THE IDEA: "It's about sex, love, relationships, careers, a time in your life when everything's possible. And it's about friendship because when you're single and in the city, your friends are your family." — Part of Crane and Kauffman's original pitch for Insomnia Cafe
"Kauffman and Crane began developing Friends under the title Insomnia Cafe between November and December 1993. They presented the idea to Bright, and together they pitched a seven-page treatment of the show to NBC. After several script rewrites and changes, including a title change to Friends Like Us, the series was finally named Friends."
Article: Which Friends Were the Closest Friends? by Slate "The Friends writers did a remarkable job of distributing screen time evenly among the six principal players. While Joey appears in 47.7 percent of all scenes, the most of any character, Phoebe, the character who appears in the fewest, is just barely behind her pals, with appearances in 41.9 percent of all scenes. (In Seinfeld, by way of comparison, Jerry appears in 58.3 percent of all scenes, while Kramer only appears in 38.4 percent.)" "There are 63 possible arrangements in which the six characters could have appeared in any given scene. This includes all combinations of one, two, three, four, five, or six characters. Each one of these 63 combinations occurred during the show’s run, though some combinations are more common than others."
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The Writing Process
The Office (BBC & NBC)
There are two categories of television:
What Dictates Programming? Every television network and radio station follows a programming schedule that runs throughout the week. This schedule says that every Monday these shows will run, and every Tuesday these shows will run, etc. This schedule also accounts for changes in programming such as a live event or previously recorded program. The schedule is driven by what? Viewers. Local television stations run news segments throughout the day because paying news anchors to appear on air and report information is relatively cheap programming compared to the alternatives; 1) produce an original show in house, or 2) pay the network to air a show already produced and regularly sold to local stations, for example "Days of Our Lives." This is why you see lineups like this one with news sprinkled through from 4pm, 5pm, 6pm, 7pm, and 11pm. Network Television Demographics & Ratings
NOTE FOR BELOW GRAPHIC: JFM is January, February, March; AMJ is April, May, June; JAS is July, August, September, and ONB is October, November, December. Questions... What trends did you notice in the ratings charts above for demographic viewing? What trends might you predict? What Does Nielsen Measure?
Why does Nielsen matter...? Networks Turning a News Profit "[Networks] presented news programming for the prestige it would bring to their network, to satisfy the public-service requirements of … how best can journalists respond to these corporate, societal and technological changes and preserve the quality and integrity of news? [As well as satisfy] Congress and the Federal Communications Commission [contracts], and more broadly so that they would be seen as good corporate citizens." Building Brands, Not Channels
Time Clock or Programming Clock 99 Percent Invisible (Podcast Episode) "Each show has a ‘clock’, a set template, from which the show almost never varies. Every show that broadcasts—or aspires to broadcast—in the public radio system has a clock."
Strategy for Scheduling Breaks in Radio and Television Programming Designing Time Clocks in Photoshop
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