Word: creators
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...success is especially gratifying for Lost creator J.J. Abrams, whose ABC drama Alias has a cult following but has never hit big, allegedly because its twisty espionage plot is too hard to follow. "If you have three CSIs and three Law & Orders on the air, people will start to say, 'What else is there?'" he says. Still, Abrams says Lost is designed to be more friendly to occasional viewers. Each funny and delightfully scary episode includes a flashback to the pre-island life of one of the castaways, so there's a story resolved in each episode along with...
Desperate Housewives is an even bigger hit. One week it outdrew CSI in the coveted 18-to-49 viewer-age category. But creator Marc Cherry's dark-comic soap was rejected by six networks before ABC bought it. Cherry actually describes himself as a big fan of the CSI and L&O franchises--at least, until they each hit their second spin-off. "Certainly," he says, "ABC's experiment with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire taught everyone something about killing the goose who lays the golden...
...tall order given the competition from cable to the Internet to plain old busy work schedules, and networks are increasingly afraid that viewers will miss episodes, fall behind and give up. "There is now the S word--serialization--that the networks are terrified of," says J.J. Abrams, creator and executive producer of Alias and Lost. On the other hand, procedurals "are easy to digest," says Peter Jankowski, an executive producer of NBC's three Law & Order series. A fourth, Trial by Jury, is coming in midseason...
There are also remnants of the competition between Pixar and Dreamworks, the creator of the wildly successful Shrek animated series. The Shrek series made the talking donkey voiced by Eddie Murphy into a main character and was rewarded with favorable publicity. The Incredibles feebly attempts to expand the racial horizon of its previous films by giving a bit role to superhero Frozone—celebrity voiced by Samuel L. Jackson—who gets approximately 15 minutes of screen time. More successful is Pixar’s attempt to challenge Dreamworks on the belly-laugh front: when Jack Jack...
...viewing calendar, and he has a slew of new shows ready to roll out, including an American takeoff on the BBC hit The Office and a boxing reality show, The Contender. To help ensure some much needed stability in such an unpredictable business, Zucker has re-signed Law & Order creator Dick Wolf through 2008 (a fourth edition is in the works) and engineered a smooth transition at the Tonight Show, where his old Harvard classmate Conan O'Brien will take over from Jay Leno...