Conscientious Sequentials: Tuning Into The Homeless Channel with Matt Silady
By Russell Burlingame
Matt Silady’s The Homeless Channel was one of the most celebrated graphic novels of 2007, drawing positive reviews from industry and mainstream press as well as award nominations and many columnists’ year-end accolades. And it was for good reason—Silady’s likable, believable characters and a compelling story coalesced with a lifelike art style and a cinematic storytelling method to create the feel of a smart, sometimes funny and always compelling movie happening on the page in front of you.
The Homeless Channel follows Darcy Shaw, an idealistic and motivated young television executive whose idea for a 24-hour television channel dedicated to reality programming centered around homeless people springs to life when she gets funding from Infinicorp, a big, anonymous corporation whose principal output is never revealed. It’s not unlike Continental Corp, the fictional corporation that owned sports network CSC in the critically-acclaimed Aaron Sorkin TV comedy SportsNight. That’s not an accident—when I first met Silady at this summer’s Small Press Expo in Washington, DC, my Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip baseball cap caught his eye and he engaged me in conversation about Sorkin’s work. Silady says of SportsNight, “When I watched that show, I found the characters to be wonderfully three-dimensional. At the same time, they tended to have an idealism that was very appealing to me in the midst of our hyper-cynical society. I tried my best to inject some of those same characteristics into the cast of The Homeless Channel.”
Unlike SportsNight, though, the corporation that owns the network in The Homeless Channel isn’t constantly interfering with the on-air content. Where Continental Corp was a frequent thorn in the side of SportsNight’s Dana, Infinicorp is little more than window dressing in The Homeless Channel. Darcy, as a reader might, expects conflict from the start, and resists the corporation’s efforts to oversee the network by placing one of their own operatives in the THC offices—only to find that their man on the inside isn’t such a bad guy and that she’s never vetoed by corporate on any major decision, including the ones that turn out to be bad for business. “One thing I was trying to do was to play off of some of those expectations,” Silady says of the choice. “By taking away the ‘evil’ network head and giving Darcy a relatively supportive environment to work within, I think it allows for her mistakes to be all her own. I wanted to see what she would do if she actually got her way and to watch those events unfold.”
Aside from that, Silady says, Darcy’s environment allows her character to deal with the issues at hand, rather than being distracted by side conflicts with her bosses. “It occurred to me that we have enough stories about someone attempting overcome ‘the man.’ Instead, I was more interested in what happens when someone becomes ‘the man.’ Can she run the show any better than the corporate suits? Because Darcy seems to be on morally higher ground, I wondered if she would have any better chance at achieving a positive outcome. As it usually does in life, it turns out to be a mixed bag. You do your best. You mess up. You get back on your feet and try again until you get it right.”
One defining element of the “easygoing corporate parent” aspect of the story is the initial pitch session, in the first few pages of the book, wherein Darcy “sells” the idea of The Homeless Channel to Infinicorp. She goes round-for-round with the board of directors, ostensibly proving that a 24-hour network dedicated to homeless people can be financially viable. The reality of the situation—that the odds of such a project getting sponsors in the real world are microscopic—doesn’t escape Silady, but since it was a question that would have occurred to critical readers, it had to be addressed. “I've gotten real extreme reactions to that aspect of the book,” Silady says. “I've had people come up to me and say that they keep expecting to turn the channel one night and actually stumble upon the network. I've had other reviewers summarily dismiss the book because they couldn't get past that plot point. For me, it was always a pretty satirical take on reality television. I can't imagine it would ever be financially viable. But who knows? These are weird times.”
The idealism isn’t all doe-eyed optimism, though; Darcy herself has frequent struggles with her conscience, questioning what value her contribution to society has, when the twin problems of poverty and homelessness of poverty are so much bigger than any one person can handle—even if with a cable network at their disposal. After one of the most traumatic moments of the story, Darcy finds herself overwhelmed and exasperated—and pelts an ungrateful homeless man with the contents of her wallet when he notes her clothes and occupation and demands more than the change she had offered. He points out that the conflicts that Darcy faces mirror some of his own inner conflicts about the issue of homelessness. “Since creating the book was, in many ways, an exploration of my internal political compass, I wanted to make sure that none of the characters were presented as too saintly,” Silady explains of Darcy’s explosion.
“My desire to work with the issue in the book came from a personal place, I think,” Silady says. “I'm a believer that creating art can be a process through which one can examine certain ideas in a pretty unique way. In this case, I was experiencing an internal struggle between my responsibilities to myself and my responsibilities to the community I lived in. The book was a way for me to address some of the political and social issues pushing and pulling at my conscience. I was trying to figure out what to do about the issue of homelessness at the same time my characters were grappling with similar dilemmas.”
Again, it’s worth noting that a 1998 episode of SportsNight (entitled “The Quality of Mercy at 29k”), these same questions are raised, with the show’s elder statesman pronouncing that he “hoped” homeless people used his money to buy booze because it isn’t as though most homeless people are a hot meal away from turning their lives around—the antecedent to Darcy’s outburst at the homeless man in The Homeless Channel. “I’m sure a little money is all you need to turn your life around,” Silady has her saying as she pelts him with her credit cards.
“I think at that point in the book, Darcy, who has championed the homeless cause to the point of ridiculousness, needed a punching bag,” Silady explains. “And how many times have we turned around and snapped at those that we care about the most?”
