Forget about critical acclaim or cult classic status. If there’s one thing important in the entertainment world, it’s coming up with a big fat hit, a show or movie that has everyone talking and the media lining up to interview your stars.
The stakes are even higher when it comes to animation. With their cross-generational appeal, sky-high licensing potential and ability to attract audiences even in their umpteenth rerun and beyond, cartoons are indeed no longer kid stuff. Programmers and producers scheme and dream to cook up that hit, but it in the long run even a sure-fire concept can go down in flames while the little show that no one even noticed turns into a national phenomenon. It’s a process more alchemy than science, with creators working harder than ever in search of that secret, mystic ingredient capable of transforming what might be programming lead into ratings gold.
Hits tend to hang around longer these days too, with primetime mainstays like The Simpsons in its 15th season and relative newcomer King of the Hill entering its sixth. Even though cartoons can be repeated endlessly and still hold on to younger viewers, a 24/7 outlet like Cartoon Network keeps adding new episodes of its classic series: the promotional value of premiere episodes, their potential for later home video release or just the importance of keeping a series fresh all justify the investment. Shows like Dexter’s Laboratory (now in its seventh season with 78 episodes under its belt) and The Powerpuff Girls [1] (already with 78 episodes in its fifth season) are regularly put back into production or rewarded with one-time specials. The Powerpuffs, for instance get their shot at the holiday season with Twas the Fight Before Christmas in December.
Newer Cartoon Network series are being rewarded with higher production orders right off the bat. Last year’s Codename: Kids Next Door and the new Duck Dodgers and Teen Titans shows all received 52-episode orders. While aging shows may be a problem for most networks, Nickelodeon is keeping Rugrats in play by aging the show’s toddlers into ‘tweens. After 169 episodes and 12 years of the babies’ original adventures, 15 episodes of the follow-up series All Grown Up! are about to begin airing, with 10 more in the scripting stage.
“Well, if I knew what makes a hit, I’d be a very wealthy man,” muses Cartoon Network’s Mike Lazzo. “TV introduces dozens of shows every year, and more and more of them are animated. So the first thing we look at is what is the idea? Is the idea going to stand out in a very crowded marketplace? Animation tends at least to get noticed, but then it’s all execution; but it does help you.”
Sidney Clifton, svp head of development at IDT Entertainment’s DPS/Film Roman agrees that the eyeball-grabbing power of animation is a recurring factor in network decision-making. “Every five years or so the broadcast networks take a stab at primetime animation, most notably with The Simpsons and King of the Hill, and most recently with Family Guy and Stripperella [2]. On many shows, however, people kind of forgot about character and story, and created very cartoon-Y cartoons rather than animated series.
The characters weren’t necessarily that strong, and in many cases there were gags but not shows, which is a death knell in primetime. Adults got it and then left.”
Clifton points to what everyone agrees is the make-or-break factor when it comes to TV animation. “You have to start with great writing, and keep in mind that on the networks,” she said. “The foundation for the series should probably be a family. The families can be traditional or non-traditional, and exist in worlds that are ordinary or not. But again, if you write it well and find a visual style that supports the writing, rather than coming up with a really cool look and making the writing of secondary importance, in primetime somebody will take the gamble.”
Over at FOX, vp of corporate communications, Scott Grogin, backs up Clifton. “It’s the writing. If it isn’t on the page the voices can’t do anything with it. But more than that, it’s a show’s point of view.”
Lazzo also cites writing over design. “Did the look of South Park help it succeed? The cutout paper look helped, but I think the show would’ve succeeded in any number of styles — the writing and the idea were so fresh and original it would’ve stood out anyway. Beavis and Butt-Head hardly moved at all and the writing helped it stand out too.”
Lazzo adds that a show’s pedigree can make a big difference. “If an individual has a track record that is meaningful that certainly helps too. I’ll open Matt Groening or (The Family Guy’s) Seth MacFarlane or (King of the Hill’s) Mike Judge’s submission first.” Having a success under one’s belt carries weight with Grogin as well. “When somebody like Mike Judge comes in with Beavis and Butt-head’s track record, we’re going to listen. King of the Hill was more suitable to broadcast but still had his distinctive point of view.
“We’re not ready to announce anything yet,” Lazzo said, “But we’re talking to some people with broad backgrounds in cartooning and animation who’ve done prime-time before. We’re hoping to have their projects on the air next fall and in ‘05.”
Arthur, PBS’s longest running series is now in its eighth season and will see a ninth in 2005, with 115 regular episodes and two primetime specials already produced. “We’re not running out of stories,” boasts Elizabeth Coté, national senior publicist from Boston’s WGBH, the PBS affiliate that originates the series with CINAR. “It mirrors the lives of real kids, and there’ll always be stories about kids to tell.”
Coté credits a number of factors for the show’s long-running success. “Arthur is book-based – that’s the reason we started with it. Marc Brown created the characters over 25 years ago and wrote and illustrated many books starring them before we became involved. Marc is also the series’ creative producer, which definitely keeps its quality up.”
