I GOT A NEW BADGE or BREAD AND BUTTER

So ever heard the phrase ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’?  

Well, I’m kinda feeling a little bit that way this week.

I’ve been a producer and director of documentaries and reality tv for over ten years, but when you hop the fence and actually own the company that makes the show, you can see just how hard it is to make ends meet in TV.  

It might surprise you that with all the cigar chomping, champagne swilling fat cats you see at awards shows, everyone, from the smallest indie to the biggest multinational are feeling the same.  

In the olden days a tv broadcaster would ask you how much a show was going to cost – you’d tell them some nice huge figure, and they’d give it to you… Houses for everybody.  

Then, when the tv bosses realized that Reality TV could, in effect, buy THEM even more houses than they used to – made as they are by non-union, fresh out of film-school kids eager to work for less and less each week – they jumped at the opportunity.  

However all this happened right about the same time that multinationals were opening up digital channels and soaking up even more of the money they’d really wanted to keep for themselves.  So, what to do?  Well, make these shows cost EVEN less, of course!  

Now, it’s a bit more complicated than all this – but imagine the big decision at the networks: “Rather than giving them a chunk of cash, let’s give producers less money, let’s audit every penny and split the underspend with producers (so giving them an incentive to make the show for even less – AND we still make money), and let’s take all the international sales for ourselves while we’re at it, (because if we don’t take it, the producers will – and if we take it, what are the producers going to do? They might whine a bit – but we’ll have their money, and they’ll have a bad mood. We win again!).” 

So, now producers had a stark choice. With every revenue stream cut off for them, either they survive on the small, line-item, commission they get from the budget, or go out of business. Make tv or don’t.  The image I can’t get out of my head is of the stupid lumberjack, stuck a hundred feet up, way out on a tree’s limb, sawing through the bough holding him up with all his might. “Wow! This is awesome”, he says, “Think how much money I’ll get for this branch!”.  

You see, from this side of the fence – I can tell you that producers are facing this extraordinary question - how to continue making tv, while still paying for our staff, paying rent on our offices, paying for the development for new shows, (another area networks used to cashflow but no longer do in any meaningful way) – and all while still having enough in the kitty for a birthday cake for Joan from business affairs on a Friday?  

Yes, these every day expenses are costs that you simply can’t put in the budget for season two of ‘When Trees Attack’, and until I come up with a new “WIPEOUT”, or “WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE” – I’ve just got to take from an ever shrinking well. 

You see, the saddest thing of all this week is that while I was sitting at my desk clipping, snipping and slicing this budget, is that there IS only one place you can cut costs – and that’s by cutting the pay of your crew, the people without whom you wouldn’t even have a show. But, as I polished my new Gamekeeper Badge, part of me, if I’m totally honest, was congratulating myself on a job well done.  

I finish this week by posing a question of my own, a question I’ve been posing for myself every night – ‘When an industry is built on a formula that means we’re producing tv for less and less each year, in an environment where we can only survive by cutting costs and making tv even cheaper… how cheap can you make TV before people stop watching?’

And will anyone notice?

YOU MUST BE MAD TO GO ON TV

No sane person could watch the contestants on a reality tv show without thinking there’s something very wrong with these people.

You’re only half right, though. Because while reality tv demands that these people are mad - it also demands that they’re ‘not too mad’.

Yes, we want you to be willing to go on tv and get into yelling matches with similarly mad people. We want you to be koo-koo enough to want to cry on cue about how ‘not winning the ‘Jello Down Your Pants’ Challenge’ has really scarred you for life. We even want you to be mad enough to go on national tv and have your private parts blurred out as you waddle away from a midnight tumble with the awful blond who should have been voted off last week.

But, we don’t want dribbling. And we hate stopping filming because we’re ‘all so concerned that Bobby might actually be losing it, should we call the network?’. We hate that most of all.

Yes, so even the most looney Survivor or Blind Dater has been certified ‘mad enough for telly’. How? It might be hard to believe they actually had to meet with a psychologist who would have quizzed them about everything from their childhood to how many times they think they’re a god per day - all for the all important stamp of approval. The real reason reality tv spends a good portion of its budgets on these heinously expensive psychological evaluations, or “Psych Evals”, is because while most of us think of reality tv as a lot of crazy people not adding much to the world, network tv bosses see reality tv as an enormous bunch of very very expensive law suits just waiting to walk into head-office and take away all their lovely money.

