Saturday, January 24, 2009

From the E-Mailbag...

Jim Frank writes to ask...

Over on Ken Levine's blog, someone asked him about the value of testing for TV shows. I assume they mean when the network shows a pilot to groups of viewers and tests their responses. I was wondering if you had any opinions about it.

Yeah, I think it's mainly done to protect network execs from taking the responsibility for decisions. They do it because it may later prove useful to say, "Don't blame me. It tested well." But in certain circumstances, it may have its value. Many years ago, there was an NBC series called Bracken's World...which, by the way, I'd love to see again. It was pure soap opera and not always in a good way, but I recall it as one of those "guilty pleasure" television joys. It was set in a movie studio and one of the big story gimmicks for the first season was that no one ever saw Mr. Bracken, the guy who ran the place. He was a faceless voice on a speakerphone.

I guess the idea was that this made him seem more mysterious and powerful, and made the people who labored under him seem more like pawns. Whatever the intent, testing indicated that it wasn't working; that audiences either didn't notice they never saw Bracken or felt like they were being sold The Danny Thomas Show but Danny Thomas wasn't showing up for work. If you were producing the program, I would think that would be very useful information to have...kind of like a comedian hearing an audience not laugh at a joke he thought was hilarious. In this case, the producers of Bracken's World decided to go ahead and show Bracken for the second season and they hired Leslie Nielsen. If they'd let him bring along his fart machine and be himself, the series might have lasted into Season Three and beyond.

There have also been times that testing indicated that audiences didn't "get" some series with a complex premise. And come to think of it, there's another good use for testing. Sometimes, it validates what you believe. Years ago, I developed a cartoon series for Disney called The Wuzzles. I liked most of how it came out but there was a character in it named Rhinokey whose voice I thought was grating and wrong. I argued for changing it and I lost.

Near the end of the second season, in an attempt to try and save a show that was probably going to be cancelled, they did testing on it and the test audiences were nearly unanimous in their dislike of Rhinokey. It didn't save the show — it was riding too low in the Nielsens by then — but I got a nice "I told you so" out of it.

The trouble with most testing is that people use it as a substitute for thinking. The Mary Tyler Moore Show famously tested as a surefire bomb, and they especially hated Mr. Grant. We are all fortunate that testing was ignored that time. Testing is also sometimes uselessly ambiguous. I was actually in the test audience, many moons ago, for the pilot of I Dream of Jeannie, the show with Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman. (It was a double-feature test session. We were also shown the pilot for another sitcom which soon became a series but not for long...Camp Runamuck.)

On Jeannie, the villain was a man named Dr. Bellows. We were asked, "Do you like Dr. Bellows?" and I didn't know how to answer. He was the villain. We weren't supposed to like him. If I thought he was a valuable part of the show, was I supposed to answer, "Yes, I like Dr. Bellows, he's a great villain" or "No, I don't like Dr. Bellows, he's a great villain"? There was no spot on the questionnaire to respond with anything but a yes or no.

I went to a few other test sessions over the years but they always seemed like a squandering of time. When I got into television, a network exec told me, "The trouble with those things is that the people who are willing to go in and do them are exactly the kind of people advertisers aren't interested in reaching. They're people with nothing to do all day or who have so little money that they'll waste three hours in the hope of taking home a five dollar prize." For a long time, CBS drew test audiences from L.A.'s famed Farmers Market tourist attraction, where I can often be found. I always declined the folks who approached to invite me to hike over to CBS (right next door) to "preview an exciting new television series and maybe win valuable prizes."

One time, I half-regretted that. A friend of mine named Rowby Goren and I wrote a pilot for CBS and a week or so after it was taped, we were lunching at Farmers Market, discussing (among other things) its possible future. A gentleman with a clipboard approached us with the above offer...and it didn't take long to figure out that we were being invited to be part of the test audience for the pilot we'd written. We immediately said yes, figuring we'd fill out the questionnaires with raves about the brilliant script and write down that we had huge families, all of them equipped with Nielsen boxes, who'd surely watch that show every week if it became a series.

And then, of course, we chickened out. What if some CBS exec who knew us was in the session? We'd be embarrassed. It took a lot to embarrass us but that would do it, plus the show would be accused of trying to rig the testing. So although we took the tickets, we never showed up for the screening.

There's a punch line to this and I know it's going to sound like I'm making this up but on my honor as a blogger, I'm not. A few weeks later, our pilot aired as a special. The morning after, the CBS Vice-President in Charge of Deciding Important Stuff (or whatever his title was) was at the Beverly Hills Hotel, awaiting a room service breakfast. As the bellhop wheeled it in, he said to the exec, "Say, is that show you had on last night going to become a series? It was great. My wife and I would watch that every week."

The exec just looked at the bellhop and said, "How much did the producer pay you to say that?"

The bellhop hung his head and said, "Fifty bucks." It was true. Our producer had gone over to the Beverly Hills Hotel, located the man who was delivering that breakfast and paid him to say what he said. It wasn't the main reason that show didn't get picked up but it sure didn't help. And when it was pointed out to the producer how he'd messed up, he said, "You're right. I should have given the kid a hundred."

• Posted at 1:42 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Here's Mel Blanc guesting with David Letterman...in 1982, I believe. You get the feeling Dave wasn't all that enthusiastic about having Mel on his show, perhaps because it's one of those auto-pilot interviews. Every talk show Mel went on, the host wound up asking him pretty much the same questions and getting pretty much the same responses. The audience seemed to be the right age to be excited about the voice of Bugs Bunny...but not old enough to care about Mel's days with Jack Benny.

Ignore the stats that Mel quotes about the costs of making an animated cartoon and the time it takes. (It may sometimes have taken up to nine months for a Warner Brothers cartoon to wind its way down the assembly line but no department worked on their part of it for more than about six weeks.) Also, the anecdote about Mel deciding to give Porky Pig a stutter after hanging out with live pigs is a tale Mel told in hundreds of interviews...but Mel was actually the second voice of the character. Porky stuttered because the writers wanted him to stutter and an actual stuttering comedian was the first voice.

Other than that, it's worth watching. It runs about ten minutes...

• Posted at 2:15 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Terry Jones isn't doing much Monty Python work these days. So he's decided to get into another business.

• Posted at 2:14 AM · LINK