Joel Keller

Earlier this year, Parade.com asked me to write a couple of TV-related quizzes:

24 Quiz (4/7/09)

Scrubs quiz (4/9/09)

Folks, I’ve decided to join all the kids and make my Twitter feed a bit more active (I was going to say “interactive,” but you need to be “active” first before adding the “inter” part. I’m at @joelkeller. TV Squad, by the way is at @tvsquad.

Oh, and by the way again, I was successfully able to get my name on Facebook, so if you go to http://www.facebook.com/joelkeller, you’ll find me.

I know… I haven’t blogged for a while.

Oh, well. I’m a person who really doesn’t feel like he should be a slave to his blog. I think it might be that I don’t have enough interesting things to say to post that often. But mostly it’s because I need to make money and the damned skinflints that run this place don’t pay me at all.

Speaking of work, here are some new clips for you to peruse:

Just out: A story I did for New Jersey Monthly on Cash Cab host Ben Bailey.

Also just out: An interview with comedian Lewis Black that I did for TV Squad.

Also also just out: I wrote two blurbs in the Feb/Mar. issue of Amtrak’s magazine, Arrive. My stories on March Madness and the musical of “Cry-Baby” are on pages 16 and 18, respectively.

From about a week ago: A TV Squad interview I did with the guys from MTV’s Human Giant.

From last month: An essay for New Jersey Monthly about the near future of my town, good ol’ Morristown, NJ.

I think that’s it. More goodness to come, including an interview I did with Barry Williams (yes, *the* Greg Brady), which should be posted on TV Squad next week.

The writers’ strike is over. Most of my favorite shows will be back next month (except for Pushing Daisies, which has been renewed but won’t be back until fall). And the late night talk show hosts actually have good jokes to tell rather than their scattershot attempts to come up with jokes on their own (or, in Jay Leno’s case, attempts to make it look like he came up with the jokes on his own). By the way: Stephen Colbert and Conan O’Brien, you navigated well without your writers. Jon Stewart? Well, as you used to say all the time… “not so much.”

Now I wonder what this means for TV writers — and those who want to be TV writers — in the long term. Will there be less opportunities for young up-and-comers to get in the business, because networks are going to go with more reality TV, or will things eventually get back to pre-strike levels? Will the internet be best way to start your TV writing career? It’s all going to be interesting to watch, and some of it is going to be for very personal reasons…

For the new year, I decided to start a new feature called “Dead Article Theater.” This is where I’ll put essays and articles that never saw the light of day. These could be essays or ideas that were shopped around forever and ever and given the thumbs down at every turn. Alternately, they could be assigned articles that, for some reason, got killed and I was unable to place it elsewhere, either because of indifference or laziness.

This first article is in the latter category. In April 2007, I pitched Radar Online the idea of doing an interview with Jackie Martling, formerly of the Howard Stern Show. They agreed. I could have easily done the interview over the phone, but when Jackie offered to take me to the Friars Club, I couldn’t turn it down. So I traveled into the city, met Jackie at his midtown Manhattan apartment (he lives in the same building as Colin Quinn, whom I saw on the way in) and did the interview, then went to the Friars Club for lunch.

(Photo: Oglio Records)
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A few quick items:

• I have a blurb about NJ Devils’ owner Jeff Vanderbeek in the January / February issue of Arrive, Amtrak’s in-train magazine. You can read a digital copy of the magazine here; my contribution is on Page 12.
• On Monday, I’m rolling out a new feature on this blog; for now I’m calling it “Dead Article Theater”. It will consist of articles that were killed by the publications I wrote them for, or essays that never found a home after years of submissions. The first piece is an interview I did last April with a very funny comedian that anyone who listened to a certain radio show would know pretty well. Stay tuned.
• Finally… I’m getting a lot of comment sp*m. Since I moderate comments, I delete them before they ever get published on the blog. But they seem to be coming in at a more rapid pace than ever. Any of you veteran bloggers figure out a way to stop the sp*m? The only way I’ve seen is to use HaloScan, which of course takes the comments off my server. Any ideas? Let me know in the comments (I’ll make sure I approve them if you’re not already approved. Honest).

In my last note, I mentioned that Pat DiNizio of the Smithereens had put a letter on his website regarding his bands’ absence from New Jersey Monthly’s music issue. Well, it looks like he’s taken that letter down. Maybe he felt he said his piece and didn’t want to belabor the point. Dunno. So, if you follow the link below and see nothing there, don’t fret for my sanity. There was a letter there at some point. I swear.

One of my articles that got cut from the New Jersey Monthly music issue was a short one I did on the Hanukkah concerts mounted by the indie band Yo La Tengo. It was cut because we couldn’t confirm that the shows were going to take place in time to make the print publication. But, since they are going to happen, the folks at NJM were nice enough to put the article on their web site. Here it is.

Meanwhile, Pat DiNizio is (correctly) upset that The Smithereens were left off of NJM’s NJ music history timeline in that issue. I tried to tell him that it was likely an oversight, but still… there are few acts outside of Springsteen and Bon Jovi that are more closely identified with New Jersey than are The Smithereens. They should have been included. What do you folks think?

