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Joined: Jul 2005
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| Thanks, Katie. Bringing it over because not everyone can access the NYT. The article is long but it covers some interesting ground:
Quote: Did You Order a Muslim? (Yuk Yuk)
By EDWARD WYATT
THERE are countless ways for a new television comedy to fail: The pilot bombs with focus groups, the series is shoved into an undesirable time slot, an actor begs off at the last minute. âAliens in America,â a new sitcom scheduled to have its premiere on the CW network in the fall, has dodged most of these bullets.
The series, about an all-American family in Wisconsin that takes in a foreign exchange student as a way to bolster their geeky sonâs popularity, has gone through two networks, two production studios and a pilot episode that sat on the shelf for a year.
Now it is one of the more anticipated new shows of the coming season. During the networksâ recent presentations to advertisers of the new fall line-ups, a promotional clip of âAliens in Americaâ received a better reception than nearly all of the comedies screened by NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox.
While the show could still fail, that it is around at all can be credited to the persistence of its creators, David Guarascio and Moses Port, and the faith of Dawn Ostroff, the president for entertainment at the CW.
âWe needed people who totally believed in it to give it a chance,â Mr. Guarascio said recently. âWhen you shoot a show that you really love, and it comes out the way you wanted it to, and a network wants to put it on the air, to have it put on the shelf for a year can lead to an existential crisis.â
The story began in fall 2005 when Mr. Guarascio and Mr. Port first pitched the idea to NBC. The premise certainly had comic potential and was topical: The family, the Tolchuks, are surprised to find their exchange student arriving from London is Raja, a Pakistani Muslim who changed planes in Britain. On his first day at school the teacher asks the class how many of them are mad at Raja because, as one student puts it, âhis people flew the planes into the buildings in New York.â
The Tolchuks are equally confused, wondering how they can endure this unexpected guest and possible terrorist in their house. âThey pose as students, Gary,â Mrs. Tolchuk tells her husband. âBill OâReilly said so.â When Mr. Tolchuk tries to argue that terrorists are unlikely to be targeting Medora, Wis., Mrs. Tolchuk replies: âOh, so now Medoraâs not important enough to blow up? Whereâs your civic pride?â
Mr. Guarascio and Mr. Port have a long, successful track record as writers on the NBC comedy âMad About You,â then as writers, producers and, eventually, show runners on NBCâs âJust Shoot Me.â
In 2001 NBC signed them to a four-year, $10 million deal to develop new programming, according to industry reports at the time. Over the next few years they came up with several ideas, a few of which were made into pilots. One, âHappy Family,â a comedy about an empty-nester couple that starred John Larroquette, made it to television as a series, though it lasted only a season.
NBC liked the idea of âAliensâ and asked Mr. Guarascio and Mr. Port to write a script. But when they did, executives decided that the show was not right for the network.
âBecause the lead characters were two teenagers, it was a little young for them,â said Shelley McCrory, the former senior vice president for comedy series at NBC Universal, the networkâs production studio, who worked on the seriesâs development. âNBC hasnât had teenagers on their air for a long time.â
When one network develops and then rejects a script for a new series, the show rarely gets a second chance somewhere else. It is too often deemed damaged goods. But Mr. Guarascioâs and Mr. Portâs agents managed to get the script in front of executives at CW, which has many series with teenage characters. There it found a fan in Ms. Ostroff, who ordered a pilot episode.
The NBC production studio agreed to make the pilot but wanted to keep the cost down, particularly if the program was going to be on another network. The economics of television dictate that a studio finances the production of a show, resulting in substantial losses in a showâs early years. The big profits, particularly for a situation comedy, come from syndication, which is only possible if a series runs four or more years. With most production houses now owned by or affiliated with networks, the studios have grown reluctant to produce too many series for other networks.
One of NBCâs cost-cutting measures, Mr. Guarascio said, was to shoot the series in Winnipeg, Manitoba (roughly 200 miles north of Fargo, N.D.), where temperatures rarely rise above freezing for four months of the year.
âThat created some issues with casting,â Mr. Guarascio said. âA lot of talent was not interested in spending the winter in Winnipeg.â
The CW received the pilot episode last fall and liked it enough to want to put it on the spring schedule. Ms. Ostroff said the network had been searching for a family comedy to pair with its hit âEverybody Hates Chrisâ and thought it had found one in âAliens.â
Late last year CW and the NBC production studio reached an impasse. Given the amount of time required to write scripts and produce and edit episodes, CW would not have been able to get the show on the air until March or April 2007, Ms. Ostroff said. That meant CW would need only 8 or so episodes to fill the spring schedule, but NBC did not want to commit to producing fewer than 13.
During those discussions, Ms. Ostroff said, the two parties explored the possibility of allowing the show to be produced by another studio, specifically CBS Paramount or Warner Brothers Television, which are both affiliated with the CW network. But NBC balked, she said.
âA lot of people said this is never going to happen,â she said. âBut we also knew that this was the perfect show to go with âEverybody Hates Chris.â And we decided that if we could wait for the fall, the show would get more attention.â
By the time the CW and other networks began to plan their fall 2007 schedules this spring, âAliens in Americaâ had lost its buzz in the trade. At some point NBC Universal changed its mind and decided to let the series be produced by Paramount and Warner.
Mr. Guarascio and Mr. Port were by then developing another series, âThe IT Crowd,â a workplace comedy for NBC about a companyâs computer technology geek squad. NBC decided to pick that series up for use in a midseason spot on its 2007-8 schedule, which meant that Mr. Guarascio and Mr. Port could spend time working on âAliensâ before turning their attention to âIT.â CW also added a third executive producer to âAliensâ to serve as the show runner, Tim Doyle, formerly an executive producer of âJake in Progress,â who early in his career also worked on âRoseanne.â
The cast was contractually committed to âAliens,â and when production moved to Paramount, they received a bonus: The studio decided to shoot the 13-episode series in Vancouver rather than Winnipeg.
Now the creators must go back to a story that they first worked on nearly two years ago, never an easy task creatively. But Mr. Guarascio said that, if anything, the showâs premise has become only more relevant as time has passed.
The new series has not met with universal acclaim. The previews being shown on the CW Web site, cwtv.com, have drawn criticism on the Internet saying the program perpetuates negative stereotypes of Muslims â not to mention of the clueless American Midwesterners â and that it conflates numerous, distinct Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures. But its creators say the subjects touched on by âAliens in Americaâ are ones that are familiar to the CWâs target audience.
âSo often people feel alienated in their own community, in their school, or in their family or culture,â he said. âBut we wanted to show something positive about that, where if you can just push past the differences on the surface of two people, you can find that there is so much that is similar going on with you.â
| __________________
Lorelai, about her dog: He's totally fine having his personal freedoms slowly stripped away,
as long as he's completely unaware that it's happening - just like a true American.Avatar by Mandasmal |
May this thread bring happy news..
and for the new thread! 
Booth' 
