Quick bites of a TV show? Sounds like a $1.75 billion idea.

haha, I do sound like a jackass when you put it that way

This is more or less how TV series work. You put out a season, you get feedback, then you develop the next season.

I doubt it's practical for individual episodes yet. You would likely need a month between episodes to do this, and people would just forget about your show in that time.

I think it's practical in a very narrow, definitely-non-scalable sense.

Some folks on Patreon are experimenting with it. One of my favorite series Astartes[0] puts out episodes every rare once and awhile, but we all clamor for them nonetheless.

You couldn't run a normal show this way, for sure. But it is interesting to see the results of it in the small.

https://www.patreon.com/astartesfilm

not as common as ordering an entire season but lots of mid-season launches are 6-10 episode orders. Also, they don't put out the entire season before feedback, hence many mid-season cancelations. I think this is a hold-over from when the airtime had a lot of value, where as now the broadcast bandwidth for your typical cable timeslot is effectively zero and the content is actually valuable. Async, on-demand consumption has pretty much killed the concept of prime time...

Aren't TV pilots individual episodes?

They are, but there's a lot of lead time that goes in to shooting the pilot, and then even more in planning the rest of the season if it gets picked back up. They end up released at the same time, but that doesn't mean that a year hasn't passed since they started pre production on the pilot.

It's simply infeasible to adjust a show to fan feedback on a weekly basis I think. You'd need either a really small show, or one where most of the elements (sets, lighting, wardrobe, etc.) stay pretty consistent between episodes, then the work would just be a matter of tweaking the story, rather than figuring out how to get the whole crew out to all the locations required to make a traditional tv show.

From listing to some of the director/producers commentary on episodic tv there is a lot of prep work that goes into a show and then you have 7 days to shoot the episode.

So you cant really change that much week to week.

Yup, exactly. I work in production, and you need so much time to prep all of the aspects of a single day of production, and then working each day in to a rational schedule to get everything you need. You can't just change everything on a whim. (not without lots of time and money)

This is actually more or less how Andy Weir wrote The Martian - and as a product development model it really did build a story of a kind that otherwise wasn’t getting built by the market. There’s definitely something to this.

Consider also the way standups hone material over many performances building up their set.

So there are incremental feedback models in entertainment - but they’re rare.

I guess remakes and reboots are a crude model of iteration as well, although it’s not like each new iteration of Spider-Man is a refinement of the last based on audience feedback - it’s still speculative ‘here’s that same thing repackaged in a way new audiences will love!’ thinking, rather than creeping towards product-market-fit

This is literally the soap opera model. Soaps actively solicit fan feedback and run productions with composable sets and flexible casts.

Some shows do actually have a bit of agility as you put it. In its simplest form, you have cahracters written in and out of shows based on popularity. There might also be story paths explored based on fan reponse. This is not the norm of course. But neither is doing a whole season blind-folded like netflix. Things do get tweaked a bit. But there’s a balance to this. You can’t really do great storytelling based on viewer-stats. That’s like a ship steered by wild monkeys. Certainly an interesting voyage, but ultimately not a rewarding one. A captain is needed to steer the passangers on a guided path that will culminate in good experience or not for the majority.

This has been done in a very real sense [0]... Defiance was a video game/tv show combo where actions in the game influenced the next episode of the TV show. This included things like 'which side was winning' and who lived/died, etc.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Defiance_(video_game)

I'd imagine the inception of Quibi in the first place probably was a conversation like that?

This situation is emblematic of the fundamental conflict it would face. On the one side the desire to produce rapid cheap bite-size content to iterate on for a metrics-based tech company, on the other blowing all the cash for said content on the Hollywood tactic of putting star power on the red carpet

Sounds like being a Youtuber

Youtube works this way to some extent.

I was thinking about this model as some sort of extension for film trailers:instead of giving out 2-4 min trailer to audience, producers could give 10-15 min,which hopefully be enough to understand whether audience finds it good enough and if it is,a full film is made. However,I can't see it working with all genres.

In the first half of the 1900's, there were "race films" from Black-owned studios that were actually financed like this. The studio would create a trailer that they'd then show to theater-owners. Exhibitors who liked the trailer would pay an advance against the box office, and if enough signed on, the film would get made and distributed to them. Kind of like authors getting an advance on a book they're writing.

Do any of them (films or trailers) survive? I've never heard of black-owned studios and I'd like to know more.

Some do, but not many. Wikipedia has a good entry for “race film”, and http://dhbasecamp.humanities.ucla.edu/afamfilm/ looks like a great resource. Also check out https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6845-black-cinema-at... and https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/short-... and other Google hits on “black cinema”.

Thanks, I appreciate the links.

video games have worked this way for a while, especially since the focus on mega-budget blockbusters. Some Kickstarter media projects also reflect this: someone makes a small short to fundraise, then commits to make a "fuller" length version based on the funds raised, linking the planned scope with available resources - sounds a lot like an agile software project!

It doesn't even work in tech, bro.