The TV Set

"Truthfully, 'original' scares me a little... you don't want to be too original."

A wonderful little film, The TV Set is the new movie from Jake Kasdan (Zero Effect, Orange County). In this story, we follow a writer and his ongoing struggle to bring his TV pilot from script to screen, all the while trying to keep his original vision for the material intact. Along the way, he deals with the incredibly stupid head of the network (Sigourney Weaver), an inept TV director, and an unbelievably over-the-top actor who he's forced to hire for the show.

The TV Set clip 1

Truth be told, the film is really a thinly-veiled account of the trials and tribulations that Kasdan and company went through bringing Freaks and Geeks to NBC in 1999, albeit with the situations reversed - the network gave very little input into the creation of the show, but after it was completed, they were horrified (frequently, notes given to them by the network were blatantly ignored).

The TV Set clip 2

Kasdan even lampoons the "testing" process, which he has probably endured dozens of times through all of his TV work.

The TV Set clip 3

Kasdan knows his subject well, and in my opinion, this goes down with Living in Oblivion as one of the best films about filmmaking ever made. Too often, a film which incorporates filmmaking into its plot loses sight of the characters and tone among everything else going on. Not in this film - the characters are intriguing and the sharp black humor shines right through.