Unfettered Brilliance: The Not-Quite-Walter-White-Wednesday Post

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

The Not-Quite-Walter-White-Wednesday Post

Before I get to the Breaking Bad portion of this week's post, I have something to announce. Ensley and I have been keeping this quiet until the contract was signed, thus making things official and he broke the news last night as soon as the ink was dry, so I didn't want to wait any longer! We can happily announce that ECW Press, who first brought you the witty and good-looking research-and-writing team of Guffey und Koontz (hey, it's my blog and that's my story), has agreed to publish another book from us! Dreams Given Form: The Unofficial Companion to the Babylon 5 Universe will be a complete guide to the complex universe created by J. Michael Straczynski - the five seasons and five movies of the original series, Crusade, Legends of the Rangers, Babylon 5: The Lost Tales, the canonical novels, short stories, and comic books will all be discussed, along with a few extra special surprises (we hope!). Dreams Given Form is slated for a fall 2016 publication date, which puts it slap in the middle of Babylon 5's 20th anniversary celebrations. In the next few months, this blog will gradually switch its focus over to the new project (Third Age Thursday??), although Breaking Bad news will still be discussed from time to time.

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And Breaking Bad continues to make headlines. A TiVo study recently found it was the "most binge watched" show (meaning 3 or more episodes in a day), edging out House of Cards and Game of Thrones. When this was discussed on the Today show, Al Roker grumpily spoiled the ending regarding Walter White's fate, thereby sparking a heated discussion on when spoiler alerts cease to be the polite thing to do. (When it comes to Breaking Bad, I say spoiler alerts are still a good idea, since it is a show that so very many people are just now discovering. On the other hand, when Whedon's version of Much Ado about Nothing came out last year, I felt it was unnecessary to alert "here be spoilers" since the play was 400+ years old!!)

BuzzFeed hopped on the Breaking Bad bandwagon again with an installment called "34 Things You Probably Didn't Know about Breaking Bad." Interesting stuff on that list and you knew many of them if you had your trusty copy of Wanna Cook? by your side, although one of them (#32) gets debunked in the book as well.

Breaking Bad continues to live on beyond the small screen - Bryan Cranston is writing a memoir for publishing house Scribner about his time on the show and the spin-off Better Call Saul will be airing in 2015. (It's been pushed back from its original November air date, but the network has shown confidence in the show by ordering 13 episodes to be produced.) Better Call Saul is going to feature a "flexible" timeframe, so we'll have the chance to see Saul Goodman pre-Breaking Bad, during the show's events, and also after the events of "Felina." I, for one, am looking forward to seeing him as the manager of an Omaha Cinnabon, but maybe I'm alone on that.

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Points of Interest

Lurker's Guide - Excellent fan-run resource guide for Babylon 5

Breaking Bad - The official AMC site for news and recaps about the best show on television

Mockingbird's Nest - What I do outside of my day job

Ensley Guffey's Blog - Musings and links worth noticing

Nik At Night's Blog - Most things TV, including the 2011 Rewatch

TV Tropes - What you've seen, over and over and why it matters

Slayage - Whedon given the scholarly treatment

Whedonesque - Clearinghouse of all things Whedon

BuffyWorld - Shooting scripts, screenshots, and more

Who?

K. Dale Koontz may have watched too much television as a child. She learned to count via Sesame Street and first learned that genres could cross-pollinate through M*A*S*H. When she discovered Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the die was cast. In 2008, McFarland published her book Faith and Choice in the Work of Joss Whedon which focused on themes such as redemption, choice, and consequences in Whedon's work up to that point. (She's fairly sure Volume 2 could be written to include Dr. Horrible, Dollhouse, and The Avengers.) She is a founding member of the Whedon Studies Association (a great group of people, but don't mention Twilight. Just sayin'). She has presented original work on the Rossum Corporation in Dollhouse, Kitty Pryde, and Japanese anime. In 2014, she and co-author Ensley F. Guffey worked with ECW Press to publish the critically-acclaimed Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad. Her most recent project was to team again with Ensley and ECW to publish A Dream Given Form, which is the only guide to all the canonical works in the Babylon 5 universe. That book is currently available for preorder and will be released in September of 2017. Dale is available for speaking engagements and only occasionally uses puppets in her presentations.

What?

I have long been interested in storytelling - how we do it, why we do it, and what happens when we mix things up. This interest might be the result of being born and raised in the American South, a region that has long celebrated the involved story over the quick answer. Television - the good stuff, anyway - does this brilliantly. Far from being film's red-headed tacky cousin, good TV lets characters and relationships build slowly and often mixes up genres, so horror is next door to humor and fantasy rubs shoulders with procedurals. This blog focuses on both the "good stuff" being broadcast that catches my fancy (with a special emphasis on Babylon 5, since that's the book that's in the process of being written right now) as well as film. The films are usually new releases being watched for TV19's weekly Meet Me at the Movies, although I reserve the right to veer off into classics and under-appreciated gems as well. Older posts cover what my introduction to film class was up to - currently, I'm not teaching that course, but who knows what the future may hold.

Notable Whedon Work