123 Cancelled TV Shows, a TV Memorial Day Excercise…

Back in the days of limited channels, we all watched pretty much the same things.

Here’s a list of cancelled shows sent to me by Dr. Laurie. I’ve added 10 titles. It is growing. How many have you actually watched? How many have you never heard of? With TV Land and the like on cable, your numbers are not based on your age necessarily. Much of this is also watchable on youtube.

It would be unthinkable to do the same with classic websites we all remember. To quote Carl Sagan, “billions and billions and billions…

Can you think of a few more? Ask your grandpa to look at the list too!

1. Andy’s Gang (Andy Devine)
2. Mission Impossible
3. LOVE AMERICAN STYLE
4. Six Million Dollar Man
5. The Danny Kaye Show
6. Then Came Bronson
7. The Smothers Brothers
8. Little House on the Prairie
9. Dragnet
10. Friday night fights!!
11. Dynasty
12. Streets of San Francisco
13. St. Elsewhere
14. Here Comes the Brides
15. Peyton Place
16. Topper
17. Friday Nite Videos
18. China Beach
19. I Remember Mama
20. The Red Skelton show
21. Lassie
22. Gunsmoke
23. 60’s LAUGH IN
24. The Dean Martin Show
25. Sky King
26. Dr. Kildare
27. The Carol Burnette Show
28. Bosom Buddies
29. Mork and Mindy
30. Truth or Consequences
31. That Girl
32. The Waltons
33. Burns and Allen
34. Star Trek
35. You Can’t Do That On Television
36. Mr. Ed
37. I Love Lucy
38. My Three Sons
39. What’s My Line
40. The Lone Ranger
41. The Ed Sullivan Show
42. You Are There (1953)
43. Bewitched
44. I Led Three Lives
45. brady bunch
46. GIMMIE A BREAK
47. Jeffersons
48. THE EDGE OF NIGHT
49. Dark Shadows with Barnabas Collins
50. Hee-Haw
51. F-TROOP
52. Rin Tin Tin
53. Charlie’s Angels
54. Casper the Friendly Ghost
55. The Wonderful World of Disney
56. Wyatt Earp
57. Flicka
58. Paladin
59. The Fall Guy
60. The Dukes of Hazzard
61. Rawhide
62. Bonanza
63. My Mother the Car
64. Ozzie & Harriet
65. American Bandstand
66. Route 66
67. The Patty Duke Show
68. Father knows best
69. Cheers
70. ALF
71. The Jetsons
72. Car 54 Where are you?
73. Green Hornet
74. Andy Griffin
75. The Twilight Zone
76. Combat!
77. Show of Shows (Syd Ceasar)
78. Dr. Kildare
79. 77 Sunset Strip (Kookie, lend me your comb)
80. I Spy
81. The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
82. Dallas
83. Man From U.N.C.L.E.
84. The Mary Tyler Moore Show
85. The Donna Reed Show
86. Inner Sanctum
87. Crusader Rabit
88. I Love Joan (Joan DAvis Show)
89. The Cisco Kid
90. Arthur Godfrey Show
91. Have Gun will Travel
92. The Beverly Hillbillies
93. Code Red
94. The Flintstones
95. Soap
96. The Flying Nun
97. The Honeymooners
98. Winky Dink and You
99. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
100. Alias Smith and Jones
101. The Bearcats
102. HR Puffn Stuff
103. A Family Affair
104. Northern Exposure
105. Time Tunnel
106. Candid Camera
107. Three’s Company
108. Rocky and Bullwinkle
109. Lidsville
110. Hawaii 5-0
111. Columbo
112. Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kindgom
113. American Sportsman
114. Battle of the Network Stars
115. Munsters
116. Get Smart
117. Six Million Dollar Woman
118. Murphy Brown
119. Wonder Woman
120. Mighty Mouse
121. Lost in Space
122. Fantasy Island
123. Sigmond and the Seamonster

Musings on the Evolution of Media Attention Spans

Everybody is aware that we live in a microwave-attention-span world. Or do we? How do you explain an opera like Wagner’s Ring Cycle still playing to sell out crowds? Didn’t opera hit it’s hey-day 150 years ago? Yet an opera which takes four days to perform with a total playing time of 15 hours, give or take a few arias, still packs them in during the Youtube generation. In fact, it sells out years in advance. Talk about a “Long Tale”!

