No Pilots?

May 2008

Has the American TV-production process reached something of a tipping point?

Maybe. In recent years, the program-development routine—pilot orders in the early spring; network schedule announcements and big upfront U.S. advertising buys and presentations to international buyers in May and a slew of over-hyped premieres in the fall—had already begun to unravel as some of the biggest U.S. hits had premieres in midseason and even in the summer.

But it was last winter’s writers’ strike that threw a major monkey wrench into that business pattern. And NBC’s announcement last month that it would be changing the way it greenlights programs and schedules its prime time, could be the tipping point for a new model. Indeed, Jeff Zucker, the president and CEO of NBC Universal, has been the most vocal proponent for an overhaul of the current model, calling for a “reengineering of our business from top to bottom” during his keynote speech at NATPE earlier this year.

“We’ve greenlit a lot of shows based on seeing the pilot and that hasn’t really gotten us anywhere, except to waste a lot of money,” Zucker tells World Screen. “The green-light decision in many instances will have to be based on our gut, our knowledge of the writers and actors who are involved, and our belief in the concept. But frankly that’s no different than what we do on the film side. We don’t make a pilot of a film before we decide to make the film.”

In a nutshell, NBC said it will no longer fund a pilot episode for every series it likes, and it will roll out new series more deliberately throughout the year, with only four series premieres scheduled for this fall. “With all of these things there are no hard-and-fast rules,” Zucker adds. “There are no absolutes. But I think that if we don’t change the way we develop our programs and stop rolling them out all at the same time, we are continuing on a downward spiral. So with regards to rolling our programs out year-round, it makes complete sense to do that.”

FOX has already embraced some of the same scheduling strategy, but an industry-wide consensus on development and scheduling was elusive as World Screen went to press.

Morgan Wandell, the senior VP of drama development for ABC Studios, calls it a confusing time. “From a studio standpoint, we’re all coming out of this strike and everybody is pursuing and trying different things,” he says. “Our challenge, as a supplier of programming, is to try and react to all the different post-strike strategies. NBC is trying to go direct to series. CBS is trying to reinvent their business. FOX is continuing its strategy of doing year-round development. We’re trying to satisfy and meet all of their needs while the natural rhythm of the business and the industry is still to stay on this traditional development cycle. For the next eight or nine months it’s going to be really funky for everybody. Everybody is going to experiment and try new things and we’ll see what works. If something works, some of those changes and ideas might stick. If they don’t, we might be back to business as usual.”

SEASONS CHANGE

This spring, though, the changes are tangible: the U.S. networks are dealing with big advertisers in a new way and international program buyers will have to evaluate, and perhaps bid on, many new series without screening a single episode or pilot.

For advertisers and agencies used to a lavish series of May parties, presentations and celebrity schmoozing at the upfront market, it’s a new world. “The upfront is gone,” says the longtime advertising and media consultant Gene DeWitt. “I think it becomes, ‘Make your upfront deal when you want,’” DeWitt says. “When you say ‘upfront’ it means you have a pretty good choice of programming and you have guaranteed ratings. I have no doubt that you could go to NBC right now and make an upfront deal. In the past you couldn’t make an upfront deal until the upfront market opened, and that didn’t happen until every network had shown their programming schedule. Today, you could secure an upfront right now with any network. I think advertisers are going to be inclined to do an upfront buy, but do it at their convenience, not in a two-week tight window.”

Without the upfront presentations and pilots, there is less to screen for the international buyers who descend on the studios a few weeks later.

“The Screenings are going to be a little more intimate,” says Keith LeGoy, the executive VP of distribution at Sony Pictures Television International. “What we’ll have to show people depends on which shows get selected by the networks. If some shows get picked up, we’ll have a full pilot to show people. If others get picked up, we’ll have a 20-minute presentation. If another gets picked up, we’ll have a script.”

LeGoy sees the Screenings as the beginning of a sales process that may continue into 2009 and, perhaps, feature fewer bidding wars for hot properties. “If someone is being presented a script instead of a pilot, or they’re being talked through how something is going to develop, I think it’s inevitable that a buyer is going to want to wait a little bit to see how that’s executed,” he says.

At the same time, all it takes is two or three buyers in a competitive market to heat things up. “If they decide on a show they have to have, at a time when there is less product in the market, there’s just as good a chance you’re going to get broadcasters competing to get that show.”

Katherine Pope, a network and studio veteran who now is the president of Universal Media Studios, thinks the old pilot-driven model won’t be sorely missed at the L.A. Screenings. “I think NBC is formalizing where the business was going,” she says. “All of us on the studio or network side, or in my case both, have been involved in pilots that look great, that you enjoy watching, but that everyone involved in their production knows there isn’t really a series there. I do think there is something incredibly effective about having to see additional scripts before deciding whether or not to make something. In TV more than almost any other medium, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. If you can’t turn out two or three episodes that prove you know where the series is going, I’m not sure you deserve to make the pilot.”

