TV Reincarnated
Trio's Brilliant But Cancelled series finds a new life online
Jason Bateman, The Jake Effect
Connoisseurs of great, ratings-challenged TV shows thought they'd died and gone to heaven when cable channel Trio introduced its Brilliant But Cancelled programming block back in 2003. Trio unearthed some fascinating pilots that never made it to air, such as a TV version of
Fargo with
Edie Falco, and critically acclaimed but short-lived series such as
East Side/West Side with
George C. Scott. When Trio was shut down after NBC bought parent company Universal, it seemed that the cool concept had bitten the dust. But the channel's creator
Lauren Zalaznick now runs NBC's Bravo (which just had its best ratings month ever). She's launched
BrilliantButCancelled.com and an iTunes store where viewers can now stream or download shows they've never seen or thought they would never see again — check out
The Jake Effect with
Jason Bateman and wonder why NBC never put it on the air. The Biz talked to Zalaznick about how this trove of TV treasures from the past is a lesson on how shows could be marketed in the future.
TVGuide.com: So Brilliant But Cancelled has entered the digital age.
Lauren Zalaznick: I actually view it in the inverse way, which is that the technology has caught up to the idea, frankly, which is how we view a lot of what went into Trio the network. It was one of those things born nonlinear in a linear age.
TVGuide.com: What does that mean?
Zalaznick: Trio the on-air network was several strands of programming. It created four or maybe five incredibly passionate viewer bases. There was Brilliant But Cancelled for people who said, "This is the place for TV viewers just like me." There was the Outzone — it was the gay-targeted TV service that didn't exist at the time. That's what OutZoneTV.com is now. A lot of people would swear that Trio was the only documentary channel on TV, or the only channel that played cool music videos. All of this passion-provoking programming has a better place on the Web than on a linear TV channel, because this is the age of "I want what I want when I want it; I want to go deeper and deeper, and then I want to talk about it."
TVGuide: The name "Brilliant But Cancelled" suggests that the audience is going to be small but passionate, and therefore will seek out the shows they loved and that were taken from them.
Zalaznick: But we really want it to be about TV of the now as well as the past. The Brilliant But Cancelled site has a compendium of local and national press [links] about what was on TV last night. I kind of feel like we have the stakes set for a broader usership. The heart of it will always be an intelligent approach to great TV. But that's not to say that really intelligent people who watch and love really intelligent TV don't also love and appreciate really terrible, unintelligent TV, and that there's plenty to talk about. That's what's more doable on the Web.
TVGuide.com: Is it easier and faster to find out what viewers want programmed on the Web?
Zalaznick: It seems easier to have the voice of the consumer feed back to you more directly and immediately. Nielsen numbers are Nielsen numbers — they're very accurate. You can see who left the commercial; you can get a lot of information — but they don't write you letters and tell you stories and tell you exactly what they think unless you go through somewhat artificial focus groups where group mentality plays into it. The online audience picks you. There is true two-way [relationship].
TVGuide.com: Is it tricky to get the rights to these shows for iTunes and all the other new media that you're doing?
Zalaznick: The funny thing about it is, there is no set path. Sometimes you go to a person... and you say, "Hey, look, we want to expose this, we want to make this work" — and it's the widow of someone. For The Ernie Kovacs Show, we literally went to his widow [Edie Adams]. The Jake Effect was the creator, Jonathan Groff — he's a big deal, but he has a story and he wants it out there. He had a big screening party and he was thrilled that this thing hit air and hit online.... It's not like there's $100 million to be made from this stuff. It really is just bringing great products back to the consumer marketplace and trying to do that in a fairly efficient way, which is not the way Hollywood works, believe me.
TVGuide.com: Are we now at the beginning of an era where everything is available? Is this the tip of an iceberg, where libraries of content that were lying dormant become valuable?
Zalaznick: I think we have a good model, and it's called video stores. Every movie that was ever made — and they weren't all great and they weren't all terrible; some were big hits and others weren't — just got made and [was] put out. All we're doing is opening a TV store, and it's a matter of how to get ready for that. There was a time when there was no such thing as home-video rights; now there is. There is such a thing right now as download rights. As soon as you figure it out, there is always something lost in a vault, and that's what marketing is all about. There is always stuff that [you think] no one wants to see ever again, and you find out when you bring it to market that someone does. I'm sure home-video distributors have millions of stories about that. It's hard to take credit for a new age of anything when you have 100 years of music and 100 years of cinema now available in a format that wasn't available even a few years ago. I think a new era of television is open to us, but I think there are a couple of good models to follow.
TVGuide.com: What show would you most want to bring on Brilliant But Cancelled?
Zalaznick: What I have the burning passion for is when you stand around at an industry dinner and/or around a bunch of critics or creators and hear, "Oh my god, you have got to track down X, Y and Z." It's how we got all these amazing leads on all this stuff. I'm kind of content-agnostic. I go by the will of the creative people on one end of the industry or another who hark back to the passion project that changed their careers for one reason or another.
