TV GOLD LIVE, AS IT HAPPENS. SORTA.

Since my last blog I’ve been chatting with other producers about the Olympic coverage, and a couple of them suggested I watch the shows ‘Live’, rather than the terribly put together clip show they’ve been putting on in prime-time.  

Now, this enterprise means some painstaking ‘watching of entire events’, and the all too complex to understand ‘inclusion of some other people’. Mainly it involves staying up late.  

So, anyway, I have been watching as much ‘live’ Olympic fun as I could.

On Saturday, I sat eagerly watching the ‘live show’ on NBC from 7.30pm, ready to witness Michael Phelps go for  his place in Olympic megastardom history by winning his eighth Gold.  

Everything was set. Beer in hand, curtains shut, pants off. …What I mean, of course, is that I was totally keyed up and there for it. I was ready. I was totally in ‘watching history’ mode, (generally a ‘pants off situation’, I think you’ll agree).

The graphic up at the top right said “LIVE”, and we all knew it was taking place sometime in the evening – the news was all about it all day. So, there I sat, waiting for the “Live-in-Primetime” event.

I sat in my chair, from 7pm, happy to watch all those products being sold to us because Michael Phelps was coming up live at any minute. Oooh goody. Here he comes… Any minute.  

By 9.30 I was beginning to do sums on my fingers, doing the complicated ‘just add 15’  math to work out what time it would be in Beijing. I even went on-line to double check my math… and then… it happened.  The cardinal sin of ‘live’ global events.  

Right there on my computer screen was the CNN latest news headline “Michael Phelps Swims to 8 Olympic Golds”.  

I stared at the screen for a moment – whipped my head back to the NBC coverage. It definitely said “LIVE” in the top right of the screen. Back to CNN… “….Swims to….”. I snapped my hand out and turned off the computer screen, half hoping I’d head off the information I’d read at the pass, stopping it from actually seeping into my brain.  

Nope. It was too late. I’d just seen the result.

Without passing on the news to my other half, I asked her if she could read the word “LIVE”? She said she could. I waited for the next ad break and turned off the DVR in case we’d accidentally hit pause at some point in the afternoon and were watching tv with a lag.  Nope.

The painful, awful truth of it was still there. I knew the result.

By this point my other half had rumbled that something was wrong, that I knew the result; and was now holding her hands over her ears, squeezing her eyes shut tight, and singing a loud song about ‘not wanting me to speak to her or even look at her’ until after the race.  

Like the ‘Live finals’ of American Idol, (where it’s actually only ‘live’ on the East Coast and delayed for the West Coast), any ‘live show’ which is only live in half of the country is no live show. What they should have called this  was a “recording of something which happened three hours ago, sucks to be you, California” show.

Someone, please tell me, why is it that I have a bloody V-Chip in my TV because some religious nut got concerned that they have so little control over their household that their TV’s off switch might not work; Janet Jackson flashes a ropey star-clad tit for a few none-too arousing frames and the FCC light up burning torches and march on Justin Timberlake’s house; but a major, historical event gets recorded and passed off to half the nation as ‘LIVE’ - and everyone seems to think it’s ok?

How the hell can they put that LIVE sign up in the right hand side of the screen and then NOT screen it live?

Someone tried to calm me down by telling me they did roll a tiny little graphic underneath the big LIVE sign which read: “EST/CENTRAL”. That was their caveat. “LIVE: SORTA”.

What’s to stop them running that logo over EVERYTHING to make it feel more ‘real’ and keep their audience? “Tonight, in Primetime: Mission to the Moon: LIVE: As it Happens: (C1969)”.  Or worse, recording EVERYTHING, then watching it all, coming up with a plan of how to play it out, and then screening it at their leisure as ‘live’, a couple of days later - or a week. Hey, why not stock-pile the news like a grain mountain, just tease it out when we get desperate. Or just live a year behind things actually happening?

Why not start with the elections. Or the weather forecasts? Cut out all the incorrect stuff and only tell us the stuff that they know is going to be important sometime down the road.

What made me the MOST angry about this was that the race, it seems, DID actually happen while I was sitting there watching TV on Saturday night. It was happening LIVE as I was sitting there patiently slipping off my trousers and popping open my beer – our friends in NYC saw it live, so why is it we weren’t allowed to see it live?  

I don’t know about you, but for me there’s some extra special importance to watching things live – something about the unpredictability, about the idea that we’re not able to change events, subvert them or rewrite them. Additionally, because it’s live, we’re part of the story, we become part of the moment. The history making moment.  It’s also part of the group dynamic of the event, the all important shared human experience.

Where were you when  Kennedy got shot? “I was in California and I watched it three hours after it happened. But it’s OK, it felt almost like I’d seen it live because the adverts were all the same”.  

And this is the reality – the reason they didn’t show it live, as they could have done, is because they knew we’d wait. And while we’re waiting for the event, we’d be watching commercials. And while we’re watching commercials we’re all buying.

And at the end of the day, I guess I have to grow up and admit, that’s exactly why NBC love all this ‘Olympic Gold’ stuff.

