the day after part two, electric boogaloo

After a lifetime of watching myself on TV and movies, I’ve developed the ability to disconnect myself from the person I’m looking at on the screen. It hasn’t been easy, and I know that I’m more critical of myself than anyone else in the world, but it’s ended up being a particularly useful skill so I can grow as an actor, and be objectively critical of my work.

When I watched The Wil Wheaton Project Episode 2: Electric Boogaloo last night, I objectively liked what I saw. I thought my energy was right where I wanted it to be all along, I thought the editing made the entire show feel less frenetic, and I thought the dumb little asides I improvised when we taped the show mostly worked. I could tell that I wasn’t afraid to have fun, to take my time, to let the audience come to me, and to trust the material we had worked out. In short, I think it worked. I don’t know what the ratings are (but I do know that, once DVR numbers were counted for our first episode, we improved dramatically over our premiere last week. I also know that each repeat had more viewers than the last, and we had the fastest and most significant audience growth in the history of unscripted programming on the network. That’s pretty awesome.)

I haven’t seen any reviews, but going by my admittedly skewed Twitter sampling, the audience feels the same way that I did, and that’s reassuring because it tells me that my instincts were right.

A few notes on this particular episode:

I thought it would be funny to try the funky 70s porn music under Oberyn Martell dancing around The Mountain, but the thing we went with was much funnier to all of us.
As a fan of Orphan Black, I had a joke about it not being a good week for characters I like keeping their heads intact, with a tag about Donnie having to call the Wolf. One other person in the room got that joke, and we decided that it was a “Wil% joke”, which is a play on the “5% joke”, meaning that only 5% of the audience gets it.
John Malkovich is the gift that keeps on giving.
Hannibal is so fucking weird, I just don’t even know what to say about it anymore.
Penny Dreadful is getting so good, it’s going to be hard to keep finding ways to do jokes for it.
I was concerned that our dumb game show with Felicia Day may not work, but I think I was wrong. The writers did a great job picking clips, and the editors did a great job putting that whole thing together. The Wilhelm Scream was my idea.
I loved the Knockbusters idea from the moment it was pitched, and the hardest part of it for us was figuring out which joke we were going to do for each clip. That Empire of the Apes thing was so outrageously bad, and the … acting? … in the not-Batman thing was so painful, we had to work really hard to find a joke that wasn’t just mean. At one point, we considered a commentary on everything that was ridiculous in it, and it just got so long, we pulled out that one thing about the scope.
In general, I was very happy with the pace and the energy. I expect that we’ll improve in some way from week to week as we get more comfortable and settle into the right rhythm for what we’re doing.

Like last week, I’ll be sharing some clips from the show. We’re starting with this silly thing, from our newest sponsor:

We are aware that DVRs think every episode is a new episode. We’ve informed the network, and I hope that they’ll fix that problem as soon as possible. I know the show is on Hulu, but not Hulu Plus. That’s out of my hands, and I hate it. The best I think you can do is email Syfy and Hulu so they know that you want it on Plus. I know that a lot of you want to see it on iTunes or Amazon VOD, and I have no idea how that licensing works, or if the people who make those decisions will put it there.

What I do know is that the thing that helps us the most, the thing that makes it most likely that we’ll get picked up after 12, is to watch it on cable when it airs. I know that a huge part of the audience doesn’t watch TV that way, but until networks and advertisers stop thinking that’s the way that matters the most, it’s what we have.

But, as I’ve said before, the most important thing to me is that you watch and enjoy the show, so … there.

at the break of day

I went to sleep around 9pm last night, because my alarm was set for 5:15 this morning. I fell asleep quickly, and slept straight through the night, with Marlowe curled up next to my left hip, and our cat, Luna, tucked into my neck.

I slept soundly, until I woke in a panic and saw that the clock said 7:34am. Oh shit I slept through my alarm! I’m supposed to be doing radio interviews! Shit! Shit! Shit!

I jumped out of bed, and ran into the kitchen, disoriented and trying to find my phone, so I could call the number … the number! I can’t remember the number!

I looked around for my laptop, and then realized that not only was it not in my kitchen, I wasn’t in my kitchen, either. Oh, I was in a kitchen, and I suppose it was mine, but I hadn’t been in this kitchen since I was a little boy and we lived in Sunland.

I sat up in bed. It was just a dream. Thank god. I looked at the clock, saw that it was 3 something in the morning, and put my head back onto my pillow. I exhaled as much of the memory of panicked adrenaline as I could, and closed my eyes. Luna began to purr and nuzzled her head back into me.

