El Cosmico here, as talkbackers have noted, these "previews" are for pilots that are old and will never be made, the below mentioned screening was just to lure folks in to test-screen commercials. Our pal Cold Toes sent in a look at the "pilot preview", just a shill for test-marketing commercials, and was kind enough to send in a report. Thanks to talkbackers for sharing their similar experiences with these things. They sound like a bad idea to me, but hey, it's a look at one aspect of television testing while the rest of us are busy with superbowl commercials...I'd rather watch my Nederlanse Eredivisie, thank you very much...GO HEERENVEEN! You can still beat...well, Twente or Groningen...Fryslan Boppe!
I don't know if sitcom news interests you, but I just attended a "pilot preview" here in a suburb of the Windy City (damn it's cold in Chicago!), with about a couple hundred other folks from all walks of life. They showed us the pilots to a couple of new sitcoms, with commercial breaks, and then had us fill out surveys on the shows and the commercials. Maybe Coaxial news would like?
The first show "City" starred Valerie Harper (?, used to be Rhoda?), as some city bureaucrat, raising a daughter by herself, and having very bad feelings towards her father who left when she was 15 and only shows up when he's got some scam going. This show was putrid. Vile, even. It was clichéd, tired, trite and worst of all, unfunny. All the characters were token characters, most obnoxious was a high-libido Hispanic women, dressed in some Chiquita banana getup, talking about her dreams of hot dogs chasing doughnuts and trains entering tunnels. The sets and clothes all screamed eighties, and judging by an informal "raise your hand" count afterward, this show wasn't well liked. The only thing slightly amusing was a young cop using a study at home course to become a psychiatrist. After walking into the room after a very loud argument he announces in a way reminiscent of Deanna Troi, "I'm sensing some tension here."
The second one featured (I believe) Patrick Warburton. I'm not sure of the spelling, he played Elaine's weird boyfriend on Seinfeld (I rarely watched Seinfeld, but I recognized the face and voice). This one was called "Blind Men", and it's about blinds salesmen (get it?) Sounded stupid, but I was surprisingly amused. Graham ( I didn't catch the actor) is the top dog in the Columbus, OH office of Luxos blinds, when the Dayton office gets slashed by an internal chainsaw executive. The only survivor is Phil (Warburton's character), who is really good and really arrogant about it, and gets sent to the Columbus office, and immediately clashes with Graham. The rest of the salesmen, are the sexfiend, the token Asian guy ( a Korean, at one point another guy says, "This is Columbus, pretty soon you're going to run of other Koreans to sell to." Jhoon (the Korean) answers, "I know, but there's Vietnamese, they'll like me too", I shouldn't have laughed at that but I did), and Bob the neurotic, played to the hilt by Wallace Shawn. The setup of the episode is this: the chainsaw exec comes to Columbus to make room for Phil, and one of her tests includes a word association session with the group. This had the whole room ROFL. Anyways, Graham hates Phil, he even thinks he's Satan come to destroy him, but must make a deal with him (and eventually learn to work with him if the show gets picked, I presume) to save Bob when he's about to be axed. A little bit of tweaking and this show could be amusing. The store manager was very Dave Foley-ish from Newsradio, so I suggested getting Dave Foley, and I told them not to focus on Warburton's character, as reactions to his character were far funnier.
I was really hoping for some sci-fi or whatnot to give really good remarks too, but hopefully I've played a small part in keeping Valerie Harper off TV.
Something else kinda interesting. We had three booklets to fill out. One was done before the show started and contained several pages of products. Like coffee, toothpaste, tampons, the works. We were to choose one of each kind of item we do or would buy. We turned these in with our names and they drew them for door prizes. Anyways, after they showed us the shows with commercial breaks intact (to recreate the TV viewing experience they said), we filled out another booklet almost identical to the first except they added in brands that had been seen in the commercials to see what kind of recognition we had. Being an armchair psychologist, I would love to see the results of that second survey. I, of course, wasn't fooled by it, and marked the same products except for one or two things that interested me. The third booklet was about the shows themselves, and more responses to the commercials, and a few questions about current events, like do we think tobacco should be banned, is there too much sex on TV and should Congress do more about campaign finance reform. The MC was an amusing British chap, and his helper was a decent blond chick, with nice roundy hips. The audience was truly from all walks of life, I saw some blue haired old ladies and a blue haired young lady who's boyfriend was sporting a mohawk. There were Asians and Middle Easterns, possibly some Indians too. So there was a really good cross section of the species, I hope more TV previews like this are done, maybe the quality of TV will improve a little. Oh who am I kidding, they canceled Sportsnite, there's no hope.
-Cold toes in Chicago
