Fall Premiere Week: Watercoolerboarding

Television is now a year-round enterprise of “whenever, wherever” (per Shakira), yet I'm still excited to watch the broadcast network premieres each September. After several years of evaluating programming and putting these schedules together, I have a pretty quick reaction to what I’m watching.

Part of this is understanding the track record: most shows fail, and I watch fully aware that most new shows won’t make it past their first season. Critics become jaded because they've seen too many that don't work, and I'm also easily frustrated by shows that feel manufactured, flailing their plot and music wildly to keep a rock afloat that’s simply meant to sink. But I also remind myself that they started as an idea in a writer’s head, an idea they expanded into a story and then a world with characters they hoped would live on in the public’s minds as well. For every nameless cop drama there's Twin Peaks and Breaking Bad, for every groaning sitcom there's Seinfeld and Friends. The fact that multiple companies spend billions of dollars a year to create stories for people to enjoy, even if it’s for commercial reasons, is amazing.

And while we move toward the moment when Netflix downloads full series directly into our brains, I still enjoy watching television unfold around the watercooler (and the internet), week-by-week. If we've learned anything from social media, it’s that people like to share themselves, but they also like to share excitement. That doesn’t happen when ten million people post selfies, it happens when ten  million people decide which image, video, article, music, movie, or show they like. People even get excited to not like content (internet, meet trolls), as long as they do it together.

I won’t be rooting for shows to crash, even if I know which ones will, and I’ll be giving each one a fair shot, even if that means I meet thirty sets of characters I’ve seen many times over. The odds are against success, but the odds are also for it once in awhile. I like to be there for those moments, to marvel at the ability of a creative team to once again reinvent the wheel, put some fancy rims on it, or when we’re really lucky, throw the wheels out altogether and give us a hoverboard.

“I’ve never heard of The Walking Dead."

I've been working on a sales event this month, and recently I spent the afternoon with a team of salespeople who flew in from across the U.S. for their annual awards. The work itself was pretty straightforward - I helped them get tickets for a TV show taping and managed some logistics on the day of the event. But the real opportunity, at least for me, was the chance to interact with a very talented cross-section of people who didn’t really know Los Angeles or the entertainment industry. Since we were at the taping, the topic was front and center, and they were curious to hear about my background.

I’m always happy to speak about the trade I know best, and since we didn't have a base of common technical knowledge, I get to think through the business and “present” it. Anytime I have the chance to explain something I think I know, I'm forced to step outside and look at it more objectively, boil it down, and try to be engaging, which is always a good way to learn something new. It helps that everyone consumes entertainment to some degree, but what I find most fascinating is that the organizational framework of distribution is practically meaningless to most consumers.

That is, we look at television, scheduled programming, video on demand, downloads, DVD, as one universe of choices that people actively engage in making. I always keep track of what content is where and how that might affect choices, but usually people consume whatever entertainment is available at a given moment. What’s on TV is what’s on. Skipping through Hulu or Netflix is another way to go. When viewers find something they like, they may stick with it and remember to go back to where they found it, and if that happens often enough, they may acquire a habit of seeking out a particular channel. But what gets me is that despite the information available through marketing, friends, news, there’s still chance involved in whether that person will happen to see and happen to be interested in watching a show.

I know this when I hear statements like “I’ve never heard of The Walking Dead,” the top scripted series on television. The guy who said this watches TV regularly, is a bit outside The Walking Dead’s demo, but also doesn’t live under a rock. I would even bet based on my impression that he’d like the show, yet he never landed on AMC when it was on, and was never influenced to check it out. I’m glad he has a fulfilling life not predicated on zombie apocalypses, but for an industry trying to get this guy to watch this show, it’s pretty crazy to think about. We’re used to thinking as heavy entertainment consumers because a) we're heavy consumers, b) the most vocal feedback comes from other heavy consumers, and c) we “neglect the denominator”: any show, even The Walking Dead, only attracts a small sliver of the national pie each week.

I guess this is my long way of saying it’s refreshing to hear the impressions of casual viewers outside of a focus group or local environment. I gathered that most of them had cable and at least one on-demand service, but these are top sales performers, and they’ve got lots of other things to do. When they turn on their TV, there's generally one reason: they have a bit of downtime and want to find something enjoyable to watch.