connorratliff:

Best Friends Forever could get a Second Season!

Thanks to fans’ and critics’ outcry, NBC has decided to air the final two episodes of Season One on June 1st. This is a great opportunity, as it gives us all a few weeks to build word-of-mouth.

The first four episodes are all available online, at NBC’s website and on hulu. This means you can get friends and family to check out the show between now and then, and hopefully grow the audience so that the June 1st episodes demonstrate some improvement in the ratings.

Meanwhile, former NBC president Warren Littlefield has a new book out, Top Of The Rock: The Rise & Fall of Must-See TV, which is filled with helpful reminders that NBC has done very well in the past when it gave good shows a chance to find their audience.

Some key quotes:

WARREN LITTLEFIELD: “I called Dick Wolf and asked him to come see me. It was just the two of us in my office. I told him I was sorry but I was canceling his show at the end of the season.”

[He’s talking about a little show called Law & Order. Turns out they changed their minds and decided to give it a 2nd Season.]

LITTLEFIELD:  “At the end of its first season, Cheers was the least watched show on prime-time network television. The chances looked good the show wouldn’t have a second season, much less an eleventh.”

Also, veteran sitcom director JIM BURROWS (Friends, Cheers, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, etc.) weighs in regarding the precarious state of Cheers at the beginning:

BURROWS: “Nobody was watching the show when it first went on. There was no reason for the public to watch the show. No star in it. And nobody was watching NBC generally.”

In an interview promoting the book, Littlefield talks about the show Friends, and why it was such a big success on NBC:

LITTLEFIELD: “Their experiences were actually very universal. Friends played in this territory of being funny, and then also just grabbing your heart. And not afraid of that. It was a comedic soap opera. Not being afraid to have an audience feel something, laugh and cry, was quite extraordinary and quite wonderful.”

Do you see shows on TV now that compare to that?

LITTLEFIELD: “I think the single-camera equivalent today of the Must See lineup is Modern Family. If you were looking for your tentpole show—NBC doesn’t have a tentpole show right now—if you could magically pick one and say, “If I could take anything from any network and it could be the cornerstone of Must See TV on Thursday…,” today it would be Modern Family. They have 20 million people watching a week, and what you feel with those characters is a lot closer to what we were presenting back then. That’s not taking anything away from NBC’s comedies. They’re just not as mainstream.”

While Littlefield doesn’t mention BFF by name, it’s not difficult to infer that it’s exactly the kind of show he’s talking about here. Hopefully, the people currently making decisions at NBC will bear some of these things in mind before making a final decision…

In the meantime, keep tweeting about the show— @NBCBFF, @NBC, #saveBFF, #saveNBCBFF, etc…

Sign the petition. Get your friends to sign it!

“Like” the show on Facebook.

Buy the season pass on iTunes, if you haven’t already.

Watch the show on hulu or nbc.com and send that link around!

#saveBFF

thenycgays:

thenycgays:

did it! do it!

connorratliff:

HOW DO YOU SAVE A TV SHOW?  

Ugh. There was a time when TV shows really got a long run to prove themselves before the networks decided whether to yank them off the air. When I was a little kid, I was aware of shows that were deemed complete failures, like the Dukes Of Hazzard spin-off Enos and the Three’s Company spin-off The Ropers. (Yes, I am old. But still well within the coveted 18-49 demographic, so there.) At the time, I remember hearing about those shows being total ratings disasters, and yet they were allowed to make it to 22 episodes and 28 episodes, respectively.

Likewise, the big hits of the 80s and 90s, Cheers and Seinfeld, were both low-rated in their early seasons, but were given time to find an audience.

We live in a different reality now, obviously.

Everybody’s heard the news about Best Friends Forever being yanked from the NBC schedule until perhaps this summer. And It’s easy to assume the worst— anyone who is a fan of quality television shows has had their heart broken more than a few times over the years, and we’ve all seen a lot of “save our show” campaigns end in disappointment.

Petitions and twitter campaigns are one modern tool at our disposal. You can also send “scoops” to NBC, certainly. I’d imagine that fans are developing all sorts of ways of getting NBC’s attention to let them know that there is a passionate audience out there that wants to see more of this show.

I have one suggestion, for anyone who’s interested. First, two examples of shows that met very different fates:

CASE #1: ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

I was one of the frantic ones while this show was in peril, and I was practically apoplectic at what I perceived to be FOX’s non-existent efforts to grow the show’s audience. (Before anyone tries the knee-jerk “FOX gave it three seasons” argument, it has been documented by NYTimes TV writer Bill Carter that Rupert Murdoch personally hated the show, and it was therefore not in the best interest of anyone at FOX to help the show do better. It was too critically beloved to cancel it quickly, so they let it die on the vine instead. Case closed.)

One of the specific things that most frustrated me was that Arrested Development was not available to purchase on iTunes. The fans were begging for ways to show their support, and for ways to demonstrate that the Nielsen ratings didn’t tell the full story. Meanwhile, the #1 show on iTunes was…

CASE #2: THE OFFICE (U.S.A. version)

The Office was not a hit at first, not by a long shot. The ratings weren’t that good for the brief first season, and a big part of the reason that they finally got a full order for a second season was that NBC put the show on iTunes, where it did great. It was easily the most popular show, almost instantly, occupying 17 slots of the iTunes Top 100 downloads. Now, years later, it’s one of NBC’s top rated shows.

This is a long rambling way of saying: one thing you can do to help save Best Friends Forever, if you are so inclined, is to buy a season pass on iTunes. It’s like 13 bucks for the whole first season, which is basically the same price as if you were to individually buy the 4 episodes they have for sale individually.

It might sound like a dumb idea— after all, if you like the show, you’ve presumably seen the 4 episodes that are already up, and they’re available for free on the NBC website or hulu. The idea of paying money for TV shows that are available for free already is ridiculous. I feel dumb typing this.

BUT: it is one way of showing support for the show, and it’s basically like paying for a movie ticket (if you live in a big city where movies are crazy expensive) or a pizza or some other thing that costs as much as a pizza. And if the goal is to convince NBC that there is a devoted audience that wants this show on the air, then maybe BFF selling a lot of iTunes downloads is one way to get their attention. It’s like voting with your dollars to say “keep making more of these, please. Here is some of my money!”

I know if FOX had put Arrested Development episodes for sale on iTunes back when it was on the bubble, I would have happily bought them all if I though it had even a small chance of saving the show. It worked for The Office. Maybe it can in some small way contribute to keeping BFF on the air long enough for more people to discover it…

AGAIN:  GO HERE IF YOU WANNA BUY A SEASON PASS OF “BEST FRIENDS FOREVER” ON iTUNES!

thenycgays:

A man mourns the loss of a completely normal pet.

Performed live on stage at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre on January 12, 2012.

I love.

ukulelesurprise:

Walls by Tom Petty for this sunny day of winter.

I <3 these people.

neighborboy:

Neighbor Boy

Show Tonight! with Fambly!

9:30 pm

UCB Theatre

reservations here

Sketch comedy funded through Kickstarter

happysadguys:

We’re on facebook, too. Which is fine, I guess. Or it can be great. No, it is great. Connecting is great. But, then again, being overly connected can be a burden. It’s 50/50, I guess.