I was listening to the "TV's Top 5" podcast this morning and they mentioned that Kyle Killen signed a deal with FOX. I chuckled because Mr. Killen had something to do with my original blog being shut down.
At FOX, he did a series for us called LONE STAR which was one of the biggest disasters of my career. He followed that up with some other bombs on other networks. there was a pattern to his pilots which, I felt, doomed them.
Anyway, after LONE STAR premiered I wrote a piece for my blog about why it failed. I never used my name and, back then, denied I was the Masked Scheduler but people knew and I found myself in my bosses office where I was told to shut down the blog. I asked my boss if he ever read it and he said no. I explained that it was mostly about my experiences in the business and mostly about my first network scheduling gig. It didn't matter to him. I'm certain he got a few calls from some thin-skinned dipshits at our studio, or some agents or whatever.
I suppose I could have kept the blog going but I probably would have been fired so I just said "OK", went back to my desk and shut it down after first saving the content. I just said to myself "Revenge is a dish best served cold". I knew I would be retiring in a few years and would fire up the blog again. Now you know the origin of the title of the blog.
Over the years my blog became an underground classic and I would get emails asking for a copy of the content. I freely gave it away never asking anything in return. I have been asked why I never turned it into a book. I just prefer to share.
I realized that I never re-published the LONE STAR piece so here it is. I wish Mr. Killen well. That 1.0 18-49 rating would get a renewal now so his time has finally come.
My son is a junior at the University of Kansas and every year I head out to Lawrence for a football weekend. A Jayhawk game on Saturday and then, on Sunday, off to Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City to see the Chiefs. The Sunday game against the 49'ers was outstanding. The Chiefs are one of three 3-0 teams in the NFL and, although I am a life long Giants fan, it was fun being part of the celebration. This is a team that has been losing quite consistently of late.
After I made the plans for the weekend it suddenly dawned on me that I was heading to Lawrence halfway through premiere week. It was a needed change. We woke up on Tuesday morning to some pretty dismal numbers for LONE STAR so it was a relief to be somewhere other than Los Angeles, somewhere where none of this shit really matters. In fact, after returning, I was telling everyone who would tolerate me that it was refreshing to be in an environment where I did not see one billboard for a network show.
In LA one is inundated with messages and we start to believe that everyone cares......and we go on social media.........Well this Tuesday, the LONE STAR ratings declined from the premiere and we accepted that we were looking at a show that was rejected. There is no other way to put it. Some of us used the R word last week but we sucked it in and gave the show another shot. We tried. We added more promos for LONE STAR in HOUSE....three minutes to be exact.....didn't matter. We were very professional about things and made the moves to hopefully strengthen our schedule.
How did this happen? Yeah, all networks have their misses but this was beyond that. I'm going to be as honest as I can about this. I will probably piss some people off. I will begin with a quote....actually a tweet about the LONE STAR premiere ratings from a colleague of mine at another network "Audience-1 Critics-0" He was right.
This has been a pretty bland Fall season.....from a critics point of view....After last season's GLEE and MODERN FAMILY this year's batch of shows just felt sort of lame and generic so LONE STAR, by default, became a critical darling. It felt different when compared to the other freshmen shows and, when network executives use the word "cable" to describe the series' sensibility....well that's just orgasmic. So expectations started to far exceed the reality of the show's potential.
This show was problematic but we took the gamble knowing full well it would either break out or crash and burn....no middle ground here. Network executives actually start to believe the critic quotes and even love to put them in promos. Here's the problem.....those Chiefs fans who were out of their minds in ecstasy on Sunday could give a flying fuck about LONE STAR and it appears that most of America felt the same. We have evidence and data up the wazoo that critic's quotes don't matter and, in fact, are a turn-off to the audience and yet we use them.
Now here's where it gets to be fun. Rather than "Hey maybe we just missed the mark on this one" The critics look for reasons why the network fucked up because how can the rest of America reject a show that they love.They're idiots and they deserve Snokie and Bristol Palin etc. and FOX executives should listen to us because we are more knowledgeable as to how to schedule and market LONE STAR to guarantee its success.
When I started out at NBC in Burbank, my boss Warren Littlefield gave me the best advise about the scheduling job. Warren said: "You have the ultimate second guess job". I live by that wisdom. So rather than get all worked up about this stuff, I just chuckle. Gang, this show was REJECTED. Deal with it. We have. Rather than pointing fingers or belittling the audience we accept that this show just did not resonate with the viewers but hey we took the shot. We were wrong. Let me let you in on a little secret.....it's just television.....shit happens.
You go online Tuesday after we cancelled LONE STAR and it felt like a fucking wake....gimme a break. When a show premieres with ratings like this and then drops to a 1.0 in 18-49's in week two.....it's not about whether we should have saved the show for later in the season (I advocated that in May but lost that one) or whether there was a better slot for it on the schedule (other shows premiered on our schedule in tough time periods to better ratings) and I don't think that there was a marketing campaign that would have significantly pumped up the ratings. I think that we were always between a rock and a hard place with this show.
I don't read all the analyses of why LONE STAR didn't work but here was my fear from the beginning: We have just suffered through an horrific economic crisis brought on by excess and illusions, we saw the devastating environmental impact of an oil spill and the resulting lack of response and indifference on the part of a large corporation as well as the government. The last thing that every day Americans want to see right now is a good looking con man who is fucking over two innocent young women who have done nothing wrong other than to love him. A con man who eventually will leave these two women and their families in ruins. This is where it has to go....anything else is bullshit and, had we kept it on, would have lead to some major eye rolling by the very people bemoaning its demise. You can't redeem this guy and everyone around him has to suffer....just ask Rita, Carmela or Betty. Dexter, Don and Tony were family men and that informed their actions...but they never looked for redemption.
If we want to do a cable show then do a fucking cable show but anticipate cable ratings. Sorry critics, LONE STAR was never going to be a "hit" on a broadcast network. We took the gamble and we moved on. So it goes. There's a big country between the coasts. There was no way that enough viewers were going to condone bigamy even with a somewhat sympathetic attractive lead. The audience was not conned. We had some big hurdles to overcome and we stumbled right out of the gate.
Do we learn from this? Well that's for another day. Oh by the way....for those of you who wander on here once in a while you may have read that I just don't get GLEE....well again my trip to the mid-west helped me to get some perspective. It was Band Day in Lawrence, Kansas and, at halftime of the Jayhawk game, several high school bands from the region performed on the field together with the Jayhawk Marching Band. Prior to the half the kids were parading around the stadium getting into position for the performance. These are kids from the middle of the country...all sizes, shapes and ethnicities, all coming together to make music with the big college band on the big college field. They were smiling and excited...there were kids in wheelchairs. This was a big deal to them.....they were all GLEEFULL....it all started to make sense.
