Greenwich Citizen Drops the Ball

November 10th, 2008 Charles
greenwich-citizen-drops-the-ball
“All of the girls in my class said that they would never watch Winners” -Sean, circa June 2006 *

“You don’t dumb down your art just because a few assholes can’t see the Monet for more than a bunch of dots.” Me, in response to Sean.

One of the planned scenes last season involved a little kid overhearing Mark swearing up a storm while working at the video store.  We were having a lot of trouble casting the role so I resorted to asking people I knew if they would offer up their children.  As luck would have it one guy that I talked to had a daughter who was getting into acting and said that he would help us out, just,”what was the show about?”

I told him nothing different from what I’ve said elsewhere, and even went as far as to tell him what the episode was about [the anal sex episode].  Not surprisingly he decided it would be in his daughter’s best professional interest if she didn’t take the role.

In May of this year Anne W. Semmes of The Greenwich Citizen interviewed Jon and Sean about the show.  At the time, and even up through last week I had no intention of posting what she wrote, but a recent conversation with the same guy who didn’t want his daughter to do the show helped me intellectualize what I hated about the article.

A couple weeks ago I saw the guy again and we got to talking about DWI’s, his daughter, tipping bartenders, and Winners. When he told me he never got around to seeing the show I pulled out a laptop and showed him a few of the clips that we posted about each character.  His response:

“Oh I get it.  It’s like real life.  Every guy who has lived through his twenties has had friends just like that.  That’s a good idea nobody has ever done a show like that before.  Shit, I wish I knew that before.  You have any roles for my daughter?”

Clearly the subject matter of our show doesn’t lend itself to everyone. Despite that, we’ve always made it our goal to be completely honest with what we wanted to portray without worrying about who would be put off.  In that regard I think we’ve accomplished our goal.  And for that reason I wouldn’t have cared if Anne W. Semmes said our show sucks, called us misogynists, smut peddlers, or losers, at least then she would be writing A) in her honest voice, and B) about us, as opposed to whatever other agenda she had when conducting the interview.

Sure she actually did bother herself to talk about the show, but Winners just served as the framework for her to drape her hangups on. Anne seemed more concerned with waxing philosophical about the name of our production company, and stressing over loaded statistics about the rate of STDs amongst teenagers then, I don’t know, actually doing any real reporting about the show.

Jon’s original response to how the interview went was something along the lines of, “She asked all the generic questions, then started to space out and talk about her own thoughts before going on and on about sexually transmitted diseases.”  He couldn’t have been more right. She actually misquotes Jon as describing all of us as, “not too successful at anything.” This is only after she takes it upon herself to say that we hired actors to portray ourselves and that they are, “five guys who don’t exactly fit the profile of upwardly mobile Greenwich grads.”  Not only is this completely wrong, it was already covered by a better journalist (who was in college at the time of writing her article.)

I’m not surprised about the content of the article given the author’s affinity for hearing her own voice, even a soldier in uniform would have trouble keeping a straight face while she talks.

I’ll leave on one final quote from her article, but before I do I want you to fill in this blank: The web address for the Winners website is http://www._______________.com.

“Saks, 24, is the writer of the WinnersSeries.com“-Anne W. Semmes

Chances are you filled in the blank correctly, and you aren’t even getting paid to know that.

*Lots of girls watch Winners.

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