NBC

Doomed But Loved: Chuck

April 13, 2009 by Jim Connelly

Save Chuck!

If you’ve been floating around the blogosphere or twittersphere or any other kind of onlineosphere in the past couple of weeks, you’ve probably run across a post or a tweet or a status update containing those two words.

To the cynical eye, it might seem that after Battlestar Galactica went off into the great good night — or great good morning, as the case may be — the geekosphere cast about for another TV show to glom onto, and still not entirely trusting LOST after that second season, fixated on Chuck.

Not true. Wealllllllll, not exactly true. LOST has momentum, an audience, and and an end date. The fate of Chuck is still very much up in the air. And the fact that NBC gave over five hours a week of prime-time programming to Jay Frakking Leno does NOT bode well for it.

And I think what worries the tvsnobosphere is an unspoken fear that if Chuck dies, that might just be the end of an era for Network television.

NBC Says “Screw You” to Friday Night Lights Fans

April 6, 2009 by Jim Connelly

Last year, I wrote about how NBC and DirecTV combined forces to keep the great Friday Night Lights on the air.

It was an experiment, to be sure, and at the time I was worried that the numbers might be hurt because people would either wait for the DVD and/or bittorrent the DirecTV episodes while ignoring the NBC broadcasts.

While I think that people did both, the numbers were strong enough that the showed got renewed not for one, but two more seasons. Awesome! And with the DVD of the third season coming out in May, there was time to watch all three seasons all over again before the next one started on DirectTV.

Which, BTW, would be worth it, because the third season was a complete rebound, washing away the taste of some of the more dubious things that went on in the second season. If you were a fan of Friday Night Lights, everything looked great.

For about a week, that is. Despite the fact that they’ll take DirecTV’s money to produce the show and our money for the DVDs, NBC obviously hates Friday Night Lights. Or more accurately, it hates the fans of Friday Night Lights. Why do I say that? According to a recent TV Shows on DVD post the third season DVD is going to contain bastardized, shorter versions of the episodes.

Whatever Happened To . . . Television Without Pity?

December 11, 2008 by Jim Connelly

A few months ago, I wrote a pretty vicious post describing the awful, user-unfriendly makeover that Bravo had foisted on Television Without Pity.

Part of the reason for the viciousness was that TWoP was a site that, only a couple of years ago, I had declared as maybe my favorite website ever.

Of course, two years is a very long long time, especially on the net. Still, when I wrote my declaration of love, TWOP had been kicking ass for a lot longer than that, and there was no reason to believe that by the middle of 2008, they would be bought by Bravo; the original founders would leave and it would be transformed from a site that I visited several times a day to a site that I now don’t visit for weeks at a time.

It’s a long way for such an established site to fall in a relatively short period of time, and apparently, I’m not the only person who has noticed: ever since the original post, there has been a steady stream of traffic to it, and commenters on it.

Will NBC and DirecTV’s “Friday Night Lights” Experiment Work?

October 8, 2008 by Jim Connelly

We are now in the second week of one of the more intriguing experiments going on in the television world: the shared production between NBC & DirecTV on Friday Night Lights.

Last year, just prior to the start of its problematic second season, it seemed like Friday Night Lights was doomed, despite the fact that it was one of the best written and acted dramas on TV.

And, in fact, it was doomed, especially as the writers strike cut short the second season just as it was finally beginning to shake off its sophomore slump. It really seemed like there was no way that it was going to come back, and those of us who had fallen in love with it were going to lose something unique in TV history: a show that took a hard, smart look at small-town America and the institutions that that were important to it — including, of course, high-school football.

Cue the last desperate improvisational drive towards the end zone as time is running out and options are running thin.

NBC’s Plan to Make The Zune Even Worse

May 8, 2008 by Kirk Biglione

The NBC programming that went missing from iTunes last December has finally turned up in the Zune marketplace. Fans of The Office, Heroes, and 30 Rock can once again pay to download episodes of their favorite programs — provided they own a Zune and a Windows PC.

Given the Zune’s miniscule market share it’s curious to see any network choosing Microsoft’s media platform over iTunes for paid downloads. When NBC pulled its programming from iTunes, network officials sniffed at the relatively small sales the Apple service had generated. By comparison, sales in the Zune marketplace are bound to redefine the term “nano”.

