In a review the Sarah Jane Adventures, Tod Emko at UGO writes:
So, children’s show, yes. Has young teens in it, yes. Yet, a show you
may actually want to watch, despite your probable hatred for Wil
Wheaton-type characters through the years. It’s definitely one of the
most intelligent shows for kids you’ll ever see, and if you can’t get
enough of the Doctor’s universe, this will give you a decent fix.
Well. Glad he liked the show, and is encouraging teenagers to watch intelligent programming; we certainly need more of that to act as a counterbalance on Hanna Montana. But I feel compelled to point something out that is apparently lost on Tod Emko-like writers: I didn’t invent that type of character. I just played one of them for a few seasons. Twenty years ago. Using my name as a pejorative in this case isn’t just profoundly offensive to me, it’s profoundly inaccurate.
Despite my probable hatred of Tod Emko-like writers through the years, though, I’m totally going to do Tod Emko-like writers a solid here: Hey guys! Send your resumes to Entertainment Weekly; they love your style.
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tweeb.
I love wil wheaton type characters. He’s a great Dad and writer.
snoogans.
Sometimes I think these idiots forget that they’re writing about people. And aside from any personal offense taken at the inaccurate insult, it’s just lazy writing.
Indeed. He could at least have written “Wesley Crusher-type characters”. After all, you did play other parts back then, but “Tod” probably didn’t see Stand By Me.
You didn’t just play one of those characters. You played the most memorable character of that type in the world. So memorable that even though he was only on the air a few seasons, twenty years ago, he is still the first one anyone thinks of.
As a fellow actor, (whose characters are usually forgotten before intermission,) I have to say that is a marvelous achievement.
(Yes, journalists are lazy. Yes, I am defending another lazy journalist. But it’s more important to point out the good than the bad.)
Enjoy the characters or not, even though there are some parallels between Luke in SJA and Wesley from ST:TNG (both extraordinarily smart and innocent), the generalization isn’t really a good fit here anyway. Tod must be one of those “not my MY bridge” types. :p
That was meant to be “not on MY bridge”. Man, I have to learn to hit “preview” first. Sorry. My bad. I’ll go now.
Dude, how totally lame of him! I think he needs a “Klingon Convention Trauma” shirt sent to him so he can understand the difference between character and actor. And yeah, I was going to wax poetic about what a “Wil Wheaton” type is but Wendy May said it first and said it best. Rock on with your awesome self.
What a douche.
The only way that passage makes any sense to me is with the use of several ellipses:
“So … Wil Wheaton … [is] definitely one of the most intelligent [dudes] … you’ll ever see … and if you can’t get enough of the Doctor’s universe, this will give you a decent fix.”
Yeah. I like the revision better.
It’d be pretty amusing if someone sent ol’ Tod a Wil Wheaton Says “Don’t be a Dick” t-shirt. Anonymously of course. He’d probably wonder about that for a long time.
Barely on topic here…
The last Torchwood I watched brought tears to my eyes. It was the one that looked at the people who were pulled through the rift and what happened to them.
Contrasting that with the Doctor’s cavalier, happy-go-lucky attitude, the fact that he needs the rift to refuel the TARDIS, and the probability that he could fix the rift if he really wanted to, make the Doctor seem like the supreme universal a-hole.
Ahh the oblivious never cease to amaze me. What a tweeter.
What. A. Tool.
(Him, not you. Obviously.)
Burst into flames, Tod Emko, burst into effing flames.
I have never understood why some journalists think it’s their duty to be the ultimate douche-bag. Is there some sort of prize that they get?
As a general rule, profoundly inaccurate and profoundly offensive tend to go hand in hand. The offense is usually due to the fact that the statement being made is just plain wrong.
In this case, it’s obvious the author was doing some very stupid short-cut thinking. No, Wil Wheaton is not an annoying little “know it all” who has a talent for stating the obvious that the adults around him (due to really bad writing) fail to see.
That was a character called Wesley who (all together now) doesn’t really exist.
I admit to having made the same mistake myself before finding the original WWDdN. I had a very low opinion of an actor who had played a badly written part way back when. Of course that was three WIl Wheaton books and countless blog posts ago, so I have learned a thing or two since then. The author of the piece doesn’t have any excuse outside of intellectual laziness.
Don’t worry Wil, in another 20 years it will be “Hayden Christensen-type characters”
I’ll take a Wil Wheaton type character over a Tod Emko type character any day of the week, baby!
