

Quality Follows Popularity - mad44
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/quality_follows_popularity/

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wallflower
There are no overnight successes; they are preceded by innumerable days and
nights of mediocre progress and failures. These videos on Storytelling have
(of course) been posted here before but I love Ira Glass talking about failing
on the way to success:

"For the first couple years that you are making stuff. It's trying to be good,
it has a mission to be good. But your taste, the thing that got you into that
game is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that
what you are making is still sort of a disappointment to you, that it's
crappy. A lot of people never get past that phase, a lot of people at that
point _they_ _quit_. The thing I would just like to say with you with all my
heart is that most everyone I know who does interesting creative work went
through a phase of _years_ "

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qmtwa1yZRM>

> The TV show Friends had a similar path. The first few episodes were awful in
> terms of writing and acting.

I remember watching the first episode (pilot) of Friends alone in my dorm room
on a Friday, and it was basically a bunch of twenty-somethings loitering in a
coffee shop called Central Perk. They never left the coffee shop. No plot,
pretty bad, what do these people do for a living? you would never have guessed
that they'd become one of the all-time most popular shows and exert a cultural
impact.

~~~
JeremyChase
Thank you for posting these videos of Ira Glass. They are very inspirational.

I don't consider myself a creative person, and didn't immediately see how it
applied to me. I think the underlying principle is that doing good work is
hard, and that you only get better at it by doing it.

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mechanical_fish
This is a fine essay on the importance of having a marketable concept.

That said, I'm a bit concerned that he's overgeneralizing from a biased sample
set: His major examples (besides his own comic) are TV series. TV series
_often_ take time to get started; they always have. To pick some examples
close to the geek heart: _Star Trek:TNG_ had a crappy first season. _Babylon
Five_ had a very spotty first season.

There's a reason for this: traditionally, the first half-season of the typical
TV show was written by a team of more-or-less freelance writers who worked
from a "series bible": A big book written by the series creator that describes
the characters and the setting and some of the possible plot directions. [1]
They might also have had a pilot script, or even an actual pilot, to work
from. But these writers would not necessarily have seen the actors performing
in their roles. They might not even have known who the actors were. So their
scripts would form an odd patchwork that would be stitched together by the
producer, the director, and the actors on the fly. By the third season,
however, things would have sorted themselves out: The producers would have
found a stable of writers they like, the writers would have seen the older
episodes and have some idea of how the actors inhabited the characters, there
would be a canon to draw upon, and so on.

\---

[1] This has changed, of course, particularly for drama series. _Heroes_ was
awesome from the first moment; most people agree that it was all downhill from
season one. Other shows -- _Firefly_ , the new _Doctor Who_ \-- also exhibit
the pattern of initial awesomeness. This is arguably because the economics of
TV series production has changed a lot: The rise of DVD box sets has changed
the target audience and the product life cycle for TV series, and the way
shows are pitched, produced, and financed has changed. And it's probably also
because writers and producers have learned from the experience of shows like
_Babylon Five_ and _X-Files_ and, later, _Buffy_ : Show runners seem to have a
greater tendency to be highly capable writers who are given much more control
over the early episodes, often to the point where they will write most of
those episodes personally.

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anthonyrubin
"The common notion about entertainment is that the better the quality, the
bigger the audience. There's some truth to that."

I think we have drastically different definitions of quality.

~~~
unalone
To be fair, this is Scott Adams. He draws a mildly funny, fairly accurate
depiction of life in a workplace. That's about it.

When Bill Watterson writes about quality and popularity, for instance, he's
got a much different attitude, something more like "Popularity be damned: this
is my art and I refuse to compromise it." I've seen it in every book of his
I've read when he talks about work. He made comics primarily for himself, it
seemed: it's why people got so much out of them. Scott Adams isn't nearly in
the same league. He's smart, but he doesn't have one of the Great Comics.

Sometimes people like that get popular, sometimes not. (To be fair to Firefly:
I think Joss Whedon has had more than a fair share of success, and he has more
rabid intelligent fangirls than any other person I can imagine.)

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cchooper
He's describing High Concept.

<http://www.writersstore.com/article.php?articles_id=609>

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BigZaphod
While I've not had significant successes in a large-scale public sense, on a
smaller stage I've noticed that people will respond to a good idea that's been
at least partially executed or proven. (Ideas alone aren't worth anything.)
That seems to be what he's saying.

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10ren
I appreciate it when general claims are supported with specific evidence,
because it gives me a handle to assess the claim, and perhaps disagree.

Here, I disagree with the Friends example: I recently happened to see the
pilot (on youtube), and I was impressed with how funny the writing and
delivery were, right from the beginning. The production values improved later
on (and Joey's clothes changed a lot), but it really seemed the same to me.
Note that I'm evaluating it as a series of jokes, which is the primary
characteristic of a sit-com (though not the only one).

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pchristensen
Worse is better?

