Re: And The Difference Between The B5:TMoS Situati
Remember TNT-Atlanta suits and Crusade? You think emotions were not involved there?
Apart from some wounded pride and a bit of pique at JMS for making them look stuipid in public (which was all
after the fact) there was really no emotion on TNT's side. Again, it was purely a business decision and - again - the facts on the ground were not what they seemed at the time. Neither we nor JMS learned the real story until years later. You keep dredging up your own emotional reactions to the original reports of things and treating them as facts, when the reality is quite different.
After agreeing to produce
Crusade (and commiting to 22 episodes and over 25 million dollars to do so) the TNT execs in Atlanta finally got a detailed analysis of the ratings for the
B5 reruns and season 5 which had so impressed them. That's when they made the horrible discovery that the show was
not expanding their viewership and in some cases was losing them viewers. While lots of new eyeballs were drawn to TNT by
B5 they tended to come for that show only and then change channels. They weren't sticking around to watch other TNT offering or checking out programs at other times of the day. Worse the loyal TNT fans were clciking
away from [b[B5[/b] and only coming back after the show was over -
most of them, anyway. Some weren't coming back. So in overall ratings terms the addition of the show was a wash, with the raw numbers virtually unchanged, while in terms of building brand loyalty
B5 was actually a detriment, losing previously loyal viewers while adding no new ones. And they had just committed nearly all of their series development dollars to a sequel that might not even appeal to all the
B5 fans.
Everything they did from that point on made perfect sense for TNT
purely as business moves. They couldn't simply opt out of doing the show in pre-production, because they'd still have to pay Warner Bros. the whole $25 million. Ditto cancelling it once it was on the air. So they launched a two-part strategy: 1) Try to piss off JMS so much that
he pulled the plug on the show and use that as an excuse to avoid the rest of the payments. 2) In case (1) didn't work, at least minimize the new show's resemblance to
B5, to make it more palatable to their core audience in case they were stuck airing it. Finally they had to keep both parts of the plan secret, because otherwise it would be clear they were acting in bad faith and WB could sue them for the rest of the money anyway. (Which ultimately almost happened. The lawsuit was finally headed off when somebody way up in the T-W heirarchy realized that the shareholders were ultimately going to have to pay two armies of lawyers tens of thousands of dollars to move 9 or 10 million dollars from one of T-W's pockets to another.)
As Michael Corleone might say, "It wasn't personal. It was strictly business."
I think the subseuent sabotage of Sci-Fi's attempt to pick up
Crusade and later to dillute the audience just before SFC started airing
B5 were deliberate, and probably driven by wounded pride, as I noted above. But that wasn't a corporate decision. Things like the sale price and schedule for the
B5 reruns would have been handled at much lower levels than the decision to make a series, and by much smaller numbers of people - perhaps only one, or a small committee. So given some of JMS's public comments I can see one to five people who felt insulted by what happened taking their petty revenge. Let's face it - even with the names removed lots o industry people would have known who the players at TNT had to be, and who would have written certain memos. So some of them probably felt publicly humiliated. Assuming some of them got promoted in the past 10 years they could also be responsbile for WB's editing JMS's
Crusade commentary, the way Tom Cruise reportedly pressured Paramount to have Comedy Central skip a planned rerun of their
South Park Scientology episode.
Regards,
Joe
