THE DAY I GAVE JACK BAUER SOME BAD NEWS

 24 premiered on FOX Broadcasting 20 years ago today. I have written about 24 previously, once when it was ending its run

https://revengeofthemaskedscheduler.blogspot.com/2015/11/and-on-ninth-day-jack-rested.html

and the time John McCain visited the set

https://revengeofthemaskedscheduler.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-day-i-met-john-mccain-on-24-set.html

but I don't think I ever told you all this tale of when I thought Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) was going to kill me.

In  November 2007 the Writers Guild went on strike which meant all shows were shut down with only a few episodes in the can. Every network was scrambling to put together a schedule which would be made up of repeats, some international shows and a lot of reality.

Fortunately, for FOX, we had Mike Darnell, Gordon Ramsay and American Idol so we weathered the storm until the strike was settled in February. I kept asking Peter Chernin when the strike would potentially be over and he was always vague so we were flying blind and had to keep revising our plans.

As the shows were going back into production we needed to make some tough decisions about delivery and number of episodes needed for the season. Once everything was resolved we would sit down with the show runners and go over our plans. Of course many showrunners were not going to be happy with our decisions so the onus of telling them fell to me. I did not have very brave bosses at that moment.

The toughest decision was what to do with 24. We were starting the show in January and ending it in May with no breaks. We would have to push back the premier and run the show through the summer. We did not want to do that. We discussed breaking up the show running 12 in the 2007-8 season and 12 in the fall. For me, I felt that we had made a pact with the viewers to give them a full non-stop season so the only solution was to pull 24 from the schedule for the entire season. Fortunately my bosses agreed with no paralysis by analysis. The burden of telling the producers and the studio (20th) was left to me.

Before alerting Joel Surnow and Howard Gordon, the 24 Executive Producers, I asked Gary Newman and Dana Walden, the heads of 20th Television if I could come over and walk them through our plan for the show. They told me that Kiefer Sutherland would be joining us. By then Kiefer was an Executive Producer.

Now there are certain actors who are so connected to a character that they become the character. James Gandolfini WAS Tony Soprano. One summer the family was back east and we had dinner at an Italian restaurant in the Village and Gandolfini showed up. Although the restaurant was crowded they accommodated him and set up a table next to us. A hush came over the place when he entered with his family. Everyone was respectful. No one came over and asked him for a selfie or an autograph. Tony Soprano was in the building.

Kiefer was Jack Bauer and here I was sitting across from him, with Dana and Gary on the sides, telling him his show would not be on the air that season. He got agitated, asked a bunch of questions. I swear to you I was expecting him to jump over the coffee table separating us start choking me and screaming "THE SHOW IS COMING BACK THIS SEASON!!!!!" I was sweating, really scared for my life. Fucking Jack Bauer was going to murder me. I know it was irrational but I felt like I was in a scene from an episode of 24. I escaped with my life.

I left and went over to the HOUSE set to discuss plans for that show. It went a lot better.

Anyway, thought I would share that one and it was an honor to be part of getting 24 on the air and keeping it going for 8 seasons. It's ironic that today is daylight savings time. I always felt it would be cool to do a season that took place over 23 hours because the clocks moved forward and that would be a critical element in the story. Oh well.

JOE MILLIONAIRE.....FOOL ME TWICE......

 When I was in the biz and something was a hit, even if it wasn't on my network, I would often ask our research department to do focus groups on the competitor's show. I wanted to know why it worked and, to be honest, I discovered that quite often network executives had no clue or they went for the simplistic answer. I wanted to hear from civilians.

One of my favorite examples of just how off base creative executives can be about the reasons for success of a show was LOST. The simplistic knee jerk response, which three networks went to by the way, was that LOST was science fiction and the tv audience is looking for science fiction. The following fall all three nets put on a sci-fi show....NBC "Surface", CBS "Threshold" and ABC "Invasion". "Invasion" even had the benefit of the LOST "sci-fi" leadin. They all bombed. 

LOST was not sci-fi. LOST was deep in characters and it had the element of "constraint". Go back through TV history and you will see what I mean about constraint. While the other networks went down the wrong path FOX unintentionally put on a show that had the two elements I just mentioned. It was not sci-fi and it lasted for a few seasons......"Prison Break".

