TV Reality

Anyone who has every collaborated to produce a television show, knows it’s an imperfect process. Getting creatives to cooperate is a little like herding cats. By nature, people who make TV are fiercely free spirited and tend to be stubbornly committed to their individual visions. And then there are the egos.

Now you can see this dysfunctional yet magical dynamic in HBO’s amusing documentary, “Exporting Raymond.” It features the creator of the Emmy-winning show, “Everybody Loves Raymond”, as he attempts to produce the sitcom in Moscow for Russian television.

This is no ordinary behind-the -scenes feature. Cameras follow Phil Rosenthal through the ordeal of translating the whacky family life made famous by Ray Romano and cast. But in Russia, Rosenthal struggles to convince the production team that his way is funny and theirs is … well, Russian.

Even the czar of Moscow’s high theatre gets involved, and Rosenthal is genuinely in awe of his stature and brilliance.

Although humorous at points, to industry insiders, “Exporting Raymond” will feel painfully real. The conflict between producers, directors, actors and Rosenthal is classic and all too familiar. It is from this friction that the heat of great productions is born. That is if those involved are mature and honest enough to seize the best ideas once they boil over.

In fact, there’s one scene where the head of comedy for Russian broadcasting is watching the taping. Even he sees that it isn’t funny. And at this point when all seems lost, the director finally turns to Rosenthal to ask him how he would change the scene. And then he follows his advice. Suddenly, everyone is on the same page. The lines are clicking. The audience that has been paid to laugh is genuinely cackling.

I won’t spoil the ending for you in case you haven’t seen it. It’s worth the 90 minutes for any audience. But if you’re in the biz you’ll see that it speaks the international language of TV.

Nyet invented here. 

"A Bite of the Apple" - Season One

Have you ever watched an episode of your favorite TV series and wished you didn’t have to wait a week or even a day to see the next one? Of course you have.

And in the future, you may get your wish.

Netflix, the Web-based subscription service for viewing movies and TV shows has become a content developer. In fact, they have two original series, and viewers can access an entire season all at once via the Internet. That’s right. No waiting until next week. Watch every episode of a brand new show on the day it debuts.

“Lilyhammer” is the Netflix hit that is now Norway’s most popular TV series. In fact, it’s already the most watched show in Norwegian television history.

It features Steven Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Van Zandt also played the mobster “Silvio” in HBO’s blockbuster hit series “The Sopranos”. A million Norwegians watched the first episode of his new show, in which he plays a New York mob boss in witness protection, hiding out in Lillehammer, Norway. His character, Frank Tagliano, chose the snowy destination based on watching the 1994 Winter Olympics broadcast from there. Now he’s an unemployed, immigrant gangster far from his territory in the big apple. If you’re a “Soprano’s” fan, you can imagine the fun.

Although a Norwegian production company produced the show for the Norwegian Broadcasting Company, Netflix helped finance it. And Americans will only see it via the Web, not over the air or on cable. But with Netflix, you can stream it to you big screen.

Hulu, another Internet-based TV entertainment source recently announced its own original series. And YouTube has paid Jay-Z and Madonna to develop YouTube video channels with fresh, unique content.

It only makes sense. If you can deliver entertainment via the Web or some other method, then why pay tolls to cable companies and satellite services. That’s obviously why Comcast bought NBC. They’re only hope for long-term survival is to create their own, exclusive content that people want to watch.

Now here’s an exciting twist to consider. Apple made news this week talking about plans to build on its Apple TV product. It’s an affordable ($200) device that allows you to stream video content from the Internet to your television. Or for that matter, it will mirror you iPad, iPod or iPhone and connect those devises to you big screen, too. So a movie you have on your phone can be viewed wirelessly on the flat screen in your living room or wherever. Apple TV can also connect you to all the content you’ve stored on the iCloud, so you have access to all the assets you own.

Up until now, Apple has made a bundle selling other people’s creative properties via iTunes, where people buy movies, music, TV shows and other entertainment to play on their various pods and pads. But, it’s only a matter of time until we’ll buy  electronic art directly from the artists or their producers.

I wonder if Apple’s next step is to begin generating its own original entertainment to sell with Apple TV. Imagine they hire Ken Burns to produce a documentary series on Steve Jobs and the evolution of his company. Maybe Ron Howard directs a movie based on Jobs’ life. If Mark Zuckerberg gets “The Social Network”, a movie celebrating the launch of Facebook, Jobs deserves an epic drama on the scale of the “Star Wars” trilogy.

