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What’s a TV Show?
Television was widely anticipated for a half-century before it finally appeared in the home. You see it as futuristic science fiction in films like Metropolis, Things to Come, Transatlantic Tunnel, and Modern Times. Someday it would provide to every American a front-row seat at public events, like the inauguration of a president, a horse race, or the World Series. There’d be live remote broadcasts from big city theaters, with dramas, operas, and vaudeville, as in International House, complete with pretty singers, leggy dancers, and black comedians. All of that would eventually come to pass, in one form or another. Live news events, sports, and variety are mainstays of television even today. But when we say the words “Last night I watched a TV show,” what we usually have in mind is different.
There was a blank spot in science fiction writers’ imaginations: scripted entertainment. One simple, obvious thing these tele-viewers of tomorrow never seemed to do in these futuristic visions was spend any couch time watching TV, at least in the sense that we know the term. The futurists of the 1920s didn’t anticipate that very soon we’d have a national habit of hanging out each week with the likes of the Ricardos and the Kramdens. Flash Gordon never kicked back with a cold brew to catch an episode of The Adventures of Superman. Inventing television was hard enough; inventing the kinds of programs and formats that people would want to see, week after week, took another kind of talent. In retrospect, it all happened quickly, but it didn’t happen overnight.
TV shows differ in all sorts of ways, but almost anywhere in the world even children recognize the basics (*): a fictional program, either dramatic or comic, that mostly features the same group of characters in every episode. It has catchy theme music, opening titles, and a closing list of people who worked on the show. It’s always aired at the same time of day, every week if it’s new, every weekday if it’s old. That time slot is either 30 or 60 minutes long, no more and no less.
Live television owes much to theater. But plays don’t have strict running times. You don’t go to a theater every week to see a continuation of last week’s play. Filmed television owes a lot to movies, with their camera angles, lighting, musical soundtracks, and editing. But neither theater plays nor movies are interrupted every ten minutes for announcements hawking the sale of cars or weight-loss pills. Television learned it from radio broadcasting, which invented time slots, commercials, and a continuing cast of actors. We’re all so familiar with the format that we’ve long since forgotten how artificial it is.
(* Naturally, there are always creative exceptions. There are anthology shows with different actors each week, like Kraft Suspense Theater or The Twilight Zone. There are entertainment offshoots like game shows, and oddball premises like Sing Along with Mitch, Candid Camera, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s Life Is Worth Living. But I’m talking plain ol’ regular TV shows: Kojak and Sgt. Bilko, Father Knows Best, and The Shield.)
Hollywood had experience in visual storytelling, technicians, and equipment ready to go on location, warehouses full of bought-and-paid-for scripts, and access to big-name talent, if only they would play ball with the networks. But they wouldn’t, not at first. Big studios not only refused to produce new material for TV, they initially refused to sell broadcast rights to their film libraries. That’s why the schedules of local stations in my childhood were loaded with fourth-rate films from third-rate studios: because the majors wouldn’t do it.
Stepping eagerly into the gap, many smaller independent companies were formed to make film series for television, the ones the big boys wouldn’t do. Some of the most famous companies were owned by film actors, like Desilu (Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball), Mark VII Productions (Jack Webb), and Four Star (David Niven, Charles Boyer, Dick Powell, and Ida Lupino).
In 1948, one of these new start-up companies, Imppro, (Independent Motion Picture Productions), signed a contract with CBS to produce 12 episodes of a detective show, The Cases of Eddie Drake, to be filmed on the west coast at a cost of $7,500 per half-hour episode, mere peanuts even by 1948 standards. By the end of the year, eight episodes were in the can, and then a mysterious interlude began. The show would have been one of the first, Hollywood-made film shows on the air, but it didn’t get there until DuMont, the runt of the network litter, bought it in 1952. Four years was an eon in early TV time. Like a fly in amber, it was by then a well-preserved fossil of a little-seen past. By ’52, there were plenty of filmed shows, and they’d started to develop a certain style.
But in ’48, they hadn’t, not quite yet. Eddie Drake doesn’t have an eye-catching animated opening with easy-to-remember theme music. It opens like a low-low-budget Hollywood feature of the late Thirties, with a stationary title card. Like a radio show, it has a framing device; each episode is supposedly a story being told by a hard-boiled detective to a psychiatrist writing a book about criminal behavior. Okay, all right, I’ll say it: “a beautiful lady psychiatrist.” Her main acting job is raising her eyebrows at descriptions of other women.