A few notes:

• I wrote an article about Newark’s new arena, the Prudential Center, for the October issue of New Jersey Monthly. Here’s the link to the story.
• I’ll be on G4’s Attack of the Show again tonight, on a segment called “Blog Watch.” I’ll be talking a little about the new fall season, concentrating on the shows G4’s audience loves. Here’s the interesting part: instead of schlepping into New York to do the interview from a satellite studio, I’ll be doing it via webcam from my New Jersey hidey-hole. It should be on between 7:30 - 8 PM ET.
• I’ve decided to dip another toe into the 21st century by creating a Facebook profile. Click on the badge to the left and you will see it. Hey, throw me a friend invite if you feel like it. Just don’t poke me; that term creeps me out to no end. Next stop on the train from Ludditeville: an iPod! I’ve heard those things are cool.
• I interviewed Rob McElhenney, creator and co-star of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, for TV Squad. This time, we decided to embed the audio and list highlights rather than transcribe the whole thing. Rob gave a pretty informative and funny interview. Definitely check it out if you’re a fan of the show.

Folks, I encourage you to go over to my “main gig”, TV Squad, today. We’re paying tribute to Adam Finley, one of the biggest contributors to the site; he died Thursday morning after he was hit by a school bus while riding his bike. No one found out until Saturday; Adam didn’t have any ID on him, and the medical examiner’s office finally identified him via the serial number off his iPod. He was only 30.

We’re foregoing news today and just posting our favorite posts from Adam, who had a love of animation, Amy Sedaris, and had a really wicked sense of humor. In my assistant editor’s role at TVS, I sometimes clashed with Adam over the obscurity of what he posted. But I always enjoyed what he wrote, especially when he created fictional conversations between two people, or himself and God, or himself and a can. Yes, he’s “talked” to God and a can.

You’ll be missed, Adam.

1) Both Hilly Kristal (founder of CBGB) and Richard Jewell (hero, then suspect in the bombing at the 1996 Olympics) died today. That leads me to this question: do obscure semi-celebrities die in threes? If so, who’s next?

2) Doesn’t new Yankee phenom Joba Chamberlain look like he’s Ricky Gervais’ younger brother?

I just realized that the link that I posted for Andy Breckman’s radio show, Seven Second Delay, hasn’t been updated since 2001. So, here’s some more up-to-date links: the show’s blog (which happens to have a link to my article at the top… don’t worry, there’s no quid pro quo deal or anything like that), and a list of archived shows.

By the way, if anyone can tell me what the Robin Williams quote I discussed yesterday actually means, let me know in the comments. I’ve been hearing that damn quote for 20 years now (I even had the soundtrack, which had all of Williams’ bits as Adrian Cronauer interspersed between the oldies), and to this day I have no idea what it means.

I just came back from a dance lesson (yes, I’m taking dance lessons… more on that later), and the one block walk from the dance studio — it’s over Hennessey’s bar! — to my apartment was just a murky mess. I’ve finally stopped sweating, about 30 minutes after coming back to my AC-bathed home (and that’s a victory in and of itself, considering how poorly the AC has worked in my building over the last few summers).

Anyway, my Andy Breckman profile has finally been posted at New Jersey Monthly’s web site, complete with the sidebar about Breckman’s writing staff at Monk (which was completely rewritten, save for the quotes I got. But the larger article is 95% how I wrote it, which is pretty satisfying to me, considering how long it is). It was a fun article to do, as I followed Breckman around for two days, from the show’s offices to the studios of WFMU, where he does a weekly radio show, to his home. The writers’ room experience was interesting, especially seeing how Andy and his crew break down the story of an episode into acts and scenes within those acts. And that’s before the script is even written.

Oh, and being in the writers’ room led me to another story lead, which I can’t talk about right now. But it’s an exciting one.

By the way, the line in the post’s title is from Good Morning, Vietnam. No, I don’t know what it means, either. But it was probably the last live-action movie where Robin Williams’ random improvised humor was actually funny. Unfortunately, it also led other filmmakers to make movies where Robin “winged it,” leading to pretty ugly results.

Ahh… it’s always good to announce new stuff of mine that pops up throughout the publishing universe. Why? Well, ego for one thing… I like seeing my name in print. But it also makes me feel good because I know a check with numbers and a dollar sign on it will soon be arriving in the mail. And, as much as I love writing, I love getting paid to write even more.

So, allow me to announce two new pieces:

1) With The Simpsons Movie coming out, I wrote a piece for Premiere.com that examines five other movies that came out while the TV shows they were based on were still running.

2) I will also have a huge profile of Monk creator Andy Breckman coming out in the August issue of New Jersey Monthly. No link yet, but I just wanted to mention it in case you wanted to run right out and get the magazine (which would be hard, since it’s not quite out yet. Should be any day, though).

Arghh. It’s amazing how when you get an idea to write an article about some band or actor, a major publication gets the idea at the same time and ends up doing an article on them.

For instance, right as I was gathering contacts in order to pitch an article about Future 86 somewhere (see the Jul. 11 post I did about them), this week’s New York Observer has a big story about them. Crap. That pretty much blows any chance I have of pitching a story about them to a local New York publication, at least for the time being.

This is the second time in a month that the Observer has crawled into my head: just when I thought it would be nice to do an article about Phil Donahue’s new documentary, I click onto the paper’s site and saw this. Double arghh.

Anyway, I will have some good stuff coming up on an interweb and newsstand near you, so stay tuned…