Producing television is a cutthroat business; ridiculously so. There are simply too many shows on an ever-growing number of networks who are vying for fragments of a too-small and constantly shrinking audience. With every variable of a potential series scrutinized and worked -- usually to a breaking point -- managing to somehow get your series' pilot produced happens only from surviving incredible and stupid odds. Or the fix is in.
The Hollywood pitch meeting scene, where studio execs try to dangle fresh meat in front of their bosses has become a reliable, eyerolling bit of comedy shtick in the burgeoning genre of behind-the-scenes entertainment. Those My God, what a stupid idea. No idiot would greenlight that dog! punchlines are of course fictional pitches written by employed, professional writers and meant to draw a knowing laugh.
The contents of actual pitches are usually worse.
Somehow surviving several rounds of cuts gets you to a pilot. Most of them end up being our Fox Force Fives, and are never seen by the public. Or they're burned off between summer reruns and are never seen by the public then, either.
Making it to series is a dubious distinction. Most series --and by this I am talking well over ninety percent here; a tenth of a tenth of a tenth by this point -- are abject failures. They're condemned to an initial production order of 9 or 13 or 22 episodes, thrown to that shrinking pack of wolves, and quickly forgotten, with maybe a dvd set subtitled "the complete series," released a few months later as a headstone.
If there weren't phenomenal piles of cash thrown at the handful of winners, nobody would continue playing the game. An infinitesimally scant few find their audience, receive their acclaim, win their timeslot, and manage enough episodes to reach the glorious afterlife of weekday syndication. Where their royalty checks will come forevermore.
Between these extremes lies the soft middle. The Sensation. Sensations unexpectedly channel the zeitgeist and quickly become part of the water-cooler universe. Their cast get plastered on all the pop magazine covers. They're the type of series you might find halfway intelligent and then are stunned to find it equally popular with the dopes at your office. Sensations have a little something for everyone, but their delivery doesn't smell like Jay Leno.
There's one major flaw, though: they're never built to last. Even the most fortunate sensations have all the longevity of a Nexus Six. A surprisingly good first season folds into a sublime second (while other networks begin developing knock-off versions) followed almost inevitably by an age-showing third (when other networks start airing the knock-offs). If the series is lucky, it spends only one final season in that circle of hell unique to popular culture: self parody. It duly receives the deluxe, bonus-feature DVD release, and its fans forget about it until a similar sensation appears, and suffers by comparison.
For our next run of series, I'm going to the sensation well of yesteryear, to see how they hold up long after their cultural expiration dates.
No comments:
Post a Comment