WELCOME BACK QUANTUM LEAP

 Well well look what's coming back. QUANTUM LEAP! Finally a reboot, reimagining, sequel or whatever that I look forward to seeing knowing it could very well suck.

I was still in NBC research in New York when the QL pilot was made. It was picked up but did not get on the schedule until March of 1989. I was sent a set of all the NBC pilots that were picked up since my job was to do the ratings estimates on the new schedule which were used by sales in the upfront.

I remember it was a Sunday evening and I popped the QL pilot in the old VCR player. The Masked Wife was putting our daughter to bed and said she would join me in a few minutes. I started watching the pilot which I believe was two hours and immediately passed out. Two hours later the Masked Wife was shaking me all excited.

"How come you didn't tell me about this show" she asked

"Why?

"I loved it!"

She's never wrong and QL stayed around for five seasons.

Like many shows QL occupied many time periods over its run. I remember in May of 1990 when Brandon Tartikoff was still head of entertainment he asked me to help him out with the upfront presentation. The show was moving time periods again and I pitched him a joke. "If it can leap through time it can leap through time periods" I was met with stone cold silence from Brandon.

In the 92-93 season we replaced MATLOCK and IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT on Tuesday night with QL and REASONABLE DOUBTS. At the upfront presentation we put up a picture of Andy Griffith and Carroll O'Connor which morphed into Scott Bakula, Marlee Matlin and Mark Harmon to show how we were aging down the night. Now that I am 71 I sort of regret that.

We had a bit of controversy when we aired a gay-themed episode. There was a lot of debate about running it. We did and took a substantial hit from several advertisers pulling out. They were replaced by the "bottom feeders".

In 2017 when we had a WGA strike and were looking for shows that we could reshoot with no change to the script I immediately thought of QUANTUM LEAP but because it was a Universal property we couldn't pursue it. I was surprised that NBC didn't think about that.

Anyway, I look forward to its return and hope not to be disappointed. This one is a no brainer.

MASKED 15 JAZZ RECOMMENDATIONS FOR 2021

We started to venture out a bit after the vaccines and the boosters, and the flu shots. Saw Kurt Elling at Catalina, Branford Marsalis, Count Basie Orchestra with Liz Wright and Adam O'Farrell's Orchestra all at the Soraya in Northridge. Can't wait to get back to Maui Sugar Mill for some blues.

Fortunately this was a great year for jazz albums and here are fifteen that I would recommend There are many more where these came from.

Franco Ambrosetti Band- Lost Within You

Veronica Swift - This Bitter Earth

Charles Lloyd & The Marvels-Tone Poem

Greg Abate - Magic Dance

Sons of Kemet-Black to the Future 

Renée Rosnes - Kinds of Love

Gretchen Parlato - Flor

Becca Stevens & The Secret Trip

The Cookers - Look Out!

Kurt Elling - SuperBlue

BADBADNOTGOOD- Talk Memory

Sheila Jordan - Come Love—Lost Session 1960

Floating Points - Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra

Christian McBride and Inside Straight - Live From the Village Vanguard

Gerry Gibbs Thrasher Dream Trios - Songs From My Father

THE MASKED TEN + FIVE SHOWS I WOULD RECOMMEND TO YOU - 2021 EDITION

COVID has changed our viewing habits. I limit my viewing to 2-3 hours a night (closer to 2). We don't have all the services so no Disney+ or Paramount+. Hardly use Amazon Prime other than for shopping. Sunday night is reserved for the 90 DAY FIANCE cycle (sorry). Masked Wife and I have a hoot yelling at the TV (as if there isn't enough evidence of how this country has lost its mind). We've kind of given up on movies. Still watching wrestling, after all, I'm in the game now. 

So we are pretty picky about what we watch. Having said all that we still watch lots of shows. Lots of international crime procedurals. Hunt down Nazis in a pulpy series (Jaguar) and I'm there.

Of course sports but I've been trying to cut back.

Still watch the 911's because they are over the top wild but not much else on the networks. Went cold turkey on Masked Singer.

All that is to say here are the ten ( and five more) that I would recommend that you check out although I have a feeling many of you may already have. I don't go for the obscure. Not here to impress.

I put them in some sort of order but, really, the top two are in a class by themselves, for me, of course. Both of them gave me the feels.....lots of feels. So.............

Reservation Dogs - FX on Whatever

Gentified - NETFLIX

Succession - HBO

Hacks - HBO With A MAX

Billions - Showtime

Akwafina is Nora From Queens - Comedy Central

Pen15 - HULU

What We Do in the Shadows FX Classic

We Are Lady Parts - The Cock

Shtisel - NETFLIX

Oh here are five more

Curb Your Enthusiasm - HBO

Mare of Easton - HBO

Heels -STARZ

Ted Lasso - Apple With A +

Girls5eva - The Pea

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.

Why Many of You Missed the Last Minute of the Packer/Bengal Game

 If you were watching the Packers/Bengals on FOX and you are in the New York market, and some adjacent markets as well, you missed the final minute of one of the more entertaining games of the season. With less than a minute left in the game, which was in overtime, the Packers field goal kicker, who had already missed three field goals, was about to try to kick the game winning field goal. Now this dude is generally automatic but not today. Suddenly, in several markets (possibly Dallas as well) the Giants/Cowboys game started. Those markets never carried the kick.

