Guidance From The Afterlife

Have you watched "The Good Place" yet? If you haven't or you're not aware of it, "The Good Place" is a TV sitcom, and since I'm not in the habit of recommending TV shows in this column, let me say up front that there WILL be a point to this that involves radio and I will eventually get there.

But first, a very quick primer: "The Good Place" is a show from Mike Schur, the guy behind shows like "Parks and Recreation" and "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" and a producer/writer on the U.S. "The Office" (he was also Mose Schrute). The premise is... okay, see, this is why I'm bringing the show up. The show's initial premise was that a very bad person (Kristen Bell) was sent by mistake to "The Good Place" (heaven), a Stepford-style community where every shop sells frozen yogurt, everyone is set up with their soulmate in homes designed to reflect the residents' favorite things, and the overseer (Ted Danson) is unaware of the problem. That was the premise through the first season....

...and then they blew up the entire premise. I will not spoil it for people who have either not seen the show or have not read about the twist, but in the final episode of the first season, a big reveal meant that everything would be changing -- HAD to change. And in the second season, the premise kept getting blown up and reset, sometimes multiple times in a single episode. At the end of season two, another big twist meant that when the show returns next Thursday, viewers are totally unsure what's next.

Why is this important? Because this show airs on NBC. At some point, Schur had to pitch this to the executives at a standard broadcast network. The Big 4 broadcast networks have been on their heels in many ways for years; the audience has shrunk to the point where ratings that would have gotten you cancelled 10 years ago will be considered a success today. Cable ate away at the audience, and streaming and time-shifting made things worse. But the networks still, largely, play it safe. CBS is full of interchangeable procedurals and laugh-track sitcoms, Fox is... well, it's hard to say what Fox is these days, ABC has family sitcoms and soap-opera-ish dramas, and NBC is more sitcoms, a really weepy drama, and a bunch of procedurals set in Chicago. There are few surprises. You would not expect anyone to take a chance on a show with an unusual premise or structure.

Yet, here's "The Good Place," and imagine the pitch to the network: We're going to do a show about bad people, it's going to start with one premise and blow that up, then it's going to keep changing the premise. It's going to delve into philosophy and ethics to the extent that names previously known primarily to graduate students will be routinely mentioned; ethics lectures will be part of the plot in practically every episode. There will be repeated Jacksonville Jaguars jokes. And you'll really have to watch the show in sequence from the beginning to know what's going on.

That is not a recipe for a broadcast network sitcom. It's not what's been done. Granted, the showrunner had a good track record and a relationship with the network, and it had a couple of TV star names attached to star, but, still, the show is not an easily described concept, and there are red flags galore here. Yet someone at NBC said yes, it made it to the air, and here it is, entering its third season, which qualifies as a success, especially on a network that's had some difficulty in recent years establishing sitcoms. Someone took a risk and it paid off, not spectacularly, but with acceptable ratings and critical acclaim. (And it should be noted that NBC also took a gamble a few years back on "This Is Us," which involves flashbacks and twists, and that paid off, too. It's more conventional than "The Good Place," but, still, it wasn't as standard a show as usually gets on the air.)

Broadcast TV networks have been in the same "old media" spiral that radio's been experiencing, and for about the same time. And they're doing some of the same things broadcast radio is doing to cope. Radio's investing in podcasting with hopes that'll pay off; broadcast TV is trying to make subscription video on demand work (CBS All Access, Disney's pending answer to Netflix, investments in Hulu). Similarly, broadcast radio and TV have played their programming safe: radio's sticking with cookie-cutter music formats ("less talk!") and the same kind of talk radio it's been doing since the '80s, while TV is so hide-bound that the Fall season on CBS is highlighted by "Murphy Brown" and "Magnum P.I." New ideas are not the province of broadcast media.

They should be. Look at Netflix and Hulu and Amazon, which have eclipsed even HBO in trying out ideas and premises that would have gotten a firm "no" from everyone not too long ago. Look at podcasting, which has no gatekeeper to say "no" to anything. There are places to which new ideas and unusual concepts can go and thrive... or fail. New ideas may not work. But at least they're being tried.

That's what I hope broadcast radio can do that it's not doing now. I understand the desire to try to hold onto every last dollar as the industry's piece of the pie gets smaller, but now would be the time to roll the dice on new ideas, and with two of the biggest radio groups having cleared the decks of much of their crushing debt, it's time to plan for the future, not just by investing in podcast networks but in creating something worth appointment listening on their broadcast streams. If NBC, of all people, could green-light a show that breaks the rules and flouts convention, radio can do that, too. It's time. Jake Jortles would approve.

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If you're a radio host or a podcaster, one way to break from convention is to put your own unique spin on topics that aren't the same as everyone else's. That's what Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports, is all about. Find your unusual topics by clicking here and/or by following the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item. This week, there's also a compelling "10 Questions With..." a guy you probably know, CKNW/Vancouver Senior PD Larry Gifford

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Next week, I'll be at the Radio Show in Orlando, so expect the usual grumbling on Twitter and complete coverage in Net News. See you there.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
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