Kontextmaschine

22nd July 2014

Post with 15 notes

In LA I took a screenwriting class sequence through the UCLA Extension program. The idea was that over 2 or 3 courses you’d conceive, outline, and complete a spec script. The program has a solid industry reputation, each section’s led by a credited working writer (even successful working tv writers are only on staff one out of every two or more years of their active career).

The teacher for my first class had had a decent working career, from at least Renegade through Stargate I think, maybe sold some pilots but none produced, and brought good experience to the table - asked how working writers would do something his answer was “basically, however your showrunner wants, but for a spec, here are a few different approaches I’ve seen and what each one is best suited to.”

The guy for the second class was a pompous ass who would publicly belittle students who didn’t follow his (never actually explained) style. This arrogance wasn’t really accounted for by (but might account FOR) his one-season-and-out-on-Charmed work history. I noped out and finished the Veronica Mars spec (“Miami Vice, Principles”) on my own.

The fellow students were a mixed bag of cool. There was a stuntwoman aging out of the job who, when we pressed her to, showed off her ability to do zero-momentum bicycle kicks. There was a (black) WB programming exec who explained, upfront, that the WB had been consciously following the Fox strategy of network-building of starting with few nights of programming and building an identity as “the black network” (the “Sister, Sister” & “Living Single” eras, respectively), then as they proved themselves discarding that for a youth identity with teen soaps (“90210”/”Dawson’s Creek”).

He wasn’t cynical about this but matter-of-fact, suits are unapologetic that it’s all about money and at least TV suits take writing seriously. (Where for movies writers are the lowest man on the pole, TV is a writers’ medium, and the head writer [“showrunner”] has ultimate control of a production. If you’ve ever wondered why a great show was cancelled after a few episodes, it’s often because someone hired on the strength of their writing couldn’t herd cats or wouldn’t compromise vision enough to keep a schedule or budget.)

The way he explained it was that there was enough of an unmet demand for black-oriented programming they’d be guaranteed a survival-level audience, but given the chance anyone would prefer teen, but the specific mechanisms for this were interesting.

It’s not just that black wealth/income numbers were iffy - teenagers aren’t that rich either. More, it was that a lot of advertisers wanted a specifically young audience - Taco Bell, Mountain Dew, lifestyle brands, Noxema, superhero movies, entry-level two-door cars - but there weren’t many products with network ad budgets with a specifically black target audience. Tyler Perry movies, basically. So they were selling time on the basis of generic human viewers to generic staple products, only with a smaller (and limited) audience than the big nets, with a reverse economy of scale where the smaller the audience the less power they had to negotiate price per 1000 impressions.

On top of that a black audience is harder to segment, which is where the best money is - Nielsen numbers were good enough for say black male 18-49, but when you get down to say black female 18-34, no kids, income 30k-60k, the sample size is small enough to push up the margin of error, and advertisers (with the aforementioned whip hand) would bid on the least charitable interpretation.

If anything, relative black poverty was the only thing that made black-targeted programming viable at all, because there were advertisers (marginal finance, discount brands & stores, career training, &ct) that specifically wanted a poor audience.