One more thing… it’s Hannah Montana. Sorry, my 7 year old daughter totally loves that’s show, along with some TNG, too.
I like Tim’s idea of sending Tod a “Wil says” T-shirt. In the name of poetic justice and “all that rot.” /british accent
Everybody else has already said it, but at the risk of being redundant: I’ll take a Wil-Wheaton-type character any day. Hoping to have “Happiest Days” in my mailbox within the next week! :o)
RRRRRRRRRRR. You’d think after all the wonderful work you’ve done over the last few years, journalists would’ve gotten a clue. Obviously not.
On-topic, I’m still pinching myself that Doctor Who is as incredibly popular as it is in the UK. 10 years ago the series was my guilty pleasure – now it seems almost everyone in the UK is loving this show. And yeah, I wish there were more Children’s TV like Sarah Jane Adventures.
I definitely agree to sending Tod Emko a “Wil says” t-shirt.
I *heart* Wil-Wheaton-type characters.
Hey, there no such thing as bad publicity, right? Or, even better: the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Mr. Wilde was on to something 🙂
whut???
wil wheaton type characters are the best!! me and all the other cool smart girls in school were way on the wheaton team. (this does, however, predate star trek. i’ve actually never seen it. but i’m sure it’s just as cool.)
i specifically remember jenny smith, the most beautiful, athletic, smart, popular girl at school declaring her mad crush on wil wheaton during lunch.
and doesn’t this dude know – the geeks end up with the hot smart chicks. i mean, cmon. has he seen your wife??
so… the characters in “the Sarah Jane Adventures” are funny, and down to earth, insightful, and to top it off, can write books too?
must be a pretty good show, eh?
😉
~s~
I’m always amazed by what reviewers will say about people. I’ve been reading Kevin Smith’s “My Boring-Ass Life”, and he seems to sum up the sentiment perfectly in there. If you don’t like the stuff that the person is doing, that’s fine, everyone has their opinion. However, don’t try to pass of factual inaccuracies as the truth, and don’t belittle the people you don’t agree with.
For the record, characters like the real Wil Wheaton make the world a great place to be. 🙂
It never ceases to amaze me that people confuse characters with the actors who portray them.
Having said that, I loved (and still love) Wesley Crusher – perhaps because I am (and was in 1987) a mother and looked at the character from the perspective of a mother. I understand that he might have annoyed fellow teens but I always thought he was a very nice character with great depth.
Since I’ve spent some time here, I have also come to greatly appreciate Wil Wheaton the person (or at least his writing – I am awaiting the arrival of 2 of his books in the mail as we speak).
Great idea with the t-shirt – although it would undoubtedly confuse the poor fellow.
*heavy sigh* I have missed Sarah Jane. I grew up in the time where you only got 3 VHF channels and then UHF – where you had to have the rabbit ears and the circular wire to catch the briefest glimpse of either – when cable just came out, but was too expensive for a single mother. There was no internet, there was no cable, there was only ABC, CBS, NBC and grainy PBS. I grew up treasuring every sci-fi moment I could snatch from the television, clogged with mindless sitcoms and movies of the week. We watched alot of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Buck Rogers when Dad was still around, but after the split – all Mom watched was Threes company and other uninspired gorp that would send my mind into torpor. Having Doctor Who surface on PBS for an hour and a half on Sunday afternoons was amazing, and you have NO idea just what happy hell I had to endure just to get left alone for that hour and a half – having to run and do stupid unnecessary errands during the middle of the show because Mom thought it was a boy’s show and would turn me lesbian. As If!
Tom Baker was my first love. I wanted to be Leela, to be Sarah Jane, to be Nyssa, or Teegan, to save Adrick. I still do, even now. When there was no Doctor Who, I read copiusly, compulsively, devouring as much Sci Fi as our school library held, and then on to the public library when those books ran thin. TNG was proof that there were other people like me in the world who still wanted to see something intelligent on television, besides Nature Documentaries. I cannot believe what changes the world has wrought. Cable is almost everywhere – or you can get your signal sent to you from a satellite…from space! There are hundreds of channels now, we have the internet, we can stream shows we want over cable into personal home computers, we have shows like Lost, and Heroes, there are THREE flavors of Doctor Who now (Sarah Jane, Doctor Who, Torchwood), we can watch all the Star Trek or whatever show we want, buy the whole collection on DVD, there are entire networks set apart specifically for encouraging the imaginations of Sci Fi fans. We have the Matrix Trilogy. We revamped Star Wars and added some pretty awful prequels. We have the Lord of the Rings movies, we have the Terminator movies – and now a pretty awesome Terminator TV series. Battlestar Galactica has come back from the past. We have Firefly, and Buffy, and Angel.
