Josh Schwartz Sucks

Posted at 3:28 PM Oct 15, 2008

By Andy Beckerman

Josh Schwartz, if you haven't been paying attention to the trades, is the wunderkind behind The O.C., Chuck and Gossip Girl, although a better Deutsche description might be "scheisechild." Or fuck it, let's hit France where Schwartz is known as "l'enfant de merde" and "Senator Mots Faux," or go to Poland where they refer to him as, "That Jew, you know, the one who produced two good seasons of The O.C. and then shit the bed by artificially introducing drama instead of letting it naturally grow out of the characters. Yes, yes, that one. The guy who continued to shit the bed with his next two shows until eventually the bed was just shit, which at that point, he began to shit the shit."

"Shoot the shit?"

"No idiot, shit the shit!"

"Sooooo, what's your problem with that American showrunner again?"

"Well, one thing that really bothers me about him is that he had a really wonderful idea, which was to take the standard teen morality drama and populate it with characters that actually had substance. I mean, they weren't Al Swearengen or Nate Fisher-caliber characters, but they were good. And the actors they chose! Peter Gallagher, Ben McKenzie, really top notch."

"So, what went wrong?"

"Wait, you impatient prick! I'm not done extolling its virtues! You see, it was also funny, and not just wacky or zany, which seems to be a network mandate for comedy, but organically funny. The characters made jokes and laughed at the things they said and weren't just belting out rote material for the invisible audience."

"Well then, Mr. Advocate, how did it turn into turds?"

"Well, as usual, the writers were afraid to allow the characters to grow, so eventually because everything was so static they had to start creating drama out of whole cloth in a half-assed way."

"Ah. And the next thing you know, the show's diving through a waterfall of cat urine."

"Precisely. But the worst thing of all is that all Schwartz has done since is take his Great Idea and split it in half, giving the 'funny' part to Chuck and the 'teen soap' part Gossip Girl. Like a monarch splitting up his kingdom, each child gets screwed. Also, the one episode I saw of Gossip Girl featured an unrepentant date rapist as one of the main characters, so that show can go fuck itself hard."

"Wow, you really need a girlfriend."

"Please help me."