Post by caitlen on Jan 26, 2009 21:08:27 GMT -5
Interesting conversations about TV that the TV cameras didn't catch. . . .
The Province - Canada.com
Sun, Jan 25 Canada -
affection for programs he helped develop while still at NBC — specifically, his continuing faith in Friday Night Lights and his irritation that Heroes, ...
Sometimes, the most telling talks about TV are the ones you don't see or hear on TV.
Take the recently concluded semi-annual gathering of the TV Critics Association in Los Angeles, for example. It's what you didn't read about in the newspaper — or see on TV — that told the true story.
The ranks of TV critics are thinning. The Oregonian, a serious newspaper with a long track record of winning Pulitzer Prizes, decided earlier this month that it no longer needs an on-staff TV reviewer. The Hollywood Reporter, a respected industry trade paper and one of Daily Variety's few competitors, announced mass layoffs, including that of its veteran TV critic, Barry Garron. There are persistent rumours that The Hollywood Reporter will soon move to an all-online edition.
The TV networks and the studios that produce TV shows are worried, too, though — for the most part — they do a good job of hiding that concern. The vast and ever-expanding universe of cable channels appears, on the face of it, to be robust and healthy. Burn Notice, a trivial, not-very-good piece of escapist fluff, recently set a ratings record for its parent network. Cable shows like The Closer — which premieres its new season this week on the national, Edmonton-based pay-TV network Super Channel — are pulling in the kind of numbers that are the envy of struggling broadcast networks like The CW, home to such mainstream fare as Gossip Girl, 90210 and America's Next Top Model.
The carefully staged press conferences at the recent TCA meeting were largely upbeat. Nina Tassler, president of entertainment for the ascendant CBS, reminded the room that the broadcast networks still pull in the big audiences, and not just on her own network. NBC's Olympic coverage pulled in an average 28 million viewers a night, she reminded her audience; Fox's American Idol pulled in 30 million on opening night. Burn Notice's 5 million isn't in the same league, even if it did set an in-house ratings record for its home channel.
It's not the managed press conferences that tell the whole story, though, but rather the off-the-record, one-on-one conversations with executives that are an essential part of a working reporter's routine at the critics' meetings.
As a general rule, the more successful a broadcast network, the more approachable its chief executives are, even for a reporter visiting from Canada. The more remarkable thing is how outspoken they are — even as the working reporter has to watch out for inappropriate coziness with the people they write about.
Striking up an informal conversation with Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly, formerly of NBC, I was struck by his lingering affection for programs he helped develop while still at NBC — specifically, his continuing faith in Friday Night Lights and his irritation that Heroes, a personal pet project of his, is not the show he supervised and originally put on the air. Reilly fretted about American Idol's return in a TV landscape besieged by a crashing economy — he needn't have worried, as it turned out — and admitted that, while economic uncertainty causes sleepless nights, the TV racket is ceaselessly fascinating for anyone curious about why people watch the shows they do.
Days later, while on the Burbank set of the oddball hit The Mentalist — arguably the only genuine hit of any new show during the past TV season — Warner Bros. studio boss Peter Roth engaged me in a long, on-the-record conversation about people's changing TV-viewing habits, and why he thinks feel-good programming like The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men — two of his marquee shows — has touched a collective nerve with the viewing public, even as TV reviewers, marketers and media analysts rail about the death of the sitcom.
Then there was ABC boss Steve McPherson, who — when I asked him about his hopes and concerns for Life on Mars, which returns later this week after a so-so start last October — said he more-or-less goes with his gut feel for a new show. Either he likes it or he doesn't. And if he likes it, he will do whatever it takes, short of crashing the company, to keep it on the air. He loved the British original of Life on Mars, he said, and he appreciates how the producers of the new Life on Mars have changed it in such a way that it has retained much of the original's pizzazz and gee-whiz daring, without being a limp imitation or Americanized rip-off of the same show.
When I asked McPherson how high he was setting the bar for Life on Mars' return performance, he replied, "Not that high, frankly," and added that as long as the same number of people watched as saw it in the fall, plus a handful of people watching for the first time out of curiosity, he could see himself moving forward with a second season.
What McPherson didn't say — but which was strongly implied by him, Reilly, Roth and other successful TV executives — is that, in uncertain times, what Hollywood really needs is a return to the days of the old-school moguls who trusted their own instincts and went with what they believed the public wanted to see, and not what some business analyst told them was the safest route.
Not by coincidence, former studio bosses often make the most successful network presidents — McPherson ran the Touchstone Television studio, before being moved sideways to ABC when that network was in free fall. As a studio boss, McPherson helped develop Grey's Anatomy, Lost and Desperate Housewives. Leslie Moonves, the de facto boss of CBS-Viacom's TV division, is a former president of the Warner Bros. TV studio, where he helped develop Friends and ER.
