Marshall Herskovitz Asks: Are The Corporate Suits Ruining TV?

Excerpts rom Herskovitz’s LA Times Op-Ed piece:

After 20 years and five series, including "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life," my partner, Ed Zwick, and I have — for the time being at least — stopped producing television programs…..

…..This is not about how we were treated but rather something much larger: How a confluence of government policy and corporate strategy is literally poisoning the TV business.

It started in 1995 when the Federal Communications Commission abolished its long-standing "finsyn" rules (that’s financial interest and syndication, for those unfamiliar with the term), allowing networks for the first time to own the programs they broadcast….

The most profound change resulting from that ruling is the way networks go about the business of creating programming. Networks today exert a level of creative control unprecedented in the history of the medium. The stories my friends tell me would make me laugh if the situation weren’t so self-defeating. Network executives routinely tell producers to change the color of the walls on sets; routinely decide on the proper wardrobe for actors; routinely have "tone" meetings with directors on upcoming pilots; routinely give notes on every page of a script. (When we did "thirtysomething" in the late ’80s, we never received network notes.)….

Our founding fathers could not have foreseen that freedom of the press might eventually be threatened just as much by media consolidation as by government. And if you doubt that’s happening, just watch Bill Moyers’ recent expose on the networks’ passive collusion with government in selling the Iraq war….

Hertzkovitz goes on to describe why he moved his productions to the Internet, culminating in the Internet series Quarterlife.

Read the entire op-ed piece here.

More on Quarterlife, in the blog post below.