HOME / tv week: What we're watching.

Must-Read TVIs Dwight Schrute any good at blogging?

By Torie BoschPosted Thursday, Sept. 20, 2007, at 7:29 AM ET

Click here for more from the Fall TV issue.

(Continued from page 1)

RSS

Related in Slate

Emily Nussbaum raved about the pleasures of participatory TV, pre-character blogs. Michael Weiss offered advice on what not to name your blog. Kera Bolonik was relieved that NBC didn't bungle its adaptation the BBC version of The Office, and Liesl Schillinger wrote about the different versions of The Office around the world.

Not all these blogs are quite so flat, though. The one maintained by Barney, Neil Patrick Harris' celebrated womanizer on How I Met Your Mother, captures his tone perfectly. Barney is calculatedly and unapologetically skeezy, and the blog takes those traits and runs with them. "Captain Ahab chased an elusive white whale. Dan Marino, the Superbowl. What's my personal Everest? Identical twins," Barney explained last fall. His most recent post featured a chart demonstrating how different wingmen affect his ability to score.

Barney's blog grew organically—in the pilot episode, he vows upon seeing his (usually disheveled) friend Ted in a suit, "This is totally going into my blog!" It certainly helps that you can imagine Barney actually having a blog—and indeed can imagine him publishing inappropriate material on it. "He's in some ways the most natural to do a blog, because he's the one who offers up unsolicited advice at all times, and in some ways, that's what blogging is," says How I Met Your Mother executive producer Carter Bays.

By contrast, it's a stretch to believe that Creed from The Office could muster a blog. Creed's site also sprang from an on-screen joke—a funny one, in fact, but one the show's producers seem not to have gotten. In an episode last season, Creed asked his colleague Ryan to start a blog for him. Ryan opens a Microsoft Word document, types a URL across the top (www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts), and tells Creed his blog is up and running. On the show, Creed falls for it and starts typing up material that Ryan describes as shocking, "even for the Internet." In real life, however, Creed offers such gems as "Working in an office is fine, but I'd rather be a millionaire."

Fans who devote their downtime to their favorite shows deserve better. The model might well be Margene's blog. Her posts delve deep into the subject matter of the series—her struggle with polygamy, for instance, has been a consistent theme explored in ways that complement what's going on in the series. Late last year, the blog experimented with the form, going back in time to post flashback entries from 2003, before Margene married into the Henrickson family, giving readers inside information about her troubled relationship with her mother and her dates with a co-worker who later ended up on the show. In her recent signoff post, Margene dropped another a spoiler: The baby she's pregnant with is a girl.

Big Love's fans have followed the blog carefully and, in some cases, with alarming passion. When Margene posted her recent goodbye to blogging, she cited the cruelty of the Internet, noting that blogging was "making me feel worse about myself." The comments are indeed a bizarre mix of people questioning polygamy, professing their undying love for Margene, and occasionally snipping at the blog itself. But in the blogosphere, inflaming such passions is a good thing, and several commenters responded to Margene's signing off with pleas for her to return. One, from someone claiming to be a real-life polygamist, read: "Margene I'm so sorry people have been so hurtful to you. Nobody really understands our lifestyle unless they have lived it."

Now that's the kind of emotional involvement I want from my television.