McPherson is a big believer in his own instincts. Shows like Life on Mars, Lost and Brothers & Sisters — serialized dramas that ask a lot of their audience — are a tough sell in an economic climate where the safe way is often considered the best way. McPherson said that, while he's mindful that he's programming a broadcast network for a mass audience — that's why The Bachelor and According to Jim are still hanging in there — he has to be moved on a fundamental, personal level by his marquee dramas and comedies. He has a deep, abiding affection for Scrubs — that's why he snapped it up when NBC lost interest — and he's still bitter that his hand was forced on Pushing Daisies. (For the record, Pushing Daisies was not that much of an underachiever in the ratings. The real problem was that it cost a lot to make, so it needed to pull in a larger audience than a less expensive show to justify its expense. More than anything, McPherson blames the writers' strike, for throwing a wrecking ball into both Pushing Daisies and Dirty Sexy Money, by driving away viewers who were only just starting to warm to the shows.)
McPherson re-upped Private Practice because, even though its ratings were commensurate with Pushing Daisies' and Dirty Sexy Money's, it's a natural fit for Grey's Anatomy.
McPherson has decided to pair Grey's Anatomy, one of his hottest shows, with Private Practice on Thursday nights for the rest of the season. He's adopting a similar strategy with Life on Mars and Lost on Wednesdays, in the hopes that the Lost audience will stick around for Life on Mars. (Here in Canada, that could prove problematic, since Lost airs on CTV-owned A channel and Life on Mars airs on Global.)
Network executives, like NHL coaches, are often hired to be fired. Sometimes, though, gut instinct wins out over craven submission to a business plan.
Just days after our conversation, ABC's parent company, Disney, merged ABC with its TV studio, and handed off the whole thing off to McPherson.
It's a gamble — a gamble that McPherson will find the new Grey's Anatomy, rather than, say, the new Cavemen or Carpoolers, two of McPherson's bigger misses . In a topsy-turvy TV world, though, gambles sometimes prove to be the best bet. One thing is certain: There's no longer any mileage to be made in staying the course.
communities.canada.com/shareit/blogs/tvguy/archive/2009/01/25/interesting-conversations-about-tv-that-the-tv-cameras-didn-t-catch.aspx
The Province - Canada.com
Sun, Jan 25 Canada -
affection for programs he helped develop while still at NBC — specifically, his continuing faith in Friday Night Lights and his irritation that Heroes, ...
Sometimes, the most telling talks about TV are the ones you don't see or hear on TV.
Take the recently concluded semi-annual gathering of the TV Critics Association in Los Angeles, for example. It's what you didn't read about in the newspaper — or see on TV — that told the true story.
The ranks of TV critics are thinning. The Oregonian, a serious newspaper with a long track record of winning Pulitzer Prizes, decided earlier this month that it no longer needs an on-staff TV reviewer. The Hollywood Reporter, a respected industry trade paper and one of Daily Variety's few competitors, announced mass layoffs, including that of its veteran TV critic, Barry Garron. There are persistent rumours that The Hollywood Reporter will soon move to an all-online edition.
The TV networks and the studios that produce TV shows are worried, too, though — for the most part — they do a good job of hiding that concern. The vast and ever-expanding universe of cable channels appears, on the face of it, to be robust and healthy. Burn Notice, a trivial, not-very-good piece of escapist fluff, recently set a ratings record for its parent network. Cable shows like The Closer — which premieres its new season this week on the national, Edmonton-based pay-TV network Super Channel — are pulling in the kind of numbers that are the envy of struggling broadcast networks like The CW, home to such mainstream fare as Gossip Girl, 90210 and America's Next Top Model.
The carefully staged press conferences at the recent TCA meeting were largely upbeat. Nina Tassler, president of entertainment for the ascendant CBS, reminded the room that the broadcast networks still pull in the big audiences, and not just on her own network. NBC's Olympic coverage pulled in an average 28 million viewers a night, she reminded her audience; Fox's American Idol pulled in 30 million on opening night. Burn Notice's 5 million isn't in the same league, even if it did set an in-house ratings record for its home channel.
It's not the managed press conferences that tell the whole story, though, but rather the off-the-record, one-on-one conversations with executives that are an essential part of a working reporter's routine at the critics' meetings.
As a general rule, the more successful a broadcast network, the more approachable its chief executives are, even for a reporter visiting from Canada. The more remarkable thing is how outspoken they are — even as the working reporter has to watch out for inappropriate coziness with the people they write about.
