https://www.imdb.com/list/ls056710448/?sort=list_order%2Casc&st_dt&mode=detail&page=1THE COST OF PRODUCING TV SHOWS:
(collected from various articles)
The minimum cost of producing a TV show would be half a million. The high end would be around several million dollars. The following is a very basic guideline. There are actually numerous items that can increase expenses.
Rules of Thumb
1 – Documentary 50k per episode (/e)
2 – Cheap Cable Presentation 75K/e
3 – Low end reality 100k/e
4 – Series 500k-3M/e
5 – High concept series 3-5M/e
7 – Top Series 5-10M/e
Average Costs Per Episode
If you take the cost of all the networks and average them, the cost would be around $1 million to $1.5 million for every episode. On free TV, there are 22 to 26 episodes per season. On cable there are usually 13 per season. This doesn’t always mean that cable shows are less expensive. It depends on the production quality and if the show becomes a hit.
The cost of producing a TV show’s pilot episode is about $500,000. This is for a typical drama series. For science fiction / fantasy, the expenses will be a little higher due to the makeup, clothing and special effects.
However the cost will go up if the show becomes popular. ER for example, cost over $12 million per episode. Other shows that become popular like the Sopranos and the X Files, also cost millions per airing.
Actor Fees
This also varies as much as the episode cost. Assume that the actor is unknown and will star in a new drama series. For the pilot episode he / she may fetch $50,000 at least. This goes to explain why the cost of producing a TV show is high.
If the program becomes a hit, the actor will want to renegotiate for a higher fee. Stars of high rating TV shows can fetch anywhere from $800,000 to a million dollars per episode.
Not all actors receive this kind of money. For those in the background scenes, it’s about $130 per day. Those with one dialogue get around $800 for every day of work. Those who get a three day contract are paid $2,000. For those who perform every week it is $3,000 to $5,000. A stunt coordinator makes approximately $3,000 weekly.
Other Expenses
But the costs of producing a TV show do not end with actor fees of course. There are the writers, director and other personnel. Other expenditures include the food, transportation, building a set and lodging. A lot of shows also have flight insurance. Shooting on location, special effects and marketing have to be considered too.
Not to be discounted is marketing. A show has to be promoted to get noticed. The nature of the program also affects the cost. Reality programs are said to be less expensive. Independent outfits have substantially lower costs too.
Generating Revenues
While the expenses are high, producers are able to recoup the costs through advertising and commercials. In cable programs, the producers make money from subscription fees and product placement.
The cost of placing a commercial depends on its length and the show. Typically, a 30 second ad in a high rating show will cost about $250,000 to $300,000.
The cost of producing a TV show is high. Given the competition in the entertainment industry, it might go up even more.
THE LIFE OF A TV SHOW
A TV show begins its life in one of four larval forms: a pitch, a script, a piece of source material, or a talent deal.
A pitch involves writers and agents presenting concepts to studios, production companies, or networks. Five hundred or more pitches may wend their way through the system in any given year. Only a few are chosen for script development. The strength of a pitch has as much to do with the team behind it as it does the concept. As the old saying goes: ideas are worthless; execution counts. An inexperienced or obscure writer is unlikely to get a pitch meeting and unlikelier still to close a deal. A writer or producer with a strong track record, on the other hand, can sometimes sell a pitch with little more than George Costanza’s logline.
Alternatively, a show could develop from a speculative or “spec” script pitched “around town” by a writer’s agent. Spec sales occur throughout the year, though a lot more specs get shelved than sold. They are also more common in the movie business than in TV. Evaluating the merits of a season of episodes involves thinking about more than a single script.
A hot spec – an original project from a writer with a hit-filled track record or the rare buzzworthy project from a newcomer – can easily fetch six figures. Its price depends to some degree on the quality of the script, but more so on the degree of interest the project generates around town. High spec prices usually result from bidding wars between the networks.
Other shows originate with the purchase or optioning of a piece of intellectual property. This could be a book, a newspaper article, a blog post, a video game, or even the rights to someone’s life story. Sourcing material is often the cheapest way to develop a concept. It can also be the riskiest, especially if the IP holder is unqualified to transform the concept into a full-fledged show. This is why networks often hand off sourced concepts to established writers to flesh out.
The hottest writers in Hollywood even have shows pitched to them. In what’s known as a “blind deal,” a studio pays a writer a handsome figure – often in the millions of dollars per year – to flesh out scripts based on any ideas the studio and the writer dream up together over the life of the contract. The writer is “blind” in the sense that she is committing to developing scripts for a buyer before the ideas are fully baked.
Breaking Bad started as a concept that X-Files veteran Vince Gilligan developed as a struggling and intermittently employed writer. Gilligan attracted the interest of Sony, who joined him in pitching the idea to networks around Hollywood. Gilligan admits that the pitch “was turned down all over town” before AMC purchased it. At the time, AMC was an unlikely buyer as smaller cable networks like AMC had only recently entered the scripted originals game. Since then, AMC has had a string of hits with Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead.
With the entrance of outsiders like AMC, Netflix, Amazon, and Microsoft, there are more buyers in the marketplace than ever before. Depending on the stage of the idea, a would-be show could be bought or optioned by a production company, a studio, a distribution company, an individual producer, or a network.
If the lines between these entities seem blurry and confusing, don’t worry; an in-depth exploration of the tangled web of media companies involved won’t help. The vertical and horizontal integration in the TV industry can be staggering.
