Dawn Ostroff, president of UPN, thought LeRoi's show was good enough to spend the budget of two pilots on one for Chris. Her confidence was rewarded with critical buzz and solid enough ratings in its first season for it to easily make the transition to the new CW network next season.
LeRoi credits Everybody Hates Chris's success partly to the attention gained by its unexpectedness – an actual funny, heartwarming comedy arriving in the midst of the "sitcoms are dead" hysteria, and on a network not known for its stellar fare. "We were the unusual suspects, so it was really exciting to see this thing come from that place." He also thinks audiences were starved for an African-American centered show that wasn't "all loud and crazy and talking about ass."
Paul Scheuring - Prison Break
Paul Scheuring of Prison Break found his show languishing after Steven Spielberg had to pull out of the project, and the nervous studio wanted to find someone with the same cache to replace him as executive producer. "As Steven Spielberg. I'm thinking ... David Hasselhoff?" Scheuring mocked. When Lost became a huge hit, demonstrating that audiences could follow a heavily serialized, high-concept story, his series was finally put into production. "It just goes to show the creativity at the network level," he sighed.
Scott Peters - The 4400
The 4400, one of basic cable's biggest successes, had a rough ride before landing on the USA network. Creator Scott Peters recounted the easy sell to enthusiastic FOX executives, after rejections from other networks. One network had objected that he wasn't sure how the show could sustain itself as a multi-year series. "It's right there in the title: we have 4400 stories," Peters pointed out to no avail. But then the project stalled when one vocal FOX exec was unsupportive. "He quit a year later. Why couldn't he have quit sooner?" Peters lamented.
Fortunately, he was able to retain the rights and shop it around again, but the project shifted from the initial concept of a 22 episode a year network series to a 6-hour mini-series followed by seasons of 13 episodes each, the second of which is now underway.
Bill Carter - Desperate Networks
Bill Carter, author of the recent book Desperate Networks, was the closing speaker for the Banff World Television Festival, and recounted anecdotes about misses and near-misses that seem glaringly stupid with hindsight: the networks that passed on American Idol and Survivor, for example, or the serendipitous events that saw CSI narrowly find funding in the first place, then manage to barely scrape onto CBS's schedule to become a franchise-spawning, top-rated show.
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