This article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal – sorry, subscription required; I’ll quote the important stuff – illustrates what’s been happening in the TV business for a while.

We’ve been buying a lot of foreign shows – correction: foreign formats – and retooling them for American television.  Emphasis on the tool.

(Although sometimes a studio looks at a foreign show and thinks, “Why bother to buy it when we can just retool it without paying?”  Again: emphasis on the tool.)

I’ve heard a lot of explanations for this:  the lingering effects of the writers’ strike, the cost of  pilot production, the global diversification of the large media companies.  All of these are basically wrong.

The writers’ strike may have been pointless, ultimately, but it didn’t create this trend.  And global reach and pilot budgets aren’t the reason, either.  The truth  – and this is something awfully hard for people who work at networks and studios to accept – is that the development system in the television business is broken.

The system they’ve created to source, develop, and pay for new television shows needs to change.  Starting, I’m sad to say, with them.  The system is broken.

Broken and bloated, which is a lot worse, at least from the shareholders perspective.

Networks have development vice presidents, executive vice presidents, and senior executive vice presidents for comedy, drama, reality, and something alarming called “alternative programming,” not to mention the various “Managers of comedy development” and “directors of drama development” and assistants and extras cluttering up the cubicles.

The studios match the network personnel person-to-person.  Go to the table reading (the first day of production, when the script is read aloud by the actors) of any television show on the air and I dare you to find an unoccupied chair.

The last reading I went to had sixty people – all executives – from the network and studio, all scribbling notes and giving concern-face.  

Even the foreigners are getting it.  From the WSJ: 

On Oct. 17, a lavish castaway drama, "Crusoe," will make its debut on NBC. The show was created by the London-based studio Power. Long accustomed to working with European networks, Power says it found NBC more demanding.
One example: Studio executives wanted daily conversations over small details, from costumes to make-up, according to founder Justin Bodle.
"They love conference calls, the Americans," Mr. Bodle says.

Mention this to anyone on that side of the business and the first thing they do is get defensive.  “We work hard,” they’ll say.  Which is true, I guess.

But my fantastic dog, Illy, works hard, too, chasing the tennis ball and bringing it back – she pants and huffs and puffs and flops down hard at the end of a session – so  I guess that makes her Executive Vice President in charge of Tennis Ball Retrieval. 

 There’s a lot of panting and huffing and flopping in the offices of the networks and studios.  But the reason they buy so much overseas material is precisely because there are so many of them, dithering and fearful.  Because the more people you have involved in a decision, the less likely it is that you’ll make a decision.  

I remember, a few years ago, hearing from a writer friend of mine who had just pitched to a network.  They passed on his idea, and when they did, this is what they said:

“The problem with your idea is that it doesn’t remind us of anything else.”

And that’s why they keep buying overseas material.  Because it exists.  Because they don’t have to imagine it.  They can see it and touch it and rewind it and it seems less risky, less dangerous to the career, to buy a foreign show and retool it.

With an emphasis on….well, you know.

All of which is fine, really.  But if you’re going to outsource your development to the UK, or France, or wherever, then what do you need all those executives back here for?  Look, when Nike builds a sweatshop overseas, they at least have the sense to close the factory in Murietta.