Author: Rick Porter

September 21, 2015 12:00pm PT by Rick Porter

 Courtesy of Twitter/@EmpireFOX/@ScandalABC/@CWJaneTheVirgin

It’s still hard to measure ratings impact, but social media is now a staple for broadcast nets.

Over the next two weeks, 58 primetime broadcast series will have their season premieres. Which means that 58 times during the next two weeks, your Twitter feed will fill up with actors and producers of those shows talking about those season premieres.

Twitter didn’t exist 10 years ago, and even five years ago you would have been hard-pressed to find casts and writers who were engaging with fans during an episode. Now, it would be surprising if it didn’t happen. Although it’s still next to impossible to say whether social engagement drives linear ratings, networks wouldn’t even consider making social media an afterthought.

“When somebody is doing a live tweet session and they’re engaged with talent and their friends … it’s kind of that analogy of the restaurant where you can’t get reservations for a month or the store that has a line out the door,” says Ben Blatt, executive director, digital strategy at ABC. “You want to know what’s happening there.”

A Changing Landscape

When Twitter launched in March 2006, the TV business was still operating much as it had for the prior half-century. DVRs were considered a small factor in ratings; Netflix delivered DVDs by mail; Amazon sold a bunch of stuff.

Now, with original programming mushrooming everywhere and an ever-expanding menu of how and where to watch that programming, social media can actually serve as a tether to the traditional network business model: getting people to sit down and watch a show as it airs.

“I think the advantage of it is it helps eventize an episode, and it’s added incentive for fans to watch a show in real time as opposed to DVR,” says Chris Ender, exec vp communications at CBS. “It provides sort of a deeper dive of engagement, because you’re giving them a pretty cool second-screen experience.”

It’s also much easier now than it was four or five years ago to get talent to take part in promoting shows on social media. Five years ago, The CW actually held social-media training sessions for its actors and producers, says Rick Haskins, the net’s head of marketing and digital.

Today, “I think it is much easier to get them to participate, because they’re more comfortable with it, they understand the power of it, and they know that this is going to behoove [them] in [their] next job,” Haskins says. “That is the second or third question that comes out of a producer’s mouth: What is your social following?”

“Everybody gets the importance, everybody sees what it can do,” says Maggie Furlong, vp social media at Fox. Creators and stars also make time to help with campaigns she says, citing a YouTube video for the network’s new comedy Grandfathered.

“Josh Peck mentions in the pilot that he made a video that was the most-watched YouTube diaper-changing video. They wrote that for us, and we got to go shoot that on set,” Furlong says, noting that series creator Danny Chun took a hand in crafting the script. “… Everybody wants to chip in and help.”

Hanging With the Cool Kids — and Their Dads

Newer apps like Snapchat are part of the social equation for networks as well, but they don’t yet have the reach of behemoths like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. CBS did its first-ever Snapchat promotion for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Ender says, and the other broadcasters are dabbling as well.

“We have not broken the code on how to use Snapchat,” Haskins says. “… It feels like more of a one-on-one experience. I understand why people like it in their personal lives. I think it gets more challenging for me where I’m a broadcaster trying to reach a broad audience.”

Instagram’s user base of 300 million is on par with that of Twitter (316 million), but it still does have the veneer of cool — and it’s an increasingly important tool, so long as it’s used the right way.

“We are seeing way more chatter than we really thought possible on Instagram for a lot of our shows,” Fox’s Furlong says. “It’s our biggest platform and our most engaged platform for Empire. For Last Man [on Earth], we see our highest engagement there. It kind of shifts what and how we’re creating, because we do create content on a platform-by-platform basis. So instead of driving people to Instagram to see a 15-second slice of a trailer and then linking to YouTube to see more, we give them something cooler and more Instagram-y, for lack of a better word, to keep them there.”

Even if they’re not seen as “cool” anymore, however, Facebook and Twitter are too big for the networks to ignore. Facebook, ABC’s Blatt notes, now has close to 1.5 billion users worldwide.

“There are new and innovative social platforms that keep popping up, that especially get more of a younger audience to be excited about them, because they want that independence from the masses,” he says. “But when you’re launching a new television show, a new brand, and you want to reach people where they are, they’re on Facebook.”

The Big Question

So does all the chatter about a show on social media actually help a network make money on said show? “That is the biggest million-dollar question for anyone working in social media,” Furlong says.

Anecdotally, the robust social presence for shows like Scandal and Empire seems to have helped pique interest among some viewers — Empire‘s social engagement numbers, at least, rose in step with its Nielsen ratings. But whether there’s a direct, cause-and-effect relationship between the two is still very much an open question.

“I don’t think anybody has found a magic-bullet equation that live tweeting equals higher ratings,” Ender says. “I just don’t think anybody has been able to make that correlation. The primary value right now is awareness and deeper engagement with the audience.”

It’s that engagement — and the potential to have fans watch a show live, where networks still make most of their money — is plenty enough reason to keep networks live-tweeting and Instagramming their brains out.

“When you’re in a social conversation and there are so many options to watch entertainment delayed and on demand, there’s more of a rationale for people to say I don’t want to miss that conversation,” Blatt says. “… We all feel good about it — we just can’t prove it.”

September 18, 2015 10:45am PT by Rick Porter

 Virginia Sherwood/NBC

“I knew it wasn’t going to be exploitative,” the actress says of the NBC freshman series.

The most striking introduction of the 2015-16 TV season may well belong to Jaimie Alexander‘s character on NBC’s Blindspot.