When the alarm went off, it was still dark. I got out of bed and walked out into my living room, where I saw my dad. I don’t remember what he said, but it was pretty mean for some reason.

I woke up again. It was now 4 something in the morning. Oh, come on…

I would dream at least three more times that I somehow overslept or couldn’t find my number to call or — in one case — was at an amusement park with no payphones for some reason. When my alarm finally did go off, for real, I felt like I was drunk and hadn’t slept at all for several days.

None of the animals moved when I got out of bed. Anne rolled over to one side and muttered something in her sleep as I gently closed our bedroom door behind myself and headed to our actual kitchen to begin the coffee ritual.

Thirty minutes later, I got on the phone and started a three hour radio press tour, working my way Westward across the country to hit morning drive time radio all over America, to talk about The Wil Wheaton Project (TONIGHT AT TEN ON SYFY, Y’ALL), The Big Bang Theory, Tabletop, and Zen And The Art of Being Wil Wheaton. I did fourteen interviews over the three hours, with one five minute break. I drank three cups of coffee, just enough to prevent me from taking a nap — at 830 in the morning — after I was finished.

I live a charmed life.

I am inherently skeptical of media, including drive-time radio, so I told the network that I wouldn’t talk to shock jocks, I wouldn’t talk to the right-wing screamers (not that they’d be interested in me, but I wanted to have all my bases covered) and I wanted to be very clear ahead of time that if they wanted me to make fun of people like me who love the things I do, I wouldn’t be talking with them. I guess everyone got the memo, because with the exception of one 60-second bit on one station (that I hope will be cut if and when the DJs will realize it probably made them come off like dicks after nearly 10 minutes of really nice conversation), I really enjoyed myself.

A few moments after I finished my last interview, I heard our bedroom door open on the other side of the house, followed by the familiar sounds of my dogs waking up and walking around. Marlowe ran into my office, tail wagging like crazy, and jumped her front paws onto my lap. Anne followed, shortly after.

“How did your interviews go?” She said, sleepily.

I told her, and gently pushed Marlowe off of my lap. She’s cute and all, but jumping up uninvited is not okay in Castle Wheaton.

“That’s good,” she said. “Sorry the one thing wasn’t awesome.”

“It’s okay. 60 seconds out of three hours is a really great batting average, and I think that by sincerely and enthusiastically answering the questions they asked as a set up to making fun of me and people like me, I managed to call them out on the premise of their thing without just saying, ‘you guys, just stop. This isn’t cool.'”

“Maybe they’ll cut it out before they air it,” she said.

“I hope so.”

Marlowe sat quietly and patiently at my side, eyes huge, tail wagging.

“Okay, Marlowe,” I said, tapping her on the shoulder. She leaned into me as I stood up. “Do you want your breakfast?” She ran into the kitchen so fast I could see the red shift.

“I’m proud of myself,” I said, “I’ve accomplished more before 9 am than I usually accomplish in a whole day!”

In the kitchen, Riley barked.

“But apparently not enough,” I said. I kissed Anne on the cheek as I passed her and went out to the kitchen to actually start my day.

If you want to read a really nice article about me, geek culture, and The Wil Wheaton Project, Fast Company got it right.

the day after

I took two chickens out of the smoker and carried them into the kitchen, where Anne was mixing up some potato salad and heating a couple cans of baked beans. Ryan and his girlfriend walked into the house, with Nolan shortly after them.

“Are you excited?” Anne asked me.

“I … guess? Not really.” I began to carve the chickens for our dinner.

“Why not?”

“The excited part is when I’m on the stage in front of the audience, everything else is various levels of anxiety while I wait.” My incredibly sharp knife slipped in my hand and cut my finger. “Ow! Shit!”

My finger began to bleed, and I wrapped a towel around it.

“Okay, so … this is going to take a few more minutes before it’s ready,” I said.

A few minutes later, we all sat down to eat dinner, while we waited for the first episode of The Wil Wheaton Project to come on.

As Heroes of Cosplay ended and little versions of me popped up on the screen reminding people to stay tuned for my stupid face, I turned to Anne. “Okay, I just got excited.”

I did a little dance when the show started, and enjoyed myself through the entire thing. My kids thought it was really funny, and my son’s girlfriend, who had never seen any of it at all, told me that she loved it. “It would have been very awkward if I hadn’t,” she told me.

We celebrated with some ice cream cones, the kids left, and Anne and I celebrated with some champagne.

Before I went to bed, I looked at Twitter, prepared for people to hate it, and me, but most everyone seemed to like the show, which made me feel good.