Olympic Sized Reality Show

It’s time for the World’s biggest reality show – the Olympics.

There will be winners, losers, characters we’ll want to see gone. There’ll be contested votes and odd people from all walks of life. There are a million B-stories and a great big finale. All, thankfully, without Ryan Seacrest.

Yes, I’m trying to justify why I’m writing about the Olympics. I think I make a good argument – so, I’m afraid you’ll just have to go with me.

Television is all about story-telling. Even news is about story-telling – that’s the chief form of storytelling in my view. Drama is easy – you get to write the lines and scenes; reality TV you get to cast the stupidest, most prone-to-being-nude characters you can find; but in news and sports you have to tell the stories of the people you’re given.

This is why I’ve been so frustrated with the NBC coverage of the games. I think they’ve totally missed the point.

Now, you’ll have to forgive me for sounding holier than thou for a moment, but I’m about to make a small reference to something I think we’ve traditionally done better in the UK – big World-wide audience events. I don’t get to do it often. So enjoy.

It’s partly because we lose a lot more often than we win events, but I think Britain’s generally humbled political position, (we gave most of the World back to its rightful owners some time ago, you might have heard about it?), means that we take far more interest in the Olympic theme of ‘Putting Aside the Petty Politics of the Day and Celebrating Excellence in Sports’.

What I mean, is in the UK, we get to learn about the other competitors, too.

Two nights ago I watched Michael Phelps winning one of his many Golds, if I hadn’t gone on line to search for the photos, according to the NBC coverage I could have safely assumed the guy was in the pool all by himself. While ‘one man-one pool’ events might be totally all-American, they’re certainly not good story-telling.

Aside from my wanting to see more of the other people because they’re from all over the place and because they’ve also spent the last four years training for this one special day, I also needed to see these people because they are a vital part of the story of the unfolding drama of the race. Who did he beat? Was it close? Was someone else ahead at any point? I don’t know.  Without the shots of the others I was left genuinely unmoved by Phelps’ World Record breaking achievement. And that’s the worst part of all of this.

I’ll take you back to the opening ceremony, the Parade of Champions. Matt Lauer had just done his opening, proclaiming that “we’ll put all the politics aside for now”…  we’d seen that awesome spectacle of the main show, then it was time for the Olympians to march in, waving their flags, smiling at a billion moms around the Globe.

I’m a bit of a school-girl about these things, and I go weak at the knees when someone plays some stirring music and says anything to a gathered crowd about ‘coming together we can overcome…’, ‘we’re all one World’, ‘we are the children’… and don’t even get me started on anything about going to the Moon.

So, for me I love it in the BBC coverage when the commentators, for a couple of hours remind us that all those Suits in power, invading each other, putting sanctions on him or making resolutions against her, are all rather silly.  What’s really important is that ‘the athletes from X and Y are amazingly holding hands and hugging’. What’s important now is the sports and human achievement.

As I watched the Parade this time on NBC, the audience was offered over an hour of remarks about invasions, partisan politics, ‘silly costumes’ and then, to top it off, coming back in from ad breaks, we were given a quick, edited montage of all those countries who aren’t really that important.  Now, this wasn’t a live event, so it’s not like we would have missed these countries otherwise – this was a decision – this was how NBC have decided to tell this story.

There’s often an attitude, one which is sometimes correct, that American audiences don’t watch unless there’s an America on tv. With the Olympics I think this completely, and dangerously misses the point.  American’s have so few opportunities to see citizens of other countries in any other context than on the news; burning effigies of Bush, or blood-soaked, running away from the effects of a suicide bomber – that to get to see them as real people who can sometime run faster than us, is not only important, but also the responsibility of the broadcaster.

With the accepted history now being that Bush’s Whitehouse manipulated information in order to invade Iraq, that they lied and covered up the fact that they had no evidence… and that the news organizations and broadcasters in the USA were lazy pawns who let them get away with it - I feel that events like the Olympics are vital in giving us the background to the World; all part of the story which may drip-feed into the public consciousness, into the news organizations, so that next time something like Iraq rears its head, Americans will see, rather than just a dusty country full of rock-throwers, ripe for the invading; these other people from other countries, with Moms, and an emotional tear when they win, are all a vital part of OUR story.

So long Nigel Lythgoe…

So, since the news broke that Executive Producer, Nigel Lythgoe is leaving American Idol after 8 seasons, I’ve been fielding confused calls from friends… mainly asking ‘why is this news?’…

I have to say that I am surprised by the reaction - it made the front page news on CNN and the BBC for goodness-sakes. I mean this isn’t the Dalai Lama deciding that he’s had enough of capes and quitting his gig, or Regis throwing it in saying he’s tired of not using the F-word on tv - this is a producer?!

In my experience there are two kinds of Executive Producer - 1) A complete a-hole who has no business being there and 2) A leader, guide - a general you’d follow into the shaddow of death. (They can also be a-holes, so my description isn’t perfect, but stay with me).

Those times when you have to let an EP walk into your edit suite are usually the times you can spot it.

