Declan Cashin

Writing: the art of applying the ass to the seat

January Jones, Elizabeth Moss, and Christina Hendricks from Mad Men snapped at last night’s Emmys, where the show won its third consecutive award for Outstanding Drama Series.

The 62nd Primetime Emmy awards take place tonight in LA. Here are my predictions:

DRAMA:

Series:

Should Win: Mad Men

Will Win: Mad Men

Lead Actor:

Should Win: Kyle Chandler, Friday Night Lights

Will Win: Hugh Laurie, House

Lead Actress:

Should Win: Connie Britton, Friday Night Lights

Will Win: Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife

Supporting Actor:

Should Win: Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad

Will Win: Terry O’Quinn, Lost

Supporting Actress:

Should Win: Christina Hendricks, Mad Men

Will Win: Christina Hendricks, Mad Men

COMEDY:

Series:

Should Win: 30 Rock

Will Win: Modern Family

Lead Actor:

Should Win: Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory

Will Win: Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock

Lead Actress:

Should Win: Tina Fey, 30 Rock

Will Win: Edie Falco, Nurse Jackie

Supporting Actor:

Should Win: Neil Patrick Harris, How I Met Your Mother

Will Win: Ty Burrell, Modern Family

Supporting Actress:

Should Win: Jane Lynch, Glee

Will Win: Jane Lynch, Glee

My interview with Drew Barrymore in today’s Irish Examiner

Drew Barrymore has to burp. “Excuse me, I’m very gassy today,” she explains. She pauses to make a muffled, petite belch, following it up with a smile that suggests she’s more proud than embarrassed of her emission. “Now where were we?”

The 35-year-old had been in the middle of talking to Weekend about her latest movie Going the Distance, a very modern romantic comedy in which she plays Erin, a struggling tomboy journalist who attempts to conduct a 3,000-mile long distance relationship with her new beau, played by Barrymore’s own on-off (more of that anon) boyfriend Justin Long.

Perched on a large chair in Claridges in London, Barrymore is rocking a grungy look, mixing a vintage white maxi dress with a black, studded-collar leather jacket and simple black shoes. She’s wearing a large mood ring on one finger, and has a long earring dangling from just one ear. The star is also growing out her roots, so her usual blonde hair is mostly dark.

At first, she speaks very slowly and politely, going as far as to thank me for asking her a question, but she soon relaxes, and the real Drew – funny, opinionated, kooky, more than a little naughty – starts to shine through.

“I want to do something different with romantic comedies,” she says. “I’m more interested in making ones that are more reality-based than fantastical. I want to make films as a woman for women, but I’ve always wanted to appeal to men in my films too. I don’t like chick flicks. I like films that boys will think are cool. I always want to appeal to the male mentality because I have it very much alive inside of me.”

What does she mean by that? “I think my approach is very androgynous,” she explains. “I grew up as a tomboy. I was raised around a lot of boys, and gay men, and they gave me an edge where I didn’t always have to be the girly-girl. Don’t get me wrong: I’m very feminine. I’m inherently a woman. I think the worst thing I could try to do is be a man in a man’s world. Ever since I founded [her production company] Flower Films, I’ve never worn a power suit. I don’t want to be a man as a director.”

Indeed, Barrymore’s first foray into directing – the roller-derby comedy Whip It, released earlier this year – was an avowedly girl-power-infused project, and was very well received by critics to boot. Since starting Flower Films back in the mid-90s, Barrymore has produced many of her own movies, including Never Been Kissed, the Charlie’s Angels reboots, 50 First Dates and Donnie Darko. After 30 years in the business, and some 60 movies, her total box office takings to date are close to e2bn.

That Barrymore is such a Hollywood powerhouse today is testament to her remarkable resilience in rehabilitating her personal and professional lives throughout her early 20s. A child star at age six in Steven Spielberg’s ET, Barrymore – a member of a legendary, Oscar-laden acting dynasty – famously entered rehab for drug addiction at age 13, attempted suicide at age 14, became emancipated from her parents at age 15, and was declared washed-up by the time she came of voting age.

After getting her act together, in every sense of the word, Barrymore clawed her way back into showbiz with a startling cameo in the blockbuster horror movie Scream (1996). A star was reborn.

Going the Distance has attracted attention because it pairs up the star with rising comic actor Justin Long (32). They dated for over a year, and though the couple officially split in 2008, rumours abound that the two are still more than just good friends. Barrymore isn’t giving anything away on the status of their relationship today, but she does say about filming with Long: “I was happy to capitalize on the fact that we had such a great history, and knew each other so well.”

Barrymore adds that she’s “getting better” at managing her personal life and relationships (she already has two short-lived marriages under her belt). “I’m getting to know myself better, and spending very vast periods of time alone, whereas I think I was in a lot of consecutive relationships up until now,” she says. “It’s given me a great sense of personal awareness.”

