NAPTE (National Association Of Television Program Executives) is an annual confab where both distributors and content producers move on the essence of what the next big angle on TV will be. However with the current economic state, the progression was slow.
Dollhouse – Premiere Screening Three weeks ahead of its February premiere, the first glimpse of the second pilot was shown. Eliza Dushku lights up the screen for sure as Echo. The initial aspect where she is playing a party girl is a little confusing but is titillating to say the least. The meat of the series is engaged with Echo stepping and taking on the persona of a negotiator. Again the total transformation of Dushku is there. This is what will sustain the series. The angle falls somewhere between “Dark Angel” and “My Own Worst Enemy”. The problem is that with the latter the audience got too much into the nuts and bolts of the series too quickly. If the awareness of Echo is allowed to grown organically (as in the first episode) where it is not overplayed, the series might survive these tough times.
In Conversation with BermanBraun In a changing world where people are shifting, the story of BermanBraun is interesting. The fact that it is topped by a former studio head (Gail Berman) and TV/Internet head (John Braun) gives it pedigree. However shifting into new spaces (like online) is always strategic. They discussed their new outing in detail. The first angle with Berman is how to keep successful: “Being facsile is the best advice. You need to be lean in terms of overhead”. Braun enhances this statement with his view of the multi-conglomerates whom both of them used to work for: “The biggest challenges that the big company has is that they have gotten too big through acquisition and have become very difficult to manage.” But in terms of the Internet in comparison to TV in terms of its monetization structure, Braun makes a very astute comment: “The online world is still being run by the people who invented the medium. The networks have had 60 years to mature into a business. The question you have to ask the big portals is: Who are you?”
As far as their first steps when they made the company, Berman lays it out: “We knew when we came together that it was likely a television company would be interested in us. We made a first look deal with Jeff Zucker at NBC. That was our first anchor. We also knew that the digital component would be a big one for us. The era of doing scripted series [online] was a bygone era. [After conceding that], Pepsi became a specific partner.” Braun adds to this statement in terms of revenue: “We do make money in the digital space but we didn’t want any debt or any equity partner. [That said] there is no money in one-off web series”. Berman enhances this point saying: “[Doing the on-offs] takes more elements than a TV show. We couldn’t figure out a way to monetize it.”
One of their big profile elements coming up is that they are launching a celebrity portal for Microsoft which does not have a centralized anchor despite the possibilities of MSN. What gets these executives nowadays is that as a higher level executive at a major company, you “are actually above the decision making process. It is the younger executives that do this.” In their own company to keep structure running and loose, they came up with two major rules: “Every day we have to have a couple laughs” and “No Assholes Allowed”. Berman also states that the keys to success are “You have to be great. You have to be lucky. And you have to be smart”. Braun follows up quickly: “And if you do everything right, you increase your chances to be lucky.”
Digital Studios: Where Is The Money? Creating content for the Internet and keeping it prevalent and cohesive is a challenge…and of course the definition of a digital studio changes all the time. Jordan Levin, CEO of Generate, who announced a deal with 20th Century Fox at NAPTE, takes a first go at its strengths: “We produce for all platforms. It becomes a process of where you go first. Digital offers the opportunity to control everything in a property. A digital studio [by extension] is a company that finances digital content.” Brent Friedman, a co-founder of Electric Farm, approached it from a different way. He was able to create high level projects in the digital world from “Afterworld” (which I first saw at Anime Expo two years ago) to his current foray with genre favorite Rosario Dawson with the cutting edge “Gemini Division”. But Friedman makes the point that these were never created to be on TV, but only online. “Gemini” was made over 30 episodes for 1.7 million. Friedman explains the evolution: “Every deal [we have made] has been different which shows how fluid the landscape is. On ‘Afterworld’ we produced 130 episodes which is about 5 hours of content. Bud TV paid a premium amount [to air it] while Sony licensed a mobile game for the project. For ‘Gemini’ [by comparison] we had a deal with NBC in place. We integrated product [deals] with Intel, UPS and Acura while Microsoft wanted to do something mobile.” The key with this kind of stacked deck is ROI where the success remains to be seen.