What’s up with this? Are the baby-boomers holding up the long-attention entertainment market?

In the recent history of popular entertainment, one could argue for a cycle of evolution that goes something like this:

1800’s: Opera gives way to Theater/Broadway shows – Early 1900’s: Theater/Broadway Shows give way to Movies – Mid 1900’s: Movies give way to Broadcast Television – 1970’s/80’s: Broadcast Television taken over by Cable – Now: All visual entertainment turns into internet/Youtube.

During this cycle, each of the new-comer technology/entertainment media declares the death of the previous. Each new medium requires less time and more choice. Each new medium requires less money to mount and produce. It might also be argued that the attention span required for each was reduced.

Maybe…

Last year the Metropolitan Opera in New York had revenues of 249,000,000 dollars. A quarter-billion dollars for one theater, showing antiquated entertainment. The next five theaters showing opera, i.e. San Francisco, Seattle, Omaha, Los Angeles, Dallas, show revenues averaging around 50-60 million a piece. The US has 125 opera companies running in full. (for now we’ll leave out profits, subsidies etc.) This is not including Europe, where opera is still very popular.

Broadway, mostly thought of as a New York industry has spread throughout the country. Over 800 cities in the US have professional theater companies, and most new plays are developed in these theaters. Broadway is now more of a place where a finished, tested piece comes to rest. Once on Broadway, a good play can generate anywhere from 600,000 to 1,000,000 per week. Per week!

Interestingly, George Lucas recently declared the “Blockbuster” dead, in much the way one would declare opera dead. Too expensive, too risky, requires attention span too long for the average citizen growing up in the Youtube age. To add insult to this form of entertainment, Vanity Fair recently ran an article by Michael Wolf, The Plot Sickens, in which he declares the screenplay dead. I don’t need to recite the thousands blogs which have declared Hollywood dead.

For readers of this blog, television has been portrayed as a fading medium as well. Seth Godin portrays the death of the television-industrial complex as a fact of the 21st century. But, cable television still gets into 80 million homes, whether anyone watches or not. Although, MTV fired all it’s producers, directors and writers a few years ago, it still is one of the most profitable brands in the history of entertainment.

(For an interesting discussion as to whether or not newspapers are dead, see this.)

What does all this mean?

As youtube and the like expand and dominate the media landscape for the new generation, we look around the media landscape and see all the old forms still being supported by rabid fans. The raging profits are not there, but that shouldn’t be surprising. The pie is being split billions of ways.

Speaking of billions of channels, this brings us back to Opera. One does not need to have a mass audience on youtube or in opera. You just need the fans who’s attention span fits with what you do. Hundreds of thousands of video producers have connected to thousands of raving fans online. Micro-entertainment for micro attention. High choice, high traffic, high clicks, low attention spans, low pay. Opera = Low Choice, Low traffic, high attention spans, and low pay.

It seems attention spans will not kill off old media forms. Hollywood may look like opera in ten years, and television may seem like opera compared to the speed and choice on youtube. But these relative comparisons are only exercises in contrast. By and large, if attention spans are evolving in media, it seems to be going both ways, toward long tales and toward short tales.

I read long books, I write long blog posts, and I’ve been to an opera or two, but I don’t watch TV. I love short form entertainment on youtube and I can’t take watching it more than 3 minutes a clip. For me, it’s either long or short. Don’t mess with mister inbetween. The long stuff is an investment in quality, the short is drive-by chuckles. Channeling your energy this way? I’d love to know…

My Descent in to and Out of Reality Television – Part 8

Along the way to getting our show green-lit. I have to mention perhaps one of the funniest/saddest business lunches I’ve ever had. It was at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. My business partner had lost a front tooth a week or so earlier, came out in a sandwich or something like that. I noticed he had something in the space where his tooth used to be as we sat down for lunch.

But first I must digress..

