Over the last ten years, there has been a strange, reoccurring story of the television show that flounders, or downright flops, during its original broadcast, but then magically finds a massive audience in DVD sales and online that catapult it into cult-hit status or better. It can even translate into new longevity for the property; Family Guy and Futurama were able to bring their shows back to life, Firefly got a movie and Party Down is rumored to be getting one as well, and Pushing Daisies was going to return as a graphic novel before DC closed down WildStorm, the subsidiary that was slated to publish it. This phenomenon has received a lot of attention from entertainment journalism and has sparked a great deal of discussion on online message boards and fan sites, particularly around the question of why these shows were canceled in the first place. It’s a good question. If these shows were destined to be so popular, why didn’t it happen while the shows were still on the air? It also raises the question: if shows this brilliant fell through the cracks, what other gems have we lost? There are many factors that cause a TV show to fail. One of the most commonly discussed is a network executive meddling too much with the creative process. Firefly was famously reordered by Fox executives, which broke up the strong narrative flow and character development that had been written into the show. Another common explanation is that a show was simply ahead of its time. Of course, for times to change some show has to break the mold successfully to demonstrate that this new idea works. The Sopranos taught erudite TV viewers that serialized, continuity-dependant dramas could work on TV by making a very successful serialized, continuity-dependant drama. So why didn’t any of these cult shows make waves while they were on the air and change the TV landscape? I think it all comes down to one of the most overlooked reasons for a show’s initial failure: marketing.
Since TV is such a vast and diverse place it is hard to talk in generalities about TV’s various failures. There are PR disasters, like when NBC fired sitcom meta-humor messiah Dan Harmon, causing his massive Internet fan-base to spam NBC’s social networking presence with his name, or variations on his name, anytime his passion-project Community is mentioned by the network. There are branding mistakes too. Arrested Development, despite being rightfully lauded as one of the funniest and most inventive comedies ever on television, couldn’t find an audience, despite winning buckets full of Emmy awards year after year, because Fox didn’t know how to market a show that so thoroughly subverted the expectations of a typical TV sitcom. As you can tell, it is hard to find the universal truths about the good and bad in marketing for television when every show has its own quirks, its own unique target market, and its own issues with network branding and image. So instead of speaking in generalities, I will focus on a handful of case studies from a variety of genres, a variety of formats, and a variety of channels.
Party Down
Party Down was a show that I discovered through Netflix Instant Play. It was suggested to me by Netflix’s content recommendation system, thanks to my prior interest in witty workplace comedies. I began watching it as the second season was starting off and caught up with the currently airing episodes rather quickly. In a piece of new media brilliance, or more likely as part of the StarzPlay deal Netflix and Starz had penned, the episodes of season two were made available on Netflix the week they aired, rather than after the customary three to six month wait one suffers through for most network shows. Still, not that many people watched it on Netflix while it was airing, and even fewer watched it on Starz, so the show was canceled due to low viewership. Cancellation wasn’t the end of Party Down. It remained on Netflix Instant Play for another three years, until the deal with Starz expired. During that time, its numbers grew and grew until it became downright popular. It’s rumored to be one of the most viewed shows on Netflix Instant Play, was one of the most bemoaned losses of the dissolution of the StarzPlay deal, and has spawned several special fan events such as all-day marathon viewings, complete with appearances by the cast and crew. So where did Starz go wrong?
Most of the time it is hard to tell what is going on behind the iron curtain of Hollywood. Everyone involved has learned to keep tight-lipped, especially about things going sour, for fear that it might hurt their future prospects in the industry. This makes working out what went wrong on many shows a bit of a challenge, and largely based around observation. In the case of Party Down, however, we are lucky enough to have some outspoken members of the cast and crew who have talked publicly about their experiences with the show. Along with the classic gripes, such as network executives shooting down interesting or funny ideas because they didn’t understand them or didn’t think they “would play” for the average viewer, there are some interesting pieces about the marketing of the show. For example, lead actor Adam Scott commented that a critic had perfectly summed up the show as the anti-Entourage, and that creator Rob Thomas had begged Starz to use that in their marketing material, to no avail. This is the first of many blunders in the promotion of the show by Starz who, according to a story from lead actress Lizzy Caplan, chose to forgo the typical billboards and bus stop ads and instead do one big event in Time Square, with costumed promoters handing out fliers for the show. Another example would be the show’s sizzle reel. The sizzle reel, which I have seen online, takes some of the series’ least funny moments, takes them out of context, and generally makes Party Down look like a rapid-fire one-liner-driven traditional sitcom, which it decidedly is not. Marketing for a TV show needs to market the show that was made, not the show that the studio wishes it had made. Party Down is a comedy that is driven by extended character interaction and banter, as well as slowly cultivated situations with incredibly hilarious pay-offs. While one-liners and punchy slapstick aren’t absent, they aren’t what made the show unique, so focusing on them does a disservice to the show and lies to the audience about what they should expect.
