[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So, it’s 1999. My writing partner and I are pitching shows around town, and we sell a show just for pilots or something called a pre-pilot presentation, which is like a high school play version of your show. They tape it, but it’s not entirely the set or anything. They give you five grand to put on a little play where you demonstrate how your show works and get a job. What we chose was to get a job in cooking. So, we had three people on. We said they were amateur chefs interested in going further in cooking. We gave them the ingredients, and then the person who did the best with the ingredients we said got a dream job under a Master Chef in a dream kitchen, a Michelin restaurant. And the show works fine. It’s for focus groups in Chicago, and they don’t pick it up because they said the focus group said getting a job is too severe, that you can’t just give somebody a job based on something as goofy as how they perform on a show. So, it never went any further, and my writing part and I invented the cooking competition show, which is now all the content; 24 hours of content on at least two channels, which is ridiculous because we made zero money; we spent the entire 5,000 bucks, and we invented a genre. It’s not like somebody looked at our pilot somewhere, but still. All right, that’s thing one.
Thing two, I was at Kimmel in 2012-2013, and when you have guests on the show, you try to come up with bits for them because it makes a guest appearance even more candy, more exciting to the viewers if you get them to participate. They’re not just sitting there talking about something. If you got them to do a project with you, it’s a little mini thing. We had the whole cast of Modern Family on, and I came up with a bit called Modern Family Feud, where you take the kids on one team, and then the adults are on the other team, and they play the game show Family Feud. They did it, and it worked great, and then they had them back and did it again. Then maybe I started doing it with other cats because it’s fun and easy and fun. Then I got fired from Kimmel, and within a couple of years, ABC, the channel Kimmel, brought back prime-time game shows with celebrity guests.
They started as part of their summer lineup, where you put on cheaper and less elaborate shows because fewer people are watching in the summer, and then they started migrating to other parts of the year and other channels. Now, it’s a standard thing like Elizabeth Banks, actor and director, who hosts the show with whammies The Joker’s Wild and again, I’m the only one who knows that I had anything to do with this. So, when I see this shit, all that happens is I wave my arms around, and Carole nods her head, and then we change the channel.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 