As Nine has been demonstrating, making hit TV isn’t as easy as it looks
I must confess I walked home with a slightly troubled conscience last night.
I’d stayed a little late in the office, caught the final minutes of Australia’s Perfect Couple, felt somewhere between horrified and fascinated and took a quick dive onto Twitter to see what the buzz was.
As I reported last night, Perfect Couple was not creating a positive response.
The trick would therefore be to make more informed programming choices than are currently being made. Is there a better way to forecast what will be a hit and what won’t be? And for those stations that are closely watching programming budgets (all of them I guess), how best to schedule what you do have?
There is a huge investment behind peak programming, often an investment made way in advance. Trans-Pacific content deals can also tie the hands of network execs when they look in the content cupboard for alternatives.
How do you improve the hit rate of investments made and then schedule what you do have to best effect? It seems to me much of it is done on gut feel. When it works, great (let’s be honest – how many people predicted Masterchef would be the ratings juggernaut it turned out to be?), but when it doesn’t, which is quite frequently, networks face huge write-offs
my humble opinion on why some of these shows are hits and some are misses…
for me, all hinges on whether the show is HONEST.
all of these disposable, BIGGEST, LOUDEST, whateverEST coming out of the networks, mostly 9 lately, are so dripping in wankdom you can spot it a mile away from the mega sexy-saturated promos, to the CraZy host is WackYYY locations. woooh. the audience can smell the bullshit/deception/editing/wanky promos a mile away – and now we have a conduit to share exactly how shit a show is, quickly, on local sites like this & twitter.
whereas if a show has a dash of honesty, and *includes* some of the awkward pauses, rough bits, real people being genuine (dare i say, most of masterchef), then generally… i think its going to be more identifiable, and successful. i feel like “talkin bout your generation” and “the 7pm project” could simply not exist on 9 at the moment, because they’d polish the shit out of it till it was unrecognisable. whereas 10 have just let the talent front up, warts and all. and theyre great shows. 7pm project is still a little awkward, but its bordering on charm when they make the odd screwup.
Sounds like common sense to me – and yet these shitty promos for shows keep coming (oz best couple etc) – i can’t believe they think their audience has the awareness of a 5 year old.
Pete O – you’ve nailed it. MasterChef didn’t have the SMS your vote gimmicks – they just let real contenders compete in genuine challenges without too much of the behind-the-scenes bitching and dramatisation (of something like Biggest Loser) and it worked. It was slick but it wasn’t sexed up beyond any sense of honest purpose.
As William Goldman famously said in regard to Hollywood box office success and why three different studios alll rejected StarWars, “nobody knows anything”.
Not entirely applicable in this discussion, but then again, most industry pundits (including me) predicted masterchef would not win.