The writers' room is the place where the stories of our favorite TV shows are born. At first, it was only used in television comedy. Due to the rise in serialized stories, dramas' writers' rooms appeared in the 1980s. Until then, creators of TV dramas wrote each episode on their own. However, this practice would not have been suitable for high concept dramas like Lost or Prison Break. Although writing 22-24 episodes a season is not an easy task, a big table, a whiteboard and some clever co-workers can help to get the job done. These rooms can include anything from flipper machines to pool tables, or, when the showrunner wants the employees to concentrate, nothing at all. In the writing room of Weeds, the sweets were replaced with foods and the cellphones were banned to increase creativity. If you follow this link, you can read about the writers' room of several different shows, with pictures attached to them. Also, you can take a look at the writers' room of Lost below:



The showrunner is the leader of the group of writers. Basically he has authority over everything and he is the one who gets the last word. This group can consist of 3 to as much as 40 writers. In the case of American network shows, their number is closer to 40, while in Britain, the groups are usually small. Additionally, in America, these groups must include an outside employee for each season who is a WGA member. Once the storyline is clear, a writer takes it home to develop it into a script. His job involves writing the dialogues and the details. Once it's finished, the showrunner will review it and hopefully move things onto the next stage.

The showrunner is usually the person who came up with the idea of the show, although that's not always the case. Sometimes the networks hire a more experienced person to run the show, or even the creator might pass it onto someone else, because running a new show does not fit into his/her time. This happened in the case of Lost, where Carlton Cuse took over JJ Abrams's showrunner position, because he was busy making movies. This is a success story, which is very rare. Just take West Wing, Alias, or Gilmore Girls for an example. In these three cases, the ratings, as well as the quality has dropped once the creator had left the show. Therefore, the best thing is to let the creators carry on with their shows. This is the idea that most cable executives follow by putting a lot of authoritative power into the hands of the creators. For example, they do not tell the showrunners which order they want to air the episodes. These shows, especially if they're serialized, air in order of their production code number. Some people, such as Aaron Sorkin, David Lynch, Jerry Bruckheimer or Joss Whedon have a high enough reputation to be left alone by network executives as well. There is one thing that every showrunner has to fear though, and that is being cancelled.

There are cases when the thought of being cancelled doesn't even come to mind, but somehow things turn out differently than expected. Veronica Mars wasn't renewed for a fourth season despite the fact that the CW network would kill for the ratings it had in its third season. And of course there is the most famous cancellation, Twin Peaks's, which stroke abruptly. On the other hand, there are showrunners who never dreamed of a second season, but somehow their series kept being renewed for years to come. David Simon was one of these showrunners during The Wire era. Last, but not least, shows like Scrubs or FNL get cancelled but other networks save them from certain death.

This year and for the past couple of years, Heroes has been one of the shows that had to be afraid of cancellation, and if it wasn't showing on NBC, it'd be long dead by now. You can see the creativity problems its writers face if you click on this link. On the other hand, there are shows that are very easy to write and doesn't matter if they're repetitive or not. Entourage is just like that. You can watch a very funny sketch of its writers' room here:

One writer who doesn't have to be afraid of being cancelled any time soon is Kirt Sutter, the creator/showrunner of Sons of Anarchy. The show's ratings have been on the rise during its second season and the critiques praised every minute of it, so he must be doing something right. Thanks to his blog http://sutterink.blogspot.com, we can take a look at how he does his job and what makes his product so great.

He says that during the writing process, he gives more time to his writers and allows several drafts to be made. He says that he gives "shitty notes", but his vision of the tone of the series has to come first and has to lead the writing process; otherwise, the episodes wouldn't be held together and the seasons wouldn't feel like whole epic stories. After he receives the network's/studio's notes on his first draft, a production draft is generated and distributed to everyone involved in the production process. He likes to be ready with as many scripts as possible before shooting begins, because then he has to oversee everything and cannot concentrate that much on writing. That's why he is in the finishing stages of the third episode of the third season, even though he doesn't even know when the season will start to air.