Producing Alternate Reality with Tim Kring The creator of “Heroes” has become a mythological figure of sorts but, despite his seemingly stealth-like nature, he sat down for an extended conversation which was corralled around his intention to highlight the extensive online world that the series has created and maintained. Kring begins talking about the origins of “Heroes” saying: “[I thought] wouldn’t it be great to do a story…about [the fact] that there is an unsettled feeling that people have in the world.” Kring’s last series “Crossing Jordan” was a modest success but Kring felt a pull: “I started to realize the power of being a writer and became very burdened by that responsibility. I wanted to address the sense of global consciousness and did a lot of soul searching. I started to realize that there was this theme of inter-connectivity and how [we] bounce off one another. But when I started thinking about a sort of genre [whether it be] cop show, medical show or legal show…none of them had a broad stance. ‘Heroes’ didn’t come from that world but I live in a world where it was becoming. It is unbelievable how the comic book world has now become such a part of pop culture.”
Kring hones in on the spectre of the idea of “Heroes”: “The whole idea is that I wanted to create a post modern idea of what a superhero was. I became fascinated with the idea of ‘wouldn’t it be amazing if the Earth found a way to populate itself [again].’ It could be you. It could be me. I started to see [these people] in terms of basic archetypes: the cheerleader, the single mom.” Archetypes become an important unifying structure in the arcs: “What I find fascinating is the point of free will. If you are predisposed to do bad, you might walk through a wall to rob a bank. It depends on what your own base is.” He then described going in to sell the show: “There wasn’t really a one line pitch. I came in with the pilot pretty formed. I wrote it before I pitched it. I [think I] exuded an inevitability to it that was infectious. I didn’t tell them that I didn’t know where it was going from there.” In terms of the current progression where in order to keep elements high, characters need to be killed off, Kring responds: “The way we structured our deals with the actors…it was an ensemble serialized drama [and] it would become necessary to kill them. There had to be stakes for the audience. The kind of storytelling I wanted to do [I call] ‘haiku storytelling’. It was about ‘Can I tell a story in ten beats or five beats?’ It was also about dropping people into stories without a lot of explanation.”
Kring also addresses the non-studio shooting element of the show: “It was difficult production-wise. From day one, we were a traveling roadshow which is very expensive. We also decided to shoot it in a way that was reminiscent of a graphic novel. Aside from the standard coverage, we would do a crazy angle. And if you are shooting four scenes a day [like that], everything got bigger and bigger. From there, the show took off and had a life of its own.” The other angle with having such a big online fan base is how much popular outcry affects story lines if at all: “Fortunately, because of the way you make television and the schedule of production, we are usually three or four months ahead of where the audience is. There is no real immediate relationship to the audience in terms of the actual TV show. Maybe [though] it is different online.” Kring goes on to explain the inherent online aspect to the “Heroes” phenomenon: “The online aspect to the show was built in from the beginning. [The question was] ‘Where is the audience going’? To the Internet. We needed to cast a line. We started with a few simple ideas. The first one was an online comic book. We could have a story that veers [off the TV show] to the left and can end in the comic book. This would give you an ancillary view of the show. I didn’t have a lot of ideas. I was aware enough of ARG gaming to know that we would have a portal that dug you into a world. We had a confluence on events and that was that GE and NBC were very interested in being in the digital space. I pitched this idea that had this whole alternative platform. In a weird way, ‘Heroes’ became an incubation labratory and testing ground for the dot.com division (of NBC/Universal). It felt like the Wild Wild West.”
