The TV networks and studios have been trying for years to transition to year-round development, avoiding the huge cost of shooting pilots that mostly disappear without a trace before the season starts in September.
Now the prospect of a long strike might present the best opportunity yet to do that. Several networks, including Fox and NBC, are said to be working on new development strategies, including forgoing pilots altogether or borrowing from the cable development model.
A drama pilots costs between $5 million and $10 million to make. Sitcoms are almost as expensive. With most networks ordering 20-30 pilots out of more than 100 scripts and picking up about a quarter of them to series, pilots have become a major drag on the conglomerates' bottom line.
Last month, News Corp. president and COO Peter Chernin touted to investors the savings in pilot-season costs that the Fox Broadcasting parent was making because of the writers strike. NBC is going further, eliminating pilots in some cases and going straight to series.
"Pilots are ridiculously expensive, you're fighting for the same pool of talent and they don't represent what the series would be anyway," one top network executive said.
It looks like a lot of the push for a new model is coming from the fact that cable networks are having a lot more success using different strategies:
Even for the top-tier ad-supported cable networks, their budgets are 25%-30% lower than those of similar broadcast series. Despite that, they've been able to attract such top talent as Glenn Close (FX's "Damages") Holly Hunter (TNT's "Saving Grace") and Kyra Sedgwick (TNT's "The Closer") as well as big audiences, crossing the 10 million viewers mark in the summer with "Closer." And some of them, including USA Network's "Burn Notice" and "Psych," can even be recycled on broadcast TV this season if the strike drags on.
This past summer, about a dozen scripted series premiered on ad-supported cable. Seven of them -- TNT's "Grace," FX's "Damages," USA's "Notice" and "The Starter Wives," Lifetime's "Army Wives," TBS' "The Bill Engvall Show" and AMC's "Mad Men" -- were picked up for a second season.
This fall, 23 scripted series premiered on broadcast. Only eight of them -- ABC's "Pushing Daisies," "Private Practice," "Samantha Who?" and "Dirty Sexy Money" and CBS' "The Big Bang Theory," NBC's "Chuck" and "Life" and the CW's "Gossip Girl" -- have been ordered for a full season.
The pilot-to-series ratio for the cable networks is impressive, too. For example, USA picked up all of its three pilots to series.
Cable networks generally spend more time on development. It took three years between the pitch and the airdate for FX's "The Riches" and "Grace." The cable networks, which order about 15-20 scripts a year and two to three pilots a year, often commission two to three additional scripts after the pilot to see where the series is headed before handing out an episodic order.
Unfortunately the article concludes that the whole idea of changing models may just be a bunch of talk because as long as the ad buyers are buying in bulk (instead of per show) and the studio executives are getting hired/fired based on show success, the studios are stuck in a rut which the strike may only have temporarily disrupted.
This actually isn't extremely recent news, but it's still amusing enough to post about. Apparently there's two Pablo Escobar movies getting made (both are suffering from the writers' strike), and of course they've both enjoyed some additional awareness due to the fictional Medellin movie from HBO's Entourage. It's odd that there's two separate projects going on related to the story, and also the fact that both movies have supposedly been talked about for some time which makes me wonder if the Entourage reference was intentional or not. Apparently there's been some tension between the two movies for obvious reasons, pitting Oliver Stone-produced "Escobar" against Joe Carnahan-penned "Killing Pablo":
Stone, who has covered the drug-smuggling terrain as a screenwriter on "Midnight Express" and "Scarface," also knows a thing or two about winning a biopic race: His movie on Alexander the Great got into production first, halting a rival film on the Macedonian conqueror that Baz Luhrmann was to direct and Leonardo DiCaprio was to topline.
Carnahan has worked for five years on "Killing Pablo." Awareness of the subject was recently heightened by "Medellin," a fictional film that was part of an ongoing storyline in the HBO series "Entourage."
While Carnahan and Yari downplayed a rival's emergence in announcing that their Escobar film was on firm footing, the "Escobar" producers said theirs is an honest depiction of Escobar's rise to become one of the world's richest men by leading the Medellin drug cartel and inflicting terror upon Colombia. "Joe Carnahan's notion of us poaching his territory and rushing for a pre-strike start is false. We've been working with Robert and a half-dozen consultants for a year and a half to tell an accurate story," said Berfield, the former "Malcolm in the Middle" star who's also mobilizing a feature about Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia.
