A Put Pilot!
Friday, September 29, 2006
CBS made a put-pilot deal on my new show (working title “The Genius Bar") yesterday, and my producing partners and I are happy as punch. The story was picked up by Reuters, and has more details.
Updated 10/07/2006
I’ve received a lot of mail asking for more details. I thought I’d clarify a few FAQs and provide a bit more information.
So, the show is a half-hout sitcom, set in a small slice of an upscale mall, where our primary ensemble happen to work in two different stores. One is an Apple Store-like “chic geek” place and the other is an A&F-like trendy apparel place. The construct is simple: we’re defined nowadays more by what we own and what we wear than by what we say or what we do. Our class structures and personal boundaries have become more retail-driven than ever before. “Genius Bar” (working title, will almost definitely change) simply explores what would happen if people started crossing over those self-imposed barriers and found love, friendship and life on the other side.
This show was neither discussed with nor endorsed by Apple or A&F when it was conceived, sold, or bought. While we think it might give the concept a bit of authenticity were we to get real brands to show up in the show, in the end, its really about the characters. If we can find a way to incorporate specific brands in a non-salesly, organic way, that’s what we’ll do!
Thanks again for all the mail!
TiVo and American Idol Predictions
So, I’ve spending a long time thinking about TiVo and its applications to the future of television. Last year, I waxed on about how TiVo could localize television advertising by providing hardware-based coupons to consumers in specific areas.
In the heat of the continuing American Idol juggernaut, I had another idea. I caught myself doing something interesting during the performance last night. I wanted to skip the commercials, so I watch the show an hour after it has aired. I noticed that I would skip the performances I didn’t like, and I would re-watch the ones I loved. Often, my distaste for a particular performance was so instant, I would start skipping within the first 10 seconds.
Looking at my TiVo privacy policy, I saw that they allow for the aggregation of anonymous content to help enhance the service. If that’s so, why couldn’t they track the skipping and rewatching habits of 5,000 users who watch American Idol post airing, and use the aggregate data around each contestant to predict their potential position in the voting lineup? Of course, for this to work, we’d have to work with the assumption that American Idol voting follows the general likeability of a performance, and that discounts for personal favoritism couldn’t be included. Or, could they?
What if we tracked each TiVo user’s behavior anonymously across multiple weeks, and created a weight-based system for their specific proclivity for a particular artist. For example, if user A rewinds every performance of Paris Bennett, but the majority of other users tend to skip her, we can under-weigh this user’s affinity to Paris in order to calculate the aggregate. I think.
The applications for this, by the way, are enormous. Because even though it is fun to predict who is going to get kicked off, the more powerful information is that of who continues to get the most viewership, and therefore (using our assumption,) the most number of votes. This means that the executives at TiVo could know well beforhand who is potentially going to win the entire prize...which, for marketers, could mean contacting their managers and getting endorsement rights well before the finale, for example.
Or, betting in Vegas. Do they have a line on Idol?
“In Development!”
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Well, it’s official. After four months of meetings, pitches, emails, brainstorming sessions, hours of notes and “treatments,” I have a show “in development” at Showtime. Matt Solo (my agent at ICM) gave me the good news this past week. Adam and I had a mild teleconfence celebration, after which the enormity of the task ahead kinda hit us.
Our next step is to nail the pilot script. It’s got to be funny, pithy, and irreverent. It’s got to knock Bob Greenblat’s socks off. It’s got to be Emmy-worthy. I have complete faith in my co-creators, Adam and Jonathan, on this. As the TV newbie, I’m just happy to be involved, and am hoping that my specific expertise can help in some measurable way.
I know I’ve been a bit cagey about describing the show, so finally, here’s a broad lowdown:
It’s a half-hour single-camera comedy about how we, as a society, have gotten so obsessed with our “things,” that we’ve put them above all else. It’s about our desire and obsession with owning, using, and discarding. It’s about how and why we buy, how we’re manipulated into acquiring things we can’t afford, and how that affects our lives, our family, and our humanity.
We had a hard time selling it into the traditional networks because of the obvious implications for advertisers. But as I’ve said before in this blog, it doesn’t really matter what one opinion is, or a spoof says—marketing is a necessary evil, and as one of its prime modern progenitors, I’m happy that it exists, and don’t think society can survive without it. That said, what good is someone who can’t laugh at himself?
Anyway—onward.
On Creating a TV Show
Thursday, August 11, 2005
I am completely smitten with the process of creating a TV show. You may remember that I wrote about my friend Adam Belanoff and I working on a show concept together. The process that we’ve gone through is completely new and fascinating to me—from the creation of the characters, to the development of the “arcs,” to working with the executive producers at Martin-Stein, to the pre-pitches we’ve been doing at ICM, all prepping for our big pitch to a television network—makes me wonder why I haven’t been in the entertainment business all along.
Adam’s a well-known name and a respected comedy writer in TV-land. He’s been a staff and head writer for shows like the Cosby Show and Murphy Brown. Incredibly detailed and thoughtful, he’s been able to take my stream of thoughts and ideas and make some coherent sense out of them. The most interesting aspect of working with someone who knows the business like Adam does is the focus on things that matter. For example, if I threw out an idea about (I’m making this up,) a couple searching for the perfect couch for their home, he would make me think about the emotional context of the purchase. Is it for their first home together? Is there conflict in what they both want? Is there sexual tension between the salesperson and one of them? Do they argue about if they can afford it? Later, in a meeting with Matt Solo, head of TV at ICM, and Joan Stein, partner at Martin-Stein, I was blown away by how something we had thought was fantastic was shown to still need a whole lot of work. In being our biggest supporters, they was also our harshest critics, and their insights added so much color to our existing concept.
The whole process has been like developing a deep, extensive marketing campaign. In marketing, we make decisions around channels, messages, venues, and context; here, we’re debating characters, connections, “handles”, and settings. In marketing, we craft emotional messaging, tone and brand; here, we create storylines, feel, tone, and “arcs”. In marketing, we discuss personnel, support and service issues; in developing a TV show, we discuss cast, location, and production values. And in marketing, we talk about nailing the right brand value proposition, and focusing single-mindedly on the customer; here, we talk about the perfect ”logline” and focusing on how to get audiences to really react well.
Conceptually, we’re pretty certain that there’s never been a show like what we’re creating. Stylistically, I’ve realized that in Hollywood, people use existing shows as a benchmark for what a new show’s handle might be. For example, “it’s like a fictional Bounty Hunter set in the digital world of Hackers.” Or, “the character’s like Kramer, only he’s smart as Monk.” Still, the big next step is making sure the networks like it. As I understand it, we get one single pitch to do it. This is, again, not unlike the agency business, where we get one shot to present a concept to a potential client.
I recently asked Joan Stein, if it made sense to use visual aides to make the presentation to the networks a little more professional. She gave me this piece of advice: “It’s all about performance. It’s all about being enthusiastic and believing in what you’re selling.”
And as I thought about that, I realized that even in our world, the agencies that consistently win aren’t necessarily the ones that bring elephants and models to a pitch; they’re the ones that, even if from a slide projector standing on an old filing cabinet, always deliver the goods.