Face to face at last

It was slightly terrifying. Instead of a field of glowing Apple logos and Dell badges, there were faces. And it was like they were all on pseudoephedrine, raising their hands and asking questions. To be sure, most of those questions sprang from the rising anxiety over the impending exam. All I know about it is that it is going to be insanely hard. I always try to make my exams as hard as possible so that I don’t have any trouble telling the B-plusses from the regular B’s etc. I learned that from all those standardized tests. The questions that separate the geeks from the nerds on the LSAT and the SAT etc. are the very, very hard ones. The easy questions don’t even matter. They’re just there to wear you and the point on your No. 2 down.

I haven’t even decided on a TV show yet, and it’s getting kind of late for that. All my exams are TV-based. It makes them easier to write and less painful to grade. The Evidence exam calls for a pretty specific formula. You need a non-cop, non-lawyer show with a sizable ensemble cast, preferably including a decent-sized family. Then you need an event that gives rise to both a criminal prosecution and a civil suit. The two cases need to be built on completely different and inconsistent explanations for said event. Then, you just mock-up all the stuff that would exist—FBI reports, deposition excerpts, hospital reports, web sites, text messages, photos, newspapers, wiretaps, emails, letters, etc.—and have them argue that it’s either in or out in one case or the other or both. For instance, my first year doing this, the church in Springfield was burned and the insurance company believed Reverend Lovejoy did it and refused to pay while the police believed Fat Tony had it torched because Lovejoy failed to pay extortion. My favorite was the Arrested Development exam because I was able to base it entirely on one episode and it worked beautifully.

There’s nothing on TV now that lends itself to this. I’ve been trying to work with Hung, which is pretty sharp. But something’s off and it hasn’t come together. It’s sort of like last time, when I tried to do an I Love Lucy that involved Fred Mertz doing inappropriate things to Little Ricky. The reaction from the two friends I sent early drafts was of such outraged revulsion that I had to start from scratch with 30 Rock. Relying on DOM’s endorsement, I tried out Glee and, boy, did I pay for that. The clip DOM posted is all you need to know. This stuff is concentrated, cloy poison. It’s Juno lobotomized and remade into a cheesy, warbling, nauseating musical: a veritable hell on Earth.