Ask A Genius 960: Tips for Working in Television
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/19
Rick Rosner: You can hold bad TV in contempt, but you must give good TV its due. How do you distinguish between the two? Bad TV is lazy. For example, my wife grew up with The Brady Bunch. She was just a child, probably six or seven years old, when it aired, so she couldn’t necessarily discern its quality. I think it’s terrible. I think it’s lazy. Much of the TV from the ’60s and ’70s was just lazy. They couldn’t explore many places, and while there were some decent shows with quality aspects, like The Rockford Files — a good, appealing show despite being a standard lighthearted private eye show — there was still much lazy content.
Even today, we still encounter lazy content, but now we have 800 shows to choose from, which has raised the bar. There is just a lot of great material available.
It would help if you were prepared to work diligently to secure a Production Assistant (PA) job. You aim to be around writers and get into the writers’ room as a PA. This will require hard work and luck. It can be an opportunity if you take your PA job seriously in the right environment and on the right show. Make people notice that you’re more competent than the other PAs, and if the people you’re working for aren’t easy enough, they’ll recognize your value.
I’ve been reluctant to write spec scripts, and it shows. In the last ten years, I haven’t yet been willing to do the necessary work to get a job. My previous paid writing job was with Kimmel, which ended in 2014. I’ve been too lazy to do the work and attend the meetings to secure the jobs I want because I’m too much of an oddball.
Eventually, I would get jobs on quiz shows, doing minor work or being a failed writer who ends up writing quiz show questions. I didn’t want to do that. I had success collaborating. Two people working together often generate better content than one person trying alone. With two people, you can review every single line and bit to ensure it’s not cliché and is the best it can be. This kind of scrutiny happens in a writer’s room.
When my writing partner and I got our first network show, they called us in and said we were taking over the show because it was just a clip show, like America’s Funniest Home Videos, but called World’s Funniest on Fox. The executive producer told us we were there because the previous pair of writers fought for their words and got upset if the producers cut something they thought was good. You can’t be too attached to your words. You have to write the content. I hope it gets you the job and keeps your job, but try not to care too much if it gets cut or changed — even if it gets worse. Sometimes, the host isn’t the best at delivering your lines, or maybe the guest hosts have different strengths. You can’t be overly concerned about it.
Here are some tips. Let’s see if there’s anything else. It would help if you were more sociable than I am and made many friends. If you start as a PA, make as many friends among the PAs or people you think are smart but don’t have writing jobs yet. Yes, befriend writers if you can, but also befriend those who might become writers. You’ll grow together. Play softball in writers’ leagues so people think of you when opportunities arise. Be prepared to attend many meetings. Some people spend 99% of their job just taking meetings. They don’t say yes; they listen to ideas. For instance, a guy working for Comedy Central might hear 2,000 pitches a year and greenlight only four. His job is not to say yes but to listen.
I asked a guy who sold many shows how many meetings he thought it took on average to sell a show. He said about 100. So be ready to take many meetings. Your goal in a meeting is to be asked back. You want them to like your idea enough to work on it more and return in a couple of weeks. That’s often how it works. You start with a one-sheet summary, and after several meetings, you might have ten pages and be on your way to a show bible. You might get a pilot out of it.
However, other people might be pitching a very similar show. For example, before all the reality competition shows, we pitched a show called Get a Job, where the winner would get a three-month apprenticeship. It had never been done before. We sold it as a pre-pilot presentation and received $5,000 to put it on tape, like a high school play. But they didn’t buy it because a focus group in Chicago felt that a job was too serious to be given away on a game show.
This turned out to be entirely wrong because now there’s an entire genre of game shows where a job is on the line. Before we sold it to FX, we were in the process of selling it to MTV. MTV bought the idea from someone else. It turned out that three teams were pitching the same concept to MTV. MTV didn’t buy the show from any of them. They decided to develop the idea independently, which led all three teams to contact their agents. MTV would have had to pay off all three teams, so they decided not to do the show. I have many ideas. Ideas alone aren’t worth much. It’s the execution that matters. Don’t always worry about someone stealing your idea. It’s the characters and situations that flesh out the idea that matter. So, there are some tips — the end.
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