Striking up an informal conversation with Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly, formerly of NBC, I was struck by his lingering affection for programs he helped develop while still at NBC — specifically, his continuing faith in Friday Night Lights and his irritation that Heroes, a personal pet project of his, is not the show he supervised and originally put on the air. Reilly fretted about American Idol's return in a TV landscape besieged by a crashing economy — he needn't have worried, as it turned out — and admitted that, while economic uncertainty causes sleepless nights, the TV racket is ceaselessly fascinating for anyone curious about why people watch the shows they do.
Days later, while on the Burbank set of the oddball hit The Mentalist — arguably the only genuine hit of any new show during the past TV season — Warner Bros. studio boss Peter Roth engaged me in a long, on-the-record conversation about people's changing TV-viewing habits, and why he thinks feel-good programming like The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men — two of his marquee shows — has touched a collective nerve with the viewing public, even as TV reviewers, marketers and media analysts rail about the death of the sitcom.
Then there was ABC boss Steve McPherson, who — when I asked him about his hopes and concerns for Life on Mars, which returns later this week after a so-so start last October — said he more-or-less goes with his gut feel for a new show. Either he likes it or he doesn't. And if he likes it, he will do whatever it takes, short of crashing the company, to keep it on the air. He loved the British original of Life on Mars, he said, and he appreciates how the producers of the new Life on Mars have changed it in such a way that it has retained much of the original's pizzazz and gee-whiz daring, without being a limp imitation or Americanized rip-off of the same show.
When I asked McPherson how high he was setting the bar for Life on Mars' return performance, he replied, "Not that high, frankly," and added that as long as the same number of people watched as saw it in the fall, plus a handful of people watching for the first time out of curiosity, he could see himself moving forward with a second season.
What McPherson didn't say — but which was strongly implied by him, Reilly, Roth and other successful TV executives — is that, in uncertain times, what Hollywood really needs is a return to the days of the old-school moguls who trusted their own instincts and went with what they believed the public wanted to see, and not what some business analyst told them was the safest route.
Not by coincidence, former studio bosses often make the most successful network presidents — McPherson ran the Touchstone Television studio, before being moved sideways to ABC when that network was in free fall. As a studio boss, McPherson helped develop Grey's Anatomy, Lost and Desperate Housewives. Leslie Moonves, the de facto boss of CBS-Viacom's TV division, is a former president of the Warner Bros. TV studio, where he helped develop Friends and ER.
McPherson is a big believer in his own instincts. Shows like Life on Mars, Lost and Brothers & Sisters — serialized dramas that ask a lot of their audience — are a tough sell in an economic climate where the safe way is often considered the best way. McPherson said that, while he's mindful that he's programming a broadcast network for a mass audience — that's why The Bachelor and According to Jim are still hanging in there — he has to be moved on a fundamental, personal level by his marquee dramas and comedies. He has a deep, abiding affection for Scrubs — that's why he snapped it up when NBC lost interest — and he's still bitter that his hand was forced on Pushing Daisies. (For the record, Pushing Daisies was not that much of an underachiever in the ratings. The real problem was that it cost a lot to make, so it needed to pull in a larger audience than a less expensive show to justify its expense. More than anything, McPherson blames the writers' strike, for throwing a wrecking ball into both Pushing Daisies and Dirty Sexy Money, by driving away viewers who were only just starting to warm to the shows.)
McPherson re-upped Private Practice because, even though its ratings were commensurate with Pushing Daisies' and Dirty Sexy Money's, it's a natural fit for Grey's Anatomy.
McPherson has decided to pair Grey's Anatomy, one of his hottest shows, with Private Practice on Thursday nights for the rest of the season. He's adopting a similar strategy with Life on Mars and Lost on Wednesdays, in the hopes that the Lost audience will stick around for Life on Mars. (Here in Canada, that could prove problematic, since Lost airs on CTV-owned A channel and Life on Mars airs on Global.)
Network executives, like NHL coaches, are often hired to be fired. Sometimes, though, gut instinct wins out over craven submission to a business plan.
Just days after our conversation, ABC's parent company, Disney, merged ABC with its TV studio, and handed off the whole thing off to McPherson.
It's a gamble — a gamble that McPherson will find the new Grey's Anatomy, rather than, say, the new Cavemen or Carpoolers, two of McPherson's bigger misses . In a topsy-turvy TV world, though, gambles sometimes prove to be the best bet. One thing is certain: There's no longer any mileage to be made in staying the course.
communities.canada.com/shareit/blogs/tvguy/archive/2009/01/25/interesting-conversations-about-tv-that-the-tv-cameras-didn-t-catch.aspx