I'm not saying I have a fantastic answer, and I want to admit that. (I'd be a lot more successful right now if I did!)
I made some edits to my reply, and I think the answer I can best come up with is this: spend less money on development, and reallocate more of that money to production (either of more series in general, or on fewer and better series, or on licensing of exclusives from shows on other channels). Money in production seems to have better ROI, while money in development is a spin of the wheel.
Another thought: a lot of great shows get canned from the networks simply because advertisers don't grok them, or networks bungle the marketing and scheduling of them. Perhaps Netflix can get into the business of picking up these wasted opportunities? That seems to have been the operating logic behind its investment in Arrested Development, and I don't see why that model wouldn't work for other shows like it.
Small anecdote from personal experience: when I worked in development at NBC, we invested a ton of money into a high-profile Aaron Sorkin dramedy about life at a TV network. It was a fantastic script, by a confirmed creative genius with a track record ten miles long. As bets went, it was about as much of a sure thing as anybody had seen. That same year we spent a much smaller sum on a quirky workplace comedy about life at a network.
Of the two shows: Studio 60 lasted all of a season. 30 Rock ran for seven. As great a show as 30 Rock became, it wasn't all that great from the get go. A lot of the magic happened in production, with the hiring of a fantastic writing staff and the time to let the whole thing gel and find audience fit. I'm not sure what the operative lesson is from that experience. But it did teach me quite a bit about how you can't tell quality when you supposedly see it. Especially early on. :)
I didn't hate Studio 60 as much as others but, yeah, it should have been better.
>As great a show as 30 Rock became, it wasn't all that great from the get go. A lot of the magic happened in production, with the hiring of a fantastic writing staff and the time to let the whole thing gel and find audience fit.
I'm generally not very receptive to arguments along the lines of "OK, this show isn't great now but you owe it to the universe to give it six months" but I also don't really disagree. I confess to also liking 30 Rock but never quite putting it in the must see bucket. (In all fairness, I've really sort of gotten away from sitcoms period.) Certainly, I imagine we'd all like to see good shows get the opportunity to work out kinks rather than putting all the burden on one pilot.
I'm curious. Are there good examples of a really "knock them dead" pilot that didn't translate into a halfway decent show. Smith might be one possible candidate although I liked the show as a whole more than people in general apparently did.
[EDIT] Related question. For a relatively big budget show, how expensive is making a pilot relative to non-pilot development costs?
"I'm generally not very receptive to arguments along the lines of "OK, this show isn't great now but you owe it to the universe to give it six months" but I also don't really disagree."
That's not really the argument I was trying to make. I apologize if I wasn't clear enough! Usually my fault. Rather, what I was trying to say is that hindsight is 20/20, and at the outset, nobody at the network -- hell, nobody in Hollywood, including Tina Fey herself -- would have imagined that 30 Rock would outperform Studio 60. I was simply making a broad illustration of the difficulty of predicting winners, even based on (ostensible) quality of a script.
"Are there good examples of a really "knock them dead" pilot that didn't translate into a halfway decent show. Smith might be one possible candidate although I liked the show as a whole more than people in general apparently did."
There are some fantastic pilots that never even got made for various reasons. As for "best pilot that became a bad series," I think Studio 60 is up there. I'd also nominate The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a show with an ostensibly built-in fanbase and a great pilot that just ran out of places to go. Also, call me completely f'ing crazy, but I thought the pilot for SeaQuest DSV was really solid. The show itself? Kind of a massive, bloated embarrassment for all concerned (including Spielberg, one of the show's executive producers).
I'm sure there are plenty of others, but the problem is that -- as with most instances -- we suffer from a bit of a hindsight issue here. Also a bit of a selection bias. Because a lot of good-pilots-turned-crappy-series got canned after a few episodes, we don't remember them as much as we do the shows that lasted a season or longer.
"Related question. For a relatively big budget show, how expensive is making a pilot relative to non-pilot development costs?"
Pilots are usually more expensive than episodes of a show, for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is economies of scale. A running show has its scripts planned out in advance, a regular staff, a cast, and a series of continuously operating parts that reduce the marginal production cost of each episode over the course of a season. A pilot is more like making a small movie: you incur a lot of ad hoc and one-time costs to build something, and you gain no economies of scale. You set up the production, make the episode, then tear everything down and put the whole thing on pause until May.
Another big reason is talent costs. It's not uncommon to convince a prestigious film director or major actor to work on the pilot of a show to help sell it to advertisers and audiences. These folks won't stick around for the show itself, but spending money on them for pilots -- basically, as a form of insurance -- is an age-old tactic.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I didn't mean to imply anything about your argument specifically around "OK this show isn't great now..." More that it's just a general observation that (especially genre) fans have this expectation that audiences and networks have this sort of moral obligation to cut the show some slack and give it time to develop.
I won't violently disagree with any of your pilot examples. I thought all those were OK shows (especially Sarah Connor for as long as it ran--on a tangential topic, some shows would really just be better as 20 show or whatever runs) but I'll agree they didn't really ultimately live up to the promise of their pilots.
The latter seems like a solid idea, if the networks could be persuaded to part with their IP.
I suspect I'm not the expert on this that you are, but the latter could be a problem, particularly from a "career preservation" point of view at the networks. If Exec Bob's show is picked up by Netflix and turned around from a flop to a hit, that tends to imply some things about Exec Bob's management of said show that he might not want to risk being implied.
But in my experience, at least, once a network cancels a show, they're usually happy to let it go. Especially if it's been dead for a few years or more. And Exec Bob is likely to have switched jobs or moved up by then, anyhow. There's a ridiculous degree of fluidity in the "musical chairs" that is the creative executive career track.
Also: once a show has moved from development to air, the show changes stewardship from the Development department to the Current Programming department -- so there's a different executive in Bob's place now, who is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the show. Bob can absolve himself of responsibility if the show makes it to the air and then gets canceled. Bob is responsible if not enough shows make it to the air in the first place, or if not enough of his shows seem to last beyond a season, or find audiences.
In general, though, Bob is judged on his hits (or lack thereof) more than his misses. He's incentivized to take a lot of swings at bat in order to land a home run. Home runs can often be career-making, even if they were sometimes just luck of the dice.
I made some edits to my reply, and I think the answer I can best come up with is this: spend less money on development, and reallocate more of that money to production (either of more series in general, or on fewer and better series, or on licensing of exclusives from shows on other channels). Money in production seems to have better ROI, while money in development is a spin of the wheel.
Another thought: a lot of great shows get canned from the networks simply because advertisers don't grok them, or networks bungle the marketing and scheduling of them. Perhaps Netflix can get into the business of picking up these wasted opportunities? That seems to have been the operating logic behind its investment in Arrested Development, and I don't see why that model wouldn't work for other shows like it.
Small anecdote from personal experience: when I worked in development at NBC, we invested a ton of money into a high-profile Aaron Sorkin dramedy about life at a TV network. It was a fantastic script, by a confirmed creative genius with a track record ten miles long. As bets went, it was about as much of a sure thing as anybody had seen. That same year we spent a much smaller sum on a quirky workplace comedy about life at a network.
Of the two shows: Studio 60 lasted all of a season. 30 Rock ran for seven. As great a show as 30 Rock became, it wasn't all that great from the get go. A lot of the magic happened in production, with the hiring of a fantastic writing staff and the time to let the whole thing gel and find audience fit. I'm not sure what the operative lesson is from that experience. But it did teach me quite a bit about how you can't tell quality when you supposedly see it. Especially early on. :)