THE REALITY TV PRODUCER

Anonymous Reality TV producer has worked in the UK and the USA, and has worked on some of the biggest reality shows on TV. He owns his own company, and for the time-being is writing anonymously to protect his future income. In time, he may reveal his true identity. And I bet you nobody cares.

 

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REALITY’S IDENTITY CRISIS

We’d all love to be someone else sometimes.

I wanted to be, variously, a better looking Steve Tyler, Neil Armstrong or that guy from Dawson’s Creek who got to fool around with Katie Holmes all the time… maybe I’ve said too much.

But, it seems the fantasy of getting out from your rut hasn’t been confined to real, living humans – I’ve begun to notice a startlingly similar desire in the Reality TV business.

Those of you who’ve scanned any of my previous blogs will know that I’m out selling shows right now. Part of being a good salesman, as with selling vacuum-cleaners, is to know your buyers – and so a major amount of my time is spent meeting the commissioners, going to events where development execs hang out, getting on the phone for the latest updates with my agent, (where usually I update HIM on the latest trends).

The trick is not to know the ‘corporate direction’ of a network, but to know the ‘feel’ of a network, that little something that makes a show a Nat Geo show over a Discovery Channel show. Mostly, you just can’t put your finger on it, but, (like the vacuum salesman who stumbles across a rich, blind, clean-freak housewife with a particularly dirty carpet), it’s payday when you get this right.

But, recently on sales trips to the East Coast something has changed. It’s like someone turned off my Spidey Sense – because strange things are a-foot. Shows that should have been for one network are no longer required there, but someone else, who six months ago would never have even dreamed of making a particular show suddenly have decided that’s the kind of show they want to make.

It started with History Channel, where a year ago I heard one commissioner say, when I accidentally pitched a show with absolutely NO history content – “You worry about the show, I’ll worry about the History. I can inject history into ANYTHING”. In the year since this meeting, sure enough, AXMEN, UFO HUNTERS, MONSTERQUEST, and the phenomenally successful, ICE ROAD TRUCKERS appeared on the network, (to the highest ratings the channel has ever seen).

This was followed by Court TV suddenly announcing they no longer felt they wanted to be a Crime network, and changed their name to TRU TV. Oprah Winfrey even backed out of her OXYGEN network, because she felt they had strayed too far from the positive female slanted shows of old, with new offerings which include the popular, (but admittedly bitch-slap-filled), BAD GIRL’S CLUB. You’d hear that ‘Discovery want to be Bravo, FX want to be A&E, Showtime want to be USA, History want to be Discovery’ and so on…

The problems all these stations face is simple – at the time, whatever they’re doing to their shows doesn’t seem to be working, so a short sharp, schizophrenic shock changes things up, and the audience come flooding back. Great idea!

Now, unhindered by tradition, a freshly re-branded network can make all those thinly veiled knock-offs of any show on TV that audiences ARE watching. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that ICE ROAD TRUCKERS, with its very similar themes, characters, story arcs, not to mention production teams, as Discovery’s DEADLIEST CATCH, is anything other than truly inspired! I’d imagine it was only a matter of time that History Channel would have come up with that on their own).

Absolutely, just as I can change into my Neil Armstrong costume, (when my other half is out), so can these networks make themselves feel closer to their goal by calling in the most expensive design teams money can buy to swap out their dreary old logos, and replace them with skinny, reflective, spangly new ones. (I have heard that many design companies actually rely on this cycle of identity crises to replenish their bottom lines on a predictable four year rotation).

But, you see, the problem is not that audiences are demanding a cute new logo, and a confusing new tag-line, the problem is that the shows these networks have been desperately putting on, are not very good.

So rather than blame their production teams, the development department or, heaven forbid, themselves, they blame the fact that the logo is ‘not communicating to our core audience anymore’. And given the choice between them or the logo, lobby the shareholders mercilessly to let them bravely move the company forward by even more bravely changing the name and logo of the network. If that doesn’t work, then the audiences simply must have fled somewhere… or popped out to the shops… for 6 months.

My prediction, however, is that this temporary identity shift will last only as long as it takes for those particular shows to get old again. Then what?

My personal feeling is they’ll find that hurriedly slipping out of a milar-jumpsuit and fishbowl helmet and stashing them both behind the boiler in the time it takes for my other half to unlock the front door, is a LOT easier than trying to rebuild a logo or re-re-rebrand again – something which I can only imagine would be as difficult to explain, and as expensive to get out of, as the time I got caught home-alone with that boxed-set of Dawson’s Creek dvds. Now I’ve definitely said too much .

