Creators vs. 'The Suits'

TV executives who don't know the first thing about show business? Dirk Benedict, who starred in the original Battlestar Galactica, explains at Big Hollywood:

Every character trait I struggled to give him was met with vigorous resistance. A charming womanizer? The "Suits" (Network Executives) hated it. A cigar (fumerello) smoker? The Suits hated it. A reluctant hero who found humor in the bleakest of situations? The Suits hated it. All this negative feedback convinced me I was on the right track.
Starbuck was meant to be a lovable rogue. It was best for the show, best for the character and the best that I could do. The Suits didn't think so. "One more cigar and he's fired," they told Glen Larson, the creator of the show. "We want Starbuck to appeal to the female audience for crying out loud." You see, the Suits knew women were turned off by men who smoked cigars, especially young men. How they "knew" this was never revealed. And they didn't stop there. "If Dirk doesn't quit playing every scene with a girl like he wants to get her in bed, he's fired." This was, well, it was blatant heterosexuality, treating women like "sex objects." I thought it was flirting.

You should read the rest, and bookmark Big Hollywood, which is becoming one of my favorite stops on the Internet.

As to the point of Benedict's column, it is amazing how people are able to gain positions of influence in show business without having the slightest instinct for show business. The music industry is notoriously run by executives with no appreciation for originality and creativity, but whose idea is always to find "new" acts that are imitative of whatever is currently popular, or who chase after trends that weren't really popular. Beatles manager Brian Epstein was told by one record-company executive in 1962 that "guitar groups are on the way out," and within two years, his guitar group had conquered the world.

Every year, the TV networks serve up idiotic new flops that were greenlighted by executives who, simultaneously, turn down scores of proposals that are certainly not less commercially viable than the flops that do get produced. And so you have the phenomenon of the "surprise hit" -- the unheralded show that suddenly catches on -- as well as the obverse phenomenon of the massively-promoted new show that executives imagine to be a surefire hit, but which is gone in 13 weeks. What this tells you is that there is some systemic flaw in the process by which TV executives are hired and promoted, so that basic aptitude at the essential task -- developing popular shows -- is a secondary consideration in the process.

And, really, the same thing is true in politics: How was it that Bob Shrum, with an 0-for-eternity record as a campaign strategist, kept getting hired to run Democratic Party campaigns? There was a systemic problem and, whatever you say about MoveOn.org, DKos and the Netroots, it was a grassroots online uprising by the Democratic Party's liberal base that finally forced the Shrum-type consultant class out of power.