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If ‘Million Second Quiz’ Succeeds, NBC Gets the Grand Prize

September 6, 2013 by

Ask NBC, and the answer will be “The Million Second Quiz,” a groundbreaking competition that will start on Monday night and end 10 days later — the online component is 10 consecutive 24-hour days — with the presentation of what the network calls the biggest guaranteed pot of money in game show history. Whether that’s the right or wrong answer will be determined when the ratings start to come in.

At a time when shrinking network audiences are the norm, the “Quiz” is already winning attention for the scale of its ambitions, as symbolized by the three-story arena that has taken shape in the Clinton neighborhood of Manhattan, where the game will be played. In keeping with the million-second theme, it has the appearance of a gigantic hourglass; its sheer size almost says, “AMC and Netflix and YouTube can’t do this!”

After its debut on Monday, “Quiz” will be broadcast on NBC for an hour a night, every night, until Sept. 19, with one break for “Sunday Night Football.” In some ways, it is a throwback to a long-ago era when families would gather around the television set for big prime-time game shows. According to NBC, there hasn’t been a live game show scheduled in prime time since the 1960s.

Back then, though, viewers could only shout answers at the TV. Now, they can play along at home with an app. And when the game is not being played on TV, it will continue as a live, continuous stream on NBC.com.

Contestants, some of whom will be picked to compete on the basis of their Internet play, will take turns sitting in the “money chair,” where every second spent answering trivia questions is worth $10. Correct answers help them reach Winners Row, an area on the set where the five best players will live and sleep (and keep answering questions, lest they be kicked out of the top five) until the million seconds are up.

“This is the Olympics of quiz,” said Stephen Lambert, the British television producer who offered the idea to Paul Telegdy, NBC’s president of alternative and late-night programming. In the pitch, Mr. Lambert described the game “almost like a tennis match between two contestants.” After all, nothing attracts more viewers to broadcast television than big sporting events. That’s partly why the “Quiz” will try to look and feel like such an event, with its open-air setting.

Since the quiz show isn’t taped like, say, “Jeopardy,” some questions will be about the day’s news. “You might be asked, ‘President Obama signed what into law this morning?’ ” said the executive producer, David Hurwitz. Other questions will be asked by celebrities — inevitably, NBC celebrities. (“If there’s a question about the weather, who better to ask it than Al Roker?” Mr. Telegdy said.) On the final night, the final contestants on Winners Row will vie for a grand prize that could theoretically top out at $10 million, though it’s likely to be closer to $5 million.

Executives at NBC haven’t actually said this, but they clearly want the “Quiz” to be nothing short of a national event — the kind of big-ticket, must-see spectacle that turns up less and less often on the broadcast networks. To that end, the executives have hired Ryan Seacrest to host and have spent tens of millions of dollars to promote the game show this summer. They say that even some of their typical rivals might be caught rooting for it: Mr. Telegdy said a “competitive éminence grise from elsewhere in TV land” — he wouldn’t name the person — had sent him a well-wishing e-mail that said bluntly, “We all need this right now.”

The producers are aware that comparisons to the blockbuster ABC show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” are probably inevitable (though there is no phone-a-friend option on this show). “Millionaire,” hosted by Regis Philbin, wowed the television industry when it drew 10, 20 and sometimes even 30 million viewers in 1999 and 2000. It continues to chug along in syndication, now with Cedric the Entertainer as the host. One difference is that “Millionaire” was already a proven hit in Britain when it arrived in the United States; “Million Second Quiz” will start stateside first. If successful, it will spread around the world.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Telegdy said that “the line will probably go dead, and a robot will eject me from my seat” if he uttered a specific ratings prediction. But his noncommittal answer was telling in and of itself: the goal, he said, is to “get people talking about NBC.”

Once upon a time, that network didn’t have to try hard to achieve that; now it does. So its parent company, Comcast, is having all of its various properties support “Quiz” through ads, guest appearances, reports on newscasts and the like — a strategy that it calls “symphony” and that was previously applied to the singing competition “The Voice.”

Mr. Seacrest, who is best known for hosting Fox’s “American Idol” and who also has a wide-ranging contract with NBC, said that after he heard the initial pitch from Mr. Lambert and Mr. Telegdy, the NBCUniversal chief executive, Steve Burke, called him to reiterate how important the “Quiz” was going to be. Mr. Burke also did so in an e-mail to every employee of the company on Wednesday.

“There is already a lot of great buzz, and we think there is a chance ‘The Million Second Quiz’ could really break through,” Mr. Burke wrote.

NBC is hopeful that starting “Quiz” slightly ahead of the fall television season — which doesn’t officially get under way until Sept. 23 — will benefit both the game show and the new series that the network will introduce later. The logic works like this: there is relatively little competition next week, giving “Quiz” a better shot at being sampled by the public; if the show catches on, then all of NBC’s ads for new series like “The Blacklist” and “The Michael J. Fox Show” will be seen by many more people, and giving away $5 million or $10 million will feel like money well spent.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/07/business/media/if-million-second-quiz-succeeds-nbc-gets-the-grand-prize.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

One Last Cringe for ‘The Office’ Finale

May 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Not the actual documentary about the Dunder-Mifflin paper company of Scranton, Pa., that a fictional camera crew shot for what turned out to be nine years, he decided — but a reunion show, in the fashion of the post-competition cast rehashes familiar from reality shows like “Survivor.”