To take one example: 20th Century Fox, a holding company, owns Fox Television Studios (a production company), 20th Century Fox Television (a production group and studio), 20th Television (a syndication and distribution company), and Fox Broadcasting Company (the network, also known as FBC or simply as Fox). 20th Century Fox is in turn a division of Fox Entertainment Group, itself a subsidiary of 21st Century Fox, which also happens to own the Fox movie studio. Until June 2013, all of these entities were owned by another parent company, News Corporation.
Even insiders have trouble prying apart the intricacies of the system. This author worked at 20th Century Fox Television in the mid-2000s and couldn’t tell you who signed his paychecks.
A 98% Failure Rate
In some ways, TV networks are like venture capital firms. They place a series of bets, many of them quite expensive, on a portfolio of pilots: proof-of-concept episodes for prospective series. Only a small number of pilots will become shows, yet a typical half-hour comedy pilot costs $2 million to shoot, and an hour-long drama costs about $5.5 million. And that’s just for shooting the pilots themselves; those costs don’t include the millions of dollars spent acquiring and developing scripts, pitches, and talent deals.
The 2012-13 “development season,” which ran from January to April, saw the production of a record 186 pilots for broadcast and cable television. The Hollywood Reporter, a trade paper, estimates that the networks spent $712 million shooting those pilots.
That level of investment looks even higher when we consider the odds stacked against any given project. Fox, for instance, shot 8 dramas and 8 comedies for the upcoming Fall 2013 TV season. Of these 16 pilots – each of which was subsequently screened for executives and focus groups – only 9 were selected for the fall lineup. Competitor ABC ordered a heftier slate of 12 dramas and 12 comedies, of which 8 shows made the cut.
For those keeping score, that’s a pilot-to-series rate of 56% for Fox and 33% for ABC. Using industry production-cost averages, we estimate that Fox spent $60 million to bring 9 shows to the air, and ABC spent $90 million to bring 8 shows to the air.
Within the industry, that’s a great year. Variety estimates that one pilot is produced for every 5 scripts purchased. And in a typical year, a network will order about 20 pilots and bring 6 to the air. That means a script has a 20% chance of being produced as a pilot and a 6% chance of being aired on television. A writer who sells her script has a depressingly small chance of ever seeing it on the air.
But wait – it gets worse. Of all the pilots aired on a new TV lineup, only 35% will air longer than a single season without cancellation. So the odds of a script achieving success are actually closer to 2.1%. To put it another way, any given script a network buys stands a 98% chance of commercial failure.
This process may strike the astute reader as absurd. Given the millions of dollars thrown around every development season, and assuming that 98% of scripts in development fail, how on earth do networks stay in business? Why can’t they find a more scalable, more efficient, less expensive way to test concepts?
The answer has a lot to do with how networks make money, and the very structured way in which TV advertising is sold. And Hollywood’s inability to predict the next hit doesn’t help.
The Biggest Show of the Year
The bulk of TV advertising sales takes place every May in New York at a series of presentations called the “network upfronts.” As the name implies, networks sell their new schedules months in advance. Up front. This is sort of like having to sell 5-year financial projections to an investor, and then being held strictly accountable for hitting each number. Advertisers don’t like to gamble on whether a show will exceed expectations. Uncertainty is the enemy. But almost nothing is certain about the fate of a show this far out.
Big advertisers, such as Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble, spend hundreds of millions of dollars each May. While they can and do make buys on individual programs (particularly on big hits like American Idol or The Big Bang Theory), they can negotiate better terms by agreeing to set levels of spending on a given network across a bundle of its programs.
Many of those shows, especially the new ones, are still in various stages of production. Nevertheless, they must be presented as if in finished form. This is especially tricky for pilots, which are essentially proofs of concept. Advertisers will scrutinize them at the upfronts, often on the basis of short clips and word of mouth. A poorly received pilot is unlikely to attract advertising dollars. In this sense, the upfronts serve as the final gating mechanism before pilots can secure a spot on the air. Small changes can be made to the schedule – a shuffling of the deck chairs, so to speak – but it’s too late to shoot new pilots to fill any gaps that emerge during the upfronts.
This system forces networks to place a polished facade over the chaos of the creative process. It strongly discourages the network from showing rougher, more minimal concepts to advertisers. Advertisers can’t tell the quality of the product from clips of the pilot. Instead they judge the confidence the network projects in its slate. A successful upfront presentation is more Steve Jobs than Steve Wozniak.
Furthermore, networks have their own brands to worry about. The risk associated with a string of failures can be quite high and hard to recover from. NBC, which has languished near the bottom of the ratings pool for a few years in a row, now suffers from the lowest average advertising rates of all the major networks.
Due to the fixed upfront schedule, iteration (improving or tweaking the show multiple times in response to viewer feedback) is also challenging. A show either looks good in May or it gets the axe. There’s very little time to make changes before the start of the Fall season. If everything gets the axe, there’s no time to develop something new. Shows that do survive the upfronts need to be staffed right away and their writing staffs to get cranking. As many as four scripts could be finished by the time the pilot debuts on TV, so there’s no room to respond to the show’s first reception by a live national audience.
This is perhaps the biggest reason why networks keep so many projects in development each year: to hedge their bets. Networks operate in an environment that demands up-front commitments against uncertain outcomes; their best way to mitigate the risk is to have many, many pilots as fallback options.
None of this would seem necessary if the networks had a halfway decent way of predicting success in the first place. They do conduct market research (usually in the form of focus groups) while in pilot production. But judging the future success of a show is extremely difficult at all stages of development.
BUDGET FOR OVER 100 POPULAR TV SHOWS
(Not price adjusted for inflation)
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls056710448/?sort=list_order%2Casc&st_dt&mode=detail&page=1Updated Dec 23, 2019, 6:01 PM
Source date (UTC): 2019-12-23 18:01:00 UTC