Wesley Crusher is part of what gave me hope, when the rest of the entertainment industry wanted to force feed me Urkel. That TNG writers could not intelligently write child parts is irrelevant. The truth is that actor who played Wesley Crusher is cool, intelligent, who loves comics and science fiction, who is a wonderful writer, a great dad, and geek like me seriously rocks. Tod Emko is an uninspired dick who cannot seperate character from actor. I have never heard of Tod Emko before today. And as I sit here, in the wee morning hours, in the dark, at work, doing technical support on satellite data uplink technology – technology in space! – I can tell you that your words mean far more. Tod Emko can DIAF. Seriously.
Is Tod Emko a real person, or just “OK me dot” backwards, kind of a Dennis-Pennis-type self-put-down?
I’ve been a reviewer of art and entertainment things for local rags over the years and here are a couple of things I know: It’s much easier to write clever negative reviews than clever positive ones. And when clever sentences become more important to you than the substance of whatever you are reviewing (even if it is light and pulpy entertainment), your brain gets lazy and your writing starts racking up the stupid. It is so easy to be stupid!
I heart Wesley Crusher. And I’d happily watch a Wil Wheaton character. There aren’t enough reflective, self-proclaimed geek writers who also clearly relish being a dad and husband out there, in my opinion.
What a schmuck. He probably thinks casual spite makes him a member of the literati.
As a working journalist, I would like to apologize for Mr. Emko. See, there’s a bit of cool cache afforded to journalists whose style tends towards the “edgy.” And edgy usually includes what I like to call “dickbag” writing, attacking people unnecessarily. It’s an embarrassment to the rest of us, and it makes our jobs that much harder because it perpetuates the stereotype that we’re all jaded a-holes who would just as soon blast everyone in our sights. Mr. Emko has obviously paid little to no attention to the actual work you’ve done, Wil, and instead has decided to go with the easiest thread. Lazy journalism, indeed.
Wil Says:
Don’t Be a Tod Emko.
Maybe he means a Richard Burns-type character or a Walter-type character (which was, incidentally, awesome). Certainly he didn’t mean a Wesley Crusher-type character 😉
At any rate, it is unforgivable that a supposed journalist can’t separate an actor from his role.
I shall send my level 70 shadow priest after TodEmko.
Problem solved.
I admit that Wesley was one of the most annoying characters, from day one. not YOUR fault just how writers have kids talk, something that there NEEDS to be a convention on to get it right (TSJA IS getting it mostly right)
That said, as soon as you got good writers, your character (and you as well) were able to shine.
Of course he should have said early Wesley etc.
I think Ill send him an email and just ask him to at least amend it
Thanks to my er… *cough* connections, I spent all of Sunday afternoon watching the entire first season of Sarah Jane, and I have to day, it was quite delightful!
It’s a pity that Mr. Emko apparently fails to see the enjoyment of watching intelligent characters battling dudes in rubber alien suits.
I actually wrote up a nice, long diatribe warning people about being able to tell the actor apart from the character a few weeks ago when I saw the fallout from a very annoying character on the show Greek. Mainly because I was seeing people go overboard at how bad Lizzi was and started bad-mouthing the actress who played her. And as a fan of hers, I pretty much had to defend her, because the character was written, directed, and acted to be hated by the fandom. Thus, Lizzi was done very, very well.
I havent watched any children’s shows in recent years, but I wonder if this is is like the Alex Mack for the modern generation of kids/teens. Though I may have liked the show more due to my probable love for Meredith Bishop.
Being something of a “Wil Wheaton-type character” myself growing up (though a little more people-smart and a lot less tachyon-smart than Wesley), I also am profoundly offended by that comment.
Oh well. At least it got your name in the press again. 🙂
Seriously, calm down guys. Who cares what smug Tod Emko thinks anyway. Wil’s a cool cat regardless of what this cat thinks.
I thought, and still think, ST:TNG was better with Wesley Crusher (aka Wil Wheaton ;D) than without. But you’ve done very well since, so… good on you!