I love merging fantasy with the everyday, creating a world that is heightened and slightly two degrees to the left.
When you read Lorrie Moore you find reality ever so slightly skewed, and more than slightly heightened, in a semi-dystopian wonderland.
And for me, "The Hour" has a slightly heightened form, and the characters came out of that.
They are more akin to what Ms. Maclean calls "a slightly heightened reality, part of the fabric of daily life".
But I am aware that I am simply an anomaly, someone with a slightly heightened chance of moving up through the class system.
PERSONALLY, I believe no situation is either so tense or so romantic that it can't be just slightly heightened by a good old-fashioned movie-musical number.
It is also salted with the sort of slightly heightened figures for whom their author has a particular fondness, characters who perform mundane jobs with an almost superhuman talent or fervor.
The channel's target audience is women 18 to 34, and it excels at "showing young people's lives slightly heightened, holding a microscope up to a heightened world that feels really fascinating, particularly to women," said Kristen Vadas, CW's head of reality development.
Mr. Giamatti and Mr. Wilkinson are a perfectly mismatched set, embodying different styles of corporate arrogance, while their underlings and enforcers (notably Denis O'Hare, Kathleen Chalfant, Tom McCarthy and Rick Worthy) display the varieties of sycophancy, treachery, vanity and incompetence found in every cubicle farm, ever so slightly heightened for comic and suspenseful effect.
