Opening Argument: Art, business, and the TV shows that time forgot
When I stopped going to the office in March of 2020, I expected I'd be gone for a while. Like, you know, probably a few weeks. Early on, I got the reputation for being a real pessimist by supposing we might not be back in the office full-time until, say, May. Or even June. As it turns out, I still work primarily at home, more than two years later, as do enough of my colleagues that nobody has yet forced me to pick up all my stuff. And I tend to accumulate stuff.
One of the things I kept at my desk was a set of DVD binders that held many of the screeners and promotional copies of things that I had been sent in the ten years or so that I'd been at NPR when I walked away from my desk. Recently, I was back at the office and I started to page through them -- they are big, notebook-sized binders with pages that hold four DVDs on each side. I have three of them, several inches thick, all filled with screeners. (Screeners are previews of shows given to critics; most of them are now offered for online viewing, but they used to be mailed to us as DVDs -- and before that, VHS tapes.)
Those binders contain screeners of shows that ultimately became hits, and screeners for shows that ultimately became beloved (not always the same thing), and screeners for shows that were good, and screeners for shows that were bad. (The DVD screener of Smash may be all four of those things.) I have screeners of things people are sometimes surprised to hear I used to receive, like a DVD of the 2012 Syfy TV movie Arachnoquake. (Some of the Syfy screeners used to be a lot of fun, because they would arrive with half-finished visual effects; I remember watching a woman run away from what was supposed to be the dreaded Piranhaconda, but it hadn't been digitally inserted yet, so she was just ... running.)
I have a DVD of the new fall pilots on Fox for the 2011-12 season. That was the year they introduced the new show Terra Nova, its time-traveling ... dinosaur adventure ... family drama. It was also the year they introduced New Girl, which they promoted with the insufferable word "adorkable" until it grew loathsome. It was the year they introduced Allen Gregory, an animated Jonah Hill sitcom of which I had no memory whatsoever. No memory of watching it, though I'm sure I did; no memory of its existing.
I have a DVD of two NBC sitcom pilots from the next year, 2012-13. One is Animal Practice, which I remember mostly for its monkey and its cushy post-Olympics slot, which didn't prevent it from running for only six episodes before being yanked. (Directors on that show included Anthony and Joe Russo; things ultimately turned out okay for them.) The other is Go On, a post-Friends Matthew Perry vehicle that was quite good and that, even then but especially in retrospect, had an absolutely killer cast: Julie White, Laura Benanti, Suzy Nakamura, Tyler James Williams, Brett Gelman, Sarah Baker, and John Cho! It's a cast made up entirely of ringers! It ran for one season.
I have PBS documentaries and Nat Geo series and British imports and the AMC series Hell On Wheels, which ran for five seasons, until 2016, and I still completely forgot about it until I saw the disc staring at me. I have episodes of the MTV series I Just Want My Pants Back and the CBS series Same Name, in which a celebrity switched lives with a person who had the same name they did. I have screeners from entire networks that don't exist anymore. (RIP, Esquire.)
A lot of us have been talking about physical media over the last few weeks, particularly as shows and movies have been yanked from HBO Max, some of which were made exclusively for that service. The people who worked on Batgirl will never even see it come out; the creator of the animated show Infinity Train wrote an angry, wrenching post on his Substack about how it feels to see the show removed from the service where it lived: "What is the point of making something, spending years working on it, putting in nights and weekends doing their terrible notes, losing sleep and not seeing our families, if it’s just going to be taken away and shot in the backyard?"
But turning the pages of these notebooks of screeners made me think even more about the abundant creativity that meets such a wide variety of fates in television. Some of those shows were great; they went away because they weren't loved by the right boss at the right moment, or the wrong power shift gave some new person in a new suit wanted to make a point. Or they went away because audiences never took to them, in that way audiences sometimes reject things for what appears to everyone involved to be no particular reason. The star is beloved, the show is good, the network is healthy, the publicity people try, and the audience shrugs.
Some of them weren't great because they were born not great; others weren't great because they were fussed with, or fought over until the life drained out of them. Some of them didn't get enough support, couldn't break through the noise, or couldn't break through the preconceptions of audiences who think they like this kind of show about this kind of person but not that kind of show about that kind of person. Some got chances they didn't deserve while other projects languished as only dreams and words in the minds of people who never got as far as a camera, let alone a DVD, let alone my desk then, let alone my desk now.
And in those DVDs, also, in among the forgotten, as part of the forgotten, are moments of creativity and pride and hard work. There is creative success, even for stories that ended early. There is part of me that wants to get rid of those binders for brutally practical reasons -- I'm not adding to them anymore because of the aforementioned digital screeners; they will always be a very particular time capsule of about 2010 to about 2017. They are not exhaustive. In fact, they are rather capricious in their coverage, so it's not as if these discs make up an encyclopedic guide to what television was.
But as long as I can find the room, I will probably keep them tucked away, because many of those shows exist in so few places. I realize the oddity of wailing "What has become of the pilot of Animal Practice?", especially since, believe it or not, as of this writing, you can still buy the episodes. Perhaps as a creative person, I feel some instinctive and protective impulse toward anything that anyone worked hard on -- perhaps even more where there weren't a lot of rewards. So for now, those binders will wait. There is no hurry. They will still be there, in the place where I expect to find them, unlike Batgirl, unlike Infinity Train, unlike whatever else winds up on the wrong side of some brutally pragmatic list of what is deemed worth saving and what is not.
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