Apparently the new VH1 show Best Week Ever is using its blog as a "virtual writer's room". As staffer Daniel Radosh puts it:
Fans of the show (purely hypothetical creatures at this stage, but I have high hopes) can watch as it's being assembled and even pitch in (presumably VH1's lawyers have worked out something so that if a joke made by a reader in a comments section gets on the air, the network doesn't have to pay royalties; that's not my department).
Okay, my snap judgment was, if I'm going to provide my special brand of "humor" without getting anything but a virtual pat on the head for it, I might as well do it here, not in the blog comments for a show on a channel I can't even afford anymore.
But after giving some thought to the matter (mark calendars), I guess it would depend on how audience contributions are going to be treated. If I post a joke in the Best Week Ever comments and it's used on the show, will I be credited? Will they mention my URL on the air? Or at least put it in the microscopic end credits in the corner of the screen for a few milliseconds? That could work. The only real currency most bloggers can hope for is traffic, isn't it? Because I'm not sure the warm glow of having a dumb joke used on basic cable, unpaid and anonymously, is such a great incentive. But I haven't seen the show (and probably won't anytime soon, unless I hit the lottery), so as usual I'm probably full of shit.
Did you guys see it? Any thoughts? (NOTE: I have even less money than VH1, so you will not be compensated for your contribution.)
Posted by Jim Treacher at January 25, 2004 11:07 AMJonathan Barlow got a screen credit this week when the show used his Howard Dean remix, but that's a special case.
I should clarify that the blog was NOT devised as a way of getting readers to write our jokes for us. It is primarly, as I said, a tool for us that we've decided to make public for the audience's (hypothetical) entertainment.
When I said that readers can "pitch in," I didn't really mean that we'll mine the blog for funny lines and then put them on the air. After all, the on-screen panelists generate their own material and most of them won't be spending much time on the blog.
But we writers are responsible for coming up with topics, shaping segments, and feeding the panelists leading questions. That's what blog readers might be able to pitch in on. A reader's comment may help us figure out what people are interested in this week, inspire us to take a segment in a particular direction, or help us get get the tone of the nation's watercooler conversations right. That could be incredibly useful to us, but I'm not sure how the show would give out individual credits for it.
My comment about the lawyers was badly worded (hey, I wrote it on a blog). What I mostly had in mind was situations where a reader makes a joke that a panelist comes up with independently. Most TV shows, as you may know, won't look at spec scripts at all, precisely because they don't want to open themselves up to lawsuits in which someone says a joke or an idea was stolen, even though no one at the show ever read the script. In this case, we are reading the blog, which seems like it could be risky if someone out there is feeling litigious, even if Mo Rocca honestly didn't know they'd made a joke before he did.
Hope everyone's enjoying the show and the blog.
PS: The opinions expressed here and on my site are my own and are made with only minimal inside information regarding the production of the show and the legal issues involved. Don't hold VH1 responsible for anything I've said. Obvs.
Posted by: Daniel Radosh at January 25, 2004 12:36 PMOkay, that makes more sense. Given a choice between being exploited and being ignored, I guess I'm better accustomed to the latter anyway. Well, I look forward to downloading I mean paying to watch the show.
Posted by: Jim Treacher at January 25, 2004 03:17 PMLove the show so far and the blog is a great idea...
Posted by: HH at January 25, 2004 08:58 PMIf you tell a joke, and there is no one around to hear it, would anyone laugh?
Posted by: Phil Winsor at January 26, 2004 10:41 AMThat may as well be my tagline.
Posted by: Jim Treacher at January 26, 2004 10:54 AM