The most prolific of the non-studio TV show factories was Ziv Productions, owned by a colorful, swashbuckling independent named Frederick Ziv. If you are film savvy, you’ve probably heard of Roger Corman. He was a moneymaking producer of cheap action and horror films, but often with a sense of class, a touch of style. Fred Ziv can fairly be called the Roger Corman of early television, before the big studios changed their minds about producing TV shows.
From 1950 through 1956, he produced The Cisco Kid, one of TV’s earliest westerns, and one of the first television series anywhere in the world to be filmed in color. This was expensive, by penny-pinching Ziv standards, and the introduction of color TV was delayed for years longer than expected. But once it did arrive, in the mid-Fifties, The Cisco Kid was one of the few color programs that small local stations could afford, so it finally paid off for Ziv.
One of Ziv Productions’ biggest-ever hits, I Led 3 Lives (1953-’57), was never on prime-time network TV, but it attracted high ratings for local stations all over the country. Only five years after the primitive-looking beginnings of The Cases of Eddie Drake, I Led 3 Lives is a great example of how much and how quickly TV producers had learned about making shows that kept viewers in seats.
Each episode begins with a dramatic musical and visual flourish as the show’s stark logotype swoops onto the cover of the book the show is based on, the memoirs of Herbert Philbrick, who infiltrated the Communist party for the FBI. The narrator intones the show’s premise, reminding the audience of the basics, and says a few words about tonight’s story.
Most episodes involve the hero foiling an act of Moscow-commanded, US Communist party sabotage or espionage. There are no gadgets, no stunt work, no gunplay, just a Dragnet-style procedural about the often-dull daily work of microfilming documents, updating cipher codes, and attending Party meetings. Ziv made a virtue of necessity, using real locations long before that was fashionable. He was too cheap to build sets.
The show was crafted to build tension and suspense before every break for a commercial. When the show came back from commercials, it featured a “bumper”—a short segment of film with that distinctive I Led 3 Lives logo again, to remind you where you were and get you back in its mood. ‘Bumpers” were a small, clever idea that stuck.
At the end of the show, the actor playing Herbert Philbrick said a few words about next week’s episode and then wished us good night. Note that at that time, there was no awareness that this show might be seen any other way than once a week, in the evening. Then the dramatic musical theme plays over the closing credit roll.
Now that’s what a TV show looks like. By then, other early shows like Susie, Topper, My Little Margie, and The Millionaire were mastering the skill of “speaking in television.” Later in the Fifties, the studios caved in, and were soon competing with each other’s new television production divisions. Hollywood films stopped routinely ridiculing their small-screen cousins, as in 1957’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? This was roughly the point at which most American intellectuals decided that they despised TV. There would be exceptions; William Faulkner’s favorite show was Car 54, Where Are You?
The contents of TV writing have shifted with the culture, but the habits and conventions of TV shows have proven to be remarkably durable over the decades. Minor adjustments do get made, like minimizing the changeover point between shows so viewers won’t be tempted to change the channel. For a long time now, the unions and guilds have okayed speeded-up end credits of an outgoing show to be displayed at unreadable size in a small box within the big picture of the incoming show. Plus, the next show begins immediately, delaying its opening credits by a minute.
Today’s streaming era cuts TV loose from narrow selections constrained by broadcast or cable bandwidth, and from being anchored in specific show times. Yet despite new technology, like small high-quality cameras that can go anywhere, few attempts to alter the boundaries of what a TV show is have succeeded.
Fact is, whether we’ve ever thought about it or not, our unstated preferences make it clear that most of us don’t really want our TV shows to be too much like the real world.
We expect modern cop shows to be “dark,” “edgy,” “gritty,” exploring depths of evil. So CSI, set in one of the world’s sunniest major cities, often does its work in the stygian darkness of derelict buildings, basements, lethal meat lockers, and other places of nightmarish shadows, requiring intensely bright little flashlights.
And on the other hand, we expect comedy shows to subconsciously clue us into the fun with shiny, uniform brightness. Some of this is for technical reasons: for example, the bars even in the shows of our esteemed R> brother Rob Long, like Cheers and Sullivan and Son, can never be too real; after all, real bars adjust their 24/7 room lighting according to the “Nobody’s ugly at two a.m.” principle. Dimly lit barflies trying to hide their wedding rings just doesn’t signal “romcom” like a brightly lit, eminently presentable Sam and Diane do. Plus, there’s the issue of sound. Real bars have blaring jukeboxes and are crowded with loud people, often cheering a game on TV. Having to shout over the noise isn’t the best environment for precision joke-telling.