As I alluded earlier, when the legal requirements of the television deal were at hand, I found my business partner had not been very upfront about funds. This is my fault. This TV sideline of mine was instigated on such a whim that I was treating it as an “Alice in Wonderland” rabbit-hole roller coaster ride, with me as a bemused high-concept/observer/creative type. But I didn’t do proper due-diligence as I would later regret. My partner had quiet a rap sheet. Literally. Four Marriages, 18 months in white-collar prison (Cocaine), three failed businesses, and a functional alcoholic. He’d also produced over 200 hours of television, run some of the largest media outlets for network radio, invented the concept of “extreme sports” television for ESPN, and was the best pitchman I have ever seen. He also had friends in very high places in the entertainment world, including (and these are just the ones I know of) Joe Roth, Mel Karmizan, and Walter Cronkite at the heavy hitter level, and Maurie Povich, Heraldo Rivera, and host of other news talents like Bill Curtis down a level or two, whom he’d discovered and developed as talent decades ago. And they all seemed to like him. Think of him as a cross between Jackie Gleason and Ron Popiel. Looked like Gleason, pitched like Popiel on late night infomercials. A real iconoclast. Tons of talent, no restraint.

The fun is over when legal steps in the room and starts making everything official. My partner insisted on forming a corporation to handle our business end of things. Not knowing all of the above, my feelers still went up. I declined. I was willing to treat this as a joint venture, but not a partnership. Then I found out later my partner had asked the attorney for funds, or at least a float, until this whole thing was produced. They had a deal about percentages and first-cut of proceeds worked out and asked if I had a problem with it. This was not good news. Bottom line, my partner was broke. It was pathetic because he put on such a good show. I had other clients, and was quite busy in the main part of my business, but this turned out to be all my partner had going. Lucky for him, things seemed like we were going to get a great order for a series if all went well with the pilot. Then his few hundred thousand dollars would make it all better. This was the hope.

I mention all this, because these revelations were still in the future as we had lunch at the Algonquin Hotel some time before legal was settled, and this lunch was one of my first clues that something was amiss.

I was regaling my partner with details about the legendary poker games upstairs at the Algonquin with George Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, Tallulah Bankhead, Harpo Marx and Dorothy Parker as detailed in one of my favorite biographies, Harpo Speaks!, in which Harpo Marx chronicles his involvement with the Algonquin Round Table crowd during the roaring twenties.

My partner didn’t smile much during my hilarious recounts. This was not like him. “You feel alright?” I asked. “Yea, I’m just practicing not smiling on account of my tooth.” At this point, he flashed a smile. It looked like he’d jammed a Halloween corn candy in his empty tooth space.

“What’s that?” I inquired.

“That’s my new tooth”, he said.

I quipped, “Give me a better look, it stands out pretty strong.”

“Did you notice?” he wondered aloud.

“I noticed there was something yellow in the space where there used to be nothing,” I said.

“&%#*”, he said.

“Why, what’s up?”

“I can’t meet with the orthodontist until next week and I’ve been looking into alternatives so I don’t go to pitch meetings with a tooth missing.”

A this point his produces a small pill bottle, rattles it and places it on the table.

“My buddy down at NYPD is high up and he scored me some teeth from the morgue” he said, smiling full-on so I could see the large yellow tooth jammed into the slot where his own tooth had once clung for dear life.

Silence.

He spilled the contents of the pill bottle on the table saying, “I’ve tried all of these, but the one I have in is the only one that will hold for any kind of duration.” He smiled again, as if to say, “Is it really that bad?”

My drink, in response to this sight, came up through my nasal cavity before I could get a napkin in place. I turned my head quickly, but was unable to stop the seltzer from spraying. Then came the stifled, uncontrollable, gut wrenching heaves of laughter. Then the tears. I totally lost it. My partners calm delivery was the best part. He had just describe something unthinkably vile in a wonderfully normal deadpan demeanor. I was a gonner for a short time.

