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AFF Panel: The Business of Writing for Television
A room full of writers hoping to get a toehold in the television business got to meet some heavyweights at the Austin Film Festival Saturday morning.
Members of the “Business of Writing for Television” panel included Bryan Brucks, a manager and producer whose clients have written on such shows as “Seinfeld” and “Murphy Brown,” and Tiffany Ward from Creative Artists Agency. Writers on the panel included Phil Rosenthal (“Everybody Loves Raymond”), Pamela Ribon (“Samantha Who”) and Noah Hawley (“The Unusuals,” “My Generation”).
The panel was less upbeat and more realistic than others at the Festival this year, addressing the ruthless nature of the business and the shrinking number of jobs for writers in a post-writer’s strike, recession-driven television economy.
Hawley, in particular, seemed to have a bad taste in his mouth following the cancelation of his ABC fall drama, “My Generation,” after only two episodes. He said it was unfair to call the show a failure, because ABC didn’t give it a chance to fail. He placed the blame squarely on the network, calling it “a marketing and time slot failure.”
There was some discussion about ABC’s hit comedy, “Modern Family,” and that what brought viewers back week after week was the characters.
“And the lesson should be ‘let writers create great shows with characters that people can relate to,’ because they (network executives) don’t understand why a show is a success,” Hawley said. “You’d think that if you knew how to do it, they would just let you do it, but that’s not the case.”
The networks don’t set out to make bad shows, Hawley said, but a shrinking business has left them “terrified.”
“Their answer to it is to try to appeal to the broadest audience possible, which means to water down the content as much as possible to make it appealing to 15-year-old boys and 70-year-old women,” he explained. “And what show appeals to those two demographics?”
“You just described ‘Golden Girls’,” joked panel moderator Stuart Kelban.
The panel talked about dwindling writing staffs on network shows.
“I think as long as ratings continue to shrink, (the networks) are going to have a hard time spending more money,” Hawley said. “Certainly the cable model is becoming more and more attractive.”
Agents will steer writers toward broadcast networks because there is a bigger audience and there’s still potentially more money to be made on a network show, he said, but he derided network product as less interesting storytelling. “It’s certainly a dilemma I wrestle with — to go and do cable or stay in network,” Hawley said, adding that he was in discussion with cable networks who might still have an interest in “My Generation.”
The panel then discussed how individual cable networks have much more distinct personalities than the networks. USA shows, for instance, are different from AMC shows. Panelists suggested that writers take their show ideas to the appropriate channel.
“If it’s a Starz idea,” Ward said, “Take it to Starz.”
Hawley pointed out another cable advantage for writers: If you develop a show for cable and they pick it up, they’ll show all the episodes that have been produced. “They don’t waste money the same way,” he said.
Ward pointed out, though, that agents might be steering clients toward the broadcast networks simply because there is more opportunity for success there by virtue of the fact that they produce so many more shows than the niche cable outlets.
“There are just more slots,” she said. “HBO will only make so many shows; they don’t have to fill a certain amount of air.”
“The (broadcast) networks buy more pitches and develop before it gets to the pilot process,” Ribon added. “They buy, maybe, 75 pitches and they develop it with you and you turn in your script and you miss Christmas and then you do a lot of notes and you wait and then Valentine’s Day is ruined when they’re not going to shoot your pilot.
“But then maybe they do,” she continued, “and that’s a smaller amount and everybody goes through the pilot process and an event smaller amount gets on the air. But that’s a lot of jobs, in the beginning, that ABC’s going to have that FX isn’t.”
At one point, Kelban noted that none of the panelists had mentioned reality television.
“I think that the glut of reality shows we’ve seen could signal more than just a trend, and that is the end of civilization,” Rosenthal said to an explosive laugh from the audience.
He neglected to mention that he’s currently developing one.
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