Curt Doolittle

Theme: Productivity

  • 6) The Jewish use of female strategy of suppression of truth, reciprocity, duty,

    6) The Jewish use of female strategy of suppression of truth, reciprocity, duty,

    6) The Jewish use of female strategy of suppression of truth, reciprocity, duty, and productivity by undermining rather than falsifying or offering a superior solution. https://t.co/ugQLcdh9r0

    Source date (UTC): 2019-12-28 19:02:33 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1210999492788596736

    Reply addressees: @nytopinion

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1210742829095374853

    IN REPLY TO:

    @nytopinion

    “Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different,” says Bret Stephens. https://t.co/XQngBOMqmQ

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1210742829095374853

  • 5) The jewish refusal to join the american civilization, integrate into it, and

    5) The jewish refusal to join the american civilization, integrate into it, and

    5) The jewish refusal to join the american civilization, integrate into it, and behave according to our high trust ethics requirement, productivity, truthful speech, fully informed, voluntary transfer, warrantied, and free of externality – all of which they violate by design. https://t.co/HlJJTHgFc5

    Source date (UTC): 2019-12-28 19:00:32 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1210998987077103616

    Reply addressees: @nytopinion

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1210742829095374853

    IN REPLY TO:

    @nytopinion

    “Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different,” says Bret Stephens. https://t.co/XQngBOMqmQ

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1210742829095374853

  • IS MY SPENDING IN UKRAINE PER MONTH? -Olga Reznikova, Kiev, Ukraine (curt: my po

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUiJ4t4NYQgWHAT IS MY SPENDING IN UKRAINE PER MONTH?

    -Olga Reznikova, Kiev, Ukraine

    (curt: my point in sharing this is to illustrate what it is possible for monthly costs to be in a big city.)

    How much does life in Ukraine cost? How much does life in USA or Germany, hehe? It’s so much depends from the lifestyle, but today I will explain you exactly on my example.

    Let me give you input. My expenses consist of my family with kid + my parents (5 people). So how much I am spending?

    1. Rent of apartment in Kiev – 400$ per month. Bills for apartment – around 40$ in warm season and 150$ in heating season.

    2. Bills for my parent’s apartment – 30$ per month + 50$ heating.

    3. Internet – 15$ per month for both apartments

    4. Mobile bills – 10$ per person per month, with 20 GB data plan.

    5. Kindergarten – 15$ per month, but it is governmental. State kindergarten would cost around 400$ per month.

    6. Food – my family spend around 400$ per month for food, and my parents need around 250$ per month.

    7. Car – 250$ per month for loan.

    8. Fuel – 200$ per month, if drive only in city.

    9. 3rd party car insurance – 15$ per year

    10. Full car insurance – 1000USD per yes.

    11. Entertainment – around 200$ per month (kid’s playground, festivals etc).

    So in total every month for bills and mandatory payments I need approximately 1200 USD every month

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUiJ4t4NYQgUpdated Dec 27, 2019, 8:08 PM

    Source date (UTC): 2019-12-27 20:08:00 UTC

  • WILL AMERICAN CAPITALISM STILL EXIST IN 100 YEARS? America doesn’t practice capi

    WILL AMERICAN CAPITALISM STILL EXIST IN 100 YEARS?

    America doesn’t practice capitalism it practices rule of law, and as a consequence of rule of law, people are limited to survival in markets. Because western civilization began entrepreneurially, developed promise and contract, tort law and property, testimony and jury, we have long standing institutions for enforcing contracts, and long standing tradition of high trust.

    So for these reasons we could develop large scale organizations using contracts. These large scale organizations using contracts could organize a lot of money behind entrepreneurial ventures.

    Because of a combination of rule of law of tort, contracts, and large organizations, we could create high production capacity using high capital investment in machines, without resorting to central government control, militarizing people, serfdom or slavery to organize people into large working groups.

    And using this combination of law, contract, jury, large organizations, and technological innovation, we could drag humanity – resisting us, kicking and screaming – out of ignorance, superstition, hard labor, poverty, starvation, disease, child mortality, early death, tyranny, and the chaos of natural forces, at the cost of creating uncertainty. So people traded poverty and certainty for prosperity and uncertainty. And people continue to make the choice every day.

    The communists (jews) invented the terms capitalism as a criticism, and socialism and communism as a false promise, as a means of restoring certainty and control over their lives. But neither socialism or communism is possible because both suffer from the four big problems of lack of incentives, and therefore laziness, the inability to use prices to efficiently organize an economy, and endemic corruption by state managed industries and the government, and the tendency of the people to vote themselves or demand themselves into tragedies ofthe commons: consumption higher than production.