It is likely that some of these poor decisions stem from Starz’s inexperience with developing and promoting original content. Before Party Down Starz had mostly produced entertainment themed shows, namely entertainment news and Hollywood focused documentaries. As for scripted, story driven shows, Starz had only produced collections of shorts and one full-fledged drama called Crash, based on the feature film of the same name. In one interview, Rob Thomas theorized that Starz simply didn’t understand how to promote original programming, including Party Down. He explains that the executives at Starz seemed to think that TV shows just brought in people by virtue of being good and existing. Basically, the Field of Dreams style of promoting: if you build it, they will come. Ironically, it turned out that they were correct, as the Netflix numbers demonstrate, just not on the timeline they were looking for. So the biggest marketing lesson to be taken from Party Down is a seemingly obvious one: a company has to be proactive with their self-promotion. It isn’t enough to make a better mousetrap, you have to tell everyone you meet that your mousetrap is better and then show them it is.
Firefly
When my sister was in college, she came home one holiday season and told us that we, as a science fiction loving family, had to watch this show she had been introduced to by her friends. That show was Firefly. This experience basically parallels how every single person I have met was introduced to Firefly. When it originally aired, it generated a rather small but very vocal fan-base, despite the fact that the show had been aired completely out of order and in a terrible timeslot. This group was so vocal that when cancellation was imminent, they took a page from Star Trek’s book and started a fan campaign to save the show, including buying full-page ads in LA newspapers to demonstrate their support. Although it ultimately failed, it kicked off the modern age of cancellation protests, from Jericho’s twenty tons of peanuts to Chuck’s Subway mass eat-a-thon, and turned fans into proselytizing zealots who would begin to spread the good word of the show to all their friends.
The biggest problem with Firefly’s marketing was that Fox didn’t really know what kind of show they had, so they didn’t know how to promote it. For example, the executives at Fox had hired a talented young TV writer, Joss Whedon, who was already involved in creating two very popular shows for another network, namely Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel. Since both of those shows had large followings and critical praise, it seems like a smart play to highlight this fact in Firefly’s marketing. On further inspection, though, it wasn’t that simple. Firefly is a far more sophisticated show than its predecessors, and more adult in its themes and narratives. Buffy was a show popular among teens airing on The WB, a network that was building its image and reputation on targeting the teen market. The old TV spots Fox aired promoting Firefly spend a large percentage of their time hyping Joss Whedon’s involvement and very little time on the show itself, favoring smash cuts between various action scenes from the first couple of episodes. I would argue this targets the wrong market. There is no need to ignore Whedon, but focusing on how Firefly is “like Buffy” implies that it is also a show targeted at teenagers, when it wasn’t. Another mistake in the TV spots was in the material that they chose to use. Whereas Party Down suffered from a lack of understanding of the show, Firefly suffered from a miscommunication between the promo editors and the studio executives. Case in point, almost every promo used footage from the pilot episode to explain Firefly‘s story to the audience, which makes sense, considering that the pilot episode is where all of the characters and the main story elements are introduced. Except that Fox didn’t air the pilot episode at the beginning of the show’s run, they aired it at the end. In fact, it was the last episode that was ever aired on the network. The tone of the promos was slightly off as well. The promos described the story of a band of renegades who become the unlikely heroes of the galaxy. While that may have been the direction the show was headed, and judging by the follow-on feature film Serenity it likely was, it wasn’t where the show started. Joss Whedon himself has said that the fifteen episodes that were made were more about the crew getting by in a tough world than anything else. Both the use of footage from the pilot and the misconstrued tone don’t ring false, in the same way the sizzle reel for Party Down does, but they do create a dissonance between the show’s marketing and what viewers would see when they tuned in. Between that and the over-emphasis on Joss Whedon’s involvement, Firefly’s marketing failed to keep focused on the things that made the show worth watching, which is really what all TV marketing ought to do.
