Despite the evidence in articles like these, TV execs can’t seem to make themselves take the impending threat to their livelihoods seriously. Some of us never learn. (And, ergo, deserve what they get?!)
Anyway:
Category: The TV Biz
Streaming Video Binges Take Up Over 70% of the Internet
TV isn’t dead, after all. Instead, it’s just moved to a new location. Our laps:
by Kate Cox
Do you remember 2007? Way back then in the long-long ago times, movies came on physical discs and you binge-watched a TV series by happening to turn on the TV while a Law and Order marathon was running. Now, however, it seems like basically everything streams to us over the internet… and basically the whole internet, or at least a huge fraction of it, is for streaming.
Hurtling Toward the TV Remake Apocalypse
by Peter Bradshaw
This article was originally published in the UK, but the situation is dire here in the good ole USA as well. Pity the poor TV executives who are running “dangerously low” on beloved old media content to re-imagine, re-do, and de-fang. What will they do when they – shudder – run out?
An awful crisis is unfolding in the world of film and TV writing, a crisis that I learned about when I had coffee recently with a top British producer. We are reaching peak reboot. The number of out-of-copyright pop culture figures or mythic icons who can be reinvented and reimagined for a modern age, or sexed up in their original setting, is running dangerously low.
Sherlock has obviously been done. So has Merlin. King Arthur is being done again on the big screen. Dracula and Frankenstein are always being summoned from the grave, the cultural undead; and The Mummy’s being remade – again.
The Token in the Writers Room
Do TV writing diversity programs help…or are they just a new way to stitch on ye olde scarlet letter?
by Rebecca Sun
In their ideal form, the mentorship and training programs that the Big Four television networks use to identify and develop new writing talent also serve to jump-start the careers of diverse writers. Such was the case for Rashad Raisani, who got into NBCUniversal’s Writers on the Verge program in 2007. Erika Kennair, who ran the program then and now is vp comedy development at ABC, pitched him for USA’s Burn Notice and worked out an unusual three-year deal in which NBCU would pay Raisani’s staff-writer (or entry-level) salary, even though the drama was being produced by Fox Television Studios. If the show decided to bring him back with the customary annual promotion the following year, Fox only would have to cover the pay difference until the NBCU contract expired. By the time Burn Notice ended in 2013, Raisani was a co-executive producer, paid no differently than the rest of the room. After helping develop NBC’s short-lived Allegiance as executive producer, he signed an overall deal with Universal TV in February and now is focusing full-time on development. “There’s no way I’d be here if it were not for Writers on the Verge because it made the decision for [showrunner] Matt Nix to hire me really easy since I was free,” says Raisani. “I also benefited from the fact that there was a diversity hire before me named Ben Watkins[now creator of Amazon’s Hand of God], and he was the star of the staff. He showed that ‘diversity’ doesn’t mean ‘second class.’ ”
Despite major strides in diversifying television with Empire, Fresh Off the Boat andBlack-ish, the stats on writers in Hollywood still are sobering: Minorities make up 13.7 percent of writers rooms while comprising 37.9 percent of the population nationwide, with only 10 individuals of color (out of 73) on THR‘s 2015 Power Showrunners list. There are no stats available on how many minority writers made it in TV without going through a program, though one Latino alum jokes: “John Ridley had to win an Oscar to get a television show.” Which is why new-talent development and “inclusion” programs, such as the ones every single broadcast network supports — no doubt part good business, part public relations, part social conscience — are a key part of writers room staffing. Like college scholarships for minorities, these programs are all about removing as many barriers to entry as possible, including financial ones. But with every good intention can come inadvertent side effects, from writers of color who are perceived as less qualified to the subsidization of first-season salaries that can lead to a “freebie” mentality among showrunners toward those scribes.
1,715 Scripted Shows and Nothing On?
Some people are sooo hard to please!
by Tim Goodman
Five years ago, there was no House of Cards or Orange Is the New Black. Amazon was shipping products, not signing Woody Allen to make television. Nobody thought Jerry Seinfeld, creator and star of one of TV’s greatest series, would make a show for the Internet.
Around that time, I was hired as THR‘s chief television critic, and I would like to think that I knew big changes were coming to the industry — but maybe not this big.