BALLS AND NUTS ARE THE SAME THING

Is it fortitude or insanity?

The ball (no pun intended) had already gotten rolling with the likes of The Kingdom and The Oaks, etc. but now with these two series orders (though one is cast contingent), it seems as though a thing that Kay Reindl, DMc, and others (honestly, the conversation has bounced from blogs to blog and I don't wanna track 'em all down) have been knocking around has come to pass. In short-fucking-order

It does rather seem that the old pilot system is not really functioning as intended. This has all been said and much better by people it a position to know. I envy being able to say I was "fucked over by the network." There is no such thing as bad sex, right?

There has been a call for the nets to show some balls (or nuts, depending how you want to look at it) and order more than just a pilot (which is no longer really what the series is gonna be like anyway).

Now it's happening. A lot. With Zak Penn's Section Eight (which doesn't seem like it should be a regular network show, it sounds more like it should be original cable programming. Too smart/peculiar/niche for primetime? Maybe it'd go well on AMC now?) and Tom Fontana's The Philanthropist (been so waiting for him to follow up solidly on Homicide and Oz) it seems that execs are hitting that button. Big. Red. Button.

I doubt it's a paradigm shift and when a couple of these series tank, it'll scare the nets off doing it again, despite the success rate not being any better than the current way things are done.

I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing. Canadians, as has been pointed out, have a screwed up development process that looks a lot like this. They want pilots. It's about how you handle it. A ten-million-dollar-pilot is not how you handle it.

In fact, I was in a meeting with a pair of highly-placed lit agents (don't ask me what I was doing in that meeting, but I was there) and the conversation turned to some of the pilots that had been shooting at the time. One mentioned that getting feature directors to spend a ridiculous amount of money wasn't doing anyone any favors. And the specific pilot we were talking about at the time...not even on a schedule. So even people deep in it know it's not working.

We'll see how this flurry of series orders goes.

In about a year.

Less with torrent "leaks."

Apologies to Emily for the use of the lolcat. I know it's her thing. It's just this once...and it is my cat.