TV Series Development Is a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Often I’ve heard it suggested that if the TV networks would only allow creative writer-producers to work unfettered, it would inaugurate a new golden age. Maybe, maybe not. But, in any case, what fun would that be for the executives in charge of program development? I mean, why would anybody want to grow up to be a TV V.P. if he or she couldn’t tell other people what to write and how to write it?

Oh, sure, it’s nice to have a big office and an attractive secretary, an expense account and an attractive secretary, one’s name on a parking space and an attractive secretary, but a person could work in the insurance business and have all that. But no insurance executive will ever experience the transcendental joy of telling a professional writer how to write a joke or develop a character arc or, best of all, of telling him that his script is worthless.

As this is the time of year when the networks traditionally decide which pilots live or die, I am reminded of the first time I became convinced that the development process by which TV series are created might well have been invented by Rube Goldberg, with an able assist by the Monty Python pranksters.

About 12 or 13 years ago, I was teaching a scriptwriting course for UCLA Extension. On occasion, I would break up the routine by inviting guest speakers. This one evening, I’d invited a fellow I’d had several dealings with, the director of comedy development for CBS. So far as I could tell, his chief qualification for the job was that he’d been director of dramatic development for CBS and had grown bored with the gig.

To be honest about it, I had never enjoyed the process of pitching pilot ideas--not to him, not to anyone. It seemed to require the writer to be part carnival barker and part Fuller Brush salesman. I could never figure out what the usual dog-and-pony show had to do with writing. The process seemed to favor extroverts who could come into a room with a load of foo-foo dust, temporarily blinding the executive to the fact that what he was being sold was a very ugly pig in a very shoddy poke.

Having the network V.P. in my bailiwick, I took advantage of the opportunity to ask him to analyze the process from his vantage point. To start with, I asked him how many pitch meetings he had sat through during the previous year. “About fifteen hundred,” he said. It sounded like an exaggeration but allowing, say, half an hour per session, one could probably handle 10 or 12 a day and still have time left over for putting practice, leisurely lunches and the occasional afternoon nap.

“Of the fifteen hundred pitches you heard,” I went on, “how many resulted in script orders?”

“About 90,” he answered.

“And of those 90, how many pilots actually got produced?”

“Fifteen.”

“And of those 15, how many finally became TV series?”

“One. ‘Frank’s Place.’”

The students, to their credit, either gasped or giggled. I seem to recall doing a little of both.

“So you’re telling us,” I summed up, “that you sat through fifteen hundred pitches in order to come up with a single show that was canceled after one season?”

He actually looked stunned for a moment, almost as if until that moment he’d been unaware of the amount of time he’d wasted.

He did go on to say how proud he was of the show. I acknowledged that the critics had loved the series, even if I and the majority of America’s TV viewers thought “Frank’s Place” was slow, unfunny and, worst of all, pretentious.

Considering the enormous expenditure of man-hours and the dismal results, I wondered why he, along with all the other development executives, simply didn’t ask writers to submit their notions on a single piece of paper, then follow up with only the ones that struck their fancy. Using his own calculations, it would have meant he could have avoided sitting through 1,410 pitches.

He had the gall to say, “I only wish I could. I love to read. The problem is that writers don’t want to write; they all want the chance to come in and sell their ideas.”

Back then, I was still in the business of writing pilots and he was, after all, not only a development executive at one of only three markets but a guest in my classroom, so I refrained from pointing out that he was a liar-liar and, what’s more, his pants were on fire. There isn’t a TV executive in the world who would rather read than be pandered to by 1,500 hungry writers and greedy producers.

Pages, after all, don’t pander.

But, lest you think I am being too harsh on the folks who determine what TV shows we get to watch, I will say that their colleagues who develop movies are far, far worse. In TV, at least, demographics aside for the moment, the bottom line is that they want to be the ones who find the next “Seinfeld,” the next “Friends,” the next “West Wing.”

They want to achieve popular success. That, oddly enough, is not the case with the folks who develop for the big screen.

The fact is that if any other business in America worked the way the movies do, we would soon run out of steel, clothing, food, computers, you name it. For no matter what other shortcomings these industries may suffer from, their first order of business is to satisfy the customer, at least to the extent of giving him what he seems to want. Even the Mafia, for crying out loud, is looking to supply a variety of demands.

But consider that, year in and year out, the most successful movies are those rated G and PG-- that is, family fare. They don’t sweep the Oscars; they just clean up at the box office. But for the most part, those people working in motion picture development want no part of such movies, because they’re not the least bit concerned with what the general public wants to see; they live only to impress their counterparts. They like to lunch with one another and brag that the projects they’re green-lighting are those that push the envelope, explore the dark side, have an edge.

The projects that excite them are rife with nudity, violence and profanity. If some new director, fresh out of film school, can be attached, guaranteeing that the final product will be under-lighted, overlong and basically incomprehensible, so much the better.

The cherry on the sundae is, of course, signing the likes of John Malkovich, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken and/or Tim Roth to play the lead. These executives simply adore those neurotic types whose mannered performances inevitably garner raves from half a dozen pompous reviewers. It not only doesn’t matter that their movies inevitably bomb with a regularity that the brass at the Pentagon can only envy, it’s also a huge part of their appeal.

These executives come and go, but the mind-set remains the same, no matter who is seated behind the desk. The real problem is that their bosses, usually being middle-aged or older, are fearful that they’re out of touch with this week’s culture scene andtherefore feel compelled to place their trust in the taste and instincts of these twentysomethings.

One can only sympathize with these aging producers. After all, it’s bad enough being stuck on the wrong side of 40 or 50 without proving how far beyond the pale you are by confessing that Gary Oldman bores you stiff or that you haven’t ever been able to sit through a movie that either featured or was directed by Sean Penn.

The only reason that all of Hollywood, except for Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks, doesn’t simply dry up and blow away is that, thanks to TV sales, videos, DVDs and foreign sales, it is nearly impossible for a movie, no matter how putrid, to lose money these days.

Actually, when you stop and think about it, the wonder of it all isn’t that occasionally something wonderful gets produced for television or the movies but that, considering the number of chowderheads in charge, anything at all gets made.

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Burt Prelutsky is a scriptwriter with credits ranging from “McMillan and Wife” and “Diagnosis Murder” to “MASH,” “Newhart” and TV movies. Sadly, if predictably, none of the many pilots he wrote was ever produced.