This week has seen two members of the still fledgling Seattle filmmaking community step out of the scrappy milieu of ultra-low-budget indie cinema and into the most formula-driven segment of Hollywood, “episodic” television.
Last Thursday, John Jeffcoat’s warm, subtle dramedy feature Outsourced premiered as a broader, more blatant NBC sitcom.
And on Sunday, Humpday mumblecore auteur Lynn Shelton made her Directors Guild of America debut helming a particularly emotional episode of AMC’s Mad Men.
Reviews for Outsourced the series are mixed at best. Shelton’s Mad Men episode got its full share of the praise that that critics’-darling series has gotten.
Jeffcoat and George Wing, his co-screenwriter on the Outsourced movie, are credited with the screenplay for the Outsourced series pilot episode. But Hollywood producer Robert Borden shepherded the series adaptation.
The simpler, cruder gags and ethnic humor in the show, compared to the original film, could be the work of Borden. But they should more appropriately attributed to the network’s vehicle assembly system, the layers of bureaucracy that turn so many promising shows into mush before they even get a chance.
Reportedly, Jeffcoat and Wing have been retained as consultants on the series. Let’s hope they can help mix in a greater portion of the film’s higher culture-clash content.
Shelton faced the opposite situation.
She was given a script, complete with multiple last-minute rewrites. She was given standing sets, a regular cast and crew, and an established audio-visual vocabulary. She had input on the episode’s new settings and guest actors. She had eight shooting days and a similarly tight editing schedule.
The result was not, by any means, a Lynn Shelton film. It was a regular Mad Men, albeit an especially potent one.
Directing episodic TV is more akin to conducting than to composing. It’s working within a complex set of disciplines and strictures. It is an art in its own right.
