Slashdot Mirror
YouTube Revives Failed Sitcom Pilot
Vary Krishna writes ""Nobody's Watching", a pilot made for last year's upfronts that was never picked up, is being put back into development by NBC after gaining attention on YouTube. From the ZapTV article:
"I love the spirit of the experimentation," NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly says. "And I think if we can actually have something find an audience on the web, gravitate over to the network, continue with a web presence and have them feed each other, that could end up being a really cool thing."
Where was this guy last year?"
Hopefully this same tactic will also revive the highly acclaimed but cancelled "Saved by the Bell: The College Years"... and Baywatch Nights.
Funnypics
When YouTube revives Firefly maybe then I'll have some respect for it. You hear me YoutTube? Sitcoms don't cut it, we need our Firefly!
Philosophy.
Only two comments on this article yet? Is 'Nobody Watching'?
...the execs finally realized that "Nobody's Watching" is the title and not the ratings?
My sig can beat up your sig.
I think what this dude is forgetting is that I can watch YouTube at 4:30 am Friday or 12:23pm Monday, it doesn't matter to the internet.
NBC wants to revive the show, put it on some usual primetime weeknight time slot, move it around a few times so everyone is completely confused, and expect it to make ratings as good as Friends or My Name is Earl. Then they sue the crap out of people that distribute it over the internet, which is how it got revived in the first place.
Then when it fails they will use that as an excuse as to why they shouldn't be distributing episodes on the internet. Sheesh...
So, the next time a woman tells me to "put YouTube in MySpace", at least I'll have a new show to watch.
I have held a grudge against the Nielson ratings for quite some time. Why? Because every time I find a show I like, it gets cancelled a few weeks later. I'm not sure if I have bad taste, unique taste, or if the sample space of Nielson is composed mainly of dangerously stupid shaved apes. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I tend to assume the latter.
I think this a wonderful turn of events. If they are smart, the other networks will be paying very close attention to this. I know this sounds radical, but why not ask the people who watch your show directly? If I ran a network, I would make sure to post an episode of every "failing" show on YouTube, Google Video, et all a.s.a.p. Not only would this put me in direct contact with my audiance, it might also help boost ratings for a still unknown show.
barack to the future?
So that's where Billy went after getting the axe from BSG! Who knew?!
FYI, his real name is Paul Campbell:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1353748/
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
They can't take the sky, but they sure as hell took the airwaves. Damn Fox.
While I really like that a network is getting ideas from non-standard sources, I can't help but think after watching the pilot that this is the kind of crap that is wrong with TV, not some overlooked jewel. They probably did make a mistake by not picking it up originally, because it seems like all the other mediocre shit that is out there.
This show has great pedigree due to the fact that its creator is also responsible for "Spin City" and "Scrubs," and is totally worth your time. Thank God YouTube got it before "Brilliant But Cancelled" did.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
your post has a lot of insight. i'm on a working vacation in Seattle right now, and i'm amazed that even though i have probably 10x as much free time to watch television, without a DVR here i'm watching basically none, because nothing I enjoy is available at the right time.
it will be interesting to see if this show does well on NBC (certainly the PR from the situation under which it was purchased by NBC will help its ratings), but I would imagine your assesment is at least partly correct. Certainly a chunk of its audience will be youtube viewers, who are probably very likely to have DVRs, so they may be able to watch it in much the same fashion as on youtube (i.e. on-demand).. but I wouldn't imagine this chunk would amount to more than a minority of the show's viewers.
what's really interesting are the business models that Mark Cuban and others are developing.. in the case of the linked press release above, basically Steven Soderbergh shooting a number of films for simultaneous theatrical / dvd / hdtv / download release, so that all marketing dollars are used effectively, and the audience ultimately decides which form of content delivery works best for them. I don't know that the model initially includes download release (i.e. itunes style), but I can imagine that's something Cuban is working on now (probably the DRM issues are a bit of a snag).
So even if NBC blows their opportunity at transferring to primetime tv the collective attention of viewers from the internet, there are other (potentially better) business models in the works that will better appeal to viewers who want to watch on their own terms.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
Same thing happened with firefly. They cancelled it, it caught internet buzz, they revived it then killed it again.
Glad they are finally picking these guys up. I discovered them about two or three years ago during spring break. This stuff isn't even there funniest, although it is a little more mainstream. Too bad going corporate has had such a profound impact on their comedic style, but I guess you gotta sell out at some point to pay the bills...