Towards the end of my time at NBC "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" exploded on ABC. This was another occasion where I asked our research department to do some focus groups to understand why it was a hit. I shared the data with the two top execs at my network because I knew that imitation is the greatest form of television and, if we had the template, maybe we would have a better chance of succeeding when we inevitably did a game show.

In December '99 I was lying in bed with the flu when the aforementioned executives called to tell me that they had ordered a revival of the game show "21". "Wasn't that the game show that has the scandal?" was my knee-jerk response. They didn't feel that mattered. Then they pitched me the show. I calmly told them that everything we were going to do was the opposite of what we determined made WWTBAM a mega-hit. "Well that will distinguish it" was their response. "21" bombed.

The TV landscape is littered with failed attempts to emulate a successful show and most of them fail because the creatives don't have a clue why a hit is a hit. I chuckle every time I read the words "reboot" "reimagining" or "revival" in the trades......bomb.

So yesterday my old home FOX announced that they are bringing back JOE MILLIONAIRE......they're not. I still remember Mike Darnell coming into my office (or more likely calling me down to his) to let me in on what he was up to. He would often pitch me the idea before he went to our boss Gail Berman and most often I would be on board and that gave Mike the confidence to go for it. The Bachelor was a hit on ABC and Mike wanted to do the "anti-Bachelor".

Those were the wild times for reality TV. There was still advertiser resistance. The networks were battling with similar ideas so a lot was done in secret. For many of these shows there was no pilot so we went forward on faith. The reality wars among the networks were getting lots of "ink" and Mike was a master at generating attention.

We started shooting the show but kept knowledge of JOE MILLIONAIRE to a small group within FOX. Jeff Zucker was over ruining NBC at the time and if he knew we were doing this he would try to expose it to the press. He did things like that. Our head of marketing was kept in the dark. I was sitting outside Gail's office when Gail told her. She came out in shock.

To our marketing team's credit they came up with an outstanding campaign. Very simple: describe the concept and tag it with "Now who would possibly do something like this?" and then the FOX logo popped up on the screen.

JM was going to come on after the new year along with "American Idol" and the move of "24" to a midseason start so we could run it non-stop. I was putting together the mid-season schedule and, along with Mike and his posse, was so certain that this would work that I put it on Monday at 9 replacing a failed David E. Kelley show. In another blog post I talk about the internal arguments over putting a reality show on a Monday night (different world now) but we did it and the rest is history. We actually won our first Sweep that February. Our sales peeps went from yelling about how much money they were going to lose to asking us to repeat JM on Thursday nights.

Mike knew that we could not do this again and wanted to shoot a second iteration before we announced the show. He was shot down. Once it was a hit of course the tune changed and the top exec at FOX claimed we were doing another JOE MILLIONAIRE. Darnell was apoplectic. We shot it in Europe because the show was so big here that we knew it would be hard to find enough "gullible" bachelorettes. It bombed.

It's back......big deal

Reality is all over the networks,, cable and streaming. It's no longer unique and you don't have the intrigue and personalities at what's left of the networks. Sure there will be some press for the announcement but that's about it. 

More importantly, this is not JOE MILLIONAIRE. JM was us being in on the con. I'm not saying we should be proud of what we did but we knew these women were being set up and that's what made it unique and different from "The Bachelor". This "who will she choose" format has been done several times. It's not unique. We did variations of this at FOX. Most of them bombed.

Will the women be told at the top that one of the bachelors is rich and one poor? Will we know? How will elimination happen? In JOE MILLIONAIRE, Joe chose (or maybe the producers, who knows) but here it seems the bachelorette will choose.....I think. I guess what I'm saying is that this is JOE MILLIONAIRE in name only.......and that host.......ugh.

Most importantly FOX had a reputation back then thanks to the antics of Mike Darnell. Reality is pervasive now. If you're looking for trainwrecks just turn on TLC.

Look I wish FOX the best with this reboot, revival, reimagining or whatever but the best TV is where you break the mold and move on to something new and unique......unless there is a colon in the show's title of course.