Friendly Advice for the Production Team of 'Cutthroat Kitchen'

Hi folks!

Look, we all know that social media is pretty awesome, especially if you're a basic cable TV show looking to drum up enthusiasm for your series that could translate into a bump in the ratings. People love to talk about television on social media, and even to watch shows while chatting with other viewers about what they're seeing live. That provides a real incentive to find ways to get your show "trending", in order to get people to switch over to see what's happening. We all get that.

And yes, it's fun to come up with clever topic hashtags, funny and quirky things that will get the public curious about what's going on with your show at that moment. Silly, funny little hashtags like "#hashtaghashtagpan" can create a little bit of excitement and, well...buzz...that one would hope translates to a few extra viewers. And since those viewers help pay for the show (indirectly through advertising, let's not explain your own business model to you) then it's understandable that you're always looking for new quirky tags.

But here's the thing about the Internet and social media...they're used for a lot of different things. Some of them are things that, well...only grown-ups talk about. Special, grown-up things that don't necessarily involve cooking or television, except for the people for which both of those things are very important to their grown-up activities because of a special rule we call Rule #34. And it's important to remember that those grown-ups, talking about grown-up things, are on the same social media as everybody else, and the only thing that really divides them is the topics they talk about.

Basically, what I'm saying is that if one of your contestants does happen to slice off the tip of their finger, as happened in the March 13th episode, it's probably for the best if you don't try to get it trending with the hashtag "#justthetip". Because there are two very different meanings to that particular phrase, used by two very different groups of people, and trust me when I say that neither one of the groups who use it want to think about the other meaning when they're very...emotionally invested...in using it in its current context.

Okay? Okay.

An Open Letter to Zombie Story Writers

(inspired by Joe McKinney's "Dead City" and "Apocalypse of the Dead", but generally applicable...I'm looking at you, "28 Days Later" in the back, there):

Dear Zombie Story Authors,

As much as I, your reader, appreciate a commitment to verisimilitude, and as much as pseudo-scientific explanations of how a zombie apocalypse could be "real" are fun, please stop trying to explain it away as a brain disease that affects living human beings, giving them superhuman pain tolerances and a mindless, ravenous appetite for human flesh. Because you then proceed to treat your "infected" just like they were zombies straight out of a Romero movie, which drastically undercuts the very sense of realism you were trying to create.

Look, we all understand that willpower is an amazing thing, and that people can do incredible stuff when they're sufficiently determined. But I have news for you. When your femoral artery is severed in the course of a zombie attack, it does not matter how determined you are to get up and eat the flesh of the living. You're going to bleed out in a matter of minutes, your circulatory system is going to collapse from hydrostatic shock, your brain is going to be completely deprived of oxygen, and you are going to die. Likewise, mindless determination to keep moving, hunting, and killing is not going to protect you from the rigors of exposure in the midst of a North Dakota winter. Starvation, dehydration, and blood loss are absolutes, even if determination can temporarily overcome them.

In essence, the human body is a machine, like an automobile. You are trying to describe the ways this machine can malfunction to produce a specific effect, and that's good, but please stop explaining to me how it keeps going without wheels, gasoline, or a functioning engine.

Thanks in advance,

John Seavey

An Open Letter To All Science-Fiction Authors Everywhere

Dear All Science Fiction Authors Everywhere,

I realize that it's a classic science-fiction trope that is rich with thematic possibilities, but it's not sustainable, long-term, to use human beings as food. You see, meat is not actually a very efficient use of agricultural resources; you use more grain in fattening an animal to the point where it can be eaten than you get from that animal. In other words, a typical cow...or to be more germane, a typical person...consumes more than 200 pounds of food in the course of their growth to a 200 pound person. Even if you assume that our hypothetical dystopian cannibal overlords are like Native Americans, and make use of every single part of the human being, they're still wasting resources. It'd be cheaper and more efficient just to feed them the grain in the first place. (And if you don't have grain available for some reason, like, say, the Earth is enshrouded in a perpetual cloud cover, the laws of thermodynamics say you're pretty much screwed.)

The main reason you hear about isolated groups of people turning to cannibalism is that those people are already full-grown adults, looking to eke out as much time as they can from their existing food supplies; the food costs of fattening a human being up has already been paid, and doesn't need to factor into their calculations. But as a permanent survival plan? Sorry. It just doesn't work. (This is why, when I had to come up with a "mysterious processed foodstuff" for Feng Shui, I used seaweed and rats as my ingredients. Just as icky, far more common.) So please, let's not see this trope again, save in outright comedies (Futurama's use of Soylent Green as an Iron Chef ingredient was hilarious, for example.)

Thank you in advance for your co-operation.

Sincerely,

John Seavey

An Open Letter To the Writers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Dear Writers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,

Andrew is not nearly as funny as you think he is.

Sincerely,

All the Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

PS. This is by no means a slight on Tom Lenk. Andrew is just as unfunny in the comics as he was on the TV show.

An Open Letter To Grant Morrison

Dear Mr. Morrison,

First, let me just apologize in advance if this expression of dissatisfaction comes across as depressing and personally abusive. Rest assured, I have a great respect for you as a writer--honestly, if you'd retired after 'Animal Man', I'd have a great respect for you as a writer, on the strength of that alone, and your later work has only helped your reputation.

