My So-Called Life special in Entertainment Weekly

[lance]

Hey all,

Well ya know how every, every time you go into Best Buy and use your credit card they offer you either 8 issues of Sports Illustrated or Entertainment Weekly? Well my brother opted for Weekly.



I was very pleased to see the article. I was also touched by how, ten years later the show still had impact on those involved. Great stuff.

-LanceMan

[sarahr_81]

ok, awesome article, but whos on the cover of issue?

[Natasha (candygirl)]

Yes, it's in the current issue of "Entertainment Weekly" for their fall TV preview. It's has Matt LeBlanc on the cover with Drea de Matteo for the new show, "Joey." The issue is a special double issue so you should be able to buy it this week and next week also.

[catalano_16]

CarrieBear
wow, thanku soooo much for the article. it's ironic, i went to the store today to pick me up the entertainment weekly w/ that article in it & they were sold out! so thats the entire article? it was so fascinating! wow, i learned new things! thanx alot!

[sarahr_81]

i ended up going to zellers on fri nite and they had 3 copies, so i picked up one.

[JPP13]

Thats a great article, thanks for posting it. I'm going to see if i can scrounge one up off the rack, for posterity sake.

[Amika]

What a wonderful article. Thank you for posting it! Even though I just read it I'm still gonna buy it...cuz MSCL is oh so special to me.

[Megs]

I'll be the dissenting opinion here. I thought something was missing from the article. It didn't seem like it was new material; it seemed like it was bits and pieces of separate interviews over time. Were this interviews new and done for the article? Becuase it didn't seem that way to me.

It was cool seeing the pics in the magazine.

[isometh]

It is unfortunate that something like not having enough money to promote the show could have been one of the contributing factors to the end of this show. But as the article points out, it was cancelled for a culmination of reasons. I'm sure that Claire Danes would have stuck with the show had the show's progression not been so jerky due to ABC's indecisiveness.

[Natasha (candygirl)]

It is unfortunate that something like not having enough money to promote the show could have been one of the contributing factors to the end of this show.

What the article says is, "To this day, the producers believe ABC failed to promote the show properly," which I agree with, but I don't believe that ABC's lack of money had much to do with their decision to promote the show a certain way. ABC didn't know how to promote the show - they had full page print ads in teen magazines as well as in women's magazines. The conundrum of how to advertise the show reminds me of the problem that occurred when The Princess Bride was released in theaters - the suits didn't know exactly what it was or how to convince other people to want to watch it. Is it for kids or adults? Is it a comedy or a drama? I understand trying to appeal to a wide audience, but the fact that ABC ran ads for MSCL in Sassy as well as Redbook seems to indicate that they weren't sure who they were trying to convince. ABC had money to advertise, but they didn't have a clear idea of how to advertise or to whom.

I'm sure that Claire Danes would have stuck with the show had the show's progression not been so jerky due to ABC's indecisiveness.

I'm not sure about this. She spent two years of her life from the time they began filming the pilot until the last episode aired. Two years is a long time to any teenager, but even more so to a teenager who wants a film career. Heck, even David Caruso left NYPD Blue after a year so that he could pursue films.

[isometh]

Harbert agreed, but he was meeting stiff resistance from ABC's sales department: Due to the show's overwhelming teen demos - not yet prized in this pre-Titanic/Dawson's Creek era - Harbert says ABC could only fetch a paltry $50,000 per commercial spot. But the exec had the clout to bring the show back and, swayed by a massive fan campaign, says he fully prepared to do so. Until...

[Natasha (candygirl)]

Harbert says ABC could only fetch a paltry $50,000 per commercial spot.

That refers to how much money ABC was able to charge to run a commercial during MSCL, not how much money they used to promote the show itself. In comparison, NBC charged $2 million for each 30 second commercial that ran during the Friends finale. There is a correlation between how much a show can charge for ads and the show's value, but since the majority of the publicity for MSCL took place during the launch, the amount of money that ABC charged for commercials didn't have much impact on how much money they initially used to promote the show.

What BF was referring to is the uneven promotion that ABC used to launch the show initially and then later continue promoting it. For anyone who watched the premiere of Lost last week, you know that ABC promoted the Bachelor endlessly, something they did not do for MSCL. In one hour, ABC advertised the season premiere of the Bachelor ten times. If they had promoted MSCL as aggressively, who knows what might have been? I'm not trying to get into a "what if?" scenario - rather, I'm highlighting the difference in how ABC markets their shows.

As for Harbert being prepared to bring the show back, that sounds like some "hindsight is 20/20" type spin a decade after the fact. He could have chosen to renew the show after the last episode ran in January 1995 instead of leaving it on the bubble for so long and waiting until May to officially announce that it was cancelled.