Five years ago this week, the television industry took on the challenge of keeping news, during the day and late-night talk shows and other current series during the hard early months of the Covid Pandemic.
We didn’t know it then, but March 2020 marked a huge bending point for the television company. Stay orders, masks and antigen-tests it seems aloof and not that far in one go. The story of how Covid has contributed to the streaming company – and the streaming wars – has been well documented in recent years.
But another large TV story unfolded during the first months of Lockdown who didn’t get that much attention. The first few weeks of the Pandemie stimulated more seat-of-the-pants innovation to broadcast operations and engineering than since the days of Sid Caesar and Milton Berle in the early 1950s. In Media and Entertainment, the Show-go-on Ethos is real. The last thing TV professionals wanted to do was serving America Dead Air. The times were difficult enough. Towards the end of 2020, Covid’s death toll had reached a stunning 400,000 in the US alone.
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The social distance conditions have forced producers and crew members and technicans to immediately create virtual control rooms. They had to find out how they could make networks for communication and video cooperation tools again within a few days. They ordered a lot of digital video equipment from Amazon to mount home agencies in a box for anchors. Talk shows quickly moved to stack monitors to make a virtual studio target groups.
I wanted to tackle the story of the Great Scramble of the Early Covid months for several years. I had the privilege of A fly on the wall are at “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in June 2021 While Colbert returned to filming with live audience in the Ed Sullivan Theater. In those interviews it became clear how many Derring do and experiments took place behind the scenes at a time when the production personnel was spread wide and silk.
I knew there were great stories, but I didn’t know how good they were until I started interviewing the 10 sources that you will hear in this episode. They shared stories that recorded this loaded period with moments of humor, moments of meltdowns with both technology and tykes, and a few moments of heartache. And ultimately, what changes really mattered? Which innovations remained beyond the crisis? We investigate the permanent legacy of solutions from the Pandemic era.
My guests are:
- Linsey Davis – Anchor of ABC News Live “Prime” and “World News Tonight” Sunday
- Vin di Bona – Executive producer of “America’s funniest home videos”
- Chris Dinan – Executive producer of ABC News’ ‘World News Tonight’
- Tony Dokoupil – Anchor of “CBS mornings”
- Bill Hemmer-Co-anchor from Fox News’ ‘America’s Newsroom’
- Jason Kurtz – Executive producer and showrunner of “The Drew Barrymore Show”
- Simone Swink – Executive producer of “Good Morning America”
- Shawna Thomas – Executive producer of “CBS Mornings”
- Jon Tower – Senior temporary employment producer of “CBS Mornings”
- Scott Wilder – Executive VP of production and operations for FOX News Media
Highlights from the episode:
Davis: “I remember the night that it was really really for us, and the NBA has canceled a game, and it was just a moment in contrast to everything I ever have … I have been reporting for about 25 years, and I just remember that I have sent friends of mine and they were:” Wait, no, that can’t happen … “”
Wilder: “It was like Defense Zone. We just tried to get people [equipment] And we tried to see where people live. I have a news photographer who lives in New Jersey and an anchor who lives in New Jersey. Faithfully together with that team together. I have a news photographer who lives on Long Island and who lives on Long Island. So that’s a team. Westchester, Connecticut, etc. and so on. And so we started. “
Dokoupil: “I tried to convince myself that I was Talese – whom I had interviewed before – and who used to set up a lot to walk from the top floor of his brownstone to the basement to work as a writer. And that was a bit like what I did. I got up, I turned on a suit and I ran from the living room on a floor to the basement and tried to be a professional. But it was a very unfinished basement with water bugs, let’s call them – we will not say cockroaches – that crawl out of the drain every night. “
Tower: “In the course of 15 hours they had to set up a very workable control room and show the next day. And under normal circumstances you might give a week, maybe two, a team to do that. And they literally had the night. ‘
Thomas: “New York City was a ghost city. It felt like one of those films where you wake up and wanders through the streets, and a place that is normally buzzing is absolutely lifeless. And it was actually exactly that. “
Dinan: “It was interesting how quickly people adapted. They have only found ways to bypass problems and bypass problems and make something happen. At that moment I look back as a very innovative time for an industry that had never had surgery. Nobody had experienced something like that. So it was completely new. ”
Kurtz: “There were conversations [about postponing the launch of ‘The Drew Barrymore Show’]But they were closed very quickly. We are all just collective – the managers at CBS, myself, Drew and all the great people who work here – it was just this collective feeling that we are doing this and we are focused, and perhaps the world needs this light point at the moment, and hopefully we can be. And that was a bit collective of how we all felt. It was never really said out loud. It was never this big rah mission. It was just this undertone and the feeling that we all had together – we do this, and we will see everyone in September. “
Swink: “We filmed Katy Perry in her backyard who sang and sang her brand new song ‘Daisies’. And I would claim that in many ways it was very cool that we were forced to innovate in it, because we brought a very famous pop star into a new song in a different kind of environment. So in some cases it was not the usual sliced podium production”.
Di Bona: “The gripping part of it is that we have kept people at work and it was a very difficult time. But we had work and hopefully we laughed America. And you know, that’s our job. “
(Shown: top row – Vin di Bona, Tony Dokoupil, Simone Swink, Shawna Thomas and Scott Wilder. Bottom Row – Jon Tower, Jason Kurtz, Bill Hemmer, Chris Dinan and Linsey Davis)
“Strictly Business” is VarietyThe weekly podcast with conversations with market leaders about the company of media and entertainment. (Click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) Debut of new episodes every Wednesday and can be downloaded on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, Soundcloud and more.