Given the movie’s subject matter, the question of long distance relationships ultimately arises. “I’ve been in long distance relationships my whole life and I find that they take an extraordinary amount of work,” she reveals. “But I don’t think they’re much different from a relationship where you live across the street.

“I think the best relationships are the ones where you don’t feel as if you’re doing all the work, and the other person is never meeting you half way. I think that breeds a lonely, empty resentment. I don’t like guys who are half-assed about things, who leave you unsure of where you stand. I can’t do that. I like a guy who is bold and willing to put his feelings on the line.”

A key scene in the movie involves the two characters attempting phone sex to keep the heat in their bicoastal relationship. “I did attempt phone sex with a lover one time, but I feel like I could have been on the other end of a dinosaur,” she laughs. “I was so off in my own world. I just had to get lost in my own fantasy rather than do the banter back and forth. I don’t even know if he hung up or whatever. That helped me realise how good I am at creating my own fantasies.”

Barrymore also divulges what she would view as grand romantic gestures. “Just little surprises when it’s least expected, like some flowers or a special appearance,” she says. “I like engravings: that’s clearly something that the person has thought about.”

She’s on a roll. “I love letters,” she continues. “They’re such a beautiful way to convey your feelings, plus you can carry them with you in your bag or tuck them under your pillow. That’s far, far more romantic than a text message, which I think has become very lazy. It’s become almost like bad foreplay.

“I like guys who are into art, and going to revival movies. Someone who’ll take you for tacos that you eat on the sidewalk somewhere off the beaten track. I don’t need fancy; I just need clever.”

Actress, director, producer: Barrymore’s future options are more varied than at any other point in her career so far. So what’s next? “I’m starting a movie soon called Everybody Loves Whales, and I’m doing some writing for a book of my photography,” she says.

“I’ve worked really hard over the last five years to do lots of diverse things, like Whip It and Grey Gardens [a miniseries for which Barrymore won a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award]. I would just like to continue on a trajectory of scaring the ever-loving shit out of myself, and feeling like I have snakes in my stomach, and that I might die everyday at work because the stakes are so high.”

*Going the Distance is released September 10.

My feature about the new season 4 of Mad Men in Weekend magazine from today’s Irish Independent

Having reached a point in its creative life-cycle when most TV shows start going into decline, the 1960s-set drama Mad Men, which starts its fourth series next week, has arguably only begun to hit its stride.

When the latest season debuted in the US last month, some 7,000 fans crowded into New York’s Times Square in the sweltering summer heat – many decked out in their best 60s-influenced outfits – to watch the opening installments on specially-erected giant TV screens.

Such was the intensity of the buzz around the fourth season of the show that ‘The Guardian’ decreed that Mad Men was now a “cultural phenomenon”, on a par with The Sopranos or Sex and the City, which, in purely popular terms, is high praise indeed.

What’s most remarkable is that despite being one of the most critically adored dramas on TV, and collecting dozens of awards (including three Golden Globes and two consecutive Emmys for Best Drama; at the time of writing the show had 17 nominations for this year’s Emmys), Mad Men remains something of a cult, rather than a mainstream, hit.

Produced by, and aired on, the US cable channel Showtime, Mad Men’s ratings only ever average around 3m viewers. That, however, doesn’t take into account the amount of people who record it to watch later on and/or download it from iTunes or file-sharing websites.

As a matter of fact, the BBC felt compelled to start showing the latest series earlier than planned as a pre-emptive strike against (il)legal downloaders (at the time of writing, RTE is planning to screen the show in the New Year). It’s that very slow-burn nature of its success, perhaps, that accounts for the show’s enhanced visibility and popularity today.

For the uninitiated, Mad Men is set in the world of 1960s New York advertising, the show’s deliberately playful title serving as a reference to the Madison Avenue ad men at the core of the plot, as well as providing a telling insight into their growing psychological and existential despair.

On the surface level alone, the show is beautiful to watch, oozing classy and classic style in everything from its Hitchcockian opening credits to its 60s fashion and cultural references, not to mention its meticulous attention to period production detail.

The series is the brainchild of Matthew Weiner, a one-time staff scribe on The Sopranos, who originally wrote the pilot episode on spec, seemingly influenced by Billy Wilder’s classic movie The Apartment.

At the heart – for want of a better word – of the show is Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm), a dashing, successful, square-jawed exec with movie star looks but a murky past. For those still playing catch-up on the last few series, beware that there are several spoilers ahead.

As fans will know, season three ended with a brave, game-changing narrative leap that saw Don, Roger Sterling (John Slattery), Bert Cooper (Robert Morse) and stiff-upper-lip Brit Lane Pryce (played by Richard Harris’ son Jared) break away from the company to form a new advertising agency, with all four as equal partners.