Berfield said that while Escobar's brother is a consultant with a first-hand perspective on how his brother built a drug empire, the sibling doesn't have script approval. "My brother will be portrayed as a ruthless head of the Medellin cartel," Escobar Gaviria said in a statement. "This is just 10% of the story. The other 90% is the story others trying to portray him simply don't have."
Stone said: "This is a great project about a fascinating man who took on the system. I think I have to thank 'Scarface,' and maybe even Ari Gold."
HBO's trailer for the fake Medellin film can be found here.
I suddenly stumbled across this yesterday, and realized I had completely forgotten about this character from the Ren & Stimpy Show. And given our excitement about toast, I couldn't not post this...it's an episode of Powdered Toast Man.
Of course, being part of Ren & Stimpy meant this would have ridiculous, off-the-wall humor. But I also like how the whole thing is full of sexual innuendo, violence, the destruction of the Constitution, and flatulence...all cornerstones of good, wholesome childrens' programming.
You may recall I just recently posted about how I was surprised to find out about a movie called Jumper on Apple's movie trailer website. I just finished reading the books it was based on, and they were great. I highly recommend both Jumper and Reflex (haven't read the third yet).
But in terms of the movie, things are crazy. The people involved are all pretty experienced, and it was surprising to me to find that so much was being invested in the movie. From the writing side, you've got David S. Goyer (Batman Begins, Blade Movies, Dark City) working with Jim Uhls who created the screenplay for Fight Club on adapting what is already great source material. Directing, they've got Doug Liman (Swingers, Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith). And then on the acting end they've got people like Hayden Christensen (Star Wars), Samuel L. Jackson, and Rachel Bilson (ugh).
For those that use labels in Gmail, this new feature is pretty cool and useful. For those that don't know, Gmail uses labels instead of folders - the benefit of that is you can tag an email with multiple labels so it's like putting the email in multiple folders without actually creating a bunch of copies of the email.
Now you can find boxes next to the labels in the left side (see the picture below) that let you select from a list of background and text colors so you can make different labels stand out better than the previous green text that was the same for all labels.
The feature will be handy for those who archive all their email as well as those who leave it in their inbox. And you can setup filters that can automatically label your incoming mail based on rules like who the email is from or what the subject is, so you don't have to do it manually for mail as it comes (filtering is not new).
(And before someone mentions it, yes it's Guitar Hero 2 and the clips been around for quite a while. But that doesn't make the title any less valid or this video any less hilarious.)
dave submitted a story from Haaretz over a week ago, but since I was on vacation I'm just getting around to posting it. Apparently Christians in Jerusalem are complaining about getting spit on by Jews there.
A few weeks ago, a senior Greek Orthodox clergyman in Israel attended a meeting at a government office in Jerusalem's Givat Shaul quarter. When he returned to his car, an elderly man wearing a skullcap came and knocked on the window. When the clergyman let the window down, the passerby spat in his face.
The clergyman prefered not to lodge a complaint with the police and told an acquaintance that he was used to being spat at by Jews. Many Jerusalem clergy have been subjected to abuse of this kind. For the most part, they ignore it but sometimes they cannot.
On Sunday, a fracas developed when a yeshiva student spat at the cross being carried by the Armenian Archbishop during a procession near the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City. The archbishop's 17th-century cross was broken during the brawl and he slapped the yeshiva student.
There are an increased number at certain times of year, such as during the Purim holiday. "I know Christians who lock themselves indoors during the entire Purim holiday," he says.
Former adviser to the mayor on Christian affairs, Shmuel Evyatar, describes the situation as "a huge disgrace." He says most of the instigators are yeshiva students studying in the Old City who view the Christian religion with disdain. "I'm sure the phenomenon would end as soon as rabbis and well-known educators denounce it. In practice, rabbis of yeshivas ignore or even encourage it," he says.
Maybe Mark can weigh in on this story since he's nearly on location :)
I was initially impressed by the fact that NBC began offering full episodes of some of their shows online. When 30 Rock was premiering this season, NBC had put up all of the first season episodes. Sure, you have to sit through occasional unskippable ads (the driving factor behind the current writers' strike), but you got pretty nice quality and not much lag so it was worthwhile to use it to catch up on shows easily.
But some shows could be hit or miss. They may not have all of the full episodes for a season (or in the case of some shows, no full episodes - just clips). So I was interested to hear NBC was launching a new venture with some other companies that was essentially like YouTube for their content called Hulu.
