Wynonna Earp, 500 TV Shows & Counting, & The Crazy Process of Getting A Television Show on the Air

[shadowkat]

1. I gave up on Doctor Who : Shada after 30 minutes and binge watched the second season of "Wynonna Earp" on Netflix instead. It's a Syfy series, that is currently in it's third season on the network. The second season is a lot better than the first season. In it, Wynonna gets pregnant. And the villains are those two twisted spiderish sisters called "The Widows". The series delves deep into American Western Mythology -- Native American and the Old West.

The set-up? Wynonna Earp is the heir of Wyatt Earp or his oldest descendant. Ages ago, Wyatt killed a demon and the demon's sons in Purgatory, Colorado. When this happened, the demon's wife, the Stone Witch cursed him and his heirs. For eternity, when his heir came of age, she or he would be cursed with killing all the people that Wyatt had killed with his rifle, Peacemaker. The people that Wyatt killed would come back as revenants. Each time the heir came back the revenants of the people he killed would rise to plague her. Not all of them are necessarily evil, since Wyatt accidentally shot people or killed people by mistake. It's a curse.

In addition the Stone Witch cursed Wyatt's best friend, Doc Holliday, with immortal life and threw him down a well. (His immortal life is provided via a ring that seals the demon in the grave.)

Doc is basically what you'd expect him to be, a gunslinger and never'do well roustabout, who is loyal to the Earps. And played rather well by Tim Rozon.

There's also a covert operation known as The Black Box, with an agent who is half fire breathing demon (he's African American), and Wynonna's lesbian sister Waverly (who I occasionally want to smack upside the head, for her stupidity), and a lesbian cop, Nicole Holt.

The second season adds Jeremy, a lab tech with special abilities.

It's fun. It's gripping. And clever in spots. If you liked Buffy, you'll probably enjoy this. It skews a bit older than Buffy, and in some respects reminds me more of Supernatural in concept. Based and adapted from a series of graphic novels and has a female show-runner.

2. Did you know that 2018 topped out at 500 scripted television series? We had 487 scripted television series in 2017. Next year they predict 520.

The Peak TV bubble isn't bursting quite yet.

According to a new FX study, the total number of English-language scripted originals released in 2017 hit a new high, growing 7 percent to 487 (up from 455 in 2016). As has been the case in the past four years, subscription-video-on-demand platforms like deep-pocketed Netflix and Amazon led the charge, growing from 90 in 2016 to 117 last year. That's more than double the 49 total series on the streaming services in 2015.

"Without a crystal ball, I think it's highly likely we top 500 [in 2018] because the increases in the last three years have been 9 percent, 8 percent and 7 percent, year-over-year," FX CEO John Landgraf, who coined the term "Peak TV," tells The Hollywood Reporter. "With 487, you only have to increase 2.7 percent off this year's total to hit 500. It seems like it's more likely that you're going to get to 520."

To his point, Netflix is expected to spend another $8 billion on scripted originals in 2018, while Amazon — which is paying $250 million for global rights for a Lord of the Rings TV series — is forecast to spend more than $4.5 billion. Hulu, the first streamer to win a best drama Emmy (for The Handmaid's Tale), will spend $2.5 billion on originals this year.

"Virtually all the growth is and will be coming out of streaming services," Landgraf says. "Everybody is going to try to maintain their investment posture as much as they can, but the traditional channels and brands are being held to a different standard of accountability than the streamers in terms of the cost of and return on capital."

And then there's Apple, entering the scripted space with a $1 billion budget. For its first series, a morning-show drama, it's said to be paying $1 million an episode to stars Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. The tech giant's slate also includes an Amazing Stories reboot and a space drama from Battlestar Galactica's Ron Moore.

Meanwhile, Landgraf believes broadcast and basic and premium cable are either at or near their peak. For the second year in a row, basic cable saw fewer new series (from 183 to 175 in 2017) as outlets like WGN America and A&E exited the scripted space. Broadcast and premium content have grown modestly over the past four years, with the former clocking in at 153 originals in 2017, up from 146, and the latter 42, up from 36.

And for every platform that leaves the scripted business, a new one — like Facebook — enters it as Landgraf says the total number of brands producing originals continues to hover around 77.

Seriously Facebook and Apple are entering the fray now??? This is getting ridiculous.

This shows the increase of television shows over time, and why.

Want to know what television pilots have been ordered to series and passed over by Broadcast Networks? HERE is a complete list.

3. What is the process of creating a television series anyhow? Why won't Joss' Rebooted Buffy Get Picked Up? Isn't this definite? Eh no...

The Whole Crazy Process of Creating a Television Series or Why do so many tv shows get greenlit but then never make it to the screen? (I already knew some of this, because I have a lot of unemployed actor friends who gave up on television and either became IT programmers/coders or Massage Therapists, and frustrated television show writer/screenwriter/play-write friends.)

