Ordinary Nothing

You all know the concept behind TV pilots, right? If a show idea isn’t scrapped to begin with, the crew shoots a single episode, to see how it looks like. It then goes to whoever needs to decide whether to finance and broadcast the show, so they could look it over. Then they have the difficult task of trying to guess if viewers are going to like the show, or not. And as can be easily seen by, well, simply opening up the TV, sometimes they guess right, and sometimes they guess horribly wrong. Though this is not a very good measurement, since we can’t see the shows that were never aired. So lots of false positives, which they discover, but only after they already invested lots of money in the show.

And that doesn’t solve the problem of false negatives. The decision makers may scrap a show even if that show, had it been aired, would have gotten a big enough audience to justify production.

But since there is no way to know whether viewers like the show before it’s being broadcasted on TV, that’s a moot point. Can’t be done. Right? Well… wrong.

Someone leaked the pilot episode of the show Global Frequency, that the WB network discarded and decided not to produce. The pilot received plenty of reviews, mostly good, by people claiming (There are some copyright issues after all) that they didn’t really see it, but that’s what they would have thought had they seen it…

The number of people who downloaded it isn’t huge, but it’s quite large. Certainly matching the number of people downloading plenty of very popular show which are airing. The way WB sees it, this is a violation of their copyright. The way I see it, they just stumbled on one of the best ways ever to evaluate a pilot, and should embrace the opportunity.

Yes, the show is their property, and releasing it is as illegal as releasing any other TV show. Except that, copyright aside, if they’re not going to air it then there is no possible loss whatsoever to the network. They can’t even make claims about commercials, selling distribution rights, and so on. WB are not going to do anything at all with that pilot episode, except keep it locked someplace. So if someone sees it, WB incur no losses. It’s not like a personal journal, that they may have a legitimate reason to keep out of the public. It doesn’t do anything for them if it’s not produced. Which places them in a winning position, since they can either make nothing with it, as they already plan on doing, or manage to make money out of it, which is bound to be an improvement

Now they can (though that’s not likely) come to their senses, change their minds, and air it. They already know that they will have viewers, and that there are plenty of people who like the show. And this huge public exposure test didn’t cost them a dime, people volunteered. This would mean that the pilot distribution will cause whatever damages the downloading of other TV series may do (a lot less, if at all, than what the TV networks claim, but that’s a different topic), but that is surely offsetted by the fact that they wouldn’t have made anything at all without it.

I do hope that someone will realize the point, someplace. And that new pilots will be placed by the networks themselves for public evaluation. It doesn’t cost them, and gives them better approximation of viewers than the guesses of the relevant people working for them.

True, that’s not perfect. The viewer pool in that way is biased towards people who have some computer knowledge. But that changes very rapidly, and many people who are completely computer illiterate already know how to download files if they want to. Plus, even if the bias was strong, it would only mean that a small viewership isn’t indicative, but a large one would still mean plenty of potential viewers.

As a final note, had I actually done something like downloading that pilot and watching it, which I of course would never imagine doing, I’d have probably said that it was pretty good. Very idiotic, but then again it is derived from a comic series. The story of the pilot, and the premises they lay for the series, are, allegedly, full of holes and make little sense. But it still would have been lots of fun to watch, and would have provided good entertainment. They also left plenty of open threads on the larger plot elements, so it could improve. Probably not enough for me to shell money on getting the DVD, but enough to warrant the time of watching it on TV.

July 1st, 2005 at 16:27 EET | Categories: Legal, Television | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.