That quality has earned Arthur a Peabody Award as well as three Emmys for Best Animated Series. For years it was the top rated series for the 2-11 crowd and still hits the number two or three spot on occasion. The most impressive evidence of the show’s ongoing appeal however may be its upcoming spin-off series, Postcards from Buster. The new show (a 20-80% mix of animation and live action) follows Arthur’s rabbit friend across the U.S. as he sends video postcards back to his buddy, and gives the aardvark face time in a second PBS series. One two-part December Arthur episode serves as introduction to the Postcards, which premieres in 2004.
“Remember most animated series, like live-action, won’t get past 65 episodes,” according to Mary Bredin, director, acquisitions and programming and part of the worldwide programming strategy of Disney/ABC Cable Networks Group, “because that’s enough to strip it five days a week for 13 weeks, which is the standard U.S. season. Long-running series for Disney in Europe have been Sabrina, Recess and Rolie Polie Olie.
On occasion a project makes it through the door on solely on the strength of an artist’s vision, without a strong story or characters backing it up. “In cases like that your job as a development person job to help the artist find the story,” says Clifton. “Sometimes artists are writers and sometimes they’re just not. If that’s the case, you find someone to work with artist to give voice to the story they’re trying to tell: what is it tonally, who is this character, why do I like him or her, what is driving them and what is their world like?
“With writer-creators, once you know who these people are, the property can almost start drawing itself. Then because we have access to amazing artists in-house and in the overall animation community, you find somebody who you think can resonate with the writer; someone who first of all, can translate what this person is trying to get across. You also have to ask yourself if the chemistry is going to work, because at the end of the day these people have to like each other if they’re going to spend hour after hour creating a show together.”
Sometimes getting a show on the air is only half the battle. Beyond having writing that makes a show and its characters come alive, Clifton sees network support as critical. “You have to have a network that has a vision and some balls. You can come up with a lot of great stories that are interesting, but at the end of the day, if the networks don’t buy into your vision, or if you have people there saying, ‘this is a little different from the stuff we know and we’re just not sure about it,’ rather than taking that gamble it’s just not going to work. You have to give it a chance, your show needs to be given shot.”
Even The Simpsons might have a harder time getting and staying on the air today than it did in the late 1980s. “The networks just aren’t giving shows the time they used to,” said Clifton. “Their attitude nowadays is it has to be an instant hit, period. There’s so many things in their pipeline that if it’s not a slam-dunk, then let’s just move on.”
Futurama may be a case in point of how everything can come together – almost. One would think that a Matt Groening-created series featuring some of the best writing and animation on TV and a loyal following would have a lock on becoming the next Simpsons. Yet Futurama just barely made it through five truncated seasons and 72 episodes – a not insignificant number, but a fraction of The Simpsons total and still growing output.
Grogin offers FOX’S perspective on Futurama and its animated brethren: “Primetime animation is a niche market, and we have to make sure any show we put on appeals to a substantial audience. You couldn’t do Kid Notorious [6] (Comedy Central’s latest raunchy offering) or South Park on a broadcast network – not necessarily because of their language or theme, but because they have a narrow point of view. Personally, I enjoy Kid Notorious; it’s perfect for a niche network, but not for us.
“Futurama had a loyal, but a relatively small core audience,” Grogin said. “It connected very strongly with 18-34 year old men, but it didn’t do so well with 12-17 year olds and it didn’t appeal to women at all – very similar to The Family Guy, by the way. By comparison, The Simpsons has high demographics across the board.”
Those higher Simpsons demographics translated not only into higher ratings, but also into sizeable licensing and merchandising revenues as well, according to CN’s Lazzo. “A lot of the original production money was recovered very rapidly. There was a good revenue story with the Simpsons that I don’t think was replayed with Futurama or The Family Guy from the ratings standpoint.”
Both cancelled series have become ratings winners for Cartoon Network’s late-night Adult Swim [7] block, where they reach a far greater concentration of their prime demographic. In recent months, rumors have surfaced of a possible revival for either or both series via a co-venture between the two networks. “Based on the cost per episode and the number of viewers they actually brought in for FOX, they probably weren’t the kind of properties that made sense for them to continue,” says Lazzo. “Family Guy has sold a large number of DVDs for FOX, so there has been interest to a degree in that property. We’ve been talking for months about that type of thing [a joint effort] with FOX. Whether something will come out of it is too early to say. [Editor’s note: Sources confidentially report that FOX will resume production of Family Guy with 35 new episodes in that could return in January 2005. This would make it the first time a canceled series has been revived due to DVD demand and ratings success in syndication.]
“There hasn’t been an equivalent situation with Futurama to date,” Lazzo offers. “It did quite well on DVD but didn’t sell the numbers that Family Guy sold. In fact, King of the Hill didn’t sell the numbers that Family Guy sold. Family Guy seems to be one of those shows that worked in cable much better than it did in broadcast.”
Lazzo goes on to describe the fate of any number of network shows, animated and live-action alike. “I think a large part of that was that you couldn’t find the show. When it first premiered I thought it was a pretty good show, but not the kick in the teeth The Simpsons had been, and I lost track of it because they moved it on the schedule. Then I tuned in the second season and went, wow, this show feels really fresh and funny now.
