Failed shows don’t always die — they can find new life on the Web
Rob Owen
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Friday, June 30, 2006
Nobody’s watching the sitcom "Nobody’s Watching" on TV, but a portion of the failed pilot has been seen more than 289,000 times since it was posted online two weeks ago at YouTube.com, one of the Internet’s most popular free clip sites.
Created by "Scrubs" executive producers Bill Lawrence, Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan, "Nobody’s Watching" was under consideration for The WB’s prime-time schedule in May 2005. The network passed, and the project seemed dead until someone posted the pilot online (Lawrence said he suspects he knows but doesn’t want to ask).
Now NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly wants to meet with Lawrence when he gets back from vacation to discuss the possibility of reviving the series. NBC Studios produced "Nobody’s Watching" for The WB, and in the past they would have ordered YouTube to remove the posting, but in this case they have not, possibly because the network announced a deal with YouTube this week to make promos of its fall series available on the site.
"Nobody’s Watching" follows two twentysomething guys from Ohio, who, sick of lame sitcoms on TV (they name check "Yes Dear" and "According to Jim"), get invited by The WB to make their own sitcom. An untrustworthy network executive is more interested in the reality show about them trying to make a sitcom than he is in the sitcom itself.
Lawrence was pleased "Nobody’s Watching" got a chance to find an online audience, and he’s bullish on its prospects for a future life on TV. He was surprised when The WB didn’t pick the sitcom up last year (especially after the network flew him to New York to announce the show at the May upfronts), because it was a favorite of young WB executives.
"I’ve made other pilots in recent years that were no one’s favorite shows," Lawrence admitted. "Those were horrible, and I’m crossing my fingers no one ever puts those on YouTube."
Lest you think TV shows online are a flash in the pan, this is just the latest example of television migrating to the Internet. Lawrence thinks allowing a show to be seen online will provide networks with more useful feedback than the classic pilot-testing process that involves focus groups.
"It’s such an archaic form of testing to put 20 people in a room in the Valley and ask leading questions [that allow network executives] to justify their hunches," Lawrence said, noting that the comments from YouTube viewers were far more insightful. Network execs worried viewers wouldn’t understand the show’s concept and asked the focus group, "Do you think this could be confusing?" to which they responded, "I suppose it could." Lawrence said no one at YouTube had such concerns.
"What’s fascinating to me is what a better form of testing it is to release something on the Internet if you’re doing a young [skewing] show," Lawrence said. "There was stuff I’d never noticed that, as I read these reviews, there was a through-line of things that bothered people that no one mentioned in testing. If we do get to make this again, we’ll change things [based on that feedback]."
David Cherry, Director of Production and Multimedia at New York interactive marketing agency ID Society, noted that YouTube is a completely unmoderated forum; with focus groups, members are pre-selected.
"When you have people sitting in a room, they’re unlikely to give you completely honest feedback, whereas on the Internet, anything goes," Cherry said.
There are downsides to online screenings (people on the Internet can claim to be whatever age and gender they want), but Cherry said NBC’s deal with YouTube gives the network a foothold with a popular online site, much the way ABC was the first to stake out iTunes.
Cherry said NBC executives saw the success of the "Saturday Night Live’s" "Lazy Sunday" download, and after a ton of online grumbling for forcing YouTube to remove the video clip, the network has decided to embrace the potential young audience the site can deliver.
"The demo for YouTube is sub-24-year-olds," Cherry said, "and that’s the demo that’s disappearing from television broadcast channels."