Lanna Michaels (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lannamichaels) wrote2023-05-01 10:12 am
lannamichaels) wrote2023-05-01 10:12 am
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I read things!
For This We Left Egypt?: A Passover Haggadah for Jews and Those Who Love Them Hardcover by Dave Barry, Alan Zweibel, Adam Mansbach Did not finish. Did not, in fact, get much beyond 10 pages into it. This is a book by people who hate Pesach, but as a reader who hates Pesach, they hate Pesach for all the wrong reasons.
Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia by Natasha Lance Rogoff : Does what it says on the tin. Unfortunately -- and what is not clear from the title -- this is a memoir, written by the executive producer of the first season.
- Everyone in this book comes off terribly, except for:
1) Dr. Genina, the education expert on the Moscow side, who is the only one involved in the project to have any project management or facilitation skills. The author keeps being in awe of her ability to manage the project and the people and get them moving in the desired direction, instead of expecting things to just happen by magic. It's not magic, and project management and facilitation are skills you can learn, or if you don't want to, you can hire someone to do on your behalf. The author never realizes this.
2) The unnamed head of the international editions group at Sesame Street, who is the only one of the higher-ups who rejects the sunk cost fallacy and keeps pointing out there's actually already a product they can use called Open Sesame, which is developed for international versions that don't have full local production partners, and they can just do that instead of getting Sesame Street and its government funding enmeshed with mobsters. The one bad thing I will say about him is that he doesn't fire her, even though she deserves it several times. - I give partial credit to the other Sesame Street higher-ups, whose big sin is hiring someone completely unqualified for the job. Unfortunately, that person is the one writing the book.
Even years after, as a memoir, she seems to have no self-awareness. She had no experience in television or children's education/media of any kind. She never ran a production in Russia. In order to find partners, people to work with, and to hire, she overly relies on one single contact -- a personal friend -- who comes off so badly in this book, I wonder why they are friends, and he's also not the right person for that job of finding her additional contacts and help. - But don't worry, you know from the start where she stands, because in her forward, she acknowledges that while the Moscow side team actually had lots of different nationalities and ethnicities, she's just gonna call them all the Russians, to distinguish them from the American side of things. She has no understanding of nuance. She loves Russia and Russians for the "wildness", and definitely for all the drinking. I've read less fetishizing in things tagged as being fetish porn.
- Not to belabor any points about project management, I will just say that this book should be required reading in project management training for when you have someone who doesn't know how to run a project running a project that has absolutely no buy-in from anyone and no actual desire to exist.
You know those fic summaries of "the bakery AU that literally no one asked for"? Well, this is the Russian version of Sesame Street that literally no one asked for, but Congress was willing to send over some funds if they could get a partner.
Halfway through the book, they still do not have a partner; they have a charismatic Russian millionaire who keeps promising them money and to sign a contract and never does either, but does attend the author's wedding. I am entirely unclear by the end of the book if she ever actually gave them any money (Sesame Street has to bail them out so the show can go on the air; this happens more than once), or if she kept grifting them the entire time, while the author was in paroxysms of... good god, I can't even tell. The author kind of loves her? As a friend? And is wowed by her glamor? And considers them to be good, close friends? Natasha, she is constantly lying to you and manipulating you.
No self-awareness. None. - I cannot stress enough how badly this author comes off, and it seems all unintentional, and also includes a line comparing herself to being "giddy" as a mail-order bride meeting her groom.
- Massive double-standards abound. When she hires only people she likes, or when people she likes only hire people they like, that's fine. When someone she doesn't like only hires people they've worked with before, that is terrible.
FFS, she goes over her boss's head to hire someone completely unqualified to run the local production when she isn't there, on the strength of that hire's mom calling her a lot on the phone, and that the hire herself won a student award for filmmaking. That's not who you hire to run an entire production!!!
This is not how you do anything!!! - This author is happy to tell you she's a journalist! No journalism is occurring here, either.
- POV of someone who was a lawyer for Sesame Street at the time, reading this book now: ...oh my god, they were doing what?
- Also, like, okay, it's 1996 and she gets pregnant. She tells the Moscow side folks, because they see her. She doesn't tell the Sesame Street folks because she's worried she's going to be fired for being pregnant.
This comes out of nowhere. Is Sesame Street known for pregnancy discrimination?
The whole plot point proves to be baseless and the Sesame Street folks are happy for her, although one of them is hurt that she wasn't told.
Why is this in the book? Why was this included? Okay, so maybe she was having irrational fears when she was pregnant, but... why is this included? - She is super judgey and constantly Disappointed when people are not as enlightened as she is. I feel like when it's the early 1990s and someone makes a homophobic remark, you do not get to be shocked at how backward someone is. It is the early 1990s. The only reason I'm not calling this anachronistic is that she did start the book by saying she was doing a bunch of queer related things, so, okay, she gets a Get Out Of Homophobia Free card for herself. But it was whiplash to have her be Disappointed. What precisely were you expecting?
There is so much signaling that the author is a Good Person with Good Opinions, and it is so Disappointing when other people are Backward.
She is the author. She is the one making the choice to include that in this book.
