Seven solid hours of zoom calls tomorrow

UGH!

Every year at the start of the term we do this thing where all the students have to present their ideas for their MFA thesis projects. It’s a multi day long affair of tedious pitches. I don’t think that it really helps the students though I’m biased because I hate an ordeal. Even when it wasn’t on zoom, no scratch that, it was worse when it was in person. At least on zoom I am at home and comfortable in my own chair.

Scheduled right in the middle of that is a story call with AMC and Macaulay Culkin about the animated project we’re working on for them. I like Mac a lot having worked with him a few times but I have no idea what this meeting is about. The producer says it’s more of a “he’s on the hook now you have to reel him in.” We tried to game out a few scenarios — most specifically how the election results change the approach to the story. We went through this in 2016 because Trump was such a disruption to the cultural landscape everything had to be reimagined. Some people said in the aftermath of the election in 2016, “people will be sick of politics, so take all the political stuff out of your story.” Then of course the last 4 years have been a boon to political content. I imagine that tomorrow’s call will be similar to when we were developing that show at USA back in 2017. Take out all the politics. In this case the politics being the low stakes of a student body election in a fictional high school series.

When I first started writing the notes from executives were all about how “they can’t do this, they can’t do that and above all they can’t use swears.” Now they’re all like, “we like to think of ABC Family as HBO.” Okay, no. You’d like to think you were working for HBO making prestige tv or prestige money but you’re not.

I’m off to bed now. I was up at 6AM and no chance of returning to sleep. I’ve had anxiety in my chest since last week’s coup attempt. That’s kind of been the thing for the last four years, waking up sick thinking, “what did he do while I was sleeping!??” Of course now we’re going to have 10 or so years of domestic right wing terrorists creating mayhem all over the country. There will be no end to the “stolen election” narrative as it serves as a justification for their pre-existing resentments against a rapidly changing country. I get how someone who voted for trump could fall for the election fraud lie trump is pushing, They need his lies to be true because otherwise, their dissatisfaction is because of their own shortcomings.  I don’t get how an elected official, who has full access to all the information I have, and one presumes critical thinking skills, is okay with letting this country go down in a fit of violence. Like really, how do you sleep at night knowing you’re unraveling democracy by perpetuating these lies? I have to assume it’s because they don’t want democracy.