Comedy Pilot Week on Three - nice concept, flawed execution
OPINION: If you turned off after The Block New Zealand, it may have escaped your notice that TV channel Three is trying to find the next big thing for scripted comedy.
Following a model that appears to be a relative of Aussie network Ten's Pilot Week gambit where various TV shows got one chance to show what they had and were voted on to see who has a future, Three's decided to dip its toes into a similar venture for comedy.
After all, the concept of Comedy Pilot Week makes sense - the network has carved itself a niche for being the home of NZ comedy. From Jono and Ben to the ever-present 7 Days via Funny Girls and Fail Army, Three is perhaps the self-proclaimed champion of what tickles Kiwis' funny bones.
So why is it that I can't shake off this nagging feeling that this quest for the pot of future ratings gold isn't quite the silver bullet the network appeared to be offering?
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There's no denying that comedy is a difficult game. One man's Hannah Gadsby is another man's Rob Schneider - that is to say tastes of what actually is funny are different, wide and varying.
But from simple strategy decisions like not releasing all of the pilots simultaneously on their online platform to being spectacularly vague about how success will be measured, MediaWorks' way of doing things seems flimsy at best, flawed at worst.
Firstly, staggering the pilots and releasing online only after transmissions on TV (how quaint in this digital day and age) seems like a massively missed - and potentially unfair - opportunity. MediaWorks says this is a commission for linear TV first, with a spokesperson adding, "We wanted to give each pilot a realistic environment should any of them be commissioned to series".
Granted, all of the pilots, bar The Lonely Hearts Motel which aired at 9pm on Monday night, benefit from being given the TV ratings lead in that is The Block NZ.
Whereas MediaWorks could guarantee Mean Mums, Sidelines, Golden Boy and Mangere Vice all get a solid lead-in as they air before The Block NZ gets closer to its series conclusion, The Lonely Hearts Motel was relying on people to sit through Sidelines and take another sampler.
It's a flawed argument - and a dangerous one at that, given how fickle TV audiences can be.
Certainly the early ratings in the oft-quoted five years plus research suggest that - on Sunday, Mean Mums got 221,800 viewers; on Monday, the 8:30pm screening of Sidelines got 195,100 viewers - but The Lonely Hearts Motel only saw 93,300 people tuning in at 9:30pm. On both days, The Block won the slot giving the shows the strongest chance possible.
Contrast this with TVNZ's New Blood campaign which launched a clutch of 10 pilots on June 1, 2017, on their OnDemand platform (none of which were aired on TV), ensuring that the playing field for online numbers was even from the beginning. (Interestingly, the 2018 batch of pilots have been launched in a similar fashion, though their number this year has been halved to just five.)
To wit, Three's Sunday's pilot will potentially have a longer chance to capture an online audience than Wednesday's offering, unless MediaWorks stagger the closing dates for consideration. The company would only say they will make an application for NZ On Air funding in October; they've said all the pilots will remain online for 12 months.
Secondly, and perhaps more crucially, the measures for looking at what defines success is spectacularly vague.
Mediaworks' chief content officer Andrew Szusterman confirmed that they would be looking at a range of factors before making a decision on which show or shows to move forward with. "We'll be looking at things like what Stuff readers say online, the ratings they generate overnight, our OnDemand results when they go up on ThreeNow and the social pages and hashtags we have."
Bar ratings, which are an unpredictable beast, all of the other criteria are open to abuse in some form or other.
I could, if so inclined or involved, email all of my 10 friends and tell them to watch my pilot online. I could, if so inclined, open up the pilot on various computers and let it play from Three Now. After all, each of those plays from a different computer would count as a unique viewer. Already I've seen on Three's Facebook page that friends of various pilots are shouting from the hills about how good they are. Seems a bit of a coincidence, but in comedy, particularly in New Zealand, there's a prevalent network of friends supporting mates.
That's no bad thing, but I've seen Jono and Ben tweet to their 63,000 followers today that Golden Boy airs tonight. I've not seen any evidence they've mentioned any other of the pilots this week - despite looking, and yeah, you could argue it's a coincidence that Nic Sampson, who works on Jono and Ben as their head writer, has worked on Golden Boy, tweeting: It's #comedypilotweek in NZ, the most wonderful time of the year! I hope you're enjoying all the content! In particular please enjoy and post about #GoldenBoy tonight at 8:30pm so we can maybe make more! I think it's really good and I have great taste!"
Call me cynical, but my Spidey senses are tingling.
Three's pilot week, as an idea, is to be applauded, but I can't help feel it's not working the way it should do and the whole thing is a bit of a rating/network stunt.
It's to be hoped that given each pilot had a budget of $100,000 (some of which would have come from New Zealand On Air, whom Three are in partnership with), we do see a transparent system - particularly as it's public money as well.
Bear in mind over in Aussie, Ten's chief content officer Beverley McGarvey said at the conclusion of their efforts that Ten was "listening to what people are saying and are also looking at a range of other measures including timeslot and demographic performance to help us decide which programs we'll be commissioning to a full series".
There's still no announcement of which show was going to be made following Aussie's Pilot Week.
Why do I have a feeling that Three will follow a similar rhetoric when the time comes?
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