Advertising model dawns with ‘Days’

Cooper Day, the adolescent narrator of ABC’s new drama “The Days,” is chronicling the 1,412 days until he turns 18 and can leave his suburban Philadelphia prison -- a.k.a. home -- for SoHo , where he’ll write his first novel and become instantly wealthy.

He’s finding inspiration for that future success by reliving his recent past ... which is just what ABC is doing.

“The Days,” debuting Sunday, hearkens back to the network’s award-winning 1976 “Family,” both in its domestic setting and because it too launched as a miniseries when ABC wasn’t willing to commit to a full season’s order. Sure enough, “The Days” kicks off at 10 p.m. Sundays with a six-episode order.

But with “The Days,” ABC is reaching even further back into television history to find a model for the unusual financial structure that made its airing possible. Instead of being a product of one of the studios, the series was funded and produced by a consortium of advertisers, reminiscent of the time when advertisers sponsored entire shows instead of 30-second spots.

If the show works, ABC executives believe it could provide the template for the TV industry’s quest to find new ways to provide original programming at minimal cost. ABC executives and the show’s creator and producers will discuss the show at a gathering of television critics in Century City today.

MindShare, which handles media planning and buying for Sears and Unilever, among other big marketers, developed and produced the show and owns its copyrights; ABC, which paid no license fee, is the distributor.

“It’s not an entirely new model, but it’s another step forward in the changing relationship of advertisers, studios and networks,” said Steve McPherson, ABC’s president of prime-time entertainment. “We will judge it entirely on its creativity and how it performs. Who owns the show is of absolutely no importance to me.”

“In a world where there are not a lot of suppliers and producers, this kind of deal opened up another entity to ABC, a new supplier, willing to deficit-finance a show,” said Mark Pedowitz, executive vice president of ABC Entertainment Television Group and president of Touchstone Television, the production arm of ABC parent Disney. “Instead of doing a pilot, a producer gets to do six episodes and be on air and test it out. It’s too soon to tell if this is a new economic model for programming. But it’s what we hope will spawn a new way of doing business.”

Peter Tortorici, former president of CBS Entertainment who recently served as executive producer of Bravo’s critically acclaimed comedy, “Significant Others,” formed a partnership with MindShare to develop modestly priced scripted programming in exchange for giving clients preferred status. As president of MindShare Entertainment, Tortorici acts as the studio head on the projects, which will include a CBS Christmas movie this year.

“There’s been a lot of talk about expanding the TV season to a 52-week calendar,” Tortorici said. “But in order to do that, you have to have a lot of different approaches both creatively and financially because nobody’s talking about doubling their programming budget. But the goal was not to do an inexpensive show. We’re giving our clients an opportunity for the same amount of money they would normally spend for media to become partners and have preferred position as advertisers.”

What viewers will get is a look inside a quirky family that sounds familiar but is rare in television today: two parents on first marriages raising children while trying to manage demanding careers. Flawed and confused, Jack and Abigail Day strive to give their children their best while taking care of their own needs. As a result, Day 1,412 is filled with confrontation and comic relief: mother and daughter find out they are both pregnant; father gives in to midlife impulses and quits his job; younger son and child prodigy Nathan suffers a panic attack at school over a girl; and 15-year-old brooding Cooper gets into a fight with the boy who fathered his sister’s baby.

In the words of Abigail Day (played by Marguerite MacIntyre, who has recently guest starred on “The Shield” and “The Practice”): “The only difference between us and the Osbournes is that they get paid.”

“So much has changed in the American family since we had family dramas like ‘Family,’ ” said creator John Scott Shepherd who penned the films “Joe Somebody” and “Life or Something Like It.” “You have 40-year-old parents now who are at the front side of the halfway point of their lives, and they’re very much wrapped up in their own worlds and have to balance their needs and agendas with those of their children. You don’t have two parents facilitating their progeny anymore. It’s five lives under one roof, five purposes. To do a cool family nowadays, it has to be blended or broken.”