(She is also deeply shocked at ableist and anti-semitic comments. The author wants you to know that an ancestor got kicked out of Eastern Europe for being Jewish, which is why anti-semitism offends her.) - There's also some very odd hanging details, like that apparently when she was younger, she married a gay guy to get him out of the Soviet Union. He is never mentioned again, but she did have an ex-fiance and I don't know if that's meant to be the same guy? Anyway, she meets and marries her current husband over the course of the book after not having dated for a while. (oddly enough, I found the wedding announcement they put in the NY Times, which mentions her husband's previous marriage, but not hers.)
(I don't actually remember them getting married by a rabbi in the book, but the author's opinion on wedding planning was essentially "my husband will do it all", which he does. Leading to the question on if the author's prior marriage isn't in the NY Times announcement not because it didn't happen, but because it was sent in by the husband, who... didn't know about it? Didn't think to include it? Thought it might incriminate his wife in fraud or cause problems for her professionally?) - Even without this being my idea of required reading at a project management training, I'm tempted to write up an after-action report (or, as a previous job used to call them: plus-deltas, aka "good things and things to change"), based only on the memoir, which she wrote, which is likely the most sympathetic account, on all the many ways this whole thing fucked up.
They hired someone unqualified and unprofessional for the job, and she in turn hires people unqualified for the job, and shows bad judgment and incompetence at every turn.
I cannot over-stress how bad she is at this job, at managing projects, at managing people, and at creating a television show. It is a miracle this show actually did exist, and, based on this memoir, it happened in spite of the author, not because of her. It's due to the Moscow-side educational team, and the Sesame Street-side trainers who made the puppets, hired the actual puppeteers, and trained them. - The guy who was the head of Childrens Television Workshop at the time wrote (well, "wrote", I imagine someone else wrote it and legal signed off on it) a short letter intro to the book, but if I were Sesame Street and reading this book, I would make everyone on the international development side read it, and from it, write Best Practices to avoid this situation ever happening again.
- Also, anyone who wants to write a dissertation on the use of Sesame Street as American cultural imperialism would do well to take a highlighter to this book, which, again, is something I do not think Sesame Street wants to be associated with.
- It would be nice to read a version of this book done as a work of journalism or an oral history, rather than a memoir. I wonder what all the Sesame Street side of this thought of this omnishambles that they kept having to bail out, and what the Moscow side folks thought of it, not filtered through this author's biases.
I've started reading Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street by Michael Davis after this, and even though that one starts awkwardly, it's everything this book should have been instead of what it is. Street Gang has endnotes! And mentions the sources! And everyone is treated with respect; it's not based on if the author likes them or not! Because it's a work of journalism and not a memoir.
And it's such a frustrating missed opportunity because this book would have been so much better if not a memoir. Especially because... - You get very little sense of what this show actually was. The book spends a lot of time on the development, all the failures of getting it on the air, of getting it written, but what were the episodes about? How many people watched it? What about the other seasons of the show? Sesame Street is all about the research, what kind of research did they do after the show was on the air, what were the results, what changes did they make based on the research? Was Lance Rogoff involved in future seasons at all, or did she leave Sesame Street right after this?
The book does not care. We end the book with the show manages to get on the air, yay! Now let's have an afterward. Actually, no, let's have two afterwards. The author needs more chances to show only Correct Opinions and judge those who don't. - An actual work of journalism, an actual oral history, incorporating interviews and sources from more than just the extremely biased, extremely unqualified executive producer, telling the story of making this show? That would be really good to read. That would be a much better book.
Unfortunately, it is not this book, and I do not recommend it. Unless you want to take a highlighter to it for Cultural Imperialism and/or Terrible Project Management reasons, then this is the book for you. Fair warning that if you know anything at all about Russia or the former Soviet Union, there are going to be parts where you will want to throw this book across the room. (And no, not just the mail-order bride comment.)
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In the afterward, she brags about having a youtube video with 2.5 million views.
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But, ugh. At one point really late in the game, the entire Moscow staff walks out. Why? They hadn't been paid. Some folks were moving things around to cover the money, but the author didn't know about it (she's the executive producer!). One wonders if they hid it from her because the person who was meant to be paying them is her bestie. Who the author then confronts and gets nowhere with.
Anyway, the point is, she then smuggles $8,000 into Moscow in her bra. This is supposedly not smuggling and not illegal, that the cap on cash into the country is larger than that. But. I sure only take the most legal things into countries hidden in my bra.
Sesame Street should have shut down this production so many times.
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(Anonymous) 2023-05-01 06:00 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
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WHICH IS ANOTHER REASON THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN SOMETHING OTHER THAN A MEMOIR! A regular nonfiction book would not be beholden so much to one source that once she leaves, the book has to end.
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If you or someone you know has ANY FACILITATION EXPERIENCE WHATSOEVER, I hope you enjoy Dr. Genina expertly facilitating a rambling, off-topic brainstorming session and getting it back on track, while the author is like "how dare people have opinions I don't like".
This whole thing is textbook Wrong Person, Wrong Job. I would put this up on the wall with the caption "a cautionary tale of what happens when you don't hire a project manager". or, you know, something pithier. "Hire a project manager or you, too, could be effortlessly grifted by everyone you meet!"