HBO Takes On Hollywood Blogs With ‘Tilda’

HBO is planning a half-hour comedy series with writer-director Bill Condon and Tell Me You Love Me creator Cynthia Mort. The show, titled Tilda, “centers on a powerful female online showbiz journalist with a no-holds-barred style.” For examples of such a character you can look to online reporters Nikki Finke, Sharon Waxman and Anne Thompson. Entertainment journalists who have made a successful career online.

As traditional news outlets scale down reporting, or go out of business entirely, many reporters have found a new home online. This is especially true for entertainment and celebrity reporting. Given that, it seems only natural for a network like HBO to latch onto this transition and build a show around it.

While there has not been a lot of details about Tilda provided this, in my opinion, could be Sex and the City 2.0. A female lead, who’s a writer, dishing on relationships (in this case about celebrities).  Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Furthermore, a show such as this is ripe for celebrity cameos, and given the rich talent pool from HBO I’m sure they can pull a few strings to get walk-ons. Being a writer, specifically one who covers entertainment news, I’m interested to see how this show shakes out.

It comes with one caveat, however.  Given the type of blogger this show is going to cover, I fear it will misrepresent the thousands of other bloggers, like me, who have yet to ascend to pseudo-celebrity status such as Finke, Waxman and Thompson.

Mind you, a show based on my life would be pretty boring.

For me, this series will go one of two ways. The first, it will be a witty, possibly dark, comedy spotlighting the often crazy world of Hollywood.  The second, it will take itself too seriously (in a celebrity sense) and overly romanticise blogging, ruining it for in-the-trenches bloggers.

That said, Tilda comes with solid pedigree behind it. Condon won an Oscar for writing Gods and Monsters and wrote/directed Dreamgirls. Clearly, this is someone who understands the machine that is Hollywood.

If nothing else, Tilda will help legitimize blogging as a profession which can only help bloggers overall.  This doesn’t mean we’ll all become overnight celebrities, but it will hopefully make people realize it’s no less of a journalistic pursuit than traditional newspaper reporters. In fact, it could make people realize while newspapers scamper to catch up online we, the bloggers, have been here all along and know the land better than anyone.