“It happens all the time: great little shows just tend to get lost,” explains Lazzo. “Audiences are fickle and you have to have a critical mass there or it just doesn’t make sense for the programmer to stick with it. Very often shows are stopped before they can find that audience. It’s a sad state of affairs, but I understand why it happens.”
Unless viewers make an effort or have the luck to revisit a series after it’s worked out its early kinks or moved around the schedule, the networks will take it as a rejection on the audience’s part. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that usually ends with (in the eyes of the show’s partisans) a premature cancellation. Anyone (like this author) who watched Futurama get pre-empted week after week by lengthy football telecasts or double runs of The Simpsons can tell when a network has given up on a series long before it actually leaves the air.
When I mentioned to a friend that I was writing this article, she described — without any prompting — Rugrats appeal to herself and her daughter: “We all knew somebody like Angelica or Tommy when we were growing up — not just the nice side of kids, but how they act and behave when they’re at their best and not so best.”
Margie Cohn, Nickelodeon’s svp of production and development, was downright delighted when I told her about my friend. “That’s wonderful — it’s so great when the audience understands what you’re trying to do.” Cohn credits Rugrats duration to the series’ writing, and the appeal of the show’s well developed characters to its ‘deeply devoted’ audience. In fact, she credits those fans with the inspiration for the new series. “We found out kids so identified with the babies that they always wondered what the characters would be like at their age.”
Nickelodeon wondered too, and their curiosity led to All Grown Up!, a 10th anniversary Rugrats special that aired during summer 2001. The fantasy episode (with the babies themselves imagining their tween-years futures) turned out to be Nick’s highest rated special ever, delivering ‘Super Bowl ratings’ to the channel. A two season order of 35 episodes followed, leading to the premiere this December of All Grown Up! — the series, produced by Klasky Csupo.
It’s not the end of the line for the Rugrats babies, however: a handful of original episodes remain unaired, and the channel is “constantly thinking of new ideas” for the characters, according to Cohn. “One idea is to have them star interpretations of classic fairy tales that could air as Nick specials or go to home video. There’s still a lot more we can do with them without beating a dead horse.”
Which seems to make it all the more strange that the channel’s ultra-hot SpongeBob SquarePants [10] is currently on hiatus with only 60 episodes under its belt. It’s not due to any stinginess on Nickelodeon’s part, says Cohn. “We very much want to do more SpongeBobs, but right now Steven Hillenberg wants to concentrate on the movie version [currently set for a year-end 2004 release]. SpongeBob is a creator-driven and Steven doesn’t want to divide his attention between the series and a movie.
“We’re hoping we can start production on new episodes sometime next year. Believe me, when a show like SpongeBob becomes a phenomenon and people demand to see more of the characters, we want to make them happy.”
“Putting a show together and selling it to the right network is an interesting combination of skill, technique and chemistry. I’m actually a yenta,” laughs Film Roman’s Clifton, comparing herself to a Jewish matchmaker. “My job is to make the matches – it’s the fun part. After all the homework that you do, ultimately if you sell it, that’s Plan A – you’re jumping through a hurdle at every turn. So if you have something they buy into, that’s the first hurdle. You cross your fingers a lot, hoping that you’ve made the right combination there too.
“At the end of the day we’re not in control of events. The most you can do is your homework and go out with quality product. You hope that the buyers are on the same page as you are. Sometimes they are. But they are not, you simply say “thank you,” and try it again.”
Those networks and their programming staffs all approach their jobs differently. Gary Levine, Showtime’s executive vp of original programming has a unique set of criteria when it comes to judging potential programming for his premium cable channel, animation or otherwise. “We’re always trying to find quality programming that’s both sophisticated and yet noisy, provocative and unique at the same time. We won’t do noisy lowbrow programming, or ‘middle of the road’ quality shows. If we did, why would anyone bother to come to Showtime?”
Meanwhile, Spike’s standard for putting shows into development is far more succinct: “whether or not it is relatable to guys,” the relaunched channel’s target audience, according to Peilin Chou, the network’s development vp. Thankfully, none of the people interviewed for this article cited technology as a deciding, or even minor factor in which shows they consider for air, thus sparing all another ‘2D vs. 3D’ [11] debate.
There probably isn’t a ‘secret ingredient’ that can guarantee, or increase the odds of a primetime animation hit, if there were, the networks would be wall to wall in them. Maybe it’s more of a secret formula, one that isn’t really all that secret: a creator with a vision instead of a knock-off… a network willing to give that vision time to realize itself and connect with its audience… and viewers who recognize a show they’ve never seen before as one they want to watch week after week.
Joe is a New York City television writer/producer with a lifelong interest in animation, and who remembers watching Astro Boy when it first aired in the U.S. His work includes numerous promotional campaigns and special events programming for cable outlets including Bravo and the Sci Fi Channel. He interviewed veteran animation exec Fred Seibert [12] in Animation World Magazine in 2003.
Links:
[1] http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=245
[2] http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=1806
[3] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/6613
[4] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/6614
[5] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/6615
[6] http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=1919
[7] http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=1572
[8] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/6616
[9] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/6617
[10] http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=1833
[11] http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=1887
[12] http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=1800
