[b:48621700cc] Originally posted by helpful information perhaps[/b:48621700cc]
a most interesting and enlightening piece from the ny times magazine - which makes it clear that fan comments on the boards are followed by both the writers and the actors; that shows use "moles" to try and shape fan opinion; that the boards reflect the core audience and the writers are on the boards as soon as it airs in the east to get fan feedback - this includes BtVS producers/writers
This is a long and very well done article that I highly recommnd. I've posted the bits that caught my attention below. If you find them interesting you can read the whole piece, on line.
registration for the times is free
excerpts below from the article
The Remote Controllers
www.nytimes.com/2002/10/2...CTIVE.htmlNew York Times Magazine
October 20, 2002
The Remote Controllers
By MARSHALL SELLA
[Sarah D. Bunting and Tara Ariano are obscure names in the high-stakes world of Hollywood TV production. They are anything but L.A. insiders; Bunting works in Manhattan, while Ariano is based in Toronto. Yet their opinions carry real weight among the producers and writers who fashion many of the most popular programs on television. The two women are co-editors of a Web site called Television Without Pity, and that's a name producers know extremely well. True to its name, Televisionwithoutpity.com critiques shows mercilessly and includes message boards where vast communities of passionate viewers register everything from arcane appraisals of a program's story line to their hatred of an actor's leather jacket.
When TWoP editors run interviews with writers and producers on the site, it is usually because the Hollywood types have contacted them, a little dazed by the level of the site's vitriol.
Even a show as critically adored as ''The Sopranos'' gets smacked around when it disappoints its most ardent fans.]
[Right now, Television Without Pity has active discussions on 35 shows. And that's just one Web site. Most popular series are tracked by scores of sites -- an official one run by the network; the others run by fans -- that dissect the content of every episode.]
[It would be simple to underestimate the intensity with which Web sites fetishize TV programs -- and the impact they have on the show's creators.
It is now standard Hollywood practice for executive producers (known in trade argot as ''show runners'') to scurry into Web groups moments after an episode is shown on the East Coast. Sure, a good review in the print media is important, but the boards, by definition, are populated by a program's core audience -- many thousands of viewers who care deeply about what direction their show takes.
Any notion that the Hollywood telegentsia hovers above the fan-site fray was shattered two years ago when Aaron Sorkin, creator of ''The West Wing,'' bitterly responded to an online complaint; he posted under his own name on Television Without Pity (or, as it was then called, Mighty Big TV). A year later, Sorkin wrote a ''West Wing'' episode that savaged TWoP and its ilk, portraying hard-core Internet users as obese shut-ins who lounge around in muumuus and chain-smoke Parliaments. It was his best and loudest available form of revenge against a phenomenon that has not always treated him fondly.]
[John Wells, executive producer of ''E.R.'' and ''The West Wing,'' knows better than to shrug off Web sites' feedback. ''We always have someone on the writing staff assigned to keep track of them,'' Wells says. ''Though we don't often need to assign that duty. There's always a writer who's in there all the time and can give you a clear sense of what's going on.
I don't overreact to the boards, but I pay real attention to messages that are thoughtful. If you ignore your customer, you do so at your peril.''
J.J. Abrams, show runner of the very Net-friendly spy show ''Alias,'' sees the boards as a real measure of the audience's pulse and rates their members as nothing less than ''an integral part of the process.''
That could never have been said five years ago. ''If the Internet is your audience, TV is quite like a play,'' Abrams says. ''Movies are a done deal -- there's no give and take -- but in a play, you listen to the applause, the missing laughs, the boos. It's the same with the Internet. If you ignore that sort of response, you probably shouldn't be working in TV right now.'' ]
[Online chat, fluffy as that phrase sounds, has become a force in Hollywood -- one that nobody anticipated, possibly because it married new technology with a curious variation of old-fashioned viewer mail. The Internet allows a mass audience to register specific desires and grievances that can never be conveyed by the Nielsen ratings. What's more, creators of TV shows can actually incorporate these insights from viewers. Where films are a single exhale of artistic breath, television breathes in and out over time. It doesn't exist as one impenetrable objet after a single act of creation.]
[Television began as a one-way street winding from producers to consumers, but that street is now becoming two-way.]
[Ariano and Bunting widened their scope considerably, applying their site's gruff sensibility to an array of shows. TWoP's home page now bears the slogan ''Spare the Snark, Spoil the Networks.'']
[Hollywood hardly takes its marching orders from TWoP -- it would be daylight madness to abjure creative control to amateurs and, worse, outsiders -- but it certainly pays heed. One of the executive producers of ''The Agency,'' Shaun Cassidy (yes, that Shaun Cassidy), once e-mailed the TWoP editors about their brutal coverage of his show, but he conceded that he thought the posts were funny and went so far as to end his note with the sincere query, ''Do you have any scripts to show me?''
One TWoP recapper, Heather Cocks, was hired as a Hollywood staff writer on the strength of her critiques of ''Making the Band.'' She now writes for a reality show called ''Tough Enough,']'
[Accordingly, sites like TWoP have subtle but substantive input. ''On our show, there's a character named Will that we thought people would love,'' J.J. Abrams says, laughing. ''We conceived him as a man pursuing the truth. But on the message boards, people thought he was an idiot! He was pursuing a truth they already knew; they were way ahead. So we fine-tuned the way he was presented and came up with stories that worked better for the audience. Of the 10 million things you have to keep in mind running a show, you can only keep 8 million in your head. The Internet groups are right there to remind you about the other 2 million things. They don't lead us, but they're as important as anything.''This isn't live TV. We're working six or eight weeks in advance, so our reactions aren't immediate, but there are times when, in post-production, we'll make line changes or alter a piece of music. I'll accept a smart critique from anywhere, whether it's from a 50-year-old studio executive or a 12-year-old kid in a rural town. Internet people are a community. They have a proprietary sense of the show. Why would I ignore people who take the time to think these things through? I am so grateful. They're doing what I'd be doing if I weren't working in TV.'']
