*cracks knuckles* Okay, let's do this. Feel free to tl:dr.
Gregory Harbin wrote:Is Terra Nova really that much more expensive to produce than Game of Thrones? Is Playboy Club more expensive than Walking Dead?
And if so, why don't the networks just slash budgets across the board, since it's obviously a simple thing to produce quality shows on a budget only supported by a couple million people.
All reasonable questions. As usual, the answers are complicated. Get comfortable.
I'll tackle the second part first...
TV shows produced on moderate budgets and which draw moderate audiences represent the vast majority of what's on network television already. Only ten shows can be in the Top Ten... most shows are somewhere in the middle of the herd, not getting massive ratings but not costing too much, either.
The example I like to use is "According To Jim". To this day, I don't know what that show was actually about, other than Jim Belushi was the star. In its highest-rated year it was at 44th place in the year-end average ratings. Its lowest-rated year, it was at 146th place. It was nominated for exactly four Emmys during its entire run, all for Cinematography for a Half-Hour Comedy. It never won.
According to Jim was on ABC for EIGHT YEARS.
Most network shows are According to Jim.
They just plod along, not hurtin' nobody, not costing too much and thus making enough money for the network to keep them on. The one-hour equivalent of According to Jim are the CSI's and Law and Orders and all the other shows that are pretty much just like them. They grind those things out the way a factory makes bricks.
And when you think about it, most of those shows are exactly the same in terms of what is required to make them: Some moderately-priced actors walk into a room, have a conversation, walk out again. Repeat. Sometimes there's a car crash or a fist fight or a visual effect to keep things interesting, and that's about it.
You can pretty much budget a show like that without even knowing what the show IS. As long as there are no dinosaurs, no spaceships, and no Charlie Sheen, a one-hour show should cost somewhere between 2 to 3 million per episode.
Of course, when a network really wants to pinch pennies, they make reality shows. Even a casual observer can see that an hour of Supernanny costs even less than an hour of Law and Order. And once in a while, one of THOSE will take off in the ratings, and the network is especially happy then.
Anyway, the break-even point for a show with a 2-3 million per episode budget is (very roughly, because there are a LOT of factors at work here) somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 in the ratings. With a 2 million budget and a 3.0 in the ratings, the show's no "hit" but it's fine. It'll probably be back next season, according to Jim.
And some of them are even genre shows, there's no bias against those. Ghost Whisperer and Medium had decent runs. Smallville did fine on the WB. And Supernatural's in its sixth season.
So Supernanny and Medium and According to Jim are what keep the lights on at a network, but of course they want hits, too. So they take chances on stuff, in hopes that something will become the next Big Thing.
Gregory Harbin wrote:People seem to be dancing around my main premise: if quality TV can be made on lower budgets, why aren't the networks doing it? Why are they continuing to throw massive amounts of cash at shows that don't grab enough eyeballs to make it worth it and end up canceling them after a season?
The problem is that "quality" is a slippery term. To a network, just as with a film studio, "quality" is generally defined by things that can be bought. Big names or lots of effects or epic locations will make a show stand out against all the CSI's and According to Jim's. Mostly because these are things that can be advertised. As opposed to: "Tuesday on NBC, the premiere of Slappy and the Teakettle! You won't believe your eyes when you see how well-written it is!"
So they make Grimm and West Wing and Pan Am and Studio 60 and Lost and Terra Nova and Firefly (all of which are risky premises, when you think about it), and they let them be pricier than average, in hopes they'll be more successful than average, too. Sometimes that pays off. More often, it doesn't. But just as with features, it pays off enough that it's worth doing. West Wing and Lost offset the losses of the bombs, just as the Harry Potter movies have paid for a dozen Sucker Punches with a billion bucks left over.
Sometimes NONE of a network's high-rollers pay off. When that happens, everybody at the network has a bad year except the guy who paints the names on parking spaces (he'll be putting in some overtime). Meanwhile somebody next door makes Glee for a normal 3 mil per episode (and it's mostly the music licensing that puts Glee on the higher side, budget wise) and that's the one that goes ballistic. This makes TV executives just as crazy as it makes the rest of us.
