Lorre, under contract with FOX at the time, proposed that they would write and shoot both possible second acts. At the commercial break, the audience would vote online to determine Nathan's choice, and the winning act would air immediately. Later, FOX's cable FX Networks could rerun the episode with the unaired second act, to show the audience what would have happened if Nathan had made the other choice.
Lorre wanted the choices to range from the mundane, such as whether to date the girl next door or his boss's daughter, to more weighty choices that could lead to disastrous consequences, even to Nathan's death, only to have the world of the show reset the next week.
What did the executives think of his innovative idea? "They were terrified. They were just terrified," he shrugged. "Everything about it was mindboggling, even from a business standpoint. How do we pay the actors for the second act that doesn't air? Questions no one had thought of."
"It was very upsetting to the executives," he commented. "I thought it was a great way of telling a story with more alternatives than linear storytelling."
It's mindboggling to me, too, to imagine the logistics involved in that kind of show, but then I'm no network executive who gets paid to figure these things out.
In his own vision of creating a national "play along" event, Silverman pointed to the significant obstacle caused by something as mundane as multiple time zones. Still, NBC's new chief is looking for those innovative ideas, and the man who brought The Office from England and Ugly Betty from Colombia knows they could come from anywhere. Maybe even Los Angeles.
Article comments
1 - Josh Lasser "TV and Film Guy"
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2 - Clint Johnson
I think that the problem with a lot of television is that there are already too many people with a say in what goes up on the screen. And these are people who have made television their business and have really given it a lot of thought... even if their thoughts are often kind of daft.
The best of television comes from a strong central voice executed as best the entire team can do. With any decision, there is a stronger and a weaker way to go and it would be counterproductive to dilute the writing talent over multiple scenarios.
I read those choose your own story books as a kid and after a couple I ignored them on the shelves. For one, the attempt to fool the reader into thinking that they had input into a storyline by giving them two or three canned choices... that just pulled me out of the already weak story.
What if they found some way to actually allow the voting viewer genuine control over where the story goes? I'll be onside with that as soon as you convince me that 51% of the viewing public could run a show as well as Joss Whedon.