Jim Frank writes to ask…
Over on Ken Levine's blog, someone asked him about the value of testing for TV shows. I assume they mean when the network shows a pilot to groups of viewers and tests their responses. I was wondering if you had any opinions about it.
Yeah, I think it's mainly done to protect network execs from taking the responsibility for decisions. They do it because it may later prove useful to say, "Don't blame me. It tested well." But in certain circumstances, it may have its value. Many years ago, there was an NBC series called Bracken's World…which, by the way, I'd love to see again. It was pure soap opera and not always in a good way, but I recall it as one of those "guilty pleasure" television joys. It was set in a movie studio and one of the big story gimmicks for the first season was that no one ever saw Mr. Bracken, the guy who ran the place. He was a faceless voice on a speakerphone.
I guess the idea was that this made him seem more mysterious and powerful, and made the people who labored under him seem more like pawns. Whatever the intent, testing indicated that it wasn't working; that audiences either didn't notice they never saw Bracken or felt like they were being sold The Danny Thomas Show but Danny Thomas wasn't showing up for work. If you were producing the program, I would think that would be very useful information to have…kind of like a comedian hearing an audience not laugh at a joke he thought was hilarious. In this case, the producers of Bracken's World decided to go ahead and show Bracken for the second season and they hired Leslie Nielsen. If they'd let him bring along his fart machine and be himself, the series might have lasted into Season Three and beyond.
There have also been times that testing indicated that audiences didn't "get" some series with a complex premise. And come to think of it, there's another good use for testing. Sometimes, it validates what you believe. Years ago, I developed a cartoon series for Disney called The Wuzzles. I liked most of how it came out but there was a character in it named Rhinokey whose voice I thought was grating and wrong. I argued for changing it and I lost.
Near the end of the first season, in an attempt to try and save a show that was probably going to be cancelled, they did testing on it and the test audiences were nearly unanimous in their dislike of Rhinokey. It didn't save the show — it was riding too low in the Nielsens by then — but I got a nice "I told you so" out of it.
The trouble with most testing is that people use it as a substitute for thinking. The Mary Tyler Moore Show famously tested as a surefire bomb, and they especially hated Mr. Grant. We are all fortunate that testing was ignored that time. Testing is also sometimes uselessly ambiguous. I was actually in the test audience, many moons ago, for the pilot of I Dream of Jeannie, the show with Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman. (It was a double-feature test session. We were also shown the pilot for another sitcom which soon became a series but not for long…Camp Runamuck.)
On Jeannie, the villain was a man named Dr. Bellows. We were asked, "Do you like Dr. Bellows?" and I didn't know how to answer. He was the villain. We weren't supposed to like him. If I thought he was a valuable part of the show, was I supposed to answer, "Yes, I like Dr. Bellows, he's a great villain" or "No, I don't like Dr. Bellows, he's a great villain"? There was no spot on the questionnaire to respond with anything but a yes or no.
I went to a few other test sessions over the years but they always seemed like a squandering of time. When I got into television, a network exec told me, "The trouble with those things is that the people who are willing to go in and do them are exactly the kind of people advertisers aren't interested in reaching. They're people with nothing to do all day or who have so little money that they'll waste three hours in the hope of taking home a five dollar prize." For a long time, CBS drew test audiences from L.A.'s famed Farmers Market tourist attraction, where I can often be found. I always declined the folks who approached to invite me to hike over to CBS (right next door) to "preview an exciting new television series and maybe win valuable prizes." I even declined once when it was a pilot I'd worked on…in that case, not because I thought it would be a waste of an afternoon but because I was afraid they'd catch me.