While he was an exec. prod. on The Shield, he saw Shawn Ryan let the writers produce their episodes as well. He says he tries to follow this path too. He gives the writer of the particular episode the authority to go and help everyone understand what the story is like, and what it needs from the departments of props, casting, locations, etc. Before the shooting, Kirt sits down with the production crew and makes sure everyone understands the episode and what their job is. When the shooting is finished, the material goes through the hands of the editor, the director and the showrunner. This is a two week long process, the result of which is the studio/network cut. The network then gives notes and then the picture is locked. After all this comes the music-picking part, which is followed by special effect coordination (sounds and dialogs). The last stage is the preparation of the Final Mix. Sounds and pictures get mixed here and once the audio levels are determined and Mr. Sutter has given a green light, the episode is ready to air.

Based on this description of the writing and production process, it must be a tiring, but effective way of making a TV show. This is how you can achieve success: hard work and friendly working environment.

Nielsen is the company that measures TV audience ratings in the US. It collects data in two different ways: "Local Measurement" and "National Measurement."

National Measurement: so-called "Nielsen People Meters" are distributed to a number of households. When the viewer activates this device, it stores data on what channel is being watched and who is watching it. This way Nielsen can gather demographic information, which is useful for determining what kind of advertisements are profitable to insert into each show's commercial break. This data is transmitted to Nielsen Media Research's Operation Center every night. Then, based on this data, the "fast national" ratings are released the next morning; whereas, the "final national" ratings are released in the afternoon.

Local Measurement: used for tracking specific markets. About 25,000 households participate in this sample. These households are given another type of device, which can measure what channel is being watched, but cannot gather demographic information. This information is also transmitted to Nielsen that releases the "metered market" ratings the next morning.

A third, but not so important way of determining ratings on an every day basis is the paper diary. Paper diaries are filled out by viewers during the sweeps weeks in November, February, May and July. Ratings during the sweeps weeks outline the advertising schedule of the networks for the next couple of months; therefore, these times of the year the networks try to air episodes that have famous stars and celebrities as guest stars.

These measurements are often criticized for not being accurate, since they are only based on a narrow proportion of society. Yet, all the networks and ad agencies rely on them, and fans usually blame false ratings for the cancellation of their favorite shows. In order to extend the size of the monitored groups, Nielsen included DVR playbacks into its ratings, which appear in the next morning's "fast ratings" as well. However, ad agencies and networks do not take DVR viewers into consideration, because they can skip commercials, which makes them insignificant from a financial point of view.


This is all we should know about tracking audience data. Now let's make some sense out of an actual rating that appears in newspapers and on websites:

7th Heaven (4.4/8, #9; 18-49: 2.7, #T4)

This is a rating for the show called 7th Heaven. The first number, 4.4, shows the percentage of television-equipped households that tuned in to watch the show. Overall, there are approximately 114.9 million of such households in America, which means that at least 5,055,600 watched the show the night before, since there are at least one person in every household.
The second number, 8, shows us the percentage of households that watched the show out of all the households that were watching television that night. This number will always be bigger than the first one, since there cannot be more TV-watching households than TV-equipped ones.

18-49 is the main target group of advertisers, that's why it's important to measure their numbers separately. In fact, if a show has bad ratings overall, but it does good among its targeted viewers (e.g. Gossip Girl), the network might keep it on the schedule. On the contrary, if a show has good ratings overall, but do not attract enough adults between 18 and 49 (e.g. Without a Trace), the network might cancel it. The 2.7 part means that 2.7% of all adults (18-49) watched the show. There are about 132 million adults who fall into that category right now, so the 2.7% viewership counts for 3,564,000 viewers who belong to the target audience.

#9 and #T4 mean the rank it has achieved compared to other shows' ratings that night. The "T" means "tie".


This is a Grey's Anatomy rating from this week:

Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 21.00) 7.6/12, #1; 18-49: (3.7, #2)

As we can see, it does much better than 7th Heaven did back in the day. The fact that it starts at 21.00 is important because when networks decide on whether to keep a show for next season or cancel it, they count in a number of different factors apart from the numbers themselves: how many viewers does it have compared to another network's show at the same time; when does it air; how many viewers can it keep from the previous show's viewers.
As we can see, Grey's Anatomy fans do not have to fear, because it meets all the requirements. It has won its timeline (21.00); in fact, it has won the whole night (#1). It airs at primetime, which is Thursday 21.00 in America, and it won. Since it is in primetime, it doesn't have to keep the previous show's viewers. Actually, it has twice as much viewers as FlashForward, the preceding show does at 20.00; as a result, FlashForward fans have a lot to fear.

