Word: trios
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Miramax Films to the rescue. Counterprogramming with a vengeance, the distributor offers a trio of summer movies with nary a beach, a bimbo or a superhero in sight. All three films--Buffalo Soldiers, The Magdalene Sisters and Dirty Pretty Things--fit snugly into what we'll call the Miramax genre. Take a fact-based scandal that made headlines in a distant country. Cram in enough subplots to fill three other dramas. Assemble a tony cast of actors just below star level. Then market the product as a searing indictment of...well, something pretty...
...older, this became less of a possibility, partly because a big part of being a network executive seemed to involve owning a suit. But then my digital-cable box neared 200 channels, designer-outlet stores became more prevalent, and my dream moved within reach. Six months ago I called Trio, an obscure arts channel that reaches just under 20 million homes and doesn't even get a Nielsen rating, and asked if they would let me run the network for a week. I chose Trio not just because its president, Lauren Zalaznick, owed me after mistakenly...
...given charge of the channel, I had to win over Michael Jackson, who, Zalaznick carefully explained, was the Vivendi Universal Television Group chairman and could not get me into Neverland. I wrote Jackson an e-mail about my plans to serve as a curator who would contextualize Trio's role as a pop-culture arbiter and other phrases I remembered from the Matthew Barney exhibit. I didn't mention my real plan: to see if I could get ridiculous garbage on TV. Jackson liked the idea so much that Trio made the My Trio concept a quarterly gimmick, with Quentin...
...first move was to play off of Trio's Brilliant but Canceled series, where, in another desperate attempt to get press, the network aired failed series that were loved by critics. My series, Just Plain Canceled, would air really awful shows that bombed. I met with Kris Slava, vice president of acquisitions and scheduling, and gave him a list of shows I wanted to air: The Chevy Chase Show, My Mother the Car, Manimal, Pink Lady and Jeff and Mr. Smith, the 1983 NBC sitcom about an orangutan that ran a Washington think tank. Slava put a lot of work...
...week, Trio even changed its slogan from "Pop, Culture, TV" to "Joel, Stein, TV" and had me introduce each show. They also had me write and host a half-hour show of clips from my selections. It was about 12 hours into the day of shooting that it struck me that I wasn't getting paid for any of my work: not the hosting, the months of programming, the Good Clean Porn show or the My Trio idea. Trio is indeed the smartest network in the world...