Audiences prefer TV shows with situations and characters that ring true to life, sure, but ones that are in an artificially heightened comedy or action bubble that seldom encounters the real world. All over the world, (and in our part of the world, for three-quarters of a century), we want shows to be original and familiar, novel and predictable. Most of the time, we’re more or less satisfied with what we see, so we snap on the TV and keep watching.
Published in General
Great movie!
Yeah, but it was only Jimmy Carter.
There’s a sub-genre of movie that’s about a TV personality at work. Some of them have really good impressions of the original show. In HBO’s Gleason, the set and cast of The Honeymooners is portrayed to perfection. The Hogan’s Heroes scenes in Autofocus are uncanny. You don’t see a whole lot of The Adventures of Superman in Hollywoodland, but what you see is eerily like watching the show.
Quiz Show, (1994) about the quiz show scandals of the late Fifties, has some of the very best scenes of a live TV show being made. My Favorite Year (1982) isn’t quite as accurate, but it’s all in the name of fun. The Front, 1976, about the blacklist, is a dishonest film politically, but it does have some true-to-life scenes of what writing and producing early Fifties television was like.
In classic era Hollywood films, the OP mentions Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957), about an advertising executive involved in TV. That’s also the background of one of the characters in It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), which culminates in a wild free-for-all on live TV. The Fifties program Person to Person, one of the most famous shows of its day, was a live remote from various notable people’s homes. It plays a major role in Bob Hope’s That Certain Feeling (1954).
Some of your comments could be new posts.
Thanks, Judge! Sometimes the comments bring up sequel or offshoot ideas.
A tv show about tv shows.
I’ve been thinking of a TV series that I would call “Pilot Project” … It would be a series about the making of pilots, focused on first time producers and directors – there would be a pitch and mentoring episode were established directors and writers would advise on how the script could be improved and shot, followed by the production episode were the pilot is shot, edited and visual effects added. Culminating in the pilot itself being shown… (perhaps with a later podcast of the table read)
I was thinking there could be an audience participation element as viewers could vote on each pilot based on weather they’d watch the series…
I was thinking back in the old Hollywood star days, there was some mentoring going on (particularly behind the camera) as cast and crew often produced several movies together…unlike today, where aside from sequels, its rare for Hollywood productions to stay together beyond one project.
There was a bit that ran on a website a month or so ago about a production house that was pimping a series about (lemme see if I remember) a lesbian cop who moves to a town Down South (where the unreconstructed racists are) and solves crime while elevating the benighted hicks who she works with, among, and for. The submittal had an added component: they also presented an alternative that essentially sounded like “Starsky and Hutch” except Hutch would be a good ol’ boy. Story boards were drawn up and the presentation was given to a variety of people a variety of times.
“Starsky and Huck” won. Every single time.
While this idea clearly sucks. I think the police procedural could be a great way to show people of disparate backgrounds finding ways to communicate and work together. I would point to “Lethal Weapon” as an example – but their backgrounds aren’t that different. (both Vietnam Vets, both veteran detectives, etc)
I dont know how Lethal Weapon 5 is going to work. Considering Roger Murtaugh is 5 years older than Joe Biden. (on a side note – Traci Wolfe who played Rhianne is 63!)
Also to have a police procedural in the rural south, you’d have to have a focus other than homicide – as murders are pretty rare in lower population counties. This is why “Justified” worked – there was plenty of murder and mayhem – but the focus of the Marshals was fugitives …
Metropolitan south on the other hand . . . it seems like they are reporting a killing most every night on the Nashville news.
Yes, thats why I also differentiated by high population counties.
Depending on your definition of the south, 4/5 of the most dangerous cities in the US are in the south. (2022 stats)
There is plenty of room out there to make crime dramas outside of LA or NY … It would be interesting to see a show from Norfolk, Memphis or Houston … But it would almost have to be like Bosch, where the city is almost a character in the show…
Red Heat (1988). Arnold Schwartzenegger as a Soviet cop and Jim Belushi as a Chicago cop.
According to TV, the murder rate in English villages is quite high.
There’s cable’s Atlanta and also Dick Wolf’s three Chicago shows . But other than Hawaii Five-O, there haven’t been a ton of shows actually filmed outside of NY or LA. Even It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is made in L.A.