Even though Grey's Anatomy has won the day, it has a relatively small number of viewers. Its average 11-12 million viewers cannot be compared to Seinfeld's or Cheers's average audience. The reason for that, and for the 100 million viewer finale of M.A.S.H. is that the number of channels available has multiplied several times in the last two decades. Also, people's taste has changed with the variety of programs offered nowadays. In the last five years, American Idol has consecutively won the title of highest average rating. Although television is getting ready for the revolution, conservative, or maybe just sane people like me can find joy in surprising miracles like Friends' 50 million and The Sopranos' 12 million series finale audiences that keep us hoping for more intelligent and entertaining shows to come.

The Pacific, a "sequel" to Spielberg's & Hanks's Band of Brothers, premiered on HBO last Sunday. On Monday, HBO started airing it here in Hungary as well. I cannot recall any TV show that arrived to our country with such a small time-gap, so I was really happy about it, even though I never watch Hungarian television. The reason why I always admired HBO is because they produced the most unusual and most intelligent dramas on television until the end of The Sopranos three years ago. Since then, they were trying to find their place. After two years of unsuccessful attempts, I can honestly say they've found what they were looking for. Bored to Death, How to Make It in America, the long-awaited Treme and The Pacific, also the upcoming Boardwalk Empire, all feel worthy of following the footsteps of Entourage, Six Feet Under, The Wire and The Sopranos. The other thing I find respectable about HBO's business decisions is that they're never afraid to take risks or to keep shows that only attract a small audience alive.

The Pacific had a budget around $200 million, which made it the most expensive show to be ever created for television. HBO also did a lot to market it properly; they even bought a 30 second Super Bowl spot for about $3 million. However, the ratings of the first episode, with a little over 3 million viewers tuning in on Sunday night, were disappointing. It cannot be compared to the Band of Brothers' 10 million, because we live in the age of DVRs, VOD, and the internet. Some might ask: Why did HBO want to air this expensive series then? Well, cable channels do not hope to earn money from the number of viewers tuning in each week, since they are not turning profit from commercials. In this sense, viewership doesn't even matter to them. The reason for ordering highly-anticipated shows is to boost the number of their subscribers because that's where their money lies. However, based on the number of viewers, they didn't succeed in doing so this time. Nevertheless, HBO is going to turn a profit on it eventually by DVD or Blu-ray sales and licensing, just like they did with Band of Brothers. This is the reason why cable channels can order a whole season of a new series; whereas, national channels only order a pilot at first. Their money comes from commercial spots, which they cannot sell for high prices if nobody watches a program, because it means that nobody is watching the commercials either.

You can watch the Super Bowl ad for The Pacific below:



But how can a series end up with such a huge budget? Well, in the case of such war-centered series as The Pacific or Band of Brothers, it's the explosions and the huge cast, including a significant number of extras that cost a lot. There are several things that an executive of a show has to consider when drawing up an estimated budget that he will present to the network executives. Expenses fall into two categories: above-the-line and below-the-line. Above-the-line means the licensing of songs, actors and scripts. Below-the-line means physical elements, such as sets, props, transportation, equipment, graphics, editing and technical personnel. Creators also have the choice of renting or buying equipment. Renting equipment is useful for small duration takes, while buying equipment is the more profitable choice if you plan on using the equipment for several years. This is what most of the series use, since they have to cover several years of recording. For example, The Sopranos and The Wire have used the same equipment throughout their production. This is observable from the quality of the recording, since, in 2007, the dawn of HDTV, the camera used for Sopranos recordings was clearly outdated.

The production of an episode for an average series is far more expensive than it is for a reality show or a late night talk show. National televisions have shown a tendency towards putting reality shows in the place of drama series increasingly often. Audiences seem to be attracted to these types of shows more than to original series, and their production costs are more less, so, based on these facts, television is unstoppably turning into a reality-centered entertainment, which, I consider to be a shame really. However, I hope that with like-minded people, we can still find refugee and joy in television channels like HBO, FX, or USA.

We all have some idea about how movies are produced and what steps have to be followed in order to get a film into the theaters, because this process hasn't really changed for almost a century now. On the other hand, the things that went through a lot of changes include the size, influence and power of the film industry, the material of the recordings, the capacity of recording devices, and, among many other things, the various special effects that were mainly developed in the last 20 years. It would take at least as many as three books to follow through and explain these changes step by step. Right now, I would like to focus on the special effects side with this 3D phenomenon breathing on our neck and taking over the theaters nowadays.

