I’m pretty jazzed to have discovered Kung Fu Monkey, the blog of a Hollywood screenwriter/exec, who was most interestingly was executive producer of a unbroadcasted TV series, Global Frequency (an adaptation of the Warren Ellis comic of the same name).
Last week, a screener of the pilot was leaked online, and this week, John Rogers wrote up a follow-up analysis. This struck me as particularly insightful:
I’ll also call Nelson McCormick, the director and let him know that on several counts he was right and I was wrong, and I owe him a beer. They made the show, you like the show. We executive types need to get the hell out of the middle of that relationship. … But you know what? I bitch and moan about how all this emergent technology is going to change the entertainment industry and nobody’s taking advantage of it. And here I have, well, unless I’m mistaken, a fan base which exists and is trying to organize for a show which has never appeared on television. Not a cancelled show — a show which has literally never aired on broadcast television. This is BoingBoing and Wired’s frikkin’ dream. Seeing as I was planning on writing a book on this stuff, I’d be insane not to follow up in some way.
Hey, what do you know, a Hollywood producer that gets it. This, from my experience, is depressingly rare in this town.
The “it” that I reference of course is the shift in the media consumption cycle due to distributed networks. This is playing out in a lot of very interesting ways, but in terms of TV production, the changes we’re seeing are just beginning (remember, this is an area where just a couple years ago, the cable was considered a “disruptive technology” (no joke, in essays published in the 00’s — what they’d call the Internet or P2P I don’t know — “the apocalypse,” most likely).
There’s a dozen connections I want to blurt out right now, but it’s late, and I’ve been swamped lately, so I’m not up for it. That, and there are already so much out there. I’ll leave off with a link to an (IMHO, classic) essay by Henry Jenkins, Interactive Audiences? The ‘Collective Intelligence’ of Media Fans. (Also: some related collected references I compiled a while back)