Terra Nova's per episode budget is 4 million, and last week it posted a series-low rating of 2.1. Not only was Terra Nova designed to bring in more dough than average, it's turned out that advertisers want to pay LESS than average for Terra Nova airtime... because at 2.1 (which is about 6 million viewers) not as many people will be seeing their commercials. So the network has a problem.
Or rather, the show does - because although we tend to say that networks make tv shows, they almost never do. Mostly they LICENSE tv shows.
This is even true for shows made by companies that are part of the same conglomerate as the network. ABC the network and ABC Studios the production company are both part of the Disney organization, but they're separate divisions with their own bottom lines to look out for.
For example, ABC Studios makes Castle and licenses it to the ABC network. But ABC Studios also makes Criminal Minds and licenses it to CBS. (Ever seen Criminal Minds? Me either. It's currently in its eighth season.) In either case, both sides need to make a deal that makes sense for their business.
So ABC the network cares if ABC the studio sells a billion copies of Castle on DVD just about as much as they care if Disneyworld sells out on July 4th, or if Pirates of the Carribbean does well at the box office. It doesn't matter to one division if the folks on another floor get a big Christmas bonus. (Fun fact: sometimes different divisions of entertainment conglomerates hate each other.)
And when a show costs 3 million per episode to make, that may or may not be what it's costing a network to get the USE of it. They might be getting it for less, if the ratings are so-so but the owners are hoping to eke out another season for syndication and DVD sales... or they might have to pay more, if the show's a hit and the producers know it. But it's still worth it, because a hit show can charge more per minute for advertising.
Which brings us back to the first question...
Is Terra Nova really that much more expensive to produce than Game of Thrones? Is Playboy Club more expensive than Walking Dead?
And then it gets weird, because the answers to those specific questions are No, and Not Really.
Per episode costs (estimated)
Terra Nova - 4 million
Game of Thrones - 5-6 million
Playboy Club - 3 million
Walking Dead - 3.4 million Season one.
Cut to 2.7 million in season two (which led to Darabont's firing when he protested this.)
I know - WTF, right?
Network and cable business models are different, and those particular shows have different origins as well. So when you try to compare them directly it doesn't make sense at all.
First - basic cable, like AMC. Basic cable is all those channels that are bundled together in your cable bill, most of which you don't watch and hate paying for. Each channel in the bundle gets a share of those cable fees, and for some that's pretty much their entire budget. Which is why the cable industry won't let you choose your channels a la carte - if you did, a lot of those niche channels would immediately die out. It's also why a lot of niche channels have stopped being niche - they need to find a larger audience to survive.
When AMC started, it was a zero-budget affair that ran old movies with no commercials. But that wasn't enough to survive on, so it added commercials, and started running more recent movies, and then started experimenting with original programming. Cable shows simply can't get the audiences that network does - so their budgets are generally lower. Two million per episode is a very high budget for a one-hour cable show.
(As for reality shows on basic cable... Eddie, ya wanna talk about how low the budgets are there? I don't know how it's possible to do ANYTHING at those prices.)
AMC's first original show - Mad Men - started at around 2 million per episode. It became a hit (well, more of a critical hit than in actual viewer numbers, but it was the first-ever basic cable series to win the Emmy for Best Drama). So, as with all successful shows, the budget crept up every season, and it's now at about 3 million per. AMC licenses MM from Lionsgate, and this season they had a very lengthy dispute over the budget. It was resolved, but as result the new season of Mad Men was delayed until 2012.
Their second show was Breaking Bad, which AMC licenses from Sony. Same story there: started reasonable, became popular (Brian Cranston won Best Actor the same year Mad Men won for Drama), went up in price, big budget dispute this season. Sony was shopping Breaking Bad to other networks for a while. But then they too made a deal.