Paul Campbell left Battlestar Galactica for this?!? I had my hopes set high, particularly when I read that the show was written by Scrubs and Family Guy writers, but it was just as painful to watch as most other sitcoms on TV (the same shows that the show lampoons).
Wasn't quite sure why he left BSG for this, but now I understand. This show looks great, and the pilot has me in stitches!
Once a show caters to people above a certain level of intelligence, they don't fall for the ads/marketing.. sponsors refuse to pay for the airtime.
Basic story.. "fake it" by buying the products or at least inquiring.. and if enough people fake it theyll continue paying for the ads.. the show stays on the air =)
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
on a somewhat similar thread, sci fi is looking for a feedback on an animated pilot using youtube. It's called "Amazing Screw On Head" and is by the same guy that created hell boy. I enjoyed it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF4hfZw_tfY
Where was this guy last year?
The link from the editor points to a slashdot story about "Global Frequency", which after getting leaked, becoming very popular on the interbutt, and supposedly "picked up", was so successful...
absolutely nothing happened and the series still hasn't been produced, and likely never will be. The slashdot editor implies that getting leaked to BitTorrent resulted in it turning into a real series, or at least some additional episodes were produced. Absolutely nothing of the sort happened, and the series had already been considered a shoe-in for production before it was leaked.
Please help metamoderate.
Hello? Arrested Development? Futurama? Firefly?
Hey if it works for one show. . .
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
it sucks.
This space available.
Some guy posted below about this but he linked to YouTube - why do that when you can link directly to the SciFi page for The Amazing Screw-On Head. It's a pretty well written cartoon with an interesting style, and I thought it was much funnier than "Nobody's Watching". After you finish watching it on SciFi you can tell them what you thought about the pilot via a quick poll, and if enough people like it we'll see more on SciFi.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The anime scene in the US has been dong this since the 80s...the only way that fans back in the day would see any shows was by sharing copied VHS tapes with subtitles edited on them, they called in fansubbing. That scene has gone digital since around 2000, but it's still basically the same. Most shows become extremely popular months before they are released outside of Japan.
Finally, someone in the broadcasting business is catching on.. There ARE a lot of people viewing video online, they WILL continue, and if you can figure out a legitimate advertising and revenue model, you can capitalise on online video content in a big way.
:)
Ever since watching "PiracyIsGood.mov", a recording of a presentation given at (I assume) a University campus, I have been very keen to have either a broadcasting company or even the advertising department of a major company latch on to the concepts presented in this movie, and release a TV series in online form with watermark advertising (as outlined in the video).
The basic concept is.. Coke/Walmart/GM or whoever currently pays thousands of dollars for a 5-10 second advert during a TV episode, which a lot of viewers simply ignore. With this new method, the company would purchase an entire series of episodes, place their watermark in the corner of the video and distribute it online. It would be impossible to remove the (admittedly fairly unobtrusive) water from the video, and certainly not worth the effort, so the company would have, perhaps, 24 episodes, 22 mins each = 528 minutes of you watching a video with their advertising in the corner.
You win (free episodes), they win (this could work out cheaper than paying for 30 seconds of advertising during the airing of these 24 episodes, plus you get 528 minutes of advertising, not 12, and it's unobstrusive so no-one is going to get frustrated at your annoying gimmick advert), and the only people who lose are the broadcasting company who was too stupid to capitalise on this idea in the first place.
Maybe this is all too idealistic, and I'm sure there are other things that need to come into consideration, but I am VERY keen to see this happen sometime. Season 5 of Futurama with a coca-cola symbol in the corner works for me.. In fact, I'll drink a bottle of coke each time I watch an episode
P.S. you can get the video at http://ausgamers.com/files/details/html/17504
Will program for karma.
... it won't work on NBC. part of why it works so well is that it is based at a third-rate network (WB); a network starving for new programming and willing to do anything for a hit. Replace WB with NBC and half the show's entire premise get's tossed out the window. The only way it will make it on NBC is through premium scheduling -- a tactic NBC has used time and again to put and keep crappy shows on the air.
I RTFA & WTFV (Watched The Fine Videos).
a nd-we-explain-the-joke-to-you-in-case-you-didn't-g et-it unfunny. This is telling you we're going to make a joke about X, then making the unclever joke X, and then explaining to you why you were supposed to laugh.
This is not clever-cheezy like some good sitcoms. These are not clever jokes arising out of humorously stupid characters. The entire show is just "we're doing a lame job of pretending to be lame and you're supposed to laugh because we're telling you that we're pretending to be lame". Not funny-cheezy performances, just lame-trying-to-be-cheezy. And that is all there is to the show.