Just as I caught my breath for the first time, he slipped in, “my buddy said it belonged to one of the most notorious Madams of the 1960’s.” He smiled again, displaying the prostitute’s pearly yellow, long dormant incisor,

I folded again. The maitre di came over to see if I was alright. I was choking, my nose was running, and I couldn’t breath. I held up my hand and waved him off as best I could, but I got the message. The whole restaurant was watching. As I straightened up and gazed upon the spilled teeth across the table cloth and my partner threatening another smile. I employed Lamaz brething techniques learned from the birth of my first child. I begged him not to smile again. I was able to keep from going off again by pondering what it must have taken for his friend to secure the selection of teeth. Sneaking into the morgue, knowing where the teeth were kept, choosing the largest sizes, noting the place from whence they came. What a friend. And a NYPD officer to boot. Who did this guy not know.

We ended up finishing lunch. I paid.

I asked if I could use his tooth story somewhere, sometime in the future. Which I have just done.

This was an omen. It was also a symbol. The old gaurd in Television was falling apart, literally. Bit by bit. I was watching it happen, biting my tongue, and hoping I had not made a big mistake becoming associated with this lot.

My Descent into and Out of Reality Television Part 7

Thank goodness for a great attorney! Our attorney had once been general council to a major cable channel. He’d seen the insides of some of the most lucrative television shows of the 1990’s and now he was doing his own thing. He secured us all the finer points going in. Kill fees, merchandising, re-run legalese, back-end this, back-end that, upfront monies, and percentages in perpetuity, worlds without end.

For the IRON CHEF knock-off fashion thing, we did a slapped-together prototype as proof of concept for the food chain. Our one-sheet was now an 6-7 minute animated/live action treatment. Our sample prototype was all the rage amongst the office crowd at Viacom. In it, we had a 3-D mockup of the set with superimposed contestants, models, and animated photographs of celebrities judging. (I think in particular we used Dennis Miller, J-Lo, and Donna Karen as the panelists) We’d paid a visit to garment district fashion houses and watched how fashion designers work these days. We found it only took a handful, maybe four or five designers, to be designing patterns and cuts, which were then faxed or e-mailed to Vietnam, where the patterns and the materials we produced. They’d send back samples overnight. Just like the computer hardware or television animation industry. Design it here, give to asia to make, get it back and sell it. They gave us a quick rundown of the business model of the fashion industry. We talked a few designers about how hard it would be to design something and drape a model in a few hours. They were all for it. We invited them over to the VH1 insert stage where we shot them on green screen, draping fabric over each other, superimposed them on a 3-D backgrounds, and the did cut-out animations of commentary by Miller, Karen, and J-Lo whose line were provided by comedy writers.

This actually was a very funny pitch. We called it Fashion on the Fly. Later, peripheral staff on this show would go on to develop Project Runway, which we found out was in development simulataneous with Fashion on the Fly. It is a small world and word travels fast. Actually, Project Runway was a week imitation of Fashion on the Fly, that is until Donald Trump’s The Apprentice hit.

Until The Apprentice did huge opening numbers everything was cool. The IRON CHEF was a hip, cool idea to run with, but when The Apprentice came out of the gate, all bets were off.

Project Runway shut down to re-tool itself into an “apprentice” style format. We stuck with the IRON CHEF format.

Someone once said, “immitation is the sincerest form of television.” We saw this in action. Having a show under development gave us an inside peek at all the ideas coming in as Apprentice Knock-offs. Sylvester Stalone, on the day following Apprentices’ premiere, pitched his boxing reality show. Ralph Lauren was rumored to have a fashion apprentice, America’s Next Top Model was in, Martha Stewart made her pitch, Steven Spielberg was in with a director idea, and a whole host of others. Everybody and their dog started to do an Apprentice-like show with a celebrity judge that fires all but one of the contestants. Every celebrity that had any kind of specialty started showing the week after the Apprentice took 18 Million viewers with it’s opening. In one massive zap of zeitgeist zaniness, everybody realized that this was the future of television entertainment, and that was that. We watched bemusedly as this whole frenzy started and we fully expected to be asked to retool this as an Apprentice knock-off.

The short story is that it was not long before our project was green-lit. And by green lit, that means all systems go. They pulled the trigger, time to produce this thing. Let the entire world mimic Apprentice, we will now stand out as the one show who doesn’t want to be the next Apprentice. We were going to be the next IRON CHEF!! The irony is rich.

VH1 secured the producer from Rosie O’Donnell’s recently cancelled show. and we were off to the races.