Bent
NBC’s Bent was backed by an incredible, and recognizable, cast and was a critical darling of the pilot season, all traits it shared with ABC’s The New Girl. One might have expected it to be a similar breakout hit, but it wasn’t. There are many factors for its lack of success. For example, many critics referred to it as the kind of show that grows on you, which makes it hard to dazzle with a premiere and then maintain those numbers. It also came out at the midseason, giving it less free promotion in the entertainment press than if it had received a full season premiere in the fall. Still, the failures of marketing again played a factor in its demise. Like Party Down, this is the story of a show that was given no marketing, outside of one short promo video and an essentially unused marquee poster.
The most obvious problem with the show’s promo is that it spells the whole show out for you in the broadest and most tired of romantic comedy clichés, while failing to demonstrate why it was worth a watch. I really only gave it a shot because I trusted the cast, and the premise seemed solid enough. Like with all romantic comedies, the point isn’t whether or not the two leads are going to end up together, they always do. It’s all about the journey. Do the two stars have chemistry? Do they have witty banter? Is it about humorous situations or about snappy one-liners? What side plots are there, and how interested in them am I going to be? I can enjoy You’ve Got Mail, even though I know how it ends, because Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan have good chemistry, I think the movie’s take on mistaken identity is unique and interesting (despite being based on the equally good classic film Shop Around the Corner), and the side plot about the closing of the children’s book shop is both touching and thought-provoking. While the chemistry between the leads in Bent is strong, what really sells the show is what is featured least in the promo. For example, the supporting characters, like the construction crew, are the source of many of the laughs, as is the contractor’s father played expertly by Arrested Development alum Jeffery Tambor. There are almost no clips in the whole promo that don’t directly reflect the potential romance between the leads, which both over-does their sexual tension and under-does the things that make the show fun and unique.
The promo also struggled in its branding. The name Bent doesn’t relate to the show in any way and was confusing for potential viewers. It refers to a line from one of the characters in the pilot about being “bent, but never broken” which ties into one of the show’s themes, picking up the pieces and reassembling your life. The contractor is a recovering gambling addict trying to get his career and life back in shape, and the lawyer is still figuring out how to be a single mother after a divorce. I can appreciate that this makes the title very clever, but it doesn’t make the name make any sense to the average viewer. The Office is about working in an office, Community is about life at a community college, Modern Family is about a modern family; the titles of each of these shows is directly tied to the topic of the show. This concept becomes glaringly obvious when you look at the show’s marquee. There is a shot of most of the important characters standing where they can be seen through a large hole knocked in the exterior wall of a house. On the face of the wall to the left of the group shot is the title BENT in spray paint. This image leaves me wondering, “What does BENT have to do with construction?” and not in a positive way.