What with their first two attempts at original series turning out to be history-making successful, AMC's third show, Walking Dead, started at 3.4 million per episode in its first season. That's high even for a network, it's astoundingly high for AMC. That first season was a huge risk (but it was only six episodes, so they were hedging their bets).
But on the other hand - AMC owns Walking Dead. They're not licensing episodes from a third party owner, they ARE the owner. (Other than whatever split they owe to the comic creators, of course.) So iTunes, Netflix, DVD sales, overseas syndication... all that comes right back to AMC. This gives them more wiggle room when it comes to the on-air profit ratio.
Overseas sales I suspect are especially important here. I doubt Mad Men or Breaking Bad have much appeal overseas - and why should AMC care anyway, since they won't see that money. But genre stuff sells everywhere. Just ask the Asylum.
But even as big a hit as Walking Dead was, and even with that long-tail back end potential, AMC still couldn't make 3.4 mil per episode work for a full season. (It's generally assumed that Breaking Bad and Walking Dead are paying the price for the Mad Men deal.) So they cut Walking Dead to about 2.7 mil in the second season, and thus adios Darabont.
So AMC has three one-hour series, all with budgets that wouldn't raise an eyebrow at a broadcast network. That's the equivalent of an average NIGHT for a network, but at AMC that's their entire slate. And they're having to juggle the budgets because that's all the money they have to play with. Welcome to basic cable.
And then there was HBO. A premium service with an estimated 40 million subscribers. CBS would kill kittens to get 40 million people just to watch their network, meanwhile HBO has 40 million people writing them a check directly every month.
Of course, a lot of that goes to licensing the movies that HBO airs, and which is still their core business. But HBO also got into the original series game quite a while ago, and if anyone has a consistent track record of "quality", well... it's not TV, it's HBO.
They do spectacle too, but for whatever reason (it may just be that HBO execs have better taste) their spectacles are also just freakin' GOOD. From the Earth to the Moon, Band of Brothers, Rome, Boardwalk Empire, The Wire, and now Thrones are my personal faves, but they've got plenty of others that other people love too.
And once the Emmys changed their rules to allow cable networks to compete, HBO instantly became the nine-hundred-pound gorilla. And that matters, too, even if it's just bragging rights. Game of Thrones was clearly Emmy-bait, and it worked as usual.
Another wrinkle, HBO doesn't have to stick to a schedule the way networks do. Game of Thrones in its first airing got 2 million views... but it aired twice more soon after, and the TOTAL views came to 4.2 million. 4.2 million would be low for a network, but for HBO that's a dandy number - that's 10 percent of their total possible pool of viewers. There are about 120 million households with regular TV in America, 10 percent of that is 12 million - and a show with 12 million viewers is an unqualified smash hit on network TV.
And finally (and probably most importantly), HBO mostly owns their shows. All those DVD's and streams and overseas sales... ka-ching! This year HBO's overseas profits alone are projected to pass one billion dollars.
So to sum up (again, these are highly approximate, based on what info is available):
Game of Thrones on HBO:
6 million per episode x 10. 60 million for season one
Subscriber supported, high-rated in its market
Good buzz. The ratings went up as the season progressed.
Good DVD potential and good overseas potential, which are valuable because it's owned in-house. (According to the Hollywood Reporter, GoT episodes were pre-sold for 2.5 mil apiece overseas, so they were halfway to profitability on season One before it even aired.)
A bucket of Emmy nominations (13), with some wins (2).
Terra Nova on Fox TV:
4 million per episode x 13. 52 million for Season one. (Throw in the rumored 10 million in development costs before they shot a single frame, and they're almost matching GoT's budget)
Ad-supported, and low-rated in its market
Not-so-good buzz. The ratings have gone down as the season progressed.
Good DVD potential and doing well overseas (I assume), which isn't as valuable because Fox co-owns the show with at least four other companies.
We won't know its Emmy potential until next year... but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
And so - a second season of Game of Thrones is a no-brainer. A second season of Terra Nova... hmm. Risky. We'll see.
The Aristocrats!
