in that way, in Angel's case, everybody that he's ever been close to dies, which is really Angel's story - that he will always outlive the people he cares about. He has gone on and on, he has seen people he loves die, which is another reason that he and Buffy realized they couldn't be together. He being a vampire, he will watch her die.
JOZIC: But they have a forever love. [laughs]
FURY: They have the forever love.
But the fact that he was side-by-side with Spike was kind of a wonderful turnaround in the mythology of the series.
JOZIC: There's Butch and Sundance right there.
FURY: That's absolutely right. That's one thing that I really wanted to do in episode 100 when I was trying to break it. I really wanted to have Spike and Angel fight side-by-side. I was desperate to put that in my episode but it was for a later time.
|
|