But once again, not all shows have full episodes, the site's still limited access (and while it lets you embed videos, international viewers still can't see them, probably because advertisers know that they're not going to be buying American products and consequently wouldn't pay for those views), and for shows that have had a few seasons, the available seasons can be bizarre (i.e. The FX show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has all of season 1 and the most recent 5 episodes of the 3rd season (eps. 9-13) online. Plus these shows will not be up forever (though I wonder what the criteria will be for shows not currently on the air, like the A-Team, to disappear from the site).
Obviously neither solution is ideal, but it seemed like they're getting closer to creating something that's better for users. Videos can be embedded, many more episodes are available now than before, etc.
But now they're launching NBC Direct as a way for people to download episodes and view them offline. Except it's far from ideal since you have to download Internet Explorer-only software, can't transfer the videos anywhere, can only get recent episodes (currently there's only 6 total episodes, and episodes disappear after 7 days), and more.
My question in all of this is: Why confuse users and provide several sub par alternatives when you can do just one thing and do it right? An excellent example of this would be the newly launched dailyshow.com. You can embed videos, they don't expire, the collection is complete, and there's one place to go for all content. YouTube has also proved that model works, though they have the pain of not owning the content they host. It doesn't seem to be that difficult to see what works and what doesn't, and yet NBC's current internet distribution is a giant mess. I'm not going to check three different places to see if an episode I want to see is available, nor will I always be looking for recent content. Wake up!
I was perusing the new trailers on Apple's site which I like to do from time-to-time to see if anything interesting is up there. I saw a cool looking poster for a movie called Jumper, so I checked out the trailer. And this movie looks really cool.
I started looking into it more and found it's based on some books by Steven Gould. Apparently he had already written two books, Jumper and Reflex, and then a third book was written to fill in the gaps for the movie. All three books are up on Amazon, though the third book, Griffin's Story, got some not so great reviews. All the negative reviews say the first two books were much better.
The trailer really is quite good...I've already got my hands on the books because it looked so interesting. And Sam Jackson's in the movie, so how could it suck? :}
Looks like the fallout of the writers' strike is going to be seen right away, even on some pre-taped shows like The Office, 30 Rock, and many others because the writing or re-writes weren't finished, there's nobody to produce shows, cast members that are also writers are striking, and some actors are just supporting the strike (likely because the Screen Actors Guild is going to be facing the same issue and negotiations soon).
"The Office" showrunner Greg Daniels has joined the picket line at his production company's Van Nuys location in an attempt to shut down production of his show.
"We're trying to shut down 'The Office,'" Mr. Daniels said. "We have the star of our show and the entire writing staff behind us."
Mr. Daniels said there's only one unproduced "Office" script that's ready to go, but it's a good one. "Last week we had our best table reading of the entire run of the show, and that's what we were going to shoot this week," he said.
30 Rock
"30 Rock" writer/star/mastermind/showrunner Tina Fey is also picketing her own show.
New Adventures of Old Christine
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Rules of Engagement
"Desperate Housewives"
Pushing Daisies
Lost
Heroes
Reportedly, Tim Kring wouldn't comply with a weekend rewrite that would tack a season ending onto the last script written and is now off Heroes.
Grey's Anatomy/Private Practice
An email from "Grey's Anatomy"/"Private Practice" mastermind Shonda Rhimes:
I have to tell all of you that this email directly reflects the stance I came to over a very long night in New York. I absolutely believed that I would edit our episodes. Until a thought hit me: how can I walk a picket line and then continue to essentially work? How am I supposed to look at myself in the mirror or look at my child years from now and know that I did not have the courage of my convictions to stand up and put myself more at risk than anyone else? So I choose not to render my services as a producer. I choose to honor the strike. And I am proud that you all stand with me.
The Unit/The Shield
Shawn Ryan, showrunner on CBS' "The Unit" and FX's "The Shield," is also staying out of the office and on the picket line with "Unit" star Robert Patrick.
Talk about bananas. Of course some of the shows mentioned just have writers picketing, so it's possible they have one or two episodes in the bag that they can air. But it sounds like that won't be the case for The Office or 30 Rock this week. And late night TV like Leno, The Daily Show, Colbert Report, Letterman, etc. are already in reruns.
Hopefully this gets resolved soon. I wouldn't have minded so much, except that the weather's gotten cold very quickly and I'd rather stay in and watch some TV!
