Tag: Dane Cook

How Many Shows Have You Seen That Were Cancelled Before They Ever Appeared?

Um, probably none, right? Writer Stephen Falk wishes he could say the same thing. But instead we’ll just have to appreciate his insight and learn from his experience:

Stephen Falk is executive producer of WEEDS & showrunner of REVOLUTION. Are either of those still on the air?

Advice To Young TV Writers (but really: What Happened To My NBC Show) – by Stephen Falk

Hey, you aspiring TV writers. It’s a hard job to crack into, but if you’re good enough and driven enough, it will happen for you. Don’t give up!

For if you work hard enough, someday you too may work on your own show for a year — from pitch to outline to script to pilot to the triumph of being picked up to series: the Golden Ticket. Then you might move across the country to actually make the show, hire a hundred actors and writers and crew members, and then in the middle of editing the 4th episode, get your show abruptly cancelled via late-night Friday phone call from Los Angeles. Then the fun part: you get to walk in shock back to your office — abandoning the confused editor waiting to lock the episode — and personally call all the actors and writers and crew and inform them the proverbial plug has been pulled and they no longer have a job, sorry. You will talk them through the tears and confusion — attempt to ameliorate the soon-to-be full-blown PTSD taking root already in them, all the while pre-knowing yours will go untreated and indeed sneak up on you weeks later. Do you clean out your office now? Do you wait — ? Shit! But first you better go see about that one prop for episode 5 you had to approve — oh, yeah. None of that matters. Everything has stopped. This is the moment after the 10.0 earthquake. Suddenly, nothing is the same. You don’t have a show anymore. Twenty minutes ago it was what took up 17 hours of your day. 24 hours of your mental real estate. It literally doesn’t exist anymore. The frozen people of Vesuvius had more warning than you did. read article

The TV Networks Are Trying to Understand Women

…But it isn’t any kind of gender bias that keeps them from getting it, it’s just that, well, let’s face it…if there’s one thing the networks have proved over the last 50 years it’s that they pretty much don’t get anything.

Network TV Attempts To Figure Out Modern Feminism, Might Just Be on to Something – by 

Television is a trend-driven business:Bridesmaids does well and suddenly, everyone’s looking for funny women, Modern Family is a hit, and suddenly, multicamera comedies are in and single-camera comedies are out. Most of the time, these trends are big, broad attempts to chase increasingly rare success stories. But this year, network TV, in its own halting way, is going after something a little more unusual: network TV is trying to figure out modern feminism.

The first attempt was Next Caller, a sitcom starring Dane Cook that NBC put into production to start airing in the midseason. On the surface, the show’s premise is disastrous: Cook was set to play Cam, the host of a shock-jock satellite radio show called Booty Calls, who’s paired with a feminist co-host, Stella (Collette Wolfe), promoted from a local NPR station to the big time because, as his boss (Jeffrey Tambor) puts it “Your show sucks and your ratings are garbage.” But apparently NBC lost faith in the concept, which many of my fellow critics hated in the first place—the network canceled Next Caller before it even assigned the sitcom a time slot for January. read article