Did USA welcome our characters?

Here’s a question a reader posed yesterday that I thought I would address today.

Hamid asked:

When are we gonna hear about the new pilot you mentioned has been picked up?

We just learned the fate last week. David Isaacs and I had sold a pilot to the USA Network late last year.

Unlike broadcast networks that are on a pretty fixed yearly schedule (buy ideas and develop pilots in the late summer/fall, make the pilots in the winter, and decide their fall schedules in early spring, watch the all die in September), cable networks are under no such restrictive timetable. So things move at a leisurely pace (which is a nice way of saying “they take forever”).

So practically ten months to the day we sold the idea and wrote the script we learned USA decided not to go with any of their comedy pilots currently in development. They are changing direction and not focusing on comedy at the moment.

At least this is the explanation we’ve been given and we choose to believe it. Everyone at USA we’ve dealt with has been great and very straightforward. And they’ve all been wildly enthusiastic about the project (which we greatly appreciated).

But…

They’re not the ones making the final decision. This happens frequently. You work with executives for weeks or months, finally arrive at a polished script everyone is excited about, and then it goes up the ladder to the big boss (who, in many cases, is not even familiar with the project). And to paraphrase Harry Truman – the bucks stop here. The big boss has a different agenda, or changes his agenda, or has different taste than his underlings. For whatever reason, promising projects die.

It’s disappointing but after awhile you just used to it. I think we gave them a good script, it fit their needs (at the time), and if there’s one silver lining about this crazy process it’s that the same people who rejected you will court you to work for them again.

We had a great experience with USA. We’ll explore other options for the project, and now finally I can make vacation plans.

Besides, you guys wouldn’t want me running a television show. When would I have time to write the blog. You all dodged a bullet.