Month: May 2015

Sitcoms: a changing medium adapts to a changing audience

Change: It’s a good thing, right? So how come everybody in the TV biz is so dang worried about it?

pic by Gustavo Morales
pic by Gustavo Morales

by Stephanie Kocer

NBC canceled a sitcom in 1989 due to low ratings. A year later network executive Rick Ludwin ordered four episodes of that same show. He liked the young comedian it starred. Those four episodes were shown during the summer season on NBC. It then scored a few viewers. Those new viewers, mostly young men, prompted the network to pick up the show for a second season. That struggling sitcom: Seinfeld.

It’s hard to tell whether a sitcom will be a smash hit or a giant flop. Seinfeld had everything working against it: scheduling, ratings and an unknown star. Today it is considered the greatest sitcom of all time. Many shows don’t get that lucky, though. There’s no secret formula for making a great comedy. Whether a show makes it or not depends on more than just being funny. read article

Herbie J Pilato tells All About the Origin of the Classic Series KUNG-FU

by Herbie J Pilato

Ed Spielman, creator of KUNG FU
Ed Spielman, creator of KUNG FU

Writer/executive producer Ed Spielman is a man for all seasons…TV seasons that is, and a few for the big screen as well.

Spielman, who is also an author and journalist, is the creator of the Emmy Award winning classic TV series, Kung Fu, the first eastern-western which initially aired on ABC from 1972 to 1975, and starred David Carradine as the Asian-American Shaolin monk from the Far East who journeyed through the Old West.

The show’s original 90-minute origin (co-written with Howard Friedlander), debuting February 22, 1972 (on ABC’s popular Movie of the Week series) was “the first American Martial Arts film.” The Emmy award winning series that followed commenced the modern martial arts genre for television and motion pictures, and was honored by Entertainment Weekly magazine as “One of the 100 Best Television Shows of All Time.” read article

Need a new home? For free? Forever? It can be arranged.

writeahouseCapture…In Detroit, anyway. Write-A-House is a new wrinkle on the traditional writers-in-residence thing because in this case the writer is just given a house. For your very own. For, like, ever.

According to the Write-A-House web page:

Write A House [is] the nonprofit organization that takes the idea of a writer’s residency quite literally. We provide writers with the unique opportunity to own a home in Detroit. read article

Don’t Let Fans’ Silence Fool You. ‘Community’ is as Great as Ever

Last week we ran a post called Why Nobody’s Talking About Community Anymore, which came to certain conclusions about the quality of the series this year and raised a bit of a ruckus. In keeping with our equal time policy – which just started today, but hey – we’re pleased us, um, punch to present another point of view:

More COMMUNITYby Pilot Viruet

The sixth season of Community should have been its biggest and most celebrated. Long before it existed, before it was even a real possibility, it was already the subject of a joking-but-not-really-joking hashtag that began in Season 2’s “Paradigms of Human Memory,” with Abed’s passing reference to The Cape. “Six seasons and a movie” was the rallying cry of fans who believed, accurately, that Community was good enough to run for several more years, despite what NBC (and the ratings) said. And against all odds — Dan Harmon’s firing and subsequent rehiring, a gas-leak season, and even a cancellation — that sixth season did happen and is currently airing. But the fanfare around the series seems to have died down.

It’s a curious development, albeit one that is easy to explain. There is, of course, the fact that Community now airs on a streaming site, Yahoo Screen (which is difficult to navigate and features a less-than-stellar video player), rather than on a broadcast network. But Community has always been fueled by the Internet — I can’t imagine it would have lasted five seasons on NBC, let alone been rescued by Yahoo, if not for the intensity of its fans on social media, who delighted in hashtags and quoted every line and took over A.V. Club comment sections. So it should be just as equipped as any other show to thrive online. read article

Peggy Bechko tells writers how to “Name that Character!”

whatname

by Peggy Bechko

Name that Character!

Sounds like a game, doesn’t it, but for the writer it’s far from it. If you thought you had a tough time finding a name for your kid, listen up. It can be a far more serious matter to find a name for the characters in your script or novel. (Maybe not to a parent, but certainly to the serious writer.)

It’s all too easy to think of naming a character after a friend, a relative or someone you met once because you happen to remember it. read article