    What the future will bring?

    In advanced countries one child policies: Automation will continue to drive down human labor markets until only a third of people, or maybe a fifth of people, can find employment, nd those people who work will end democracy and rule the people that can’t. The end result will be eugenics that suppressed the reproduction and consumption of those people who are unable to participate in production distribution and trade. IN poor countries they will forgo automation and continue to use labor, which will produce subsistence level for the poor and a small wealthy class.

    Just Like the rest of history.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-12-27 15:36:00 UTC

  • Like I said. Y’all learned lying from the Bolsheviks and can’t get over it. Whic

    Like I said. Y’all learned lying from the Bolsheviks and can’t get over it. Which is why you can’t make an economy, and 1/3 of your people still lack indoor plumbing despite more scientific advancement in 30 fields than the west. Russia is a product of the west (scandinavians).

    Source date (UTC): 2019-12-26 13:48:39 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1210195724056616961

    Reply addressees: @galt_the @JohnNune1

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1210194333896298496

    IN REPLY TO:

    Original post on X

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    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1210194333896298496

  • He’s never run a company, had a board of directors, a horde of shareholders, tho

    He’s never run a company, had a board of directors, a horde of shareholders, thousands of employees and he certainly doesn’t know, anyone who does. Profitability is extremely difficult to achieve and maintain. Customers are difficult to obtain and maintain. Shareholders are difficult to obtain and maintain. Employees are difficult to obtain and maintain. Credit capacity is difficult to obtain and maintain – at least until you obtain access to the stock market. In every generation there is a google, facebook, apple, microsoft, and within three generations they are gone. Workers have the same power in a company shareholders do: departure (starve the business). The problem is that employee contribution to the business’ survival are distributed by a power law. The CEO almost always being the most important of them. Google is an outlier that won’t survive the first company that invents a recursive search that provides the person with what he wants – because the opportunity to advertise decreases with getting the answer you want. Microsoft was an outlier that lost its position because the government forced out its CEO. Apple survived only by hiring back the CEO it had fired. In every company, someone or some group, knows the answer to any problem the business faces. But it might be financially, politically, memetically, impossible to reorganize – because it means all those people entrenched in jobs. Mondragon is a dishonest (false) example: they produce niche products in small volume, in a remote, poor, location. Many employees are not franchise holders. Only a minority of employees are involved in management. The workers do not collectively decide. They bubble information upward. (I’m calling the speaker a liar by the way.) All successful companies take in employee feedback. Marx caused 100M dead seeking stability. The Abrahamic revolution in the ancient world created judaism, christianity, islam and a thousand year dark age. Stability is a bad thing. Look at the developmental history of China and India. Look what intellectual and cultural stability did to Islamic civilization: five great civilizations of the ancient world were reduced to genetic, cultural, artistic, technological, and social, ashes. Marx (pseudoscience), Freud (pseudoscience), Boas (pseudoscience), Adorno (pseudoscience), Friedan (pseudoscience), Derrida (sophism), Rand/Rothbard (sophism). We don’t study marx not because we are afraid, but because it has failed in every single instance – and yes we know why. So the First Generation of Jewish Abrahamic Thought caused 1Billion dead, five great civilizations, a thousand year dark age. And this second Generation of Jewish Abrahamic Thought caused 100M dead so far, and is in no small part responsible for the collapse of european civilization and it’s attempt at dragging the world out of ignorance and poverty. Europe only stagnated during the dark age of christian (lying) stability. Western Contractualism, rule of law, sovereignty, and reciprocity, made possible Western Capitalism, which dragged humanity kicking and screaming out of ignorance, superstition, hard labor, poverty, starvation, disease, suffering, child mortality, early death, tyranny, and vicissitudes of a nature all but hostile to advanced life. In the ancient world, greek reason, roman administration and in the modern world, germanic empiricism and administration. There is no failure of a capitalist system. It’s what dragged humanity – all of it now – out of poverty. Period. Now, it’s not false that we should pursue nationalist policies so that consumption does not so exclusively drive economic behavior. It’s not true that worker opinion about governance is worth anything. There isn’t much evidence of it. I mean, it’s kind of surprising we don’t make advocacy of this kind of nonsense illegal – or any other religion, sophism, or pseudoscience. Every downturn is a GOOD thing, just as europe’s, india’s and china’s wars were a good thing. It’s called evolution. Evolve or die.