“At one point I actually approached Jeff Probst,” the host of “Survivor,” Mr. Daniels whispered as the big reunion scene unfolded here in the auditorium of an ATT office building. Standing in for the Scranton cultural center, it was one of many locations for the ambitious one-hour finale, to be shown on May 16 on NBC.

Onstage at the reunion were most of the prominent characters — minus the biggest one, Steve Carell’s Michael Scott — arrayed in a long arc of folding chairs. They were answering questions about how the documentary, supposedly recently presented on Scranton’s PBS affiliate, had changed their (fictional) lives.

Why PBS? “I tried to think what outlet would shoot something like this and take nine years to do it,” Mr. Daniels said.

That idea is almost as improbable as the notion that a comedy adapted from a British sitcom and initially poised for oblivion (after NBC’s screening of the pilot, it was headed for exile on Bravo, one executive related) would become a bellwether of many of the changes that have overtaken television today.

As the anchor of NBC’s once-heralded Thursday-night lineup, it played a role in pioneering alternative entertainment forms like TV offerings on iTunes and Webisodes on the Internet. It helped executives recognize the value of delayed viewing. Equally important, it opened broadcast television to a new concept in humor: the sitcom that makes you uncomfortable.

“The Office,” never qualified as a blockbuster hit (though it attracted one of the most affluent audiences in television). Yet it clearly paved the way for a style of filmed comedy — smart, multilayered and subtle, sometimes so much so that a portion of viewers never understood its humor. The genre has since been embodied by other highly regarded comedies like “30 Rock,” “Parks and Recreation,” “Community” and “The Mindy Project” (starring an “Office” graduate, Mindy Kaling).

The show also had striking worldwide appeal. The original British version, starring Ricky Gervais, has been copied in places as disparate as Chile and France, proving that office life under a bumptious boss is apparently universal. “ ‘The Office’ was like a high-wire act,” said Ken Kwapis, the show’s first and last director. He cited, among other things, the absence of a laugh track, the exclusion of any kind of background music and a completely untraditional filming style.

“Some of the things most compelling about the show aren’t even funny,” Mr. Kwapis said. “But they make you cringe. Now I go to pitch meetings where executives say, ‘I want that cringe-worthy comedy.’ ”

That any of this happened is mind-boggling for almost everyone who was involved at the show’s inception, beginning with Ben Silverman, the executive producer (and later, head of NBC’s entertainment division), who chased Mr. Gervais all over London to secure the American rights. “What was required to get this show on was almost herculean,” Mr. Silverman said.

The NBC chief executive at the time, Jeff Zucker, had proclaimed that no single-camera comedy could ever be a hit show. (Single-camera shows are shot on sets and locations and feel like movies; three-camera comedies like “The Big Bang Theory” are shot on stages in front of audiences and feel like theater.) Mr. Zucker was not an initial fan of NBC’s version of “The Office,” and he wasn’t alone. “A lot of people didn’t get it,” Mr. Daniels said.

John Krasinski, who memorably inhabited the show’s male romantic lead, Jim, recalled that during the shooting of the first six episodes, a network executive would show up every Friday and say, “This episode is so good — unfortunately, it’s the last one we’re going to do.”

Expectations among critics were also low because the British version, created by Mr. Gervais and Stephen Merchant, had been deemed an instant classic, and NBC had misfired two seasons earlier in a remake of the British comedy “Coupling.” Mr. Daniels recalled watching the British “Office,” with its ironic tone, and thinking, “Oh my God, how did they pull this off?”A breakthrough came when Mr. Daniels realized that between Americans’ newborn fascination with reality shows and their growing habit of recording even mundane events in their own daily lives, “being in front of a camera and talking to a camera became a most relatable experience.”

The idea of allowing characters to speak directly to the camera, another device straight out of “Survivor,” also opened up possibilities, Mr. Daniels said, because “you can tell stories in a first-person point of view.” That technique is now commonplace on shows like “Modern Family” and countless commercials.

With his own experience in the reality genre, Mr. Silverman reached out to camera operators with reality-television credits to film the pilot. To direct, Mr. Daniels hired Mr. Kwapis, who had cut his teeth on observational single-camera comedies like “Freaks and Geeks,” and especially “The Larry Sanders Show.” And Mr. Kwapis brought in Peter Smokler, who had worked on the beloved mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap,” as director of photography.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 1, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated after which season Steve Carell left “The Office.” It was after Season 7, not 5.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/arts/television/the-office-finale.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Economix Blog: Ask David Barboza About China’s Economy

December 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment

David Barboza

David Barboza has been a correspondent for The New York Times based in Shanghai, China, since November 2004. In a series of recent articles, he has examined China’s system of government-managed capitalism in depth. He will be answering questions from readers in connection with these articles. Submit your question via the comments section below. Mr. Barboza will respond to a selection of questions in the days ahead.

In the most recent article in the series, he looks at a pattern of conflicts between China’s emerging private sector and its powerful state-run enterprises:

Some prominent Chinese economists are warning that the potentially corrosive effects of an approach that favors government companies at the expense of the private sector could eventually stifle innovation, saying it could stunt China’s long-term growth and quash the rising aspirations of the nation’s 1.3 billion people.

Earlier, Mr. Barboza examined how the Chinese economy relied on enormous infrastructure projects, financed with government debt that can be concealed from auditors.

Another article looked closely at a missing element in China’s boom: the Chinese consumer.

Read the full Endangered Dragon series.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e12327258dcbc5860c5e0fc23d064e3b

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,