Sadly, no one bought me lunch today.
But I made sure to eat my weight in free food, which included Granola Bars, Wheat Thins, all the water I could drink and a bagel (without cream cheese or any condiment whatsoever). As for work, there was plenty.
My experience with television shows for Major Networks is that the way a show starts is never how it ends. I was once working on a show called Spy Games for ABC and Dreamworks Television. The show was this ingenius reality show that was based on this elaborate scavenger hunt that the Microsoft kids play every year. Clues were intelligent and very hard to figure out, but these Microsoft employees dropped thousands of dollars a piece just to be included on a team for the game. Anyway, the show that was originally created from it was this great hybrid reality show/drama. It would pit regular people against a real life Bond-like menace, and they would actually find themselves competing and battling actors playing a role in the “story”. Like a really elaborate Dinner Party/Murder Mystery.
Soon, the network got a hold of the concept and we found ourselves trying to write in clowns with pies and dogs in tutus… Then the name of the show changed, then changed again… Eventually 9/11 happened a week before we started production and it was crapped. Because, as someone said, “Who wants to watch real people on television when there’s enough horrible things happening to them in the real world?” It was a good thing, cause the show probably would’ve tanked.
Nonetheless, this show that I’m working on has a brilliant concept and has the potential to be really different from other shows out there. I just hope that the network doesn’t come in and muckity-muck it around. Which, they usually do. It’s about, in a nutshell, selling the audience on something completely original while presenting it in a format that people “can understand”.
Meaning, basically that it can have some original elements, but if the audience doesn’t recognize the format, they’ll turn the channel confused.
A thin line we people in [UNDISCLOSED] shows, have to walk.
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