So much weight rested on the promo because it represented literally all the marketing budget the show had. So why was there so little money available for marketing Bent? Certainly, the fact that NBC is currently the last place network in broadcast TV plays a role. They simply don’t have the money to go hog-wild promoting every show in their line-up. But they do have some money, and that money has to go somewhere. It just didn’t go to Bent. During the fall pilot season, several comedies were optioned by NBC and their pilot screeners were shipped, along with the other shows NBC had optioned, out to TV critics for review. Despite receiving positive reviews, NBC chose to bench Bent until the midseason and promote Whitney instead, a show whose pilot critics called at best “tepid” and at worst “belligerently bad.” Hazarding a guess, I suspect that focus groups responded poorly to Bent, since it is the kind of show that grows on you, so NBC decided to instead pursue a show that tested better, Whitney, which they did with gusto. NBC plastered the world with billboards, posters, and bus ads letting the world know that Whitney was coming. Whitney went on to be as tepid as critics had suggested, and narrowly avoiding cancellation its first season. Since they went all-out of promoting Whitney, there wasn’t much left in the budget for marketing other freshman shows when midseason came around. With what little money they had left, NBC decided again to focus its marketing budget on another show, in this case: Smash. Smash was critically acclaimed, was backed by Steven Spielberg’s name, and had some decent star-power behind it in the form of Debra Messing and Katherine McPhee, amongst others, so putting marketing weight behind it made sense. It, like Whitney, was not a runaway success and squeaked past cancellation by virtue of it outperforming previous shows in its timeslot, despite its mediocre ratings. As a result of a complete lack of promotion, the midseason premiere, a confusing title, and an arguably terrible time-slot, when Bent finally came out in March it hit a record low for season premieres. Although it was able to maintain those numbers for the duration of its run, suggesting it was the kind of show that could hold on to viewers once it got them, it was clear after the second week that NBC’s strategy of running multiple episodes back-to-back in the hopes of getting people sucked into the slow-starting show was turning into a strategy to dump the show before they would have to renew contracts on any of the cast and crew once summer rolled around.
It is too soon to tell if Bent will find its fan-base post-cancellation. On the one hand, it isn’t groundbreaking, unique, or aimed at a passionate niche audience, it’s just good television. On the other hand, it’s the kind of show that grows on you, so maybe it will grow on the viewing public and become another surprise cult hit. Either way, there are lessons here are about branding and about budgeting. Bent struggled with attracting viewers from its marketing campaign because it was equal parts vapid and confusing. The promo ad was basically a template romantic comedy trailer with no life or originality to it, the name was confusing, and the marquee raised more questions than it answered about the show and its premise. The application of this disappointing branding suffered too, since NBC spent almost no money on it. This was largely a result of NBC not having any money left over after promoting other properties, which provides a cautionary tale about putting all of one’s marketing eggs in one basket. Budgeting for marketing at a company should, if at all possible, be stretched to cover all of its offerings, lest some products become dead weight unnecessarily.
Terriers
Terriers is a positively brilliant show from FX about an ex-cop and an ex-con that work together as private investigators in Ocean Beach, San Diego, California. The show starts off with a mixture of one-off small time cases and the increasingly tense over-arching story of a local conspiracy and the power-players involved, which eventually takes over the show. That description doesn’t do it justice, though, since it is so much more than that. Every character has depth and nuance, almost every person you meet is important to the story in some way, and the writing, pacing, acting, and everything else is spot on. It was also cancelled after one season.
Terriers was not a case of spending too little on a marketing budget; Terriers was promoted everywhere. Before it aired, I felt like it was advertised on every bus stop I walked past. Despite that, it didn’t seem to translate into viewers. Like with Bent, branding played a major role. The first problem with the marketing campaign was the image they used on all of the advertisements: a picture of a dog on a mono-color background with the title just below it. A terrier is a type of dog, it’s true, but the show has nothing to do with dogs. There is one case, in the beginning of the show, where the two leads chase down a stolen dog, but that’s it. From the marketing campaign, I expected the pilot to end with them adopting a dog, or keeping the stolen dog as a mascot, or something… but it never happened. This leads into the second, and related, problem of the name. Again, the show has nothing to do with dogs, let alone terriers, so why is it called Terriers? I originally passed on the show because I wasn’t interested in a show whose premise was centered around dogs or dog breeding, which is what I assumed from the name and campaign the show was about. It wasn’t until it was recommended to me as a quality show that I gave it a chance. The name remains a mystery, perhaps it was provided by the show’s creators and no one had any better ideas, but the visuals of the campaign were likely fixation by the marketing department. They either weren’t made aware of what the show was really going to be about, or they had become completely enamored with the idea of this one picture of a dog, that they just ran with it despite it grossly misrepresenting the show. If you watch the TV spot, it gives a much clearer expectation of the mixture of comedy, drama, and human interest that the show expertly wove, but it also got significantly less exposure than the print ads. While it looks bleak, I hope Terriers is able to find its fan-base after the fact (I tell everyone about it when I can) and be another example of a show outliving its terrible marketing plan.