Silady points out that art is at its best when it asks these questions and raises possible answers, rather than preaching too much. “There are a lot of issues that didn't make it into the book,” continues Silady, “but I didn't want every scene to come off as a lecture on ‘how bad it is out there.’ It was a tough balance strike. Sorkin tends to walk that line pretty well. The West Wing was at its best when that balance was maintained. It was at its worst when it turned into civics lectures.”
When you ask the questions and let readers think for themselves, rather than committing to an answer, one advantage he has over many of the other works I’ll be examining in this column is that he’s not married to a point of view. Where many political writers have to worry about whether they’re preaching to the converted, Silady avoided that conflict by leaving himself open to discovery. “I didn't know what I agreed with,” Silady says. “I embarked on the project in order to find answers about these political and social issues for myself. The thing about the project that surprised me in the end (which shouldn't have surprised me at all, I suppose,) is that I ended up with an even more complicated and confusing picture of the situation than when I started. But that's not a bad thing. That's probably a much truer picture in the end.”
The whole project has an air of the Paddy Chayevsky film Network, where an aging news anchor loses it on air and, believing his career to be over anyway, delivers a long, anti-corporate, antisocial diatribe and inadvertently makes himself insanely famous, even developing a cult-like following. It’s a satire, and even Silady acknowledges that—like Network before it—the basic premise of The Homeless Channel is more than a little silly, though not completely outside the realm of possibility. “I was sitting in a bar amusing myself by jotting dumb cable network ideas on a cocktail napkin while I was waiting for a friend to get off work,” Silady says. “Gopher Planet. The Needlepoint Network. And The Homeless Channel was the third one on the list. It was just such a plain old stupid idea that I couldn't stop thinking about it for a week. That's where the story really started formulating.”
[Note: Silady has not yet—unlike the characters in Sorkin’s White House drama The West Wing—framed the fateful napkin.]
He says that when he came up with the title, while living in Champaign, Illinois, he simply filed it away, but when he moved to California a few months later to take a teaching job at UC Davis, and the homeless problem was always visible, the concept really began to take root. “There is a homeless problem in Champaign and all across the rural Midwest,” says Silady. “It's more invisible in some ways than it is out here in cities like Berkeley and San Francisco. That's something I didn't even get to chance to touch on in the book. But out here in California, it was so much more ‘in my face’ everyday I couldn't avoid the issue in my own life anymore.”
The other thing that comes into play besides homelessness and poverty, of course, is reality television, which gets its share of lampooning here, too. While never indicting any particular shows in the book, the concepts of celebrities “helping out” (Regis Philbin terrifies an unexpecting homeless man with his demand for a hug) and corporate sponsorship of socially-relevant programming are touched on here. When pressed on the question, he singles out ABC Television’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition as one of the most difficult programs on TV to get a bead on: “There seems to be common correlation between ‘socially conscious’ and "product placement’,” Silady says. “Is that okay? I'm not sure. I'm not sure building ten mansions for ten needy households is as important as building one hundred affordable houses for one hundred low income families. I guess it's certainly not as glamorous. I can't help but cringe a little when it's Sears that's swooping in to save the day instead of our government.”
This is an issue that I’ve dealt with myself in the past; the ubiquitous product placement on many of the programs that provide homes or home upgrades to low-income families—not just Extreme Makeover, though it’s the best example—present a constant challenge to a cynical viewer. Silady himself, who is less wary of these corporations than I am, described the conflict: “How can you possibly gripe about a family who is clearly in dire circumstances getting a new financial beginning? You are a cold-hearted human being. You should be ashamed of yourself. On the other hand, it's shows like that that completely distort our perspective on what really takes to solve the systematic socioeconomic issues facing our communities. We watch our Extreme Home Makeover, feel good about ourselves and the world, and then all go and hold hands together at the closest Sears! Kick-ass!”
When pressed, Silady admits that he did have to do his homework to prepare for the project, but that he tried not to let himself get too hung up on the statistics. “The project did involve a certain amount of research,” Silady says. “The research was really depressing though. After reading a couple pretty dark books on the subject, I was pretty down. Creating a project like this is an emotional roller coaster all on its own even without the sobering statistics and heart-wrenching anecdotal accounts.”
Another dynamic fairly unique to the current American media atmosphere that’s touched upon briefly in The Homeless Channel is the fact that tragedies often seem to only really get covered in the media when there’s a sexy angle to them, most notably when they impact a celebrity (think the California Wildfires or Britney Spears’ mental illness, folks). When one of the established, recognizable homeless people seen in The Homeless Channel does die, Silady explains, the characters in the story—and he as a writer—are conflicted in just how to cope. “Oh, of course. I'm far from the first writer to admit that each of their characters represents a different part of my head and heart. So, there's a very practical side of me that shouted ‘RATINGS BONANZA!’…Another part of me that loathed the very thought of that implication. Hopefully, I was able to capture a good number of those fragments on the page and within the characters to create a story that has some sort of emotional honesty to it.”
At its core, that’s what The Homeless Channel is all about – an emotional and intellectual honesty that’s rare and beautiful, and the kind of complex analysis that most writers—even some with the best intentions—tend to miss in service of a simple story or a happy ending. “These sort of issues aren't digital,” Silady says. “They aren't superheroes. They aren't partisan. They are real. And the solutions are going to have to be as complex and convoluted as the problems. I don't think the book asks the audience to agree with anything. It just asks them to watch, to listen, and to think.”
Related Links:
AiT/Planet Lar’s The Homeless Channel page
The Homeless Channel site
Matt Silady’s homepage
You like this book? Check out:
Network
SportsNight
The West Wing
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