Luckily for us, the quartet managed to poach some of the show’s most compelling characters to come with them on this new venture, including slimy, ruthless upstart Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), prim, ambitious secretary-cum-copywriter Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss), and office manager Joan Harris, played by the glorious Christina Hendricks, she of the most famous and scrutinised curves, bum, and bosom in all of showbiz.

It’s just the sort of creative shake-up that the show needed entering its fourth year, and one, on the evidence of the first five new episodes aired in the US thus far, that continues to reap benefits in terms of the narrative arc and character dynamics.

The action has moved forward a year from the sombre timeline of series three, where JFK’s assassination cast a long shadow over the world of these characters. It’s now November 1964: America is caught up in Beatles-mania; President Lyndon Johnson has just signed the Civil Rights Act and, at the same time, is escalating the number of US troops in Vietnam; the cigarette industry – the life-blood of the advertising economy – is coming under more pressure to be open about the addictive and dangerous nature of nicotine; and the counter-cultural revolution is gaining traction in mainstream American life.

Aside from the professional re-jig, the other major storyline that needs to be picked up from series three is Don’s divorce from his young wife Betty (played by January Jones), a woman whose glacial, Grace Kelly-esque blonde beauty has barely concealed the piecemeal nervous breakdown smoldering away inside her.

As series four kicks off, Betty has re-married another older man, Henry Francis, and is struggling to adjust to her new life. Don himself seems to be slowly coming apart at the seams; rather than living the high-life of a swinging bachelor, he seems to be drowning ever more in the depths of self-loathing.

Meanwhile, Betty and Don seem to have come to a chilly rapprochement concerning the welfare of their two children, Bobby (Jared Gilmore) and doesn’t-miss-a-trick Sally (played by the wonderfully instinctive child actress Kiernan Shipka). Indeed, one of Mad Men’s guiltiest pleasures is watching the dreadful parenting of the self-involved Betty and, going on what we see in the first episode, Betty is still in no fear of winning any Mother of the Year prizes.

As always, Mad Men uses its characters – especially the women – as prisms through which to explore the issues and fissures that we now know will convulse American society in the 1960s: namely sexuality, feminism, politics, and race.

The beauty of the show has always been that it has the benefit of (some) historical distance to approach those themes with a knowing, deftly ironic wink of the eye. For instance, the ad men chain-smoke indoors, while every meeting is lubricated by copious amounts of whiskey, scotch and martini, regardless of the time of day.

Most prominently, the sexism shown towards the female characters is staggering, though that’s beginning to change as the series progresses, reflecting the advances of feminism in wider society at the time.

For this reason, the show’s female characters have always been the most interesting: season two and three, in many ways, were all about Betty, Peggy and Joan, three archetypes of womanhood that continue to provide Mad Men with its soul.

True to form, season four looks set to create even more turmoil and drama for its leading ladies: Peggy, sporting a new fringe, becomes more involved with New York’s underground culture (there’s even the suggestion of a lesbian dalliance), while Joan seems destined for further heartbreak as her doctor husband (and, let us remember, rapist) gears up to ship off to Vietnam.

Whatever lies in store, the dearth of decent TV dramas of late, coupled with Mad Men’s confident recalibration of its artistic mojo, means that there is no better time to become immersed in a show that is, in the words of its 2007 Peabody Award citation, “as sharp as the creases in the two button suits, as precise as a narrow-knotted necktie, and as wry as the rye on the bar.”

*Mad Men series 4 starts on BBC4 on September 8.

The Daily Beast has a good interview with Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, the sublime stars of what has to be the most criminally under-appreciated show on TV, Friday Night Lights. The pair are nominated – for the first time (for shame TV Academy) – for Lead Actor and Actress at the Emmys this Sunday night.

What do you mean you don’t watch FNL? Trust me: it’s not even about football. It’s about real life, and real, believable characters that you grow to love and care about so, so deeply.  I cry on average of three times per episode. It is, quite simply, one of the greatest artistic achievements in the history of dramatic American television.

In fact, the LA Times went further than that recently by arguing – convincingly in my opinion – that FNL “may be the best dramatic series in the history of television. That’s right: history.”

My Nightwatch column from Day and Night in today’s Irish Independent

Not for the first time in my life have I found cause to ask the question: WWMD? (What Would Madonna Do?) Or perhaps more accurately: WWMSD? (What Would Madonna’s Staff Do?)

You may have noticed a few weeks back that Her Madgesty was served with a noise abatement notice for a late-night karaoke party held in her €8m London home. La Ciccone herself wasn’t present — or so we’re told anyway — but rather the soiree was the work of her entourage.

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Lego Milhouse!

The most bizarre sex ed videos…watch here

If Facebook can have a movie about its origins, then why not Google? Read here

Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up? From today’s New York Times.