In the following paragraphs I'm going to mention the effects that I find the most important. Note that there are may more besides these main ones.

Chroma key compositing, commonly referred to as green screen or blue screen, is the process of combining two or more recordings in one scene. This type of effect is used when a locational shoot would be expensive, or when the story takes place in a faraway place or between imaginary surroundings. The background of a set is a single-colored wall. Actors walk before this wall and the background image is projected in the place of the wall when the two recordings become one. Cameras recognize that particular color and where they perceive it, they project the other bit of film in its place. It is a bit tricky because, if a color in the scene falls into the range of color that the background is in, the object with that color will be projected onto as well, so clothes and props have to be chosen accordingly. Nevertheless, this also enables the creation of further effects like the invisibility cloak in the Harry Potter series.
The background can have any kind of color, but green and blue are the most often used. Green is used because it requires less light than blue, the green channel of digital cameras holds the most detail, and the blue color of the sky is inevitable during an outdoor shoot. Whereas, blue is complementary to human skin tone, and when several plants are included in a scene, green wouldn't work. Blue background is commonly used for weather forecasts. Red is rarely used, since it prevails in human skin pigments.
Below, thanks to Stargate Studios, you can see a compilation of how series are created using chroma key compositing:



CGI (computer generated imagery) represents the group of effects created by the use of computer graphics. It is widely used in the production of computer games and animation movies. The first animation movie to be fully created by the use of such technology was Toy Story. CGI can either be pre-rendered graphics (mostly cutscenes in computer games), or performances of actors and movement of objects that have been animated onto, such as Gollum or A Scanner Darkly. As a matter of fact, both of the previous examples are outcomes of a CGI-type visual effect called rotoscoping, which means that they were animated frame by frame.

Bullet Time is an especially important effect for me, as I was a fan of The Matrix and Max Payne as a kid as well. This technique helps overcome the limits of time and space on screen, by letting the audience observe the scene from different perspectives at various speed. Although this effect can be achieved manually with multiple cameras, most of the time it is done by the use of virtual cameras. It first appeared in Blade in 1998.

Stop motion is my personal favorite of all, because its results are usually mind-blowing and extremely abstract. The idea is to make physically manipulated objects look like they are moving on their own. This is done by taking lots of pictures of moving objects under a fairly small amount of time, or altering inert subjects between shots. A popular branch of this technique is clay-mation, an example for which is Wallace and Gromit.
Now take a look at a music video, which was compiled from 5.000 photographs with stop motion in mind. Then watch the making of the video. Kaki King - Pull Me Out Alive:





Last, but not least, we have 3D on the uprise among effects. This technique is more than a hundred years old actually. It originates from stereoscopy, which includes any kind of technique that is capable of recording 3D or creating the illusion of depth in an image. When you are watching a movie in 3D, you are looking at the screen from two different perspectives at the same time. This 3D illusion is created either by recording from two perspectives at the same time during shooting, or generating two perspectives with a computer. There are several different techniques for recording in 3D and watching 3D: various types of cameras, various types of 3D glasses, etc. I don't want to go into details about them now, but I might do another post on them.
What I will mention though is that soon we might not have to put on glasses at the movies. Autostereoscopy means being able to observe 3D with only the help of your eyes, and Hitachi has recently released the 1st 3D mobile phone that meets those requirements. However, this technology cannot be integrated into theaters yet.

Even though it is amazing how advanced we are technologically and how eye-popping 3D can be, I'm not sure whether I'd like to see it gaining attention and popularity. Nevertheless, I'll surely miss the 35mm films if that will be the case.

OMG! The Academy Awards are on this weekend! Are you as excited as I am? Then you're not excited at all.

The way I see it, all these hyped award ceremonies like the Emmys, the Grammys and the Oscars are just for showing off. By gathering a bunch of stars under one roof, they can show the world that America is the capital of show-business. Personally, I'm aware of this fact without all this garniture. In fact, it would not even bother me, if they wouldn't represent the biggest achievement in their particular line of the entertainment industry.