At $500 a share for its stock, Apple certainly has the cash to go into the entertainment business. If they’re as good at it as they have been at re-inventing computing and communications, we’ll soon forget about traditional TV.

And if “Jobs” becomes a series, I’ll bet we watch every episode on the first weekend.

Head Games

Somewhere inside Lucas Oil Stadium, an emergency medical team will be ready to respond to an injured player on Super Bowl Sunday. During most games at most stadiums, these first responders remain idle on the bench.

That’s not to say there aren’t serious, life-threatening injuries occurring every week in the National Football League. They go unnoticed. For that matter, those same traumas occur on the college gridiron and at the high school level.

Some studies estimate that as many as 15-20% of high school players (200,000 to 250,000 boys) experience concussions each year.

During the run-up to this week’s big game, media outlets have explored the head injury issue. Last Sunday night, CNN and Sanjay Gupta, M.D., exposed some jaw-dropping insight on the impact of repetitive concussions. A pathologist examined the brain of a deceased 17-year-old player and identified conditions of dementia. That’s right, this young victim’s brain had started to turn very old because of the beating it took on the field.

For years, HBO’s “Real Sports” has been the journalistic leader in efforts to report the connections between football head injuries and their long term affects, including causing ALS.

Although slow to acknowledge the scientific connections, even the NFL has now made a formal commitment to fund studies of concussions and improve the healthcare of injured athletes.

But despite all this data, why haven’t we seen a better football helmet?

Battle Sports Science manufactures a variety of protective gear including a chinstrap Impact Indicator ^TM. The technology measures the force a football player endures and if the green light goes out, it means he should sit and his coach should evaluate him for a concussion. It’s a step in the right direction, but it would be better if we could prevent the injuries in the first place.

When it comes to safety, the NFL, NCAA and governing bodies for high school sports could all take a cue from the car business. The laws of physics are the same. It’s not the acceleration that hurts you in a car crash or a smashing hit on the football field. It’s the deceleration that kills. You stop so fast in a vehicle collision that your vital organs hit your skeleton at high speed. And the same thing happens to the brain during a helmet-to-helmet hit. The organ and its surrounding fluids are battered back and forth within the skull.

The big difference is that many people never experience a car crash in their lives. On the football field, collisions occur on virtually every play. And they can add up to trouble.

Like the NFL, the carmakers too were slow to get behind advanced safety. Lee Iacocca was against airbags before he was for them.  Eventually, Detroit and the rest of the automakers responded to public pressure and federal regulation to add technologies like smart air bags, as well as side airbags and head airbags mounted in  headliners.

But the need to decrease fatalities eventually forced companies to realize it was not just important to protect occupants in a crash. But it was even more critical to prevent the collision in the first place. Crash avoidance features have exploded in an evolutionary cascade, from anti-lock brakes and traction control to electronic stability control and active rollover protection. There are now systems that alert drivers, like blind spot detection and lane departure warning.

Volvo, a premier safety nameplate, refused to market a sport utility vehicle until its engineers could counter the dangerous vulnerability of a truck with a high center of gravity. When Continental AG invented Active Rollover Protection (ARP), Volvo released the XC90. You might remember the infamous Ford Explorer rollovers. Those vehicles now include standard rollover protection.

Carmakers have even borrowed military technology to improve safety. When Cadillac first offered night vision in the 1990’s, it came from defense contractors that had developed the technology for U.S. troops.

Can sports equipment companies like Riddell and Schutt reinvent headgear to better protect football players?

Right now, the helmet makers struggle with the same challenges as auto engineers. If they stiffen the structure to sustain harder hits, the same helmet can cause head injuries at lower impacts. The car guys eventually figured out you need to avoid the crash to reduce fatalities.

With that same logic, some critics are calling for an end to football, as we know it.  They’re suggesting rule changes like the elimination of the three-point stance. That would prevent two 300-pound linemen from getting maximum leverage before lunging into each other. Some high school coaches are limiting the hits in practice to reduce the thousands of impacts kids endure.

Parents work so hard to protect their children in vehicles with car seats, it’s ironic that they allow them to suit up for football without better protection.

Sadly, there have been no significant changes to helmet standards in nearly 40 years. Meanwhile players have gotten much bigger and faster.

But if the NFL and the NCAA invest enough money someone will invent the helmet of the future. A billion dollar purse to the company that develops the ultimate football safety gear would not only generate a few high-paying jobs, it could save lives and America’s favorite game.

Enjoy the Super Bowl.