Lone Star Lament: A Q&A with Kyle Killen
October 1st, 2010
While the online narrative about Lone Star‘s demise considered the show as an example of the divide between cable and network, or as a sign that critical praise actually hurts television series, I personally chose to take something positive: although I was sad to see the show progress into the rest of its first season, which I think had the potential to be a very good television series, I was pleased to see that creator/writer Kyle Killen seemed to be approaching the cancellation with a sense of purpose (in putting himself out there to promote the series between the first and second episodes) and class (by resisting any sort of vitriolic response to its cancellation).
As a result, I was extremely excited for Killen’s appearance at Flow 2010, a television and media conference at the University of Texas at Austin; not only would it give us a chance to learn more about the series, but I could also see whether or not my impression of Killen (pieced together from interviews, tweets and some press tour quotes) would hold in person. During the Q&A after a screening of the series’ pilot, Killen was honest about the show’s failure, open to more complex discussions of the series’ gender representations, and realistic about the way the television industry operates. While the show’s failure identifies much of the cruelty in terms of how the industry evaluates a series’ success, Killen rose above the victim narrative and focused on what he learned from the process, what he wishes he could have achieved, and how he feels about how the process unfolded.
The result was a glimpse into a world of disappointment that, even after learning that we’d be screening the pilot instead of the unfinished third episode, was not close to being disappointing in and of itself.
Cultural Learnings 