Creating Television: Conversations With the People Behind 50 Years of American TV
A Volume in LEA's Communication Series, © Copyright 2004

Robert Kubey (kubey@scils.rutgers.edu)
Director, Center for Media Studies (www.mediastudies.rutgers.edu)
Professor, Dept of Journalism & Media Studies, Rutgers University

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Why Do Some Television Programs Turn out Badly?

(executives distracted, talent spread thin, non-writers producing shows)

Each quote is followed by the page number in Creating Television where the full quote can be found.

Documentary producer Dave Bell:

Why are so many television movies bad? Why are they so simplistic? Why are they so uncomplicated? What are the characters so cliché? The answer is because television executives are stretched thin. Television executives read 8, 10 scripts on a weekend, read them in the car, read them on airplanes, read them on boats, read them every goddamn place except sitting down in a nice quiet spot. As soon as you give them a complicated script, they lose track. They have had three phone calls, they’ve had a drink, they’ve played some tennis in the middle, and they have lost track of where that argument is going. 263

Writer-producer Arla Sorkin Manson:

With Millionaire and Survivor, it eats into writing opportunities. . . . [There’s] a lack of diversity in the product. And a proliferation of non-writing show runners. 198

Director Walter Grauman:

There are too many inexperienced people from networks and production companies who feel that have to make noise. They seem to need to justify that they’ve got a job and that they are getting paid. They say, “Heh, I’m not contributing. I could lose my job.” It’s all bullshit and you and I know it and everybody else knows it. It’s self-protective interference. 304

Writer-producer Allan Burns:

There are too damn many networks right now. . . . The talent pool was stretched critically before that. It’s always been very hard to staff up your show. Now…..where in the hell are you gonna get the writers and producers to do this? That’s what’s wrong with the quality. I think there just aren’t enough writers. 183

What happens now, is, somebody spends a year or two writing Friends—he’s just been writing, he’s never produced, but they call him a producer, because his talent agent has blackmailed the studio to call him a producer. There’s a proliferation of credit. It’s silly. 184

What about casting? Isn’t it hard to find a comedic lead who’s young and good looking?

They’ve always been hard to find. Historically, it’s the leading man. Never hard at all to find funny, attractive leading women.. . . . Is Ben Affleck going to do television? 183

This [the] group writing concept I just loath. When we were doing the Mary show, of course, all the first ones were all Jim Brooks’ and my image, and we wrote a lot of the scripts in the first year or two. We had a vision, and we knew our characters, what they do, what they wouldn’t do. Now, it’s not unusual for a situation comedy to have 12, 14 writers on staff.. What kind of vision do you get from a group like that? You don’t. You can’t.

I had a very discouraging experience a couple of years ago. I was asked to consult on a show that had been on the air for three years but it was in trouble. It had started out sort of promisingly in its first year, and they sort of got in trouble. And I was asked to come in and help for about five weeks to help them break stories for an upcoming year.

I went in and was amazed at the way it was done, how sloppily the stories were prepared. There was this gang effort, with literally 10 or 12 people around the table, all pitching ideas that were being put into a computer by a writer’s assistant. They were working on a story line, for example, and everybody was pitching, and it would take three or four days, and people would be walking in and out and getting lunch and food, and coming back in. I left at the end of one day to come back to find out that they had abandoned the story that they’d been working on all day for something else because they were having difficulty with this idea. And it was so sloppy, and people were talking about everything else other than what they should have been, they weren’t really concentrating on the effort. People were talking about other shows. 185