January 31st, 2008, 15 Comments »
We’ve gotten into the habit of watching an hour (well, a TV hour, meaning 42 to 50 minutes) of commercial-free TV before bed. Not every night, certainly, but probably four to five nights a week.
We don’t have a TV–we watch downloaded shows on a laptop. They’re what I’d judge to be ‘quality’ shows. Television has experienced a renaissance in quality in the last decade, and these shows are the result. They’re mostly critically-acclaimed–”Dexter”, “Veronica Mars” (though the acting on this show is appalling), “30 Rock”, “Battlestar Galactica” and so forth.
I got to wondering. If we, hypothetically, watched four or five episodes of quality television each week, is there enough out there for an entire year?
Let’s make it 230 TV-hours a year. What are the best shows that add up to about that number? I’ll use these critics’ lists as a starting point, and tweak them a bit for my personal preferences. I’ll also assume that the writer’s strike didn’t exist (so that there would be complete seasons). The numbers refer to the total hours for a season:
- “Dexter” – 12
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- “Mad Men” – 22
- “30 Rock” – 11
- “House” – 22
- “Big Love” – 12
- “The Wire” – 22
- “Battlestar Galactica” – 22
- “Friday Night Lights” – 22
- “Pushing Daisies” – 22
- “Rome” – 10
- “Damages” – 13
- “Californication” – 22
- “The War” – 7
No Project Runway at My House
I haven’t seen a single episode of many of these shows (this season or past ones), so I’m basing my notion of ‘quality’ on critical response and word of mouth. It’s in the eye of the beholder. If you think “Project Runway” is quality TV, well, all power to you. You just can’t watch it at my house.
Plus, back in Canada, I spend plenty of time watching the Canucks, so that qualifies as my brainless viewing. I was hoping I could come back to some local playoff hockey, but that’s not looking all that likely.
My list gets me to 219 hours of TV. That sounds like a lot when you say it like that, but it’s only about 3.5 hours of TV a week (as each TV hour probably averages 50 minutes or less).
That’s encouraging, in a way. If you’re disciplined in what you watch, you really could spend a reasonable amount of time enjoying just the cream of the television crop.
Plus, there’s plenty of good TV (I’ve never seen more than one episode of “Deadwood”, “Arrested Development”, “House” and so forth) that I’ve missed from the past five years to fill in the gaps
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November 8th, 2007, 26 Comments »
As you may know, Hollywood writers from the Writers Guild of America are on strike, seeking a larger cut of DVD and Internet-based revenue from their employers. This video apparently summarizes their predicament.
I’m pretty ambivalent about this labour action. I’m at least a year behind in my TV watching, and the writers are hardly Polish steelworkers. But I did wonder–how much do TV writers earn?
I know nothing about television writers’ compensation, so I’ll just report what I could find on the Writer’s Guild of America website. On that site, I found a 2004 Schedule of Minimums, which describes (as you might expect), the minimum compensation for various types of projects. There’s some industry specific language there that I don’t fully understand. If anybody works in the industry, please let me know where I’ve gone wrong.
Grey’s Anatomy and Soap Operas
Krista Vernoff is a writer and producer on “Gray’s Anatomy”. I picked Ms. Vernoff because I saw a video featuring some “Grey’s Anatomy” actors striking in solidarity. She’s got a lot of producer credits, but in season two she’s credited with writing three episodes.
Assuming Ms. Vernoff wrote both the story and the teleplay for each episode, she’d earn a minimum of US $30,823 per episode, or about US US $92,500 for the three she wrote. This has nothing to do with the popularity of “Grey’s Anatomy”–these are standard minimums for writing sixty minutes or less of network prime time TV. Maybe there are bonuses or premiums for working on popular shows? I assume that Ms. Vernoff was also compensated for all those episodes in which she’s credited as supervising or executive producer. It’s unclear what that work is worth.
According to the aforementioned video, Ms. Vernoff also earns four cents for every “Grey’s Anatomy” DVD that’s sold. Is that four cents or 3/22 of four cents? I’m not sure, but there’s some additional money to be made there.
Network prime time television is pretty splashy, admittedly. What about somebody who’s slaving away for a daytime soap opera or so-called “strip program”? If you’re the head writer on an hour-long soap opera, you earn US $31,879 a week, minimum. If you’re a contributing writer on a soap opera, you earn a ‘script fee’ of US $3,087 per script.
They’re Making Out Okay
I may have this all wrong, but it looks to me like television writing pays pretty well. That video claims that, at any given time, 48% of writers are out of work. I’d be curious how they arrive at that figure, but it’s not surprising. If you’re a freelance writer and not currently writing something, then do you qualify as unemployed?
The video also makes much of the threat to writers losing their houses, health insurance and not being able to support their families. If those wages are at all accurate, I wonder how dire the threat to their hearth and home is? If they’re not, I’d love for one of the writers of the United Hollywood blog to clarify some typical TV writer compensation.
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September 23rd, 2007, 4 Comments »
Plenty of TV shows get canceled. Some of those have an incredibly loyal fanbase who, upon announcement of a show’s impending doom, leap into action to try to rescue the show. This almost never happens, and can be a lot of wasted energy. After all, it’s only a TV show. Popular examples include Jericho, Firefly and My So-Called Life.
Jericho is a rare, partial exception to the ‘dead show walking’ syndrome. From Wikipedia:
However, after a grassroots campaign to revive the series, CBS officially announced on June 6, 2007 that it had purchased seven new episodes of Jericho for broadcast as a midseason replacement.
This is the fifth time the network has resuscitated a cancelled series due to viewer demand. Fans of Cagney and Lacey, Designing Women, The Magnificent Seven and Touched by an Angel all were successful in convincing CBS to bring the shows back after their respective cancellations were announced.
Interestingly, three of those series would have 18 to 50 year-old women as their core audience–they’re traditionally the most powerful grassroots organizers.
Anyhow, that’s a long-winded introduction to this article (which could do with some subheadings), which discusses the rejuvenation of Jericho and the unfortunate, premature demise of Veronica Mars. As you’d expect, fans are in a tizzy.
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