Are the corporate suits ruining TV?
Network control and media consolidation are wringing the creativity out of entertainment.By Marshall Herskovitz
November 7, 2007
After 20 years and five series, including "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life," my partner, Ed Zwick, and I have -- for the time being at least -- stopped producing television programs.
It's not personal. I count as friends many of the executives who work at the networks. We had a deal at one network, ABC, for all of those 20 years, and, in spite of many regime changes, we were always treated with great respect. This is not about how we were treated but rather something much larger: How a confluence of government policy and corporate strategy is literally poisoning the TV business.
It started in 1995 when the Federal Communications Commission abolished its long-standing "finsyn" rules (that's financial interest and syndication, for those unfamiliar with the term), allowing networks for the first time to own the programs they broadcast. Before that, under classic antitrust definitions, the networks had been confined to the role of broadcaster, paying a license fee to production companies for the right to broadcast programs just two times. The production companies owned all subsequent rights. In the mid-1990s there were 40 independent production companies making television shows. If a particular network didn't like a show -- as famously happened with "The Cosby Show" many years ago -- the production company could take it to another network.
But not after 1995. The abolition of the old rules set in motion an ineluctable process, one that has negatively affected every creative person I know in television. Today there are zero independent production companies making scripted television. They were all forced out of business by the networks' insistence -- following the FCC's fin-syn ruling -- on owning part or all of every program they broadcast.
The most profound change resulting from that ruling is the way networks go about the business of creating programming. Networks today exert a level of creative control unprecedented in the history of the medium. ...
morehttp://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-herskovitz7nov07,1,6072340.story?coll=la-news-a_section http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-herskovitz7nov07,1,2014831,print.story?coll=la-news-a_section&ctrack=2&cset=true Marshall Herskovitz is a TV and movie producer whose credits include "Blood Diamond," "thirtysomething" and the upcoming "quarterlife." He is president of the Producers Guild of America (which is not affiliated with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers, currently being struck by the Writers Guild of America).
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HP bio & blog entries:
Smoking and R-Ratings ("...the current push to make smoking in films a crime punishable by an R rating...:hold on a second. What exactly are we talking about?..." 2007) Where was the filibuster over film "sanitizing?" ("...where companies from red states edit films made in a blue state to make them less blue -- without the permission of the filmmaker or the studio -- ..." 2005)
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