Quality Follows Popularity

There are no overnight successes; they are preceded by innumerable days and nights of mediocre progress and failures. These videos on Storytelling have (of course) been posted here before but I love Ira Glass talking about failing on the way to success:

"For the first couple years that you are making stuff. It's trying to be good, it has a mission to be good. But your taste, the thing that got you into that game is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you are making is still sort of a disappointment to you, that it's crappy. A lot of people never get past that phase, a lot of people at that point they quit. The thing I would just like to say with you with all my heart is that most everyone I know who does interesting creative work went through a phase of years"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qmtwa1yZRM

> The TV show Friends had a similar path. The first few episodes were awful in terms of writing and acting.

I remember watching the first episode (pilot) of Friends alone in my dorm room on a Friday, and it was basically a bunch of twenty-somethings loitering in a coffee shop called Central Perk. They never left the coffee shop. No plot, pretty bad, what do these people do for a living? you would never have guessed that they'd become one of the all-time most popular shows and exert a cultural impact.

This is a fine essay on the importance of having a marketable concept.

That said, I'm a bit concerned that he's overgeneralizing from a biased sample set: His major examples (besides his own comic) are TV series. TV series often take time to get started; they always have. To pick some examples close to the geek heart: Star Trek:TNG had a crappy first season. Babylon Five had a very spotty first season.

There's a reason for this: traditionally, the first half-season of the typical TV show was written by a team of more-or-less freelance writers who worked from a "series bible": A big book written by the series creator that describes the characters and the setting and some of the possible plot directions. [1] They might also have had a pilot script, or even an actual pilot, to work from. But these writers would not necessarily have seen the actors performing in their roles. They might not even have known who the actors were. So their scripts would form an odd patchwork that would be stitched together by the producer, the director, and the actors on the fly. By the third season, however, things would have sorted themselves out: The producers would have found a stable of writers they like, the writers would have seen the older episodes and have some idea of how the actors inhabited the characters, there would be a canon to draw upon, and so on.

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[1] This has changed, of course, particularly for drama series. Heroes was awesome from the first moment; most people agree that it was all downhill from season one. Other shows -- Firefly, the new Doctor Who -- also exhibit the pattern of initial awesomeness. This is arguably because the economics of TV series production has changed a lot: The rise of DVD box sets has changed the target audience and the product life cycle for TV series, and the way shows are pitched, produced, and financed has changed. And it's probably also because writers and producers have learned from the experience of shows like Babylon Five and X-Files and, later, Buffy: Show runners seem to have a greater tendency to be highly capable writers who are given much more control over the early episodes, often to the point where they will write most of those episodes personally.

"The common notion about entertainment is that the better the quality, the bigger the audience. There's some truth to that."

I think we have drastically different definitions of quality.

He's describing High Concept.

http://www.writersstore.com/article.php?articles_id=609

While I've not had significant successes in a large-scale public sense, on a smaller stage I've noticed that people will respond to a good idea that's been at least partially executed or proven. (Ideas alone aren't worth anything.) That seems to be what he's saying.

I appreciate it when general claims are supported with specific evidence, because it gives me a handle to assess the claim, and perhaps disagree.

Here, I disagree with the Friends example: I recently happened to see the pilot (on youtube), and I was impressed with how funny the writing and delivery were, right from the beginning. The production values improved later on (and Joey's clothes changed a lot), but it really seemed the same to me. Note that I'm evaluating it as a series of jokes, which is the primary characteristic of a sit-com (though not the only one).

Worse is better?