Clearly this move isn’t about selling digital content online. NBC seems to be more interested in punishing Apple for exercising control over iTunes pricing than it is in actually expanding the market for legal downloads.

NBC’s Bad Move

September 4, 2007 by Kassia Krozser

Will all due apologies to the Fresh Prince, networks executives just don’t understand. Or, rather, NBC executive just don’t understand. This past week, we learned that negotiations between Apple and NBC broke down because NBC wants to charge $5.00 an episode for television shows sold via iTunes while Apple, understandably, wants to charge less.

Rather than lure consumers in with a partial-season offering of NBC programming, Apple will not sell any NBC shows this fall (the deal was set to end in December anyway). First, a little bit of math. Assuming a 24-episode season, regular viewers will be paying approximately $50 for the season at $1.99; NBC wants those viewers to pay in the neighborhood of $120 for that same programming. You know, that’s a lot of money, especially considering that the cost of production is largely subsidized by commercial advertisers during the first broadcast run.
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Examining NBC Universal and News Corp’s So-Called YouTube Killer

March 27, 2007 by Kassia Krozser

It’s not easy being an industry leader these days. The moment you hit the top, every time your competition releases a new product, it’s going to “kill” you. The Zune was the iPod killer. Microsoft’s new and improved search was the Google killer. And NBC Universal/News Corp’s new service is, naturally, being touted as the YouTube killer.

All which makes for violent headlines, but the proof, as we all know, is in the audience. It’s not enough to release a new service into the wild and expect it to take the Internets by storm. YouTube didn’t become the go-to online video service simply because it was there. And that is the lesson big media needs to learn.

I think it’s important to review what makes YouTube, well, YouTube. It’s obviously not the only video sharing site out there. Grouper, Revver, and a host of other services allow users to easily upload video. If rumors are to be believed, Revver is the place to go if you’re trying to make a buck off your work. But the zeitgeist — that intangible thing — is with YouTube. Users cross the myriad cultural divides. My mother-in-law finds stuff on YouTube, because YouTube is pretty close to foolproof. It’s designed for the casual user.
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NBC’s Insidious Plot

October 24, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Last week, NBC Universal announced that, as part of a cost-cutting measure, that they were going to totally abandon the 8:00pm hour to game shows and reality shows. No more sitcoms or dramas with their pesky and expensive money-wasting frills like “actors” and “scripts.”

In the age of TiVo, YouTube & iTunes it doesn’t really matter when or where a show airs as long as it does air. So the worry here is mostly if this means something like Nobody’s Watching will ever make it to the airwaves. Also, how much longer NBC will be considered a “major” network when the fracking CW ends up carrying more scripted shows just because NBC doesn’t think it can have a sitcom hit at 8:00pm? Bill Cosby must be spinning in his grave.

Anyways, I thought it would be ironic to get some comments from fans of NBC’s low-rated freshman drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip — which has spent a lot of time and energy railing against this exact type of situation — but I had a helluva time finding any. And when I did, I was very much surprised by their reaction to this news. They weren’t at all upset. As a matter of fact, they supported NBC’s move.

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NBC: Getting Smarter

July 25, 2006 by Jim Connelly

When faced with the world of 21st Century Television, different networks do different things to bring audiences to their shows. In the past couple of weeks we’ve learned that FOX will continue to ruin the baseball playoffs; ABC wants to disable the fast-forward button on DVRs and CBS is going to advertise on food.

Lame lame lame. (Actually, I recognize that the FOX/MLB partnership is shrewd from the marketing standpoint; it’s just that I’m a lifelong baseball fan who recoils in horror at being faced with Tim McCarver, those dopey “Sounds of the Game” and sitcom stars in box seats every goddamn October until 2053 or whenever it is.)

So just when you’d figure that NBC would also come up with some kind of dumbass stunt or idea of their own, they actually go in the complete opposite direction and do something very very smart.

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How Can I Get My TV Pilot Picked Up?

July 21, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Dear Lopy:

I just made a pilot for a big (OK, big-ish) TV Network, and it was rejected for being different from other TV shows. How can I get it picked up by another network?

Signed,

Hapless in Hollywood

Dear Hapless,

Here’s how to get your rejected pilot picked up by another network, in six easy steps.