Financial Aid for Television

We all have a list of fallen favorites. Mine includes “Freaks and Geeks,” “Clone High,” “Sports Night,” “Arrested Development,” and—as of this June—“Party Down;” all astonishingly brilliant television shows that were prematurely cancelled for their poor ratings. To the loyal fan, every season that never was represents the loss of an immensely valuable cultural object. A slew of Internet petitions and mournful blog entries typically mark the untimely demise of a great show, but to no avail. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but cash is mightier than the message board.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how we pay for television. By the nature of mainstream television’s distribution, our favorite programs are necessarily entwined within a capitalist labyrinth of networks and production houses. Tempting as it may be to demonize television executives as cold and quantitative, it is precisely their job to do just that—the networks wouldn’t stay afloat without real-life Jack Donaghys and Russell Dalrymples.

What, then, can be done? Here’s what I (semi-seriously) propose: an independent source of funding to save culturally significant television shows in danger of cancellation, paid directly to the executive producer to cover production costs.

A collective of television critics, writers and producers, would administer the grants. The National Film Preservation Board could serve as a useful model for this project. The Board selects twenty-five movies annually to be preserved in the National Film Registry. Its members include academics from Tisch and the American Film Institute, as well as filmmakers and journalists. Names you might recognize include Martin Scorsese and Leonard Maltin. For our purposes, we could turn to such industry luminaries as Aaron Sorkin, Lorne Michaels, or Nancy Franklin of The New Yorker, plus representatives from the likes of the Writers Guild of America, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and the Paley Center for Media. I have no doubt that many eccentric, TiVo-happy millionaires would be delighted to serve as the fund’s beneficiaries.

Moreover, this program might incentivize developing quality programming from the start—board-funded shows would obviously require less network support, and would benefit from publicity as a result of their selection.

Now, a few caveats. By no means should this money be funneled into a killer wrap party on the roof of The Standard Hotel. As part of the application process, perhaps, a program’s staff would have to elucidate their specific plans for use of the funding. It is also important that the board should be permitted no editorial control over the shows it finances; this isn’t “Choose Your Own Adventure” television.

On a similar note, the goal is not to gentrify the television industry, but to offer the slightest nudge in a positive direction. As long as 15 million viewers keep tuning in to watch them, there will always be shows like “Two and a Half Men.” Nor would the board’s selections necessarily err on the side of highbrow—for instance, I would argue that a show like “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” hyper-vulgar as it may be, is extraordinarily valuable (and, fortunately for us, it seems FX agrees). Unlike PBS, with its prerogatives of education and betterment, this board would be committed to nothing other than quality.

This plan is admittedly oversimplified. If FOX nabs the rights to “America’s Most Emotionally Damaged Stripper,” would they consent to waste that precious prime-time hour on a show on life support? It remains the network’s right to renew whichever shows it pleases; it is not my intent to federalize television.

And what about the thousands of young, unknown writers who can’t get NBC to return their calls, let alone pick up their pilots? And the creators of Web series? Producers of public-access shows? One could argue compellingly that these are the individuals who need our assistance most; it is a little troubling to further privilege the privileged.

But that is another project for another day. Network television need not remain the only place for episodic narratives to flourish, but this funding initiative could represent a promising first step toward making mainstream TV more artistically meritocratic.

—Columnist Molly O. Fitzpatrick can be reached at fitzpat@fas.harvard.edu.