[As they are cybernetically masked in a spooky ''Eyes Wide Shut'' sort of way, message-board folk are unfettered by the decorum you would employ in a letter to the editor of a magazine, but they police a show's quality and content all the same. Anonymity breeds not only rudeness but also sincerity. For his part, Abrams is dazzled by the viewers' meticulous knowledge. Message groups are so reliable about a show's history that he has used them to confirm details about old ''Alias'' episodes. It is quicker -- and every bit as trustworthy -- as rifling through old scripts.]
[Sites like TWoP may have more power than even their creators realize. Two years ago, the producers of ''Charmed'' were on the fence about bringing back a (half-human) character named Cole for its next season, but the message boards' lust for him was a deciding factor.]
[Though few on a TV staff read viewer mail, everybody can read the boards. Writers check out their episode's ''grade'' on TWoP; cast members read Internet commentary and are by turns elated or upset. Some who portray villains are mortified to see that people in the message boards hate them. (An alarming number of viewers want to ''slap'' Janice Soprano.)
It has even become Hollywood routine for a writer's assistant to work the boards as a mole. A staff member will slink into a board anonymously and, like Prince Hal walking incognito among his troops, tout a coming episode. Aspiring writers are routinely ordered to pop into message boards and pimp an episode before it is shown, often with a shifty claim along the lines of: I know someone who works on ''Angel'' and got a sneak peek at tonight's show! It's awesome! ]
[Message groups sometimes get hold of synopses and scripts, then post ''spoilers'' about coming shows. In Hollywood, keeping control of a script is nearly impossible. On some popular shows, there is said to be what amounts to a near black market in as-yet-unshot scripts. Within a day or two of a script's being dispatched to the studio for approval, the thing has appeared on the Internet.
Curiously, this has occasionally resulted in direct improvements in shows. Recently, one hit show had a routine script leak, and the staff awoke to find someone on a message board complaining that a character was speaking fluent French when that same character had been seen peering at a basic phrase book not so many episodes earlier. The writers were actually able to correct the continuity error in shooting that very script, thanks to a message board's ill-gained insights.]
[networks like the WB and Fox, with their younger, Net-savvy viewers, lean heavily on them. Any program with a sci-fi element is, by its nature, bound to have an Internet presence. ]
[ ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer,'' which offers the twin appeal of teen fashion and the supernatural, has long been a sure-fire message-board draw. Conversely, shows that skew to older audiences or those with very broad demographics are less likely to pay close attention to their Internet response]
[''Survivor'' was CBS's wake-up call to the power of the Net. ''In the first season, there was a ground swell of attention in there,'' he recalls. ''We started monitoring the message boards to actually help guide us in what would resonate in our marketing. It's just the best market research you can get.'' ]
[Message-board types feel that they're getting something back in their half-imaginary communities. They're happy to be neighbors, bound by a common mission out in the Internet suburbs of big-ticket American media. They bend heliotropically to the attention of artists they admire, warm their hands on the glow of celebrity and creativity. And they feel that, in a very real way, they're involved with the show. They're not deluded.]
[ Nancie S. Martin, who runs the WB's Web site, sees the boards' imprints firsthand. ''The directions shows take is affected by all this,'' she says. ''Producers really do use these communities. On 'Smallville,' for instance, there was a feeling on the message boards that the show should focus more on character than Kryptonite, and sure enough, the next season is going to reflect that directly.'']
[Of course, there are limits to viewers' understanding when it comes to the inner workings of Hollywood. No show runner discusses the boards without using the phrase ''grain of salt.'' Marti Noxon, executive producer of ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer,'' has had to cut back on her Web visits, in no small measure because some loyal fans quite unjustly turned against her -- by name. Internet fans blamed Noxon for changing the tone of the show, which was created by Joss Whedon.]
[Says Noxon: ''It all gets very personal. I don't have a strong enough ego to go in there. People on those sites blame me for the darkness of last season's shows, and those story lines were created by Joss a year earlier. This show is a slow-turning ship. But suddenly, I'm the Queen of Darkness on the Net! This year, we've made the show . . . well, a bit less dark. We get the sense, having read those criticisms, that maybe we've just been amusing ourselves.''
[It's as easy as shooting Trekkies in a barrel. But perhaps that's not a fair impulse. Robert Thompson, a media expert at Syracuse University, withholds his scorn. ''If this were happening at any other time in history, we'd celebrate it,'' he insists. ''When readers hold parties for Bloomsday and discuss James Joyce, we consider it an apex -- people taking culture seriously. But when viewers discuss the minutiae of a TV show, we call them crazy. One's got to admire it. Essentially what the message boards are is a panel of unpaid experts, with passion, analyzing culture.'']
[In an extreme case, it could be that Net influence, with its qualitative specificity and sheer heat, could gnaw away at the hegemony of the Nielsen ratings. Perhaps, if message boards become powerful and pervasive enough, the day will come when viewers vote online for or against a show's renewal, ''American Idol''-style.]
[there's the old truism that, in Hollywood, a friend is someone who stabs you in the chest.
And -- for the moment -- Sarah D. Bunting, with her bright, flick-knife prose, is still on the job, keeping both lanes open on the two-lane highway. ''There are people who tell us, 'Get a life!''' she says. ''Well, this is it. This is what we went out and got. If only we could get to these TV people before they made the shows.'' ]
most beautiful thing in the world is the girl you love. kitchy yet true.