Yes, imagine if someone went postal in the Big Brother house? Or went gaga and throttled the Supernanny, right there on tv?! Now, while many of you might think Congressional Medals would be in order for those loopy Lou’s, you can only imagine the hours of wasted legal time to clear that mess up… so, psych evals it is.

But, the other, not often talked about reason we have these Psych Evals created is because of the wonderful veneer of responsibility it gives reality tv producers… er, like me.

Now, You might be the most caring, wonderful human being on Earth. But, if you’re stuck on location with a thousand better hotel rooms between you and home, and you’re watching a normal person, being absolutely normal for 24 hours a day… and niceties are flowing, people are getting on and NOTHING is happening, (by the TV definition of ‘Nothing’), even you would scream out for even the mildest mental issue to creep in. Just to spice it up. And you’re a nice person.

But, (putting on my Orwellian voice over voice), ‘We all know where this will end’.

I used to live in London, not far from the site of the infamous mental institution known, back when it was open, as “Bedlam”. One of my favorite haunts was a pub, overlooking the grounds. On the wall in the gents bathroom was a plaque that reminded us that where I was now relieving myself used to be the 2-penny Gallery, where for 2 pence you could stand with a beer in hand and look over the wall at the really, sick inmates going about their craziness.

This is where it would end. Tv producers would go wild. You can only imagine.

So, carrying my file of ‘Approved for Telly!’ psych certificates, I can walk onto set happy in the knowledge that while these people might be mad - these wonderful certificates under my arm say that not only are they not too mad, but I’ve been a really responsible producer, caring enough about these people that I even had them evaluated by a really expensive psychologist for their own well-being.

And that makes all us reality TV producers feel pretty darned good, I can tell you.

THE BRITISH ARE COMING AND THEY WANT TO SWAP OUR WIVES

It’s widely believed that the British started reality tv – in fact most people agree we are responsible for the whole lot of it.

Sorry about that.  

Yes, I am a Brit. I have a chirpy manner, an insatiable desire to correct Americans’ use of the word ‘irony’, and an unnatural love of “chim-en-eys”.  

Of course, if I were personally responsible for all of reality TV I’d be happy to welcome each and every one of you round to my place up on Mulholland Drive for another raucous night of champagne Jacuzzis and all night partying with the catwalk models I would have bought with cash from Tyra Banks.  

Yes, that would be nice.  

For those of you paying close attention, I did not come up with The Apprentice, Survivor, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, The Weakest Link, Wife Swap, Super Nanny, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol nor America’s Got Talent… but I know some people who did.  

They’re indeed British. And they have very nice houses.  And no champagne left this morning.

But, today’s blog is about a strange phenomenon in this tv invasion that I find quite puzzling. Some of you might even find some hope in it.  

I was recently back in the UK, and watched the finale of the British version of ‘The Apprentice’. In the UK this BBC smash hit/cultural phenomenon has whipped up the nation in ways not seen since the awesome ‘The Queen Visits Some People’ newsreel, or the last public hanging of a dentist.  

Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s the last 5 years of my living in the USA – but frankly, I found the show really, genuinely, mind-numbingly boring. Yes, as a Brit some of you will think that last sentence rather strongly worded.  

I’m sure in some olden-days time, this would have been considered treason.  

Over there, instead of The Donald, they have a graying businessman, with an equally chequered business history as Trump, by the name of Sir Alan Sugar. He’s bombastic, cheeky and charming in turns. Nothing wrong with that casting at all. Nor with the arrogant, smartly dressed assortment of hopeful Apprentices. Nothing wrong at all.  

What WAS wrong was that it was just, well, boring. Nothing happened. It was slow, it was ill conceived, it was lacking in any drama at all. It was better shot that the American version – I’ll give it that. Yes, it is a longer slot to fill, showing as it does on the BBC with no commercials, (about 8 minutes longer). Yes, the British audiences are ok with leaving a talking head on screen for longer than 5 seconds, unlike their US counterparts.  

But it was more than that. Screening as it is on a public broadcaster network – it felt to me just LAZY. There’s no real balls to it, no competitive edge, the sort that I felt we are constantly in pursuit of in the USA working on shows for ABC. We are always trying to raise our game, get better shots, tell better stories, think of even bigger, better ideas, all the time. We have competitors, we have peer pressure – we have Nielsen figures.  