When I woke up this morning, I looked at the news for reviews, and found that most places liked it (we got a B from the AV Club, which is like an A+ anywhere else), some really didn’t, and some were sort of “meh” on the whole thing. It’s about what I expected, but I wasn’t expecting the reviewers who didn’t like it to complain that I wasn’t mean or snarky enough. It’s disheartening that people would tune into a show expecting and hoping for someone to be mean, but if that’s what they want, this isn’t the show for them.

Some of the feedback was really useful, and lined up with my own thoughts: My energy at the beginning of the show was way too high (I wanted to keep it lower and more like myself, but I was directed to be BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER, so I’m trusting my instincts and being more myself next week), and the audio was weird in places. Some people complained about a laugh track that doesn’t exist (we shoot in a small stage with a full audience that’s very loud, which is good), but overall, the feedback was generally positive.

The biggest disappointment for me is our ratings numbers. They were not as good as I’d hoped, and I don’t know why. Though we did better than anything that’s been in our time slot before, we lost about half the audience that was watching Heroes of Cosplay, which surprised me. People who understand that stuff better than I do told me not to worry, because shows like ours usually start out with a small audience that grows, as word of mouth spreads. I hope they’re right. There’s also something called “Live +3” which is the total ratings number that includes people who watch the show on their DVR in the three days after the show first airs, and we expect those numbers to grow.

This whole ratings thing seems outdated and irrelevant to me, because it doesn’t take into account cord-cutters, who I know are a significant part of the audience, and I guess the fact that two different topics associated with our show were trending on Twitter doesn’t count for anything, either. What this says to me is that the industry needs to rethink how it scores things, and networks especially need to find ways to get their programming to people the way those people want to see it, whether that’s on demand, on a site like Hulu +, on Apple TV, Google Play, or whatever else the damn kids today are into. There’s a very real chance that I won’t get to do more than 12 episodes of this show because so many people who want to watch it don’t subscribe to cable, and that makes me really sad.

Overall, though, the things that I had a hand in, and the things I could control from a creative point of view, seemed to land on the majority of the audience in a good way. People expecting me to be a dick.0 didn’t like it, and that’s totally fine with me. Now that I’ve had my brief moment of excitement (and it was genuinely awesome to watch the show with my family, and find out from thousands of people on Twitter that they liked it), I’m back to the focus and varying levels of anxiety that come with getting ready for the next one.

Outtakes of me and Chris Hardwick

On tonight’s Wil Wheaton Project, my friend Chris Hardwick came by to do something really silly and funny. I don’t want to give away the joke, because I think it’s a good one, but here are some outtakes that don’t give anything away:

I’m grateful to my network for giving me permission to do this, and I hope that it’s only the beginning of me getting to share all sorts of stuff from the show that doesn’t make it into the final cut.

OBLIGATORY ALL-CAPS REMINDER THAT THE WIL WHEATON PROJECT PREMIERES IN TWO AND A HALF HOURS ON SYFY.

Today, we shoot our first episode of The Wil Wheaton Project

In a few hours, I’ll begin recording the first episode of The Wil Wheaton Project. We’ve been working on it for a very long time, and it is a surreal feeling to know that in about 30 hours, my stupid face is going to be a moderately big deal for twenty-one and a half minutes on a major cable network.

I have the same feeling I have before I publish a book, or after I wrap a TV show: I’ve done the best I can to make something I’m proud of, that I think other people will like, but it’s pretty much out of my hands the second we push the beautiful, shiny button … the jolly, candy-like button. Like everything I do as an artist, the best I can hope for is that I don’t get hit by lightning on my way out of the studio. Oh, and that the stuff I think is entertaining and informative lands on the audience the same way.

I know a lot of you reading this don’t subscribe to cable or satellite, and as far as I know, it will be online at Syfy.com and probably Hulu and Hulu+, but I’m not sure how soon after it airs. I also think it’s available as a subscription in iTunes. I know that, because of a number of factors that are completely out of my control, it’s only available in the United States. Totally unrelated to that, I wonder if any of you non-American viewers have ever heard of VPN services like unblock-us.

So I really want everyone in the world to see my show, because I’m super proud of it and I think a lot of you will enjoy it. If you have to use some possibly questionable means to see it, I’m not going to try to stop you. BUT — if you can watch it in some way that the network can score (on broadcast or via one of the legally-supported websites), please do that, because the more people who watch it in a way the network can count, the more likely it is they will order a full season of the show.

This is a big day for me. Thank you to everyone who has helped make it possible.