The Mythic Backstory

Though we covered plenty during this week from covering the evolution of the television device to the evolution of tv shows in the 80s through another beautiful documentary of CNN’s documentary, my most intriguing part of this week was the two episodes we watched on the backstory to Mr. backstory himself. We watched two mythic quest episodes on the backstory an upcoming of the writer of the game that the show bases itself on, Carl Longbottom. The first episode that was displayed showed beautiful broadcasting and multiple purposes to relay back to the show as a whole.

This show begins when the show flashes back to California in the 70’s where he has his first day at a new job as a writing assistant in pursuit to becoming a major writer. This takes a sad turn as he is overshadowed by his peers and goes through his reaction to these events with drinking and isolation while trying to revise his work that just was failing. In an ordinary television show the adversity would usually be overcame by extreme work ethic and determination, however carl doesn’t achieve his future accomplishments through nothing other than luck and stolen ideas. This happens when carl works up the courage to ask one of his idols to revise his novel he wrote and was gifted with a revision; however, this “revision” was essentially the revisor rewriting the whole novel. With this carl had fallen deeper into his depression and this continued until he was overcome with passion over the new emergence of television and when no one listened to his ideas he gave them his attention grabber. He published the novel with all the words from the revised work of his work. With this he was able to receive a Nevin’s award for the best first novel. This became his biggest blessing and advancement in the literature world and gained the attention of his peers but also his biggest curse, because he now had to live with a lie that essentially created his name in the attention of others. This episode was very intriguing to me not only was the show taking an extensive and detailed background of the character, but they also allowed the viewers to understand why he acts the way he acts in the present day of the show with his obsessive drinking and love for backstory because that was what his original draft that everyone hated in the 70’s was about. This was why I was so invested into the episodes.

At first, I was looking forward to what I can accomplish in talking about on the blog this week because of the variety of content that was displayed. The information all revolved around television but was showcased through different sources and I struggled to find the most entertaining topic to showcase what I observed from the past few days. It was when I sat and truly thought on it when I realized I had watched a perfect summary of the week with the evolution of television how it was overlooked and hated upon writers in past decades to its ironic nature of a former writer writing a script for a video game. What was your favorite moment of the featured episode that was displayed in the “backstory” episode