Making Friends

First off, those of you who are as anal about schedules and punctuality as my production manager is, you will have been dreadfully hurt that I didn’t post last week. By way of an apology, I’ll try to cleverly craft my excuse into a blog. (Just like I craft my overspends into ‘critical editorial inclusions, sanctioned by the network’ when talking to my Production Manager)…

So, yes, at the risk of sounding all pompous and big headed, I was shooting last week. It was a long and demanding shoot in a city I’d not really shot much more than interviews in before… and it was in the other side of the country.

The last few blogs have touched on this process of selling shows I’m going through right now. This shoot last week was what they call a ‘Paid Presentation Reel’, basically before the network can finally, fully commit to buying the show, you first have to make the show. But for cheap. So, the network gives you some silly, tiny amount of cash to go away and come back with a tape they can look at and go ‘that looks like a tv show’. They can then show their advertisers, who all agree it ‘looks like a tv show’, then, ideally they now feel happy to pull the trigger and go to a full pilot or series, fuelled by a new-found enthusiasm and sense of wonder (bordering on euphoria), based largely on the fact that you’ve done so much work for virtually free.

So, here you have zero money, to speak of, no time, (because time is money… and we don’t have any of that), and no real network of friends or crew members in our city of choice. And the ticking clock of the network’s deadline you must deliver this tape to them by in order to give them enough time to decide to buy the show before some arbitrary sounding date in the VERY near future, (usually not more than a month!).

What do you do? Well, this is where the subject of this blog comes in. You make brand new wonderful friends. Fast.

I’ve worked in movies, and there your work is pretty insular a lot of the time, aside from the hectic six week shoot you’re working with the same four people for four or more years to get your film made. TV is the opposite.

TV, especially reality TV is SO consumable that the turnover of colleagues and crews can make your brain ache and send you down the road of beginning to refer to this barrage of faces that you ’sorta- kinda’ remember collectively as ‘mate’, (it pays to be a Brit), ‘my man’, (less convincing from a Brit), or ’sugar-tits’, (I dont frequently quote Mel Gibson… but you should know my agent enjoys me calling him that one).

I recently heard a quote from an angry producer, mad at yet another audio screw up, that “it’s almost impossible to work with the same crew twice in LA” because there’s so much work out there. (He added under his breath that this was often a very great blessing too). The point is that from my experience you’ll do anything you can, (short of actually paying people properly), to hang on to good people. The reason is obvious - especially when it comes to pulling off the seemingly
impossible as we did last week.

To pull in favors you need to have friends out there willing to come to your aid when you need them. This is all very cool when you’re shooting in your home town, but last week we just had to make calls to random vendors, other production companies based there… and above all I
had to cross my fingers and hope that we’d find good people.

Part of my job here is to inspire people that the show we’re making, if it should go to series, would bring wealth, happiness and inner fulfilment beyond their imaginings… and we might even manage to pay their rate. I never lie to people, I just tell them this is how it is, that I’m working for absolutely nothing, (which is painfully true), and that I’ll be trying to make this whole experience fun in its own right, (which is mostly true… see my previous comment about time/money…).

So here’s my main advice about finding and keeping good crews… take money from anywhere you can in the budget, anywhere at all, and put it in the ‘crew meals’ line, (you know what they say, “happy crews run on hand-held meals that cost less than 8 bucks”. To be honest I’ve never
heard that quote, but ‘feed often and swiftly’ is my final word on feeding crews).

Second, thank them sincerely for their time, (but don’t grovel, they do have their reasons why they’re there with you, and the last thing you want to do is make them feel like victims!).

Lastly, do good work. Simple. If they’re good people, they’ll appreciate they’re in good hands if you take pride  in your work and don’t cut corners… (and don’t goof off writing blogs when they’re all
working as hard as they are), they all want this show to be as good as you do.

THE CHAMPAGNE MOMENT

So last blog I talked a bit about my role in sating the World’s appetite for new reality tv.

This week I’ve been out pitching a new show – so I wanted to talk about the ‘Champagne Moment’… or reality tv’s very own unique version of this ultra-tease.

Here’s how it goes. You spend months finding new characters, preparing them for the ordeal of the months of work and slow progress ahead. You write up the act breakdown – (what goes in each act) – and work up the treatment, perhaps even a script. And then you fly somewhere across the States and shoot tape with your own money for a couple of days to make a reel… you painstakingly cut it over weeks – and finally have a 5 minute reel that you feel happy to show. It’s fast, it’s cool, it has all the right character bits in it. Great, now you screen it to your agent with a view to finally going out and pitching this in meetings.

