5 hours ago, KMan101 said:

 

I was thrilled too they weren't involved! lol

 

I think AMC needed a bit more fleshing out, but OLTL got right into things. Shame what could have been.

Yep if it was two years later i believe this would have had legs

If they had had men in charge who knew WTF they were doing, the shows might've had had legs.  However, the Prospect Park guys provided a textbook example of how NOT to run an online series.

7 hours ago, John said:

Yep if it was two years later i believe this would have had legs

I think the OLTL and AMC online versions were just a tad early. People were still getting used to or just starting to stream things.

This topic is veering off of what it was created for, but I will add this:

 

AMC/OLTL not only failed due to mismanagement of the Prospect Park (now The Firm) executives, but also because they put too much emphasis on big name "stars" and tried to push two iconic soaps back into production using just $25 million as a budget that could never have sustained more than the amount of episodes it did with them not even securing a real broadcast TV home and the bulk of each show's viewers being 60 years old and older. It's not to say that there weren't older tech savvy viewers, but a lot of them weren't willing to transition to an online format when you had to pay for each episode using iTunes or be a (then) Hulu Plus subscriber. Not for nothing, but when you got a product for free for 40 years you aren't inclined to want to start paying to watch it again when most of the people you would have watched for (AMC in particular) weren't even there.

 

Speaking of the $25 million, I reported when they got that amount from ABRY partners and I knew they were dumb to push through with just that money. And I was right. Because they got not a cent more, PP turned into even more of a financial disaster with those shows.

 

They thought going big and all out would have made them successful. They forgot that they (the soaps) were  already successful for more than 40 years before they got their hooks into them. They only needed minor adjustments to recapture the magic of what made them so must-see in the past. The PP execs should have stepped aside and not made themselves EPs just so they could ignore the two women they had hired in the first place to do the actual EP's job. I personally did a lot of promotion for that crazy bunch at PP, more than a lot of pubs, and kept my mouth shut about what I really felt for the fact that I stand by my writing towards the facts of a story and not inserting my opinion. Nearly seven years of silence, I felt it was way beyond time to say the above.

 

Apologies for it being on a semi-unrelated thread but since most of you all were referring to these two shows here I guess it's alright. 

 

Rant over, for now.

By all means, @Errol, rant away.  I've been WAITING for someone to give some BTS details about what really went wrong at PP.

I don't think any of us would disagree with any of that. To my knowledge they never paid most actors, and they did micromanage. 'Mismanagement' is simply a convenient catch-all term for many things. To me the problem was the execs, not the shows (or their actual creative teams and EPs). I'd give a lot to see candid interviews with Pepperman and Smith about the entire endeavour as well as creative plans.

5 hours ago, Vee said:

I don't think any of us would disagree with any of that. To my knowledge they never paid most actors, and they did micromanage. 'Mismanagement' is simply a convenient catch-all term for many things. To me the problem was the execs, not the shows (or their actual creative teams and EPs). I'd give a lot to see candid interviews with Pepperman and Smith about the entire endeavour as well as creative plans.

 

So, IOW, and salary issues notwithstanding, the online versions of AMC and OLTL encountered the same problems with higher-ups that the network versions had.  Interesting.

Edited February 3, 20205 yr by Khan

I think they had a lot less in some areas, but a lot in others. The regular HW turnovers were no coincidence. Do I think the shows were ghostwritten by the VC guys? No. But certain things were clearly part of a push.

 

I think some things were necessary to modernize the shows on streaming - more candid adult content, language, etc. There was controversy on that but I was and am for it. Real brands, real music again. At the same time other things didn't need much change, or other moments threw cash around at the wrong things. You didn't need to pay for 25 seconds of The Rolling Stones when Jack Manning [!@#$%^&*] his teacher if you haven't even made payroll yet; I wanted real music back, but if it's that situation that's not acceptable. It was arrogance and incompetence.

Edited February 3, 20205 yr by Vee

23 hours ago, John said:

Yep if it was two years later i believe this would have had legs

 

Yeah, it was also slightly before it's time (though I'd have loved to see GL become the first soap to move online). They did well on Hulu though. Hard to believe it was 7 years ago this year they relaunched to such fanfare. 

With the cancellation of Ambitions and people remembering The Women of Brewster Place in the wake of Paula Kelly's passing, this video seems quite prescient.

 

 

 

 

It seems as though it were done before the cancellation of the series though.

Robin Givens can't even play Robin Givens convincingly.