You could blame local chauvinism, habit, prejudice, etc, but the real reason is practical: the actors and crews live in Los Angeles (and more rarely, New York), and the technical infrastructure is here. To film the whole show on location means paying people to live away from home for most of the year. It also means that if you suddenly need 20 trained extras or three extra camera batteries, you’re not going to find them locally.
Seems Georgia could be viable then. You have the large number of productions going there for the tax credits already, and then add in Tyler Perry’s new studio complex.
Tyler Perry’s studio is the best funded, most likely to succeed of the attempts to produce outside of Hollywood. The question there is depth. They probably would have the trained extras and the camera batteries I used as examples. The problem there is solitude. Perry’s studio has no local competitors yet, so there isn’t a whole lot of work available, not enough to support a pool of talent and technical ability. Top cameramen will not move to a place where there’s only one potential employer, plus whatever pickup shots are needed for Kenan and/or other occasional projects.
I like this Chris Elliott pilot, which is a family comedy when his character is home, but turns into a “gritty” cop drama when he goes outside:
Not a bad idea. The Daily Wire could do a reality show like the one you suggest. I’d throw in a Masterclass twist, similar to the music competitions, of having known “names” participate. David Mamet could do a guest spot, advising the writer, giving us his candid commentary on how it’s going; Gary Sinise or Dean Cain would play one of the leads that week, the other roles played by aspiring actors who are part of the ensemble.
Didn’t Matt Damon and Ben Affleck do something along these lines about 20 years ago?
Project Greenlight is similar, but the key difference would be, PG identifies its winner, then follows them through a completed project. Our suggested show would be closer in spirit to Operation Green Screen; it would be a different group of actors, writers and directors each week, and an SNL-scale sketch would be the result, a chosen sample of the complete idea.
There was a short-lived police detective show in 2010 starring Jason Lee, called Memphis Beat. Generally speaking, I haven’t been too interested in cop shows for the last 20 years but I watched and loved Memphis Beat. I don’t know why it didn’t survive but it only played for one season.
Most shows set in other cities are filmed in L.A. with “stock shots” of the ostensible location. The first two seasons of Kojak were done that way. The only things not filmed at Universal were shots made before production of the series began. Telly getting into and out of the car; Telly doing it all over again in winter clothes; walking down the street in various generic outfits. The remaining seasons were actually filmed in New York.
CSI:NY was much the same, almost entirely filmed in and around the CBS Studio City lot that used to be Republic Pictures. One thing the show did unusually well was finding L.A. locations that could sort-of pass for NYC. They always manage to frame out the palm trees, but they can’t do much about Los Angeles’ newspaper street dispensing boxes, or its painted curbs. Production companies complained when some streets in downtown L.A. were given a green stripe bike lane that doesn’t match NYC streets.
Yes, I was thinking of him and Andrew Klavan, Clint Eastwood, Tarantino etc would provide suggestions in the first episode on how to polish things up a little more…Give some advice – in general, or on specific scenes.
Yes, I remember that show. I liked it as well.
Well they’re full of Englishmen. If one’s not plotting the murder of at least a dozen, he’s lazy.
Off the point here, but there’s a “fan” theory that Ben and Matt knew the movies produced by the show would be terrible (the couple I saw sure were,) and that the point of the show for them was to amuse themselves with the mayhem and squabbling. Does that ring true to you, Gary?
It doesn’t ring true to me. I think they really felt they were using their fame to assist new talent, and had no motive to pick lousy material or be cynical about the show. This doesn’t make them saints, of course, and it doesn’t make Project Greenlight into some kind of noble undertaking.
The rules for a reality show like this one, even if the people involved have good intentions, are too shallow to do a hard evaluation of a script, or of the likelihood that a new director can learn the craft thoroughly and fast. It’s all too time-compressed; in the real world, these things seem to take forever. Projects start and stop and get set aside temporarily; funders lose their faith, or their nerve, or both, and new funders have to be found. That’s what real life is like.
The group I used to work for, the American Cinema Foundation, had an annual screenwriting competition that paid $10,000 to the winner. Making that phone call was one of the most pleasant moments of the year. We tried to help the prizewinners by introducing them to agents, or giving them contact info of willing executives. Several started the process, though none of them finally got made. If we’d had ten winners a year, and if we’d been able to keep the competition running for 20 years, we probably would have had better luck. In general, great filmmakers do not emerge from contests.