HBO Unveils Plans for Fictionalized Nikki Finke Comedy Series
For those who thought cinematized stasis had nowhere else to go after “My Left Foot,” in which a massively impaired Daniel Day-Lewis wriggled his toes for two hours and was rewarded with an Oscar, think again. Today, HollywoodReporter.com reveals that HBO has started developments on “Tilda,” a half-hour comedy series centering on the exploits of a ruthless Hollywood gossip blogger with an unmissable resemblance to Nikki Finke. Just so we are clear, that means HBO is going to be televising a show about blogging about television – a premise that makes me, anyway, feel abruptly in need of oxygen.
Finke, whom hardly anybody in Hollywood knows, but everyone fears, has made a name and a living for herself, in a handsome symmetry, by tearing down the names and lives of Hollywood’s ruling class. Of course, Finke’s ability to do this is a function of her prodigious, and at times prophetic, reportorial powers. Above all, Finke is renowned for breaking stories before the principals of these stories even know there is a story.
The HBO comedy is to be written and directed (the exact division of labor was not divulged) by Cynthia Mort and Bill Condon. Mort recently scored acclaim for her single-season HBO series, the divertingly randy “Love Me.” Condon, a bigger fish, has won an Oscar and directed “Dream Girls,” but is not yet famous enough to escape near-universal confusion, in the ears of the public, with the popular form of contraception.
Blogging, to put it gently, is not a very visually compelling activity. Aside from the twitching of fingers (most of them wracked by carpal-tunnel), there is no movement. What there is, on the other hand, is a lot of stillness. It requires tons – and by tons, I mean hour upon unrelieved hour – of staring, muted grumbling, and slouching. The slouching involved in blogging is, really, epic in scale. Then we come to the sensitive crux of the type of person who is attracted to blogging. As a species, the blogger tends to be sallow, bitter, and under-exercised. He couples a quivering narcissism with the husky conviction that the world at large is hurtfully neglecting him.
This, mind you, is the garden-variety blogger, the humdrum nine-to-fiver: not exactly screaming for the screen treatment. But Nikki Finki is no ordinary blogger. Even among bloggers, even by their occult standards, Finke is supremely invisible, immobile, and reclusive. Bitterness is hard to gauge, but when pressed for comment by Defamer about the HBO project today, Finke responded, with classic demureness, “Why are you so F*ING fascinated with me? Get a life.” Which gives you a ballpark idea.
The question, then, is what the hell should we expect to happen, frame-by-frame, in “Tilda”? Aside from a pretext for more chittering about the gold-plated depravities of the Hollywood Hills, what does Nikki Finke – a blogger so tediously committed to the tedium of blogging that even Gawker, blog among blogs, was obliged to her call her out for it — offer a screenwriter? A frowning session at the swivel-chair, followed by a frowning session at the microwave, succeeded by an even longer frown on the phone, capped and delivered to a climax by a return to the computer, where, frown still intact, she bangs out a few paragraphs of radioactive snark?
Then again, perhaps Finke’s onscreen avatar will be faithful to the mix of bodilessness and omniscience that has defined the Finke of real life – a sort of hybrid of Charlie Townsen and the Wizard of Oz, both everywhere and nowhere, supervising a drama from which she herself stays studiously absent. Needless to say, we bloggers await “Tilda” eagerly. The question is, should you?