From there the different story lines had to be maintained. Kring speaks on the writing process: “The writers room on ‘Heroes’ is like the engine room. You have 10 writers in a room for about 10,000 hours. If you think about ‘Heroes: The Television Show’ as the mother ship, certain stories that don’t make it [there], come online. It is kind of a philosophy of taking a show [on] with a large canon. The wonderful thing about what we are doing laboratory is the purity of it.” In terms of creating cross over, Kring makes a concession: “We chewed through story very quickly. But the bigger thing was a zeitgeist idea. It was not the most original idea. It was an archetypal idea about good and evil and overcoming demons within yourself. This seemed to connect on multiple levels.”
Kring also speaks of the “Heroes” community as utterly “tech-savvy” and that has to do with the prevalence of the technology: “What you are going for is an open source revolution”. Kring speaks of his thoughts to found a foundation to foster this. He actually went up to meet with Google to push this possibility forward. After the meeting, he was walking out with a 25-year old [assistant from Google] who told him that he thought “this granting thing was kind of lame. A lot of people are doing that. You are storyteller. Nobody is doing that in the philanthropic world”. These words really stuck to Kring and he had to digest what it really meant. Kring knows the “Heroes” universe is huge: “We are doing so much content and are in a unique situation from stories to webisodes to games.”
In conclusion on the “Heroes” foray into this multifaceted world, Kring states: “I think ‘Heroes’ has now become a model of how to do this. The problem with most shows is that it wasn’t baked into their premise. With ‘Heroes’ it was never a struggle. It was an embarrassment of riches.”
TV Online: Is The Present The Future? The key with online elements especially with episodic is if people are watching your content and how can you make money off that? One of the most successful ventures in terms of launching its show has been ABC.com which has gotten major views on “Lost”. Exec VP of Digital Media at Disney, Albert Cheng comments on their angle: “We need to be proactive. There is a threshold that we have to figure out.” He uses an orange juice ad as an example. They found that if you increase the amount of ads 4-8 interweaving with the point of the programming, you don’t decrease the customer satisfaction with the player. Jordan Hoffner, Director of Content Partnerships at You Tube, talked about his experiences: “When we launched the overlay ad, some advertisers liked it but others said they didn’t want it, [Right now] I think the margin pressure at the ad agencies is very high.” It sounds like that the earlier adopters are in play but the consumer has yet to truly form a bond that the ad buyers can see to truly maximize their dollar.
The Future of Mobile TV In many countries, especially the Far East, delivery of digital video by mobile carrier is much more prevalent. As cell and data networks become even more powerful, this is the logical next step. As other conferences on this subject have stated, people are willing to pay for this mobile content since it is not the Internet. People have it ingrained in their minds that the Internet is free but providers can charge a premium for games or videos downloaded directly on the cell network. However, this panel initially suggested that although viewers want this and they subscribe to premium content, the growth in this area is flat. Different speakers on the panel brought different thoughts. Dan Hsieh, Special Advisor at ION Networks, states that the capability for HD is there on mobile while Ray De Renzo, SVP of Product and Programming was talking about personalized video on demand they are working on which operates just like the tickers on television but interacting with the content. Mobile TV is coming and the ideas are flowing but in this country it is not quite there yet.
NAPTE showed this year that the want for content is still there as long the economy rebounds at a certain point. Belts are being tightened and on the market floor, there was product still being shown. However, there seemed a bigger tendency, much like Sundance, to watch and see. Time will tell.
“Nights In Rodanthe” is a progression of the weepy 40s films that had so much power. Despite the possibilities to be over melodramatic, there is a sense of calm balance to the proceedings. The images themselves work because they seem lifted from a novel (which they are). The setting itself is what allows it to breathe. The simple blue house provides the best amount of story structure because it is a place that nothing can break down. Diane Lane and Richard Gere work easily with each other and you see and know the history which works both for and against it. The resolution and soft touch of the director and succinct and effective supporting players in Scott Glenn and James Franco balance the proceedings. The Blu Ray transfer makes the ocean undeniably pop with the scenes on the beach and especially the initial flying shots looking quite beautiful.