It's not even funny in an inside joke "we-both-know-I'm-pretending-to-make-a-show" way. It's not an inside joke when they spend half the time blatantly and clumsly violating the premise and explaining to you that what the inside joke is supposed to be.
One characteristicly geek form of humor is meta-humor. Subtle and sophisticated meta-humor. This show takes the meta-concept and dumbs it down to the lowest possible common denominator for a beer guzzling houseplant to be able to say "oooh I get it! Everything sucks because they are pretending to suck! Pretending to be a sitcom about a sitcom! Wow it goes around like a round thing!".
This is we-think-you-are-stupid-so-we-avoid-clever-jokes-
The gag of deliberately adding a "token black" to the all-white show should have been very funny, but nooooo, they first had to sit there explaining the joke to us before cutting to the scene of 20 black-only candidates for the position. Yeah, jokes are so much funnier when you stop to explain them first.
I think I lost IQ points just by watching it.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
If only we could get Heat Vision and Jack picked up!!! Too bad those guys (Owen Wilson, Jack Black, Ron Silver) are way outside the sitcom budget these days.
Can't you spot viral marketing yet?
The show pretty much has one shtick: trying get a laugh out of phoney self-references. It's like exploiting an worn out oil field; they're trying to pump laughs out of the old gags, and top that off with gags about how old the old gags are, and since that is getting old itself, probably gags about how gags about old gags are old.
The executives at WB are characters in the show. Or rather, characters in the show play WB executives who will resort to any underhanded ploy to promote the show. So the "executives" at WB cancel the show, only to have YouTube revive it; it's a plot line.
The pilot is funny -- for about five minutes. That's the difference between YouTube and TV; TV has to make something you want to tune into week after week. By in large TV fails. The Internet provides the opportunity for "All Your Base" kind of phenomena to spread, but not necessarily to command a half hour of your time (with advertisements) a couple of dozen times a year.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Just put some adds in old shows and place them on torrents. If they use their own servers instead of torrent, they might even add localized advertisement on it, if they can what country/state/area you connect from.
Yes, some people will rip out the adversisements and most won't be botherd and just watch the inline advertisement.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You use the same toothpaste because it is what you are used to and you didn't see a reason to change. Nothing to do with advertising or positive feelings, but simple inertia.
True. I've been using a dusty VCR to record and watch the shows I like. Then I watch the good ones when there's nothing but crap on. It seems the major TV networks aren't realizing how many people time-shift the shows. Now it's harder to find good shows because of the million channels of crap. Then the networks bury the good shows after a year or two so you've gotta scour the guide for them. The internet has allowed me to find quality shows that I otherwise would have missed.
Maybe less crap would be produced if the networks implement a model where people watch what they want when they want. Maybe the answer is TV on demand, or maybe an a la carte method, where you pay for what you watch, or maybe it's iTunes/BitTorrent, I don't know.
It's time the TV networks step it up.
Funny createSig(Witty remark, Odd reference)
{
return (Funny)remark + (Funny)reference;
}
I just saw it expecting something good and found it kind of lame. Sounds like marketing promo to me.
Yes, testing out pilots on YouTube is a great idea. And finding sources on YouTube & it's ilk are a good idea. But using YouTube related press to hype a kind of lame show is not a good idea. Face it. You just aren't going to fool people after they see it.
Acting was a little too canned. Gags were run of the mill expected (a few good ones, but over powered by the extended lameness factor).
Clearly YouTube has failed in the bigger mission to revive the Ben Stiller/Jack Black/Owen Wilson vehicle, Heat Vision and Jack ...
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
I don't bother with any series on a major network that has an overall plot line, until it has at least survived the first season. Then I watch it in reruns, or as DVD rental. The thing is, the UK system makes a lot more sense than the US approach. In the UK, a first season will only have 6 or 8 episodes. The TV station can therefore commit to showing all of them, even if ratings are bad. This, in turn, means that viewers are more willing to commit to watching, and giving the show time to develop. Contrast with the US, where they'll cancel a show after as little as 3 episodes, even if the rest of the first season has already been made and there's plot to be resolved. Gosh, wonder why major network audience figures are dropping, eh? Some of the cable channels understand this. Futurama revived partly because Cartoon Network was prepared to give it a regular slot, and not expect instant success. After a while, it grew to have the highest ratings on the channel, even though a rerun. NBC = Now Being Canceled ABC = Already Been Canceled CBS = Canceled Before Showing
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
"I love the spirit of the experimentation," NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly says. "And I think if we can actually have something find an audience on the web, gravitate over to the network, continue with a web presence and have them feed each other, that could end up being a really cool thing."