So it struck me, suddenly in a moment of strange, guilt-ridden clarity, (the kind that you get when you realize for the first time that your parents are real people and might actually be talking bollocks from time to time), that while the British might have come up with the ideas for these shows originally - they just don’t have that, ‘killer’ instinct, and still need a good ‘ol chunk of American market forces to make the best of them.  

I think, uniquely, in reality tv it is exactly that mix of British ideas and American desire for raising the stakes that creates the quality of production we’re used to over here. And while I’d rather watch a British soccer match in Britain, there’s nowhere in the world I’d rather watch a Wife get Swapped, a Super Nanny, or an American Idol do their stuff than in America.

The Cost of Business

So, all things being well, I was, last week, supposed to be ‘coming to you live from Cannes’… from the beating heart of all things entertainment. Yes, I hadn’t forgotten, I’m supposed to be the Reality TV Producer, but if you’d read the back-story you’ll remember that I wasn’t always this way.  

Yes, I was supposed to be down in Cannes with my film producing team living it up with our sales agents, having meetings about an upcoming feature-film, mixing with old friends, and drinking an awful lot of pink wine.  However, today’s lesson is about “the cost of business”. I’m not talking about buying staples or expensive lunches at ‘The Ivy’, I’m talking about the real, true cost of doing what we do.  

To take you on one of my little tangents for a moment, let’s go to a bachelor party I was at a few weeks ago. It was one of those lovely events where nobody else comes from the industry; none of them had ever gotten their script to anyone – not even entertained the idea of coming up with a ‘great show about…’, not one of them had ever, ever ‘done lunch’ with anyone. Lovely. So, great – zero pressure to have sold anything immediately, so I can tell them about the show I sold last month – even though it has already been old news in the trades for two weeks… What IS great about these events is that you do get to bask in being ‘the guy from LA’ – and pretty much whatever you say is cool, because it represents a world completely ‘other’ than their’s.  

But, importantly, you also get reminded that it’s not necessarily ‘better’ than theirs.  

After a long, drink-infused, anecdote about the reality show I’m currently working my tail off on, (trying to turn from Pilot into series), someone asked me, an account manager at a bank I think, why I work such crazy hours, and put so much work into these shows. I replied, ‘that I love what I do’. They all nodded sagely, a couple even shook their heads and whispered ‘wow, that’s cool’.  

I was feeling pretty good about my martyred self, when one of the others asked, ‘yes, but you miss all those weekends, miss family events, you don’t even get home most nights until late… you do this for your new little company (rather than for yourself), AND get paid less than you’ve been paid for years… WHY?!’

I have to say, I didn’t much like this turn in the discussion, I liked it when it was about my life being really cool. But, I thought long and hard, and, summoning up as much business-brain as I could, I replied ‘the important thing about this ‘investment in me’ is that it’s either going to go down the sh*tpan or it’s going to come out in spades later – then I’ll be able to have stability, maybe a little house and even, yes, even, have weekends’. 

Around the table I was now faced with a sea of bewildered looks. One of them even sniggered. What had I said?  “That’s funny”, said one. ‘What’s funny?” I asked, rather irritated nobody was whispering ‘wow’, this time.  The banker leaned in close and said, like an old wizard giving the secret spell to the young adventurer – “It’s funny, because you’re doing all this crazy work to get exactly what we already have – in fact you should come to my house in the mountains one weekend”.

 So, if you can all go wobbly for a minute, I’ll bring you back in time to the moment I was  sitting in my edit suite last week, on hold on the phone with Virgin Atlantic – with the girl on the other end asking the question, ‘so you’re sure you want to cancel this ticket to Nice, France?’ I looked over at my editor, cutting like the wind, and a half page of network notes on my desk… glanced at the timeline on the computer, with over half the show to fine-cut – and then a final look at my watch: 3.46pm. I was never going to make that 8.30pm flight. I was never going to finish this before the middle of Cannes.  So, the decision was made. If I had any chance of turning this pilot into a series, I wouldn’t be going to Cannes.

The cost of business, as far as I can see it, is an ever increasing pile of imaginary, missed-weekend-shaped chips on a large poker-table. And, as I said so eloquently to the bankers, who may yet have the last laugh, this could all go down the sh*tpan, or it has got to, got to come back to me in spades.