Shot with a hand-held camera and cast like an independent film, each episode of “The Days” follows one day in the life of the family but not sequentially. Lively and dramatic, “The Days” combines serious issues (teen pregnancy) and funny moments (“I’m sorry, I think I was channeling Robert Young for a minute there,” says Jack Day [David Newsom] after asking for a family meeting) to lend credibility to the family’s life, Shepherd said.If it is picked up next year, its financial arrangement will serve as a new economic model in the sense that old things, with time, become new again, said Tom Sarnoff, chairman of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation.

In fact, during the first two decades of television, advertisers, such as Chevrolet, followed the radio model and sponsored entire shows, like “The Dinah Shore Show,” or hired agencies to produce them. Procter & Gamble Co., especially, dominated daytime with the soap operas it produced.

Networks, in turn, either produced shows and sold them to sponsors or made their money from selling specific time slots. As production costs rose and newsmagazines, such as NBC’s “Today” show, were created, it became impossible for sponsors to carry entire shows, so the costs were split among several advertisers.

“That gave control back to the networks,” said Sarnoff, whose father, David Sarnoff, founded NBC and is one of the people credited with inventing TV. “Now, there are a lot of approaches being developed because there are so many more opportunities for advertisers and others to get into the marketplace.”

This new direction began to take shape with reality television, a low-budget genre that yields high financial returns when a show breaks out. Catching on that more money can be made from sponsorships than from license fees (what networks pay studios for the rights to air programs), reality producers began striking deals with advertisers to place their products in shows and with networks for commercial time that they can later resell.

Now, blatant product placement has given way to “branded entertainment,” which embeds advertising in programming using less invasive methods.

On the Sci-Fi Channel last month, for example, food and bags from McDonald’s were spotted in three of five episodes of “5ive Days to Midnight” while Mountain Dew made three appearances. In the fall, Campbell Soup will join the backdrop of NBC’s “American Dreams” by sponsoring a life-imitates-art school contest held in the show’s fictional school as well as schools across America.

On the WB’s “One Tree Hill,” Secret deodorant sponsored a cheerleading competition, and its logo appeared on a banner on the set. “One Tree Hill” is produced by Mike Tollin and Brian Robbins, who agreed to become the executive producers of “The Days” because they were longing to help create a family drama that reflected their own lives.

“It would be an issue if [Sears] made us write an episode about a dishwasher, but that’s not what it’s like,” Robbins said. “Let’s say MindShare developed ‘Friends’ and one of the advertisers was Starbucks. Instead of hanging out at Central Perk, the friends would have been at Starbucks for 10 years. How unbelievable would that have been? It seems like that is the goal here.”

The Day family does not live in the brand-free world of most TV characters. Natalie Day, 17, for example wears an Adidas soccer uniform in the first episode and a jar of Vaseline sits in her bathroom. Lipton and Slim-Fast, two Unilever brands, appear in other episodes.

“We feared it would be more overt,” said MacIntyre, who learned of the show’s production deal after she had arrived in Vancouver, Canada, to begin taping. “I was wondering if I was going to be picking up big cans of Coke while having conversations. There’s something cheesy about that. Will Abby be cleaning with Windex constantly? But I’m so relieved it hasn’t been an issue at all. It has been great to work on a show where the characters do not live in one dimension.”

In fact, the show’s financial arrangement has given the production an experimental feeling that is liberating for the actors, said Newsom, who plays a corporate lawyer. “There’s something very exciting and immediate and urgent about hand-held digital video,” Newsom said.

Evan Peters, 17, who plays Cooper, doesn’t spend much time thinking about production deals or network expectations, product placement or ratings. On this particular June evening, Peters is still relishing the 10 takes of a make-out scene with an actress he is fond of.

“Us actors are the last people to know anything,” he says. “I don’t even think about any of that stuff. This is all good fun. To be honest, I can’t believe they pay us. It’s pretty ridiculous.”