He went on to add, "That spirit of experimentation is awesome especially because we had worked so hard to stamp it out before, with our over reliance on market research and focus groups. Now that there's a forum to showcase originality without an actual need for us to support it ourselves, we plan on taking full advantage of it. Who doesn't like a free lunch?"
Let the HV&J groundswell commence!
Sorry guys, I would not usually take an AC stance, but this sitcom was never axed in the way you think. This was part of the marketing strategy as no studio would axe a show and pick it up again after just one or two million views and on top of that have such slick production for the pilot and let people get it copied on Youtube without suing their ass off... are you serious?
I know when they did this they were trying to pull the wool over your guys heads (not slashdot, but the shows demographic).
Regards,
****
NBC ran promo after promo for the show conviction. I finally broke down 3 weeks into the season, downloaded 3 episodes in HD and ended up loving the show, so it got a season pass in my Tivo. Now NBC has canceled the show. I'm furious at how short a run they give TV shows like that any more.
But that show had the best. line. ever.
You thawed Vikings frozen in a glacier? You fools, when will science learn!
Said Vikings proceed to run Amok(tm).
Here's Kevin Reilly greenlighting the show over the phone on Carson Daly. (With Ashton Kutcher in his office for some reason talking in the background.)
Big media, big numbers, big money - views/examples
Mass media is a profit-driven, numbers game. Let me show you with a few examples....
c) stupid reality shows that should be slaughtered, dismembered, burnt, and then the ashes thrown into the sun
Reality programming is cheap and easy to produce.
Cop shows are very popular on TV.
So in 1989, John Langley and Malcolm Barbour created COPS as an 'experiment' in a new form of tv programming, which is considered to be the very first 'reality tv program'. At the time there was a screenwriter's strike so the show was greenlighted mainly on the strength of being unscripted and no need for a screenwriter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COPS_(TV_series)
There is now only ONE genre of reality programming on TV worth watching: Televised Poker.
It is the ONLY kind of reality programming on TV right now that both educates AND entertains thus helping you to become a better player if you pay attention and take into account the show is a 'highlight reel'.
So I tape them and watch them later--fast forwarding through the regular ads and ignoring any product placement in the shows themselves.
The shows now on tv are popular because enough people are watching them (and buying sponsor products) that they stay on the air. When that doesn't happen, the show is canceled or put on hiatus. Program quality has nothing to do with it. The most famous cancelled show in TV history has got to be the original STAR TREK series. It was a somewhat cerebral show that addressed the issues and themes of the day in a science fiction setting. The problem was most people were watching anything but the show because westerns, comedy shows, and sitcoms were more popular on TV back then. I'm surprised Bjo Trimble's letter writing campaign convinced NBC to give the show a 3rd and final season before it was cancelled. As a result of her efforts, fans got a last taste of STAR TREK on TV before it went off the air and into syndication.
The rest is history and need not be repeated here.
This link should be sufficient:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek
In the early 1980s, NBC tried to cash in on the music video craze, then in its infancy, inspiring then head honcho Brandon Tartikoff to write the famous 2 word memo: MTV COPS. Michael Mann answered with MIAMI VICE, a cop show so 'groundbreaking' that he (essentially) sued William Friedken for his film classic TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. for 'look and feel' reasons.
These examples should prove my point. Any other views?
Fox has a history of killing shows with a great fan "buzz" but don't seem to capture the audience Fox believes they deserve (see : Family Guy pre-cancellation, Arrested Development). This pilot really reminds me of Arrested Development in its satire, and I wouldn't be surprised if the creator named AD as a creative influence. While AD had a very devoted audience, they couldn't avoid being cancelled. I think that this show would suffer the same fate as AD if Fox would be the ones picking it up.
Family Ties
WKRP
The Drew Carey Show
Herman's Head
Normal, Ohio
Not to mention all the times I have seen a character (usually secondary) in a movie or tv show, when the script at some point asks where they are from, and if where they are from is not important to the plot, it's almost always "Ohio".
Joe
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."
mix and match, you faggots
Except The Amazing Race, Real World, Road Rules, The Apprentice, Survivor.. and probably a bunch more. (The Mole is the best reality show ever though.)
I watch a bunch of poker shows btw.