Winning an Oscar is one of the easiest things to do. As this website illustrates, you just have to play one of these characters in a movie that has an intellectual, heart-warming tone and a message. Plus, you need to pair up with a good director and a good script writer (they don't have to be great, good is enough), and you're good to go.

A couple of decades passed and people realised that the Academy Awards are not representing the biggest talents and the best movies; furthermore, there are a lot of other things you can watch on Sunday night now, so viewers started to wave goodbye to the ceremony a couple of years ago.

This lead the big thinkers behind the curtain into making some major changes. Hugh Jackman managed to get a couple of viewers back last year, so they wanted him to lead the ceremony again. He is not dumb, so he rejected the offer. Seriously, how can someone think it would be as interesting as last year's with the same guy dancing, singing and jumping around on stage. He did a fine job last year, we need to move on. That's it. The choice of Sacha Baron Cohen was understandable; he would've turned it into a huge scandal, just like he did with Eminem at the Grammys. In the end, they changed their mind because the sketch he wanted to do about Avatar freaked the directors out, even though Cameron would've been ok with it. I mean why do you want him to host if you don't let him do the thing why you've chosen him to lead in the first place. It's just illogical. Another alternative, Robert Downey Jr, showed more intelligence and vision from the organizers; unfortunately, he did not accept the invitation. Then came Ben Stiller as a candidate. That would've been mediocre, because he can always make a fool of himself, but everyone is tired of him by now. He did not want to do it either. What I don't understand is why their next choice wasn't Adam Sandler if they wanted someone with that type of humor. Anyhow, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin will be the captains of the sinking boat this Sunday night. The decision makers decided to pull out an old trick, because the multiple hosts idea was last exercised in the Chevy Chase era. I'd say this was a good decision because Alec Baldwin happens to be one of my favorite actors, but they definitely won't draw more viewers before their television. They do not possess, even together, as much fame as Downey does on his own. Also, they're old, which is not appealing to too many teenagers.

To compensate the hosts' age, they tried to draw the attention of youngsters by adding such names to the list of presenters as Kristen Stewart, Miley Cyrus and Zac Efron. This is an evident, but good business move.

So much about stars. The show's outline and the number of nominees have also changed this year. They raised the number of nominees for best movie from 5 to 10. Yes, they're that desparate. I really don't understand what difference it makes. I would not even nominate 5 out of the 10 they did, and the fact that 500 Days of Summer did not make it into the top 10 while Up did, tells everything about the Oscars. Here comes the point where I fell out of my chair from laughing. They told the stars to save the thank you segment for later. After they received the statue, they go backstage to record a thank you movie, which they'll put on the official website. Who the heck wants to see that? Those that the person is thanking? If you want to take down a painting from the wall because it bothers everyone and it's just using up space, take it down and throw it out. Don't put it in another room.

Of course, the most important thing in an award like this is the liability of the judges. If they become influenced, the whole ceremony has no meaning anymore. The problem is that it has already happened this year. A producer of The Hurt Locker sent emails to voters asking them to side with his movie instead of Avatar. I agree with him, but this is unprofessional. The voters should know better than to choose Avatar anyway. The Hurt Locker took the best picture prize on all other ceremonies, so why should the AA be an exception? The Hurt Locker is also more likely to win because of the new tendency to appreciate low-budget and independent movies. Last year, Slumdog Millionaire won as a result of this tendency, since the AA was accused of not letting independent movies be recognized. This is sad, as it should've won anyway, since it's a better film than the other contestants were.

Just as a last thought, I'd like to share my biggest problem with the ceremony. Why do they only nominate movies that come out during the previous winter or autumn for the best movie award? This year, the oldest film is Up, which came out around July. How about Star Trek? If Avatar can be nominated based on its looks, why can't Star Trek, which, besides its eyepopping looks, had a much better storyline, script and cast than Avatar? This is why most of the good movies come out just before the Oscars and the audience is overwhelmed by them. Not to mention that, in other countries, people cannot enjoy the AA the same way Americans do, since the majority of the nominated movies do not even reach the cinemas before the ceremonies.

To stop my flow of thoughts before this posts gets even longer than this, let me just summarize the main points. The Oscars are always surrounded by a lot of controversy and scandal. The organizers are having a harder time than ever before. In addition to the usual debates, this year brought up several new issues with changes that will either raise the number of viewers or make it fall. Which one it is going to be, we'll find out on Sunday.