Now, for the first time in the process my agent says “Yeah! I always LOVED this project, never doubted you!”… which is pretty much 100% the opposite of what he said six months before… then – boom – you’re on the top of the books again because – you’re now the team going out with a show!

So, you spend your time and your own hard earned cash flying to the East Coast, flitting about Burbank and Century City, running from meeting to meeting, shaking hands, being ‘good in the room’, watching the vast array of terribly set up TV&Audio systems in various network meeting rooms, (with tv’s that are seemingly never set up for the TV to work, waiting for “Jonah, our tech guy” to switch the channel, but who forgets to turn on the amp. Then waiting for Jonah to come back and fix the sound…) – but mainly, above all, you spend all this time drinking in all that wonderful positiveness. Ahhh.

That’s great. All that hard work and now people really like the show. They love the show. Some of them even understand the show. Then there are handshakes, I even had a backslap last week, (I think I enjoyed that), and the meetings are over. Then, your team and your agent wait until the elevator before saying positive things to each other about how well that meeting went… or… ‘he’s really cool, I particularly liked the bit where he said I was great’.

(But strangely nobody says anything bad in these moments, because as loony as it seems, there’s a collective recognition, and it’s never spoken out loud, that the elevator might actually be bugged… I even found myself sliding my feet to the very edge of the floor when leaving the office of a well known pay cable network last week, I guess with the very real expectation that the floor would open up any second and we’d be dumped down a chute into a pool and I’d really have my day ruined by Hollywood sharks).

Then, once you drive away, your phone rings and it’s your agent with everyone in their own cars on a conference call. Now you talk about what really happened in the meeting.

This can be very dispiriting. A meeting where they loved every second of the reel, where they nodded and made appreciative clicking noises with their pens as they jotted down the details of your pitch – is often interpreted as ‘a complete waste of your time’ by the agent. ‘What a total douche-bag that guy was’.

Sometimes he might be right. But… mostly… I dunno. I was THERE. I didn’t see it. But there’s such a thing as a game face, I guess. And your agent, for all his faults, can spot it, and in the long run even if you don’t believe them, they can turn out to be very, painfully right.

Then come the offers, passes and ‘don’t do anything until I’ve shown the team’ calls.

It’s exciting – everyone agrees – this could be the one. They offer, counter offer, reveal what the offer REALLY meant by having their business affairs call and deny any of the offer was actually what I have written down right here in my notes. But the most important thing is that any day you KNOW you’re going to call your friends, email your family and give everyone the good news – ‘we sold a show!’…. champagne will flow, beers will be drunk – laughter will be had. Great times.

But no. Because then the offer changes a little more, they want a few more bits of free work before they’ll truly actually really sign, or their enthusiastic statements about how you’re all going to love working together become laced with caveats like ‘Bob just wants to take a last look at it with the focus group, but you’ll definitely know by Monday’.

It’s still exciting… but now it’s another weekend with the champagne still sitting in the fridge. Monday comes. Monday goes. ‘Everyone’s SUPER excited’ the agent says, ‘you’ll know by Friday for sure!’

Friday comes and goes… now the offers are still good, a lot of people are putting in real time putting them together, negotiating them, working through it. But, what there isn’t is a ‘YES’ - a real live, slap-it-it’ll-wobble ‘yes’. And you stand swinging on the open fridge door, staring down that bottle of champers. But you don’t touch it, you resist.

Any minute now. Just wait for it. You can drink it soon enough…

And finally, as the field has narrowed to two suitors, (that’s still TWO, folks), your agent casually slips in the sad news that the major network officially passed yesterday, but ‘this is great about THIS deal, right?!’… you can’t help but be left with the feeling that this has all been such a lot of work all you want to do is sell the f#king show now. You’re done with this process… it’s not fun any more. Why didn’t someone buy it last week when they said they loved it? What did we do wrong? Your agent shrugs – happy that at least you’re selling it to a really good network – and chiding you for being down on a fantastic achievement.

But somehow, after all that fuss, all that whirl, everyone seems to have conspired to have made all this process a colossal buzz-kill. And now opening the champagne seems kinda pointless considering all the work you have to do now to turn this option/development budget or ‘off network pilot’ into a real pilot. And what if they don’t like the pilot. What if it goes away? Or what if they pick it up – then we’ll have to convince them the series is great too and then, what if we get axed after two episodes, publicly, and as a failure? What then? Ohmygod…. There’s SO much to go wrong!

Oh. This is horrible.

I don’t think I’m even in the mood for champagne.