That said, I think you might be slightly confused as to the source of some of the ire fans hold for the recent comics that you have written, and DC has published. This isn't necessarily your fault, of course. While I love the Internet greatly, I do find that some of the people that populate it aren't the best at articulating their thoughts and feelings. (Luckily, everyone who reads my blog is intelligent, articulate, and possessed of eminent taste and discretion.) But I do flatter myself that one of my strengths as a writer is in explaining things clearly, so let me go ahead and try to do just that.

In your recent interview at Newsarama, you express a great deal of confusion over the phrase "event fatigue", wondering exactly how someone could be "fatigued" with "events". You also express some confusion and dismay at the frustration fans felt with "Batman R.I.P.", and wondered why it was that these fans were so angry. The causes are distinct, but related. I'll try to tackle them in order.

The first one is very simple. "Event fatigue" is not a mental syndrome, but a financial one. I'm aware that most DC writers are put on the "comp list", where they get copies of the company's comics every month, so it might very well have been a while since you've had to pay for a comic yourself. I'm also assuming (and certainly hoping) that DC pays you pretty well for your efforts. Between these two things, you might have forgotten just how much one has to spend to follow an "event".

Newsarama has been kind enough to break down the cost here. If you who don't feel like wading through the article, it comes out to about $135, with an extra $152 for those who bought 'Countdown to Final Crisis', which you have said was not connected to 'Final Crisis'--a fact you politely waited until approximately one week after 'Countdown' had concluded to mention. Which does, of course, mean that the people most interested in 'Final Crisis' had already spent that money before finding that fact out. They also tack on an extra thirty bucks for 'Death of the New Gods', another series that was released as being "essential to 'Final Crisis'" that actually wasn't.

Note those last two points. Stories not connected to 'Final Crisis' were being sold as "essential to 'Final Crisis'." This is also an issue with "Batman R.I.P.", which was first sold as "the end of Batman", then sold as "the end of Batman that ties into 'Final Crisis'," then finally explained as "a Batman story that came out at roughly the same time as the end of Batman which happens in 'Final Crisis', because Dan DiDio asked me if we could have these two relate to each other so I made sure they happened at roughly the same time." (If I can slightly paraphrase your statements in the interview. I hope I'm not taking too severe a liberty with them; the link is, of course, there for those who want to read your exact words.)

These two issues relate there, at the convergence of DC's marketing strategy (which I could charitably describe as "disingenuous") and the rather large financial outlay required to pick up all of the stories that DC is marketing as "essential to 'Final Crisis'." Very few fans have unlimited financial resources that we can devote to comic books. We have to pick and choose the titles that we're interested in, and fit our purchases to a budget. Event crossovers are a strain on that budget, because of the extra purchases they require--asking fans to bear that burden too often, and essentially tricking them into bearing a larger burden than needed through deceptive advertising and deceptive public statements, invites discontent which eventually becomes frustration which eventually becomes exhaustion with the medium as a whole. Hence, "event fatigue".

Now naturally, you have the right to feel as though laying this at your doorstep is unfair. You are not DC's marketing department, nor are you DC's editor-in-chief. You didn't schedule 'Final Crisis', nor did you participate in the various marketing tactics that caused people to spend large amounts of money on comics that they didn't enjoy, and found out they didn't need only after they'd spent that money. In that sense, yes, the ire directed at you is entirely misplaced.

But as noted, you weren't exactly speaking up at the time to protect your fans' financial well-being. You waited until after we'd spent our money, then explained that of course we didn't need to spend that money in order to follow your story. Who could possibly have thought otherwise? And it's hard not to feel that you're being deliberately obtuse in that regard. Surely you had to know that they were marketing a full year of build-up to your story, one that would ultimately be nothing more than a waste of time and money? Surely you had to notice, as you did interviews leading into "Batman R.I.P.", that DC was promoting it as "the end of Batman," "the last Batman story", et cetera, something that you knew it wasn't going to be and wasn't intended to be? Surely you have to understand that it's a bad idea to create expectations of a work that you know it's not going to be able to fulfill?

In short, I think that if you want less dissatisfaction from fans, you need to take a greater hand in the promotion of your work at DC. I'm aware that such a thing is probably much easier said than done, but a good share of the frustration with 'Final Crisis' comes from a feeling--probably one a lot of fans couldn't even articulate to themselves, much less to others--that the series was badly misrepresented to us, and that DC walked away with a lot of our money based on that misrepresentation. That creates mistrust, which is a very dangerous thing in an industry that relies on its customers returning every week for the rest of their lives. The last thing you want is for your readers not to trust you, and clearly 'Final Crisis' proves that the promotion of your work can't be left in the hands of the DC marketing department. While you blithely suggest in the interview that dissatisfied fans "Do something else, buy cigarettes or booze or bananas," if they don't want to buy the series, I'm sure you don't want to see readers abandon DC en masse.

I hope that this proves helpful to you. But really, I'd settle for you ever actually seeing it in the first place.

Sincerely,

John Seavey