And Pope doesn’t think international buyers coming to the L. A. Screenings will be ill-served by a lack of completed pilots. “It’s going to be hard on them and we’re asking them to sort of take a leap of faith with us and know that we absolutely are going to make sure these are successful series, not successful pilots,” she says. “Our goal is to feel so confident that when it comes time for the Screenings we can talk about the other elements we put into these shows and give them a sense of where the series is going much more fully than we ever would have been able to in May in the past. There isn’t going to be a lot to look at. You’re not going to be looking at a shiny, pretty pilot while we all know, behind the scenes, that the second episode is a mess.”

FLYING DIRECT

For Pope, making the decision to go directly to a series without a pilot generally requires four to six completed scripts, the creation of which imposes greater discipline on the producers.

“Logistically, when you go straight to series, that demands you have your scripts ready to go, and so your production cycle on the preproduction side is much, much longer,” she says. “We aren’t going into production on a lot of these new shows until June. We’re going to have so much more solid footing on the series that we are doing. That’s hopefully what the trade is.”

Not having artificial deadlines for advertisers and international sales may also give producers a better chance to fine-tune the early episodes of a new series, Pope suggests.

There will be “a little hiatus period where you’re looking to make sure the elements have really come together,” she says. “We’re planning to have our scripts in hand, shoot our first episode, look at everything to make sure we’re correcting things along the way, and then go into shooting episodes two through thirteen.”

For NBC’s fall schedule, Universal is developing My Own Worst Enemy, starring Christian Slater as a middle-class suburban dad whose alter ego is a super spy; Knight Rider, a sequel to the 1980s series; and Kath & Kim, starring Molly Shannon and Selma Blair in an adaptation of a popular Australian comedy that focuses on a dysfunctional relationship between a mother and daughter.

Announced by NBC, but scheduled for later premieres, are the Universal series Kings, a contemporary take on the story of King David starring Christopher Egan and Ian McShane; The Philanthropist, about a maverick billionaire who goes out of his way to help those in need; and a spinoff from The Office.

“To me,” says Pope, “what is exciting about the time right now is that it is all about the shows. It’s about listening to what’s right for each particular show. On a show like Kings we’re making a big two-hour, with feature director Francis Lawrence coming in. We’ve got My Own Worst Enemy, the Christian Slater show, which is going to go directly to episodes. It’s a very different process. It’s fun to see what is going to work for which project. It’s not about making rules, it’s not about absolutes. You try to make a plan based on what’s right for that show, for that show runner. It’s about being more flexible, that’s what I think is great.”

No one has posited that there is anything inherently bad about shooting pilots; it’s just that they are expensive and, if too much emphasis is placed on the pilot over the continuing story arc of the series, a well-made pilot may disguise a series that just isn’t all that viable.

However, some executives do stand by the value of a pilot, among them Robert Greenblatt, the president of entertainment at Showtime Networks, which has seen success with original productions like Dexter and Californication. “I think the pilot process is an excellent way to go about finding your shows,” he says, adding, “I think you have to manage the whole thing. It’s ridiculous to do 30 or 40 pilots and pick up five shows. That said, [a pilot provides us the] ability to see something on film and then step back from it for a few months and analyze what worked and didn’t work. What we do at Showtime is we make three or four pilots a year and we’ll pick up two or three shows out of them. We’re very efficient about the pilots we make. We feel very good about them before we ever make them, so the chances of them going to series are really good.”

Wandell of ABC Studios also sees a role for the pilot. “These shows today are so big and so complex in terms of scale and scope and storytelling,” he notes. “They are like little movies. Because the bar has been raised so high by shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives, there is still a need to make sure we get the prototype right, in some cases. That doesn’t mean that, if a network has a project that it wants to go direct to series on, we wouldn’t be game for the challenge of trying to do that.”

In fact, ABC Studios skipped the pilot phase on Wizard’s First Rule, a new syndicated series. “We’re launching that this fall with a lot of the Tribune stations,” Wandell says. “We’re producing it in New Zealand and we’re going straight into production on 22 episodes.”

In April, ABC Studios was working on 14 pilots. “ABC picked up a bunch of pilots from us and [at the end of March] we got a few more picked up,” Wandell says. “We are prepping 14 pilots currently and will be producing them through the summer. They’ll screen and evaluate them and most likely launch their new series in the new year and not try and race any of these particular projects into production now for a May presentation announcement. Part of the problem, coming out of the strike, was that a lot of the material just wasn’t ready to be ordered to pilot. There was not enough time to get these pilots up and on their feet.”