The EPs who are put in place by a nervous network exec, who doesn’t know what he’s doing either, will walk in usually face buried deep in their Blackberry… then limit their comments to that most annoying kind - when they simply reitterate other people’s points three seconds after the original comment, but much louder. These would be the first kind of EP.

The second kind sit in sage silence, they’ll take notes, they’ll laugh and enjoy the funny bits - and they’ll rarely cry at the sad bits, (because they hate sentimentality - they love great story telling and they’ll catch you out every time you try to sneak sentimentality by them by pasting sad music over a scene), at the end they’ll list off three or four scenes that aren’t working, (something you knew already - usually because you’d plastered sad music over them hoping you’d get by), and then give you three or so places where you missed a trick, or where you could add a line that fixes the problem you stayed late three nights in a row trying to fix. Yes, this is the second kind.

Now, they don’t have to be nice about it, (see my comment about a-holes) - but if you’re in tv to have your back rubbed you’re in the wrong business, (or at least the wrong country - I think producers in Finland get their backs rubbed).

Yes, you can sometimes feel mugged, embarrassed, defensive, angry… but never right. You know they’ve made your show better. It’s a mix of enormous experience, confidence, intuition - and mostly pride. After all this show has their name on it, usually in much bigger fonts than everyone else’s - and at the very front of the show, right after the title.

The word on the street is that Nigel Lythgoe is definitely the second kind of EP. Someone who at the end of each day, as he leaves the studios in his solid gold rocket car, knows he just made a show much, much better.

I recently heard a pitch for his new show, and it’s a good’n - but once you’ve run the world’s most successful tv show for 8 years running, the usual getting out of a job line of ‘wanting to face new challenges’ couldn’t be more appropriate.

 

INSPIRED TV and FLAVA FLAV

So, you can imagine the scene… A TV executive hangs out with some people who are a bit different from him and he ponders… “what would it be like if I had to live with him/her”.  

Weeks later “Wife Swap” turns up on TV.  

A junior development producer travels to a far away island and ponders how living alone, stranded there with people you don’t even know might provoke a great fight… Voilà! ”Survivor” arrives in the middle of the schedules.

Don’t ask me what the exec who developed “Wipeout” was watching… but an average weekend round at my in-laws might have done it.

Anyway, the point is inspiration for a TV show can come from a lot of places.  But coming up with Reality TV shows is not quite as easy as sitting and waiting for inspiration to strike. No matter what you might think watching Tila Tequila.  

Sure - sometimes you’ll come up with a genius idea in the bath, or at spin class. Sometimes someone will pitch you a great idea… but not often. So you can’t rely on just coming up with ideas if you’re serious about being a reality tv company.  

One of the major mistakes that inexperienced producers make is to hold on to ONE idea way past it’s death-by date. You’ll meet producers who pitch to you and they have one show idea – but it’s lame, tired, (already on tv – yes, this really happens!) – in short, it’s just not working – but 6 months later they’re still pressing it – having made zero progress.  

Don’t get me wrong, tenacity is THE most important trait to have in reality tv, but if you’re not generating fresh sounding ideas for your company to make, then you may as well not be doing it at all. The chances that your ONE idea is going to be the one to make it through and get green-lit are very slim. So you’re going to need more ideas.

How?  

The most reliable way of coming up with ideas is BRAINSTORMING – not wild, off-the-wall brainstorming – but focused, smart regular meetings with your team, with a very short list of networks very much in mind.  

The next thing we do is draw up a list of ‘areas’, hot topics that are relevant, timely and ideally provocative. Say ‘Runaway Dads’, ‘DEBT & foreclosures’, ‘fathers at war’. We then take each one and talk through the issues at hand – what’s at stake, what are the core problems. We then think of similar shows in a similar vein. Finally, we talk over the way we’d handle that in an ENTERTAINING way on tv!  

But, the thing you’ll find is that once you create your ‘areas list’ you’ll also be focusing the way you even come across new RANDOM ideas. You’ll hear a radio story, talk with someone, or read a book - and then you’ll already be thinking how it could work WITHIN one of your ‘hot topic areas’.  

The important thing about this is that it will make every idea you come up with RELEVANT. People will always be so thrilled you’re always pitching ideas that ‘absolutely hits upon the zeitgeist’. So, you’ll also be making yourself hip and cool in the process.  

The most vital thing to remember in all of this is that every idea MUST have a home. This is important – you’re making shows for people to buy – and they are the networks on your list. If you can’t sell your show to these guys, you’re going to have a long, uphill battle to sell the show. And that’s not good. 

Any idea we run by each other MUST have a possible home at 4 or more networks otherwise we dump it.  

The way to work this out is to talk with the network, or, simplest of all – watch the network. Lots of it. Also, check out their advertizing, which shows are they turning into billboards? (This is A REALLY simple but valuable tip – because you’ll really see what shows they want to be known for. Study the graphics, the looks and feels of the press and the shows themselves. This will give you a great understanding of the ‘feel’ of the network – how edgy they are or want to be, or how ‘family oriented’).  

And if all this doesn’t work – then just stick a giant clock round the neck of a former Rapper – and have him try to choose a wife from a bunch of skanky lap-dancers.