  • He’s never run a company, had a board of directors, a horde of shareholders, tho

    He’s never run a company, had a board of directors, a horde of shareholders, thousands of employees and he certainly doesn’t know, anyone who does. Profitability is extremely difficult to achieve and maintain. Customers are difficult to obtain and maintain. Shareholders are difficult to obtain and maintain. Employees are difficult to obtain and maintain. Credit capacity is difficult to obtain and maintain – at least until you obtain access to the stock market. In every generation there is a google, facebook, apple, microsoft, and within three generations they are gone. Workers have the same power in a company shareholders do: departure (starve the business). The problem is that employee contribution to the business’ survival are distributed by a power law. The CEO almost always being the most important of them. Google is an outlier that won’t survive the first company that invents a recursive search that provides the person with what he wants – because the opportunity to advertise decreases with getting the answer you want. Microsoft was an outlier that lost its position because the government forced out its CEO. Apple survived only by hiring back the CEO it had fired. In every company, someone or some group, knows the answer to any problem the business faces. But it might be financially, politically, memetically, impossible to reorganize – because it means all those people entrenched in jobs. Mondragon is a dishonest (false) example: they produce niche products in small volume, in a remote, poor, location. Many employees are not franchise holders. Only a minority of employees are involved in management. The workers do not collectively decide. They bubble information upward. (I’m calling the speaker a liar by the way.) All successful companies take in employee feedback. Marx caused 100M dead seeking stability. The Abrahamic revolution in the ancient world created judaism, christianity, islam and a thousand year dark age. Stability is a bad thing. Look at the developmental history of China and India. Look what intellectual and cultural stability did to Islamic civilization: five great civilizations of the ancient world were reduced to genetic, cultural, artistic, technological, and social, ashes. Marx (pseudoscience), Freud (pseudoscience), Boas (pseudoscience), Adorno (pseudoscience), Friedan (pseudoscience), Derrida (sophism), Rand/Rothbard (sophism). We don’t study marx not because we are afraid, but because it has failed in every single instance – and yes we know why. So the First Generation of Jewish Abrahamic Thought caused 1Billion dead, five great civilizations, a thousand year dark age. And this second Generation of Jewish Abrahamic Thought caused 100M dead so far, and is in no small part responsible for the collapse of european civilization and it’s attempt at dragging the world out of ignorance and poverty. Europe only stagnated during the dark age of christian (lying) stability. Western Contractualism, rule of law, sovereignty, and reciprocity, made possible Western Capitalism, which dragged humanity kicking and screaming out of ignorance, superstition, hard labor, poverty, starvation, disease, suffering, child mortality, early death, tyranny, and vicissitudes of a nature all but hostile to advanced life. In the ancient world, greek reason, roman administration and in the modern world, germanic empiricism and administration. There is no failure of a capitalist system. It’s what dragged humanity – all of it now – out of poverty. Period. Now, it’s not false that we should pursue nationalist policies so that consumption does not so exclusively drive economic behavior. It’s not true that worker opinion about governance is worth anything. There isn’t much evidence of it. I mean, it’s kind of surprising we don’t make advocacy of this kind of nonsense illegal – or any other religion, sophism, or pseudoscience. Every downturn is a GOOD thing, just as europe’s, india’s and china’s wars were a good thing. It’s called evolution. Evolve or die.

  • Prewar we had done to europe what china has recently done to us. Panic of 1901,

    Prewar we had done to europe what china has recently done to us.

    Panic of 1901, a U.S. economic recession that started a fight for financial control of the Northern Pacific Railway

    Panic of 1907, a U.S. economic recession with bank failures

    In 1913 we formed the federal reserve.

    The 19-teens. Visions of Big government danced in their heads. Fiat currency catastrophe begins.

    The USA becomes a world creditor because of the wars.

    Depression of 1920-21, a U.S. economic recession following the end of WW1

    Roaring 20’s give us Electrification and the Automobile which are the primary drivers of the 20th century.

    Wall Street Crash of 1929 and Great Depression (1929–1939) the worst depression of modern history

    1930’s the Lost Decade of the Great Depression.

    FDR’s failures at socialism, that end up without result.

    WW1 and WW2 were financed by high taxation. Restores the economy.

    Big government at home, becomes big government worldwide as the USA tries to ‘teach the world a lesson’. See the pattern yet?

    We survived WW2 but the industrialized world was trashed, and the developing world was taking on communism (effectively slave labor).

    1950’s were a quiet boom, the height of fashion, family, masculinity and mass migration into home ownership and the middle class.

