Last week I didn’t get to vote because Mali’s e-mail with the links to the surveys didn’t come to me for some reason. This meant I wasn’t as excited to see the ratings as the previous week. It was a bit of a disaster in the end – my new show The Illustrator got only 7% of the viewing audience. Coasting also didn’t do well on ABC.
I’m getting a little tired of being a producer in this game because I basically have no idea what the kids in this class want, other than that it’s got to have Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston, Owen Wilson or Will Ferrell in it. I predicted that cheap, exploitative shows would do well, but I wasn’t prepared for quite how crappy the most popular things would be. The shows I think are good and am impressed by never seem to do well, so they don’t get developed week to week.
It’s the end of season 1 this coming week, so we’ll be tallying up our scores. I fancy going to work for a network for season 2. I might try to do the PBS thing – I guess I’m the sort of person who should work for public television, since I’m some kind of intellectual snob and I don’t even know how much fake money we’ve made this season.
This week’s shows (we also sold an episode of Family Guy):
Sweep Up
Sam (Orlando Bloom) is a happy-go-lucky successful man who owns his own business… a waste disposal business.
Episode 1 – An Old Flame
One night out in a bar Sam bumps into an old girlfriend from high school that he hasn’t seen in ten years. She’s just as beautiful as she was when she broke his heart, but now she’s a sophisticated woman who works as a lawyer in a city firm. Sparks fly as they get chatting and the Kleoni agrees to a date on Saturday night. The next morning as Sam does his rounds of a nice local neighbourhood, who does he meet as he’s emptying her garbage can into his truck?
One liner: What happens when love rekindled meets garbage? Starring Orlando Bloom.
Extras
Maggie can’t seem to get away from the issue of race in this episode. This is a problem, not least because she’s utterly infatuated with a young black actor called Danny.
Andy Millman, under pressure, cracks this joke…
Q: What’s E.T. short for?
A: He’s only got little legs.
Meanwhile, on the set of a Samuel L Jackson police thriller, Andy Millman seems to have acquired a stalker; a bald, morose, dullard of a man who wants Andy to come over to his place and watch Vera Drake on DVD.
One liner: The banal and embarrassing world of the movie set – by the makers of The Office.
