Dee Blind Mice

Last week was the last class of Primetime: the Game of Television. All in all I had mixed feelings about the class. It was fun, but it got kind of tedious towards the end. I think the main benefit was the constant idea generation when we were producers – in both Seasons 1 & 3. Particularly in Season 1, where we had to come up with lots of show ideas to pitch and try to match them against what was likely to be popular, the game felt challenging and creative. Being a network executive when we couldn’t produce was pretty boring and a lot of paper work. Perhaps it’s like the real world. I guess I like coming up with ideas a lot.

In season 3 of Primetime it’s impossible for the Networks not to lose money. You can’t get enough money from the advertisers to come even close to covering even an A show.

Our response has been to create the cheapest TV possible – 3 hours of DV footage shot by a homeless person and edited by a student intern on $10 an hour for 8 hours.

This is the show as I have proposed it. The others may well change it.

Candid Bums

We gave a video camera and some tapes to a homeless drunk for a week – this is the exclusive footage.

A cutting edge, low-budget documentary from the makers of Extreme Makeover. This feature-length show is the result of a daring expermiment – giving a $2000 video camera and some DV tapes to a homeless drunk. We showed him how to use the equipment and sent him off to record his life on the streets. The resulting footage is disturbing, moving, and must-see viewing for anyone who thinks they know New York City. This is a view you won’t get to see again. Meet Walt, his friends and enemies on the street, and the members of the settled community who come in their lives.

Last week in Primetime was tax week. Jason had already handed in tax for us.

We did OK in the ratings – Garden State was the only thing to top its time. I was surprised, but I guess the other options on Friday night were not good.

Season 3 starts today.

Actors are back in, but syndication is out. Hopefully that will mean original shows, although people will only watch them based on who’s in them, so who cares?

This season there will be 20 networks or something. We only program for one night. I don’t suppose anyone will be reading the Viewer’s Guide anymore. It will all come down to the titles and descriptions.

We are staying together as ABC, so we’ll still be a network dealing with advertisers. Bring it on I guess.

Here is the line up for ABC this week:

Viewers’ Guide

This week we’re trying a totally different strategy – almost all our shows are syndicated. This means they are cheaper and less work for us as the descriptions tend to be copied from the originals. We needed to do cheap shows this week as advertising budgets were tight and Jason, our Stern student, insisted that we not commission any shows at a loss.

So creativity and inventiveness has lost out to the bottom line – we are counting on the recognition of our shows pulling in viewers who aren’t interested in any of the other offerings, which should give us ratings approximately as good as our ratings were last week, which wasn’t great.

This class is so weird – no action has a simple predictable effect. The ban on using real actors, which was intended to promote creativity has actually lessened it. Rather than people coming up with original ideas that they then stick a famous actor in to get it promoted and win an audience, people are coming up with ideas entirely based on familiar stories because you don’t get ratings with things that are unknown.

Also the Producers’ Union has not had the desired effect of raising the payment of producers, it’s just changed how people bargain over shows – so now they negotiate over what grade of show it is rather than how much producers should be paid. This will make it harder for producers to improve their margins as far as I can see. I’ve always been very pro-Union, but having to deal with an incredibly difficult union rep last week gave me some sympathy with business owners who don’t want to be locked into inflexible contracts that might put the whole business in jeopardy when the union behaves in a hostile and unco-operative manner.

When somebody starts a negotiation by telling you that if you don’t agree to their terms they’re going to strike and make you go bankrupt, it feels more like blackmail than give and take and your reaction tends not to be terribly sympathetic. My reminders that producers and networks were mutually dependent fell on deaf ears. And I thought the union was a good and fair idea until I saw what it turned into in reality.

So an interesting week and a line up I’m half ashamed of, half utterly tickled by.

So this was the last week of season 1. Our new show Sweep Up (renamed by NBC to Dirty Love, which I think is probably an improvement) did quite well.

For the next season Jenny, Candice and I will be working with a guy called Jason. We’re ABC network. I think being a network will be more administrative work, but it will be interesting to see the game from another perspective.

There’s a new rule for season 2 that I’m very excited about: no name recognition. This means you can’t get rights to any celebrities – actors, writers, whatever. You can syndicate shows, but not make new episodes of them. I’m so happy about this. I was getting very bored of the whole game coming down to which celebrities were on board. I was a little surprised to find Film & TV students going for boring show ideas just because of their stars.