User blog:Paul.rea/Teen Wolf News 091416

 Teen Wolf News 091416



 Dylan O'Brien Snubbed by Critics

Dylan O’Brien’s latest movie, Deepwater Horizon, debuted this week at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). A number of the major entertainment publications, including Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter, covered the event and published reviews. Dylan O’Brien gets mentioned in none of them. Almost everyone liked the movie. Almost everyone compared it to 1970s disaster classic, The Towering Inferno. Everyone mentioned director Peter Berg and star Mark Walberg. Most mentioned Kate Hudson, John Malkovich, and Kurt Russell. Only one publication, The Wrap, mentions Dylan in passing. It’s not flattering and it's not a review of his performance. “I don’t see the beaten-down citizens of the Bayou La Batre… in Marky Mark and Hudson’s love story. I don’t see suddenly unemployed blue collar men and women in Kurt Russell or Dylan O'Brien‘s characters. I don’t see compassion in the calcified hearts of conglomerates skilled in performative activism. You know what I see? A movie, coming soon to a theater near you.”

That’s it. One mention in an article that is more protest piece than a film review.

Having not seen the movie, I can’t even guess why they overlooked someone with the current profile, name recognition and what was thought to be a pivotal role in the film. It’s possible the studio overemphasized the size of his part in the trailer and the poster set they released. It could be that his performance got lost in all the noise and fire. The Hollywood Reporter summed up that aspect of the film. “Ruggedness and resilience count for far more in the characterizations here than does nuance, and everyone delivers as required. From a craft and technical point of view, the film is all but seamless, a credit to the extra care taken to avoid a CGI look.” Whatever the reason for the snub, the movie met with overall positive notices from those who saw it which bodes well for its wide release on September 30.

 American Assassin First Look

While Dylan O’Brien get overlooked in his current film, he is front and center in pre-publicity for his next project. CBS Films released the first image of O’Brien from the set of American Assassin in London this week. For more on the film and Dylan’s role, check out our report at Fandom.com - http://fandom.wikia.com/articles/dylan-obrien-fans-freak-first-american-assassin-image

 Tyler Posey Breakout Star (Again)

Vanity Fair magazine gives a lot of coverage to Tyler Posey in their latest edition. Posey appears in a feature called “Hipper by the Dozen” described as “Twelve rising stars from the Snapchat Generation – cool, diverse, ambitious, fearless – light up a new era of television.” While some wonder how a 24-year-old actor in the sixth season starring in his own hit show can still be considered a “rising star,” it’s great publicity for Posey and Teen Wolf.

In addition to the print magazine spread, you can catch Posey playing with puppies on the Vanity Fair discovery channel on Snapchat for the next day or so - http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/09/vanity-fair-snapchat-discovery-channel

If you don’t have Snapchat, there might be a bootleg version on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv21JsO-8XM

 EDITORIAL: Dear VIACOM, Surprise Me.

<p class="MsoNormal">The VIACOM board of directors meets this week to choose a new CEO. Whomever the board chooses, the biggest job ahead will be saving the company’s floundering TV networks in a post-ratings world. It’s not a simple task but one that other aging cable networks have faced and are beginning to overcome.

<p class="MsoNormal">If MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and the rest of the lineup are to survive, they must get away from the idea that they’re “brands” and back to making interesting quality television and, most of all, they need to start surprising viewers again. <p class="MsoNormal">When Teen Wolf debuted on MTV in the summer of 11, viewers were surprised. The most frequently heard comment at the time (behind “Stiles is so cute!”) was “This is MTV?” It was surprising. The same can be said for comedy Awkward and, to a slightly lesser extent, family drama Finding Carter. These were “real” TV shows, something MTV had not done before. They were known for low-budget, faux reality stuff and poorly-scripted stabs at drama and comedy.

<p class="MsoNormal">Five years later, MTV’s fortunes (along with every other cable network) began to dip. Part of the reason is an overall decline in the number of people watching TV shows on an actual TV at the time those shows actually broadcast. Another part of the decline came because MTV stopped surprising people. They again became obsessed with their “brand” of which Teen Wolf was the new standard bearer. They debuted show after show featuring pretty young people in danger, pretty young people getting stabbed, pretty young people getting stalked, pretty young people saving a post-apocalyptic fairy land. You knew what you were going to get from an MTV drama before the opening credits. There were zero surprises.

If You Can't Innovate, Emulate
<p class="MsoNormal">Going forward, MTV and VIACOM should take a lesson from the Turner Networks. While their audiences tend to skew older, TBS and TNT suffered the same slump in viewership across the board. They’d fallen into the same pattern of “brand.” TBS was home to most of the Tyler Perry oeuvre, and TNT is where folks turned for procedurals like The Closer, Leverage and Rizzoli & Isles. Some of these are fine shows but audiences in a post-cable era just DVR fine shows. They only actually tune in for surprises.

<p class="MsoNormal">TBS began punching up their lineup last season with a run of hits including Samantha Bee’s talker, Full Frontal, warped family sitcom The Detour, A sitcom version of Lost called Wrecked and police procedural satire Angie Tribeca. Each is very different. Each is surprising. Each made waves with audiences.

<p class="MsoNormal">TNT started surprising folks back in 2011 with Falling Skies (The Walking Dead with aliens) to great success. Their primary “brand’ was still stuck on procedurals, though and most of those efforts continued to fail. It wasn’t until 2014 that they started surprising folks again with the debut of The Last Ship, a post-apocalyptic military drama. This year they launched Animal Kingdom, a twisted crime-family drama. They’re following up with Will a show about William Shakespeare, Good Behavior a hitman romance and a new Tales from the Crypt anthology with M. Night Shyamalan behind the camera. These may not be great shows, we don’t know yet, but one thing is for sure; they’re surprising. And, because each one is wildly different, it’s become increasing hard to pin a “brand” on TNT’s lineup.

<p class="MsoNormal">When things got tough, the old guard at VIACOM scurried back to the familiar. Like a certain presidential candidate, they thought the way to “Make Something Great Again” lay in the past. In the case of MTV, that meant a return to reality shows and other low-brow pursuits. They’ve canceled most of the scripted programming already. The new leadership at VIACOM will need to act quickly to change course. They have a few scripted shows left in the pipeline, but there are precious few surprises ahead.