The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories by Frank Rose

Author:Frank Rose [Rose, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-02-27T14:00:00+00:00

TEN YEARS AFTER ITS INITIAL experiments with Homicide, the idea of extending television shows online suddenly became part of NBC’s core strategy. The announcement came in May 2006 from Jeff Zucker, then chief of television operations at NBC Universal, the entertainment combine created by the merger of General Electric’s NBC with Vivendi’s Universal Studios. Zucker spoke during the spring upfront, the annual razzle-dazzle at which the US broadcast networks introduce their fall lineups to advertisers. The upfronts are a storied ritual of broadcasting, a week of lavish parties and elaborately staged presentations culminating—hopefully—in a fevered auction during which Madison Avenue hurls money at the networks. Year after year, even as their audience kept drifting away to cable and video games and the Internet, the networks had managed to command more and more money for their airtime because advertisers in search of a mass audience had nowhere else to go. But this year, for the first time, it wasn’t working.

It particularly wasn’t working for NBC, which in 10 years had slipped from number one among the nation’s four major television networks to number four. From the mid-eighties on, NBC had seemed unbeatable in prime time. The Cosby Show, Cheers, Seinfeld, ER—between 1985 and 1999, NBC had the top-ranked show in the country for 11 out of 14 seasons. But first Seinfeld and then Friends and Frasier had run their course, and the network seemed unable to replace them. Now CBS was on top, riding high on the success of Anthony Zuiker’s CSI franchise, which was so popular it had managed to turn forensics into a fad, and Survivor. NBC was beginning to look not just dated but sad.

NBC’s upfront presentation was at Radio City Music Hall, the 1930s song-and-dance palace just down the street from 30 Rock, its glamorously streamlined form a reminder of the era when the National Broadcasting Company was America’s premier radio network. The afternoon got off to a fairly promising start. Steve Carell came onstage to say some very funny things. There were not one but two self-referential comedies inspired by Saturday Night Live: Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, which looked kind of cool; and Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which seemed oddly self-important. There was a strange new series called Heroes, about ordinary people with superpowers. And then Zucker took the stage.

Zucker’s big news was “TV 360,” an initiative that would offer advertisers more than just television. TV 360 meant taking what NBC.com had done with The Office and extending it across the prime-time lineup and beyond. There would be all kinds of extra stuff—Webisodes from the high school football drama Friday Night Lights; a new home page for The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live; a “show behind the show” from 30 Rock; an online comic from Heroes; a Web-only version of The Biggest Loser, the weight loss reality program, featuring would-be contestants who didn’t make it onto the actual show; even online beauty makeovers from iVillage, the Web site that NBC Universal had just bought.

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