My Twitter feed exploded. I tried to explain why this happened. In case you're interested:

Here's how the Sunday TV deals work with CBS and FOX. Each week one of those networks can bring two games into the markets. The early game is made up of several "regional games" while the late game is the "Doubleheader Game". The doubleheader game is generally carried throughout the country although there could be a second game and that game goes to the markets of the teams playing in it. So today virtually everyone got the Giants/Cowboys but Phoenix and San Francisco got the Cardinals/49'ers instead which was also carried by FOX. 

Following me so far?

This week the FOX owned stations in New York and Los Angeles carried the same two games. The "regional game" was the Packers/Bengals and the "doubleheader game" was the Giants/Cowboys. That rarely happens.

So the Packer game went into overtime and at 4:25 FOX switched over to the Giants game on WNYW in New York BUT STAYED WITH THE PACKERS GAME ON KTTV IN LOS ANGELES. The deal with the NFL is that you have to switch to the home team in the home team market. You can't join the game in progress.

Most early games are over by 4:25 so this rarely happens but, sadly, it happened with this game. It resulted in a lot of pissed off football fans. Something tells me there will be some conversations tomorrow between FOX, CBS and the NFL to address this. My guess: If you're beyond the two minute warning and the game is within eight points you stay with the regional game. Simple right? Watch them fuck this up.

By the way the kicker for the Packers who missed the three field goals (and an extra point as well) is a team captain and he lost the overtime coin toss as well. Happy he finally won the game for Green Bay. Also it's 34-13 Cowboys.Lucky Giants fans were able to watch this slaughter from the very beginning.

HOW FAMILY GUY ALMOST DIDN'T RETURN TO FOX:WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

 This morning I was reading an article in the Hollywood Reporter about NBC's decision to bring back LAW AND ORDER on the broadcast network rather than putting the originals on their PEACOCK streaming service. Of course, the following day L&O will stream on Peacock but this decision reminded me of a moment back around 2005 when FAMILY GUY was going to return to television on CARTOON NETWORK and how I intervened to bring it back to FOX prior to its run on CC.

When I arrived at FOX in June 2000 FAMILY GUY was floundering around the schedule and was about to be cancelled for, I think, the second time. The reruns moved over to ADULT SWIM on CARTOON NETWORK in 2003. FAMILY GUY became a cult hit. DVD sales of the first two seasons were huge and it was clear that there was still life left in this show.

My son, who was around 11, was a huge fan of the show and lived in a FAMILY GUY t-shirt. Wherever we went people would stop, point at his shirt and tell us how much they loved the show. I encouraged my son to write a letter to my boss Gail Berman asking her to bring the show back. I wish I saved it. It was hilarious. I was talking to Rupert Murdoch one day and the topic came around to FAMILY GUY. I mentioned the DVD sales and Rupert dismissed them not realizing how huge they were. To his credit he called me a few weeks after our conversation to tell me he was wrong about dismissing the numbers.

Given the success of FAMILY GUY it was inevitable that eventually there would be discussions by the studio (20th) about reviving the show. After several years off the air a deal was made to revive FAMILY GUY. Sound familiar? The deal was not with FBC but with CARTOON NETWORK.

My immediate reaction to this announcement was "WHY THE FUCK IS FAMILY GUY GOING TO FUCKING CARTOON NETWORK RATHER THAN FOX" Now one can make the case that the show had found a home on CN and that FOX had mishandled the show and Seth MacFarlane would be concerned that it would again suffer at the hands of FOX execs, but this is our studio and not being given the opportunity to be part of the revival made no sense to me. I get that way.

I went to see Ira Kurgan who was our head of business affairs and suggested that FAMILY GUY episodes premiere on FBC before going over to CN. We would take our second run following CN running the episodes a given number of times. We spoke to the higher ups and that's how FAMILY GUY wound up on FOX prior to its runs on CARTOON NETWORK.

Here was a fun tidbit. You know how shows run on the broadcast networks and then air on their streamers the following day? Well in 2005, 16 years ago, I had a conversation with my counterpart over at CARTOON NETWORK about how sharing the show would work. He asked me how long after the FOX run they would need to wait before they could air the episode. I immediately said "You can air it the next day for all I care". He was speechless. He thought I was kidding him. It really was not going to matter in terms of our rating.

When I read that NBC would take the initial run of LAW AND ORDER before it drops on PEACOCK the next day my only reaction was yup, that's the way you do it. things haven't changed all that much.

One footnote: I think as a gesture of good faith Seth asked my boss Gail Berman if she would reconsider airing the final FAMILY GUY episode which never aired on FOX, "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein", prior to the show returning in MAY 2005. Gail and I watched the episode and decided to air it which we did as part of a one hour FAMILY GUY holiday block of episodes in December.

The show is still on FOX and we will never know its fate had we not intervened to bring it back to network television. I even pitched an episode to Seth which he embraced called "All in the Nielsen Family" where the GRIFFINS became a people meter family. I actually get a shout out in the episode.