    By 1960 it was clear communism couldn’t function. This led to intellectual postmodernism (what we call political correctness – pseudoscience, pseudomathematics, sophistry and denialism)

    By the mid 1960’s the world had recovered.

    In 1964 we implement the immigration act designed to flood the country with underclass labor that would drive down the price of labor, and destroy the american experiment of a nation ‘of people of character’ (meaning a middle class nation state).

    The 1960’s ended the feeling of certainty. Why? The counter culture and media, and the assault on our civilization. Everything goes wrong here. Everything.

    By 1970 it was clear that unions had run up costs during a period of recovery that could not be paid.

    Nixon’s was in the right doing it wrong. He’s gone. Vietnam ends. Cold war is at its height.

    In 1973 we had the oil crisis that crashed our economy. By the mid 70’s only a minority of college educated graduates would find jobs. Gasoline went from .25 a gallon to over $1.00

    Secondary banking crisis of 1973–1975 in the UK

    Latin American debt crisis (late 1970s, early 1980s) known as “lost decade”

    The automotive industry collapsed, as it tried to convert from making poor quality, heavy cars, to those that could operate

    By 1976 we understood that Johnson’s Great society project to imitate the soviets had failed and all we had done was destroy black families, the black middle class, and great vast ghettos in urban areas that would bankrupt our cities.

    In 77 we had star wars and” something changed” – the tech revolution was starting. (I built my first computer).

    In 1979 we had the second oil crisis. We were tired of ‘losing’ more and more year after year.

    The seventies ended the postwar economy and with it the socialists and communists’ dreams.

    In 1980 we elected reagan. He and thatcher ended the postwar social fantasy that soviet or social democratic economics were possible.

    in 1980 and 1982 we had two recessions.

    In the 1980s we had the savings and loan crisis.

    Reagan’s strategy was to bankrupt the soviets and the chinese. It worked. It worked at the cost of debt.

    Black Monday in 1987

    1992 Soviet Collapse results in 1990’s peace dividend, and the roaring 90’s. client server peaks. Internet era starts, cell phone era starts.

    Dot-com bubble (2000-2002) (US) and… wow.

    Uncertainty returns. The 1980-2000 period like the teens and twenties, and like the 50’s is a high period for america.

    2007-2009 Financial Crisis

    2010’s the Lost Decade of World Financial Exhaustion.

    Late 20-teens america begins ending the postwar order and returning to the world balance of powers, now that technology and power have been equilibrated by the rest of the world ‘catching up’ and americans ‘falling behind’.

    Do I need to give a lesson to you on the economics of of the late 19th – early 21st century?

    America was artificially wealthy for (a) conquering a continent, (b) buying the rest from napoleon for cheap, (c) selling it off to ethnic europeans (largely germans) who were genetically middle class and land- constrained (c) using fiat currency to finance the immigration of through the 20’s, (d) inheriting the british empire and replacing london as the world currency, (e) using our resources to fund the world’s recovery (f) and the war against world communism (g) and the war against world islamism that has replaced it.

    But the world has caught up and we have immigrated the underclasses our ancestors sought to avoid -because they create demand for parasitic redistribution, and authoritarian government, because they are not genetically middle class.

    We no longer have 400 years of northern european institutional, technological, knowledge, cultural and genetic advantage.

    Meanwhile the destruction of the family, the substitution of INTEREST for TAXATION, and the decline in reproduction has pushed US IQ levels from 115 victorian era to 97 and soon we will fall off the cliff to third world IQ levels.

    We are entering a century where the american standard of living will decline in parallel with the US Military and the use of the dollar as a reserve currency.

    The world is going to equilibrate but that means we will be relatively poorer.

    Just as the vast underclass population we allowed into the country becomes a majority, generates demand for a centrally planned state, and we follow south america into collapse.

    And that’s before I get started on automation, changes to the labor force, and the problem of organizing people if the voluntary organization of production (markets, money, productivity, incentives)

    So when you look at that chart outlined in red, you don’t knw what the fk you’re talking about.

    Drop a few tech companies out of the economy – heck, just apple – and look for productivity gains.

    They aren’t there.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-12-25 19:37:00 UTC

  • Again: the prosperity is largely petrochemical, debt and population increase con

    Again: the prosperity is largely petrochemical, debt and population increase consuming European knowledge and innovation. Are we Athens emptying the silver mine, or England inventing steam power? Where is productivity other than inflation? https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1208318063982129152

  • COST OF PRODUCING TV SHOWS: (collected from various articles) The minimum cost o

    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