For Mark Kaner, the president of Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution, the old pilot process is wasteful and risky. “Say you are a studio and you committed to 30 pilots, which is insane in many ways. You probably paid $100 million to $150 million, because these pilots, depending on whether they are a half hour or an hour, cost between $3.5 million and $7 million, or in some cases a lot more. Your success rate on your 30 pilots is probably six to eight if you are good at what you do. You have many more opportunities to succeed and if you are a network you have a lot more to choose from, but it’s so expensive for both sides and it takes so long and there is much that can happen between the script and the screen. If you are a network, in many ways you would prefer to roll the dice and go straight to series because it allows you to plan your schedule, your marketing, your life. If you commit to four series and three fail, which is a real possibility, you have lost a lot of money and you don’t have as many choices waiting in the wings to replace your failed attempts. It’s a numbers game and a crap shoot.”

Pilots versus direct-to-series isn’t an issue that the ad maven DeWitt cares much about, but he does think the networks will be smart if they use two-hour movies to launch new dramatic series. “Whether it becomes a series or not, it can become a DVD,” he notes. “Instead of developing 15 pilots, none of which has a chance of earning a penny, if the networks develop 15 TV movies, every one is a DVD, an opportunity for global distribution.”

As an example, DeWitt points to the recent deal between NBC Universal and Liberty Mutual for two TV movies, including the pilot for Kings. The deal is part of a broad Liberty Mutual marketing campaign tied to the theme of personal responsibility that will span multiple NBC Universal properties.

“They have Liberty Mutual sponsoring it, so they’ve taken the risk out of it,” DeWitt says. “It would be very difficult to get an advertiser to sponsor a pilot. It’s another way to get to step up and finance the production, which is something you can never do with pilots.”

But one area where conventional pilots still are important is comedy, Universal’s Pope says. “There is something to the chemistry of a comedy ensemble,” she continues. “You just don’t always know until you see it. Most of the dramas we make have pretty clear concepts or story drivers. It’s either going to work or not, based on that. Comedy is about the reactions, the relationships. We’re making a bunch of comedy pilots for NBC, one for CBS and one for ABC.”

That being said, Universal is going directly to series with Kath & Kim, which has the benefit of being a known quantity in Australia and having name talent in Molly Shannon and Selma Blair.

Premiering series in the summer or midseason isn’t groundbreaking, but Brad Adgate, the senior VP and director of research at Horizon Media, says what is really new about the NBC announcement is that no network has ever offered up a 65-week schedule, covering what would normally be two fall premiere seasons.

“Whether they stick to that remains to be seen,” Adgate says. “Prime time is a very volatile daypart. Ratings fluctuate and there is a lot of counterprogramming and shifts and movements in the tastes of viewers. To go out there and give a blueprint of 65 weeks gives marketers an inkling of what the network is trying to do in the future. It gives them some flexibility. I think advertisers are pretty good with this right now. It gives them an idea of what the network wants to do, what they see their vision is for the next year or year and a quarter. I think they like that.”

On the other hand, DeWitt doesn’t see advertisers caring much about when new shows are rolled out. “Advertisers and media buyers want higher and more reliable ratings,” he says. “They want anything that will reduce cost inflation. Their costs just keep going up and it’s driving them crazy. On the one hand, they’re getting a less reliable media buy because it’s very hard to predict ratings delivery, and there have been a lot of shortfalls in the last few years. At the same time they’re paying more.”

YEAR-ROUND PREMIERES

But DeWitt does hold out the possibility that rolling out shows throughout the year could lead toward better programs. “Taking a more leisurely approach to development is likely to result in better programs,” he says. “And because it allows for promotion when everyone else isn’t promoting, it could yield higher ratings.”

From the studio side, Wandell favors year-round premieres. “Coming out of the strike, if there is one thing we could change that would improve the business, it would be to move toward a year-round development strategy,” he says. “It is so difficult, when pilots are ordered, for the entire town to chase the same ten actors and the same five directors. We accentuate our chance of success by doing it at different times during the year when different talent might be available. My hope is that that effort sticks and we’re able to develop year-round.”

Wandell also maintains that American television is becoming increasingly event-driven, which favors year-round premieres. “For example, American Idol—there are almost two seasons in the television year, when American Idol is on and when it’s off. When Lost comes on, that becomes a big event. There is a trend toward that and it seems to make a lot of sense. When you have more serialized, high-concept shows you want to tee up the audience and run it straight through. It’s a strong argument for following that strategy.”

Pope also embraces year-round rollouts. “What I quibble with is the false May date,” she says. “That’s what became so brutal. To me, it was never about September. It was just about the fact that no pilot could go into production past April 1. That’s where you got into such a tight window. That’s what was really hurting the process. Everybody’s a little more open to doing things on a little more of a rolling basis. It’s not, ‘If you don’t have this done by this date, the show is dead.’ Everybody realizes how difficult it is to make a great show. People are realizing that great scripts and great actors are hard to come by, and let’s not assume we’ll just find another one.”