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.
...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?
They can't take the sky, but they sure as hell took the airwaves. Damn Fox.
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.
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.
I'd like to think I'm "too smart for ads", but in truth, I'm not.
True story: I had a psychology teacher who challenged me to compare my consumer habits to those of my siblings, even though we all live in different states these days. The results were very werid. My brother, sister and I all used the same brand of toothpaste, and preferred the same brand of soda, but were completely unique in fashion, electronics, etc, purchases. My prof.'s theory was that, as children, we all shared these basic consumer goods, and so, we all associated them with positive feelings. This intrigued me, so I checked and sure enough, both of my granparents (both sides!) enjoyed many of these same staples.
Apparently, I've been enslaved to Pepsi, Colgate and Chef-Boy-R-Dee for generations now. Ok, ok, I admit it! Take my money! Take every last cent I have if you must, but please, please can I have some new Futurama?
And suddenly, the $30 cost for a DVD set doesn't seem so expensive to me.
barack to the future?
I'd like to think I'm "too smart for ads", but in truth, I'm not.
Ads, despite what advertisers themselves may believe, aren't about tricking you into things. They're about increasing brand or product recognition. You've seen Brand X on TV, you've never heard of Brand Y, you're going to buy Brand X. It's not about smart or stupid, it's about risk and comfort levels. You don't want to buy something shady, so you'll buy the thing you know. Without commercials, we'd have to rely on which box had the prettiest pictures, or, heaven forbid, product research. So commercials aren't that bad in themselves, they're just often done really badly.
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.
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.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Arrested Development is probably the poster-boy for this. Every time the Fox Network asked the show's creators to do something or threatened to cancel the show, the show would get really snarky about that request. For example, during the first season, they asked the creators to make an episode where the main character teaches his son "a lesson" (apparently, a quote from the memo). They did do this, but in the process, "the lesson" got warped into an elaborate thing involving a drug deal gone bad, fake cop strippers, and a one-armed man getting his fake arm shot off. In the end, it was the main character's father teaching him the lesson. What was that lesson? Don't teach lessons to your son, of course.
Getting back to the advertisement thing, apparently the show's creators were asked to heavily feature Burger King in a second-season episode of the show (as product placement). They did so while turning the whole thing into one big joke. The episode was originally called the "Tendercrisp Chicken Comedy Half-Hour," and features such quotes as, "It really is a wonderful restaurant." Carl Weathers, the actor turned cheapskate in his role on the show, also went on a long diatribe about how BK would underwrite the cost of filming a scene from a show if it took place in a Burger King. (Ironically, that very scene took place in a BK.)
What ended up happening to the show? Well, it survived into the second season by winning five Emmys and being loved by pretty much every critic, but by this point, the only advertisements for the show would appear ten seconds before its airing (as opposed to American Idol, which has an ad every commercial break). In the second season, its episode order was cut by four episodes so that Fox could show more reruns of Family Guy. *ugh* In its third season, it only had 13 episodes ordered, was moved to Monday nights, and was finally cancelled. Its last four episodes, including its series finale, were dumped on February 10th, during the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics. Note that this is the same network which also cancelled the Bernie Mac Show and Malcolm in the Middle this year without having any good sitcoms to replace them with. Instead, they're airing The War at Home, the Loop, and Free Ride, FOX's equivalent of Yes, Dear and According to Jim.