Blurb from the article:

Right about now, we ought to be in the middle of watching the first season of Hieroglyph, a show about gods in ancient Egypt that was "ordered to series" by Fox. But Fox pulled the plug on Hieroglyph, even after ordering a full season in advance, and we never even got to see it. That's just one extreme example of a more common phenomenon — to casual observers, it looks like things are getting ordered all the time, then never showing up.

...

Here's a couple of more blurbs from the article or teasers (there's nine steps related in the article, I'm teasing two to give you an idea. The Buffy Reboot is in stage one.)

1) The Pitchening:

This begins in June or July, for the broadcast networks. In a nutshell, you pitch a studio, and once you have studio backing, then you go to the network. Often, you'll pitch a producer first, and the producer will have a deal with a particular studio that he or she will bring the project to. On occasion, a producer can go straight to the network, skipping the studio — but networks like to know that a studio is backing a show, because that makes it more likely they'll actually get the show they ordered.

This process, from producer to studio to network, can take weeks — or it can go incredibly fast, if you have J.J. Abrams or Steven Spielberg on board as a producer, or if your show is based on a well-known comic book or beloved property.

Javier Grillo-Marxuach, creator of The Middleman and writer for Helix, explains:

It helps if you think of the studio as a bank. What they do, in the broadest and most essential sense, if advance a showrunner/show creator the money and resources to actually make the show in advance of the network paying their fees (networks basically "rent" shows for a premiere showing and a number of repeats. They also get a creative oversight because the fees they pay cover most of the show's cost. That much said, if the show costs more to make than what the network pays — which is most of the time — then the studio has to deficit finance those costs, so their interest is to make sure the show stays around long enough to be sold into syndication, which is where they bounce back from the deficit.

Sometimes a studio has corporate affiliation with a network (like Warner Bros. and The CW) which means they might try to place shows with that network. (Although Warner Bros. also makes Person of Interest, which is on CBS right now.) Sometimes a studio will give the "right of first refusal" to an affiliated network, before pitching elsewhere.

Also, sometimes a producer will have an exclusive deal with a particular studio, called an "overall deal," which means you only pitch to that studio or get assigned to work on that studio's projects.

With cable TV networks and things like Netflix, the process is much less standardized — some of them have a schedule that's similar to broadcast, while HBO is famous for taking years and years to develop a single show.

You might find out a week or two before the upfronts that your show has been picked up — if you're incredibly lucky. But sometimes, the network doesn't make up its mind, or let you know, until the very last minute. "Basically, you sit by the phone and have a bag packed because you could be going to NYC in the span of twelve hours," says Grillo-Marxuach."

If the show does get picked up, the creators may find themselves sitting on a panel discussion with the actors, in front of a crowd of advertisers and journalists, soon after finding out they have jobs.

9. The Staffening

Every year, new TV shows come to Comic-Con and show their pilots, and the creators and cast members answer questions from the audience and journalists. And pretty much every time, the actors will respond that they've only filmed the pilot at this point, and can only speculate about what happens in the second episode based on that. Why do TV shows that are launching in September still not filming before late July?

Because they have to start staffing up with writers, to write all the episodes that come after the pilot. Berg explains:

Because of the uncertainty with network scheduling, showrunners often don't wait for the official word before starting to put together their writing staffs. The Upfronts are the second or third week in May and writing staffs generally start the first week in June, so really there's no time to waste. On several occasions I've been "hired" on shows that didn't end up getting picked up. Which is why you never put all your eggs in one basket. Just like actors can be in first or second position to a show, so can writers.

And it can take about six weeks for production to ramp up after the show is picked up, meaning that when Comic-Con rolls around in July, the show is often just about to start filming its second episode. Also, the show may wind up with a totally different crew than the one that filmed the pilot — and it may film in a different city than the pilot was filmed in, depending on financial incentives.

Ugh. So glad I don't do that for a living. Sounds insanely stressful.

10. And yet there are (well more than) 57 Channels and Nothing On

Comments

[trepkos]

I might give Wynonna Earp a try. I hope it comes out on DVD.

[shadowkat]

It's fun, and it handles romantic relationships and sex far better than Buffy and Veronica Mars did, possibly because the show-runner is female. LOL!

[elisi]

Re. Shada, read the book!

[shadowkat]

Why? When the episode is free? Also I sort of feel about Doctor Who the way you feel about Buffy. ;-)

[elisi]

Why? When the episode is free?
Because the book is better. But I can understand not wanting to pay for it, however, the story is excellent.

Also I sort of feel about Doctor Who the way you feel about Buffy. ;-)
You mean you like the tv show and don't care about the rest? Doctor Who is... a different beast. Bigger, longer-running, HUUUUGE extended universe, no defined canon. In this case, the novelization is better than the tv serial, even with late animated additions... /early morning ramble

[shadowkat]

Thank you for the rec, maybe some day I'll check it out. ;-)

[elisi]

You're welcome! (About half of it written by Douglas Adams btw. So were the tv episodes I think, but the book is just delightful.)