Her character, known only as Jane Doe, emerges from a duffle bag in the middle of a deserted Times Square, naked but covered in tattoos. It’s an image that NBC has already shown countless times in previews for the series, but it still packs a punch in context.

“She’s covered in story — that’s the way I look at it,” Alexander says. “Her body is literally a treasure map.”

The Thor: The Dark World actress talked with The Hollywood Reporter about that first appearance, wearing all those tattoos and what viewers can expect from Blindspot, which premieres Monday following The Voice.

Let’s start with the tattoos — how big a pain are they to apply?

I’ve gotten used to them. To be honest, sometimes I don’t even remember they’re on. They’re not too bad. The summertime makes it a little more difficult because it’s very humid in New York, and they get pretty sticky from time to time. But other than that, it’s great. They’re just cool. [Laughs.]

Do you have a favorite among them?

I’m a huge fan of neck tattoos, so I love the bird on the left side of my neck. I just think it’s a really cool thing to have. Then I have another one up the back of my neck. It’s a really cool look with short hair — I’ve always liked that on females, and now I get to sort of live that fantasy through Jane Doe.

In the pilot, the character spends a lot of time with her body exposed as she’s being scanned and examined. That must be kind of a strange, vulnerable feeling for both the character and for you, right?

I think there are so many ways to show vulnerability, and in the right context I’ve always said I have no problem using my body to show certain things [about] a character, so long as it’s the right context and in makes sense. Pointless nudity is ridiculous to me. It cheapens the value of a project. So when I read that she comes out of a bag in Times Square completely naked, I didn’t even think of it as being naked. I just thought, “Oh my God, this poor woman.” How violated she must feel. I knew that when that was my gut reaction to the scene, I knew it wasn’t going to be exploitative.

I’ve read here and there, there are some activists and certain people saying this exploits women, and I want them to know it absolutely does not. This could be a man — it could be anyone. It’s not pointless nudity. It’s not shot in a way that’s pointless or gratuitous. She’s covered in story — that’s the way I look at it. Her body is literally a treasure map. It could have just been on her arm, it could have been on her foot. Either way, we have to show that — that’s the premise of the show.

For me, it was a little daunting just because it was so cold. … But it was so worth it, and there’s something so strangely liberating about it because it’s such a shocking thing to film, in the middle of Times Square completely shut down. There are no visual effects in the opening sequence at all. There were really no people there.

When we meet Jane, she has no memory whatsoever of her past. How do you build a character from such a blank slate?

I see it as a fantastic opportunity for me as an actress. The sky is the limit, really. I get to sort of create this character alongside the writers, producers and directors. It’s been a really cool journey for me, just taking one little block of Jane and building on that piece by piece, episode by episode. A lot of times I don’t know what’s going to happen until about the day before we shoot the episode. I don’t like to read ahead, so everything stays pretty fresh for me. The only thing I like to know is if there is a massive stunt coming — which is pretty much every episode [laughs] — so I can train. But that’s about it. Any other emotional aspects of the scripts, I wait until just before we’re about to shoot it.

So, without venturing into spoiler territory, have there been revelations thus far that have surprised you?

Yes. There are so many twists and turns that I’ll get chills when I’m reading the scripts. Which is so great. That’s what my hope was for the show, that it would be something I could be creatively satisfied doing, and also that I want to know what’s going to happen next. It’s not just a job.

This show is so gratifying, that’s the best way I can describe it. You get answers right away. In the pilot, you get answers. It’s a fast-paced show while also being easy to pick up on if you come in at episode three, which is fantastic. We’ve somehow managed to pull that off while still being gripping and interesting. You get answers with all the characters. As the story unfolds, there are twists, there are turns, but you get explanations. There are [also] things the audience gets to figure out on their own — we don’t spoon-feed you like a lot of procedurals do, which I like. It’s very smart. Our showrunner and producers are extremely smart for doing that. Audiences are just so much more evolved than they used to be. … We want you guys to work for it a little bit.

Blindspot

September 18, 2015 9:42am PT by Rick Porter

 Courtesy of NBC; FOX

Jed Bartlet is fondly remembered in 2064.

Fox’s new series Minority Report is a sequel to the 2002 film of the same name, so it’s no surprise that the show shares a world and characters — namely, the three psychics who were at the center of the Pre-Crime unit — with the movie.

The show also, however, apparently takes place in the same fictional Washington, D.C., where Jed Bartlet once occupied the White House. Watch the early scenes of Monday’s Minority Report premiere and you’ll see a rather prominent homage to The West Wing.

The real-life connection between the two shows is executive producer Kevin Falls, a West Wing alum who’s now running Minority Report. He says the reference began as a small Easter egg.

“That started out as my homage to Aaron [Sorkin],” Falls says. “It was [initially] a tiny graphic on a bus screen, so no one could really see it.”

It didn’t stay that way. During some reshoots on the pilot involving Dash (Stark Sands), a Precog who has returned to Washington, “suddenly Bartlet Plaza grew,” Falls says.

“I was like, ‘Oh shit, is Aaron gonna be pissed?’ I don’t think he will be, because the spirit in which it was intended was a good one,” he adds. “… We thought, well, it’s Washington, D.C., and we didn’t want to use too many real people, government figures or historical figures, so why not Jed Bartlet?”

So that’s a yes, then, on whether The West Wing and Minority Report occupy the same fictional world? Says Falls, “I would say yes.”

Whether that means the characters will one day walk past a statue of Matt Santos remains to be seen.

Minority Report premieres at Monday at 9 p.m. on Fox. Stay tuned to THR for more from Falls.

Minority Report (TV)