Website allows public to share, judge TV ideas

By Lynn Elber

AP Television Writer

LOS ANGELES

You’re mystified by the number of destined-for-failure shows on TV and figure you could make better picks than network executives.

Or you sneer at the recycled concepts of too many dull series when you have a killer original story to tell.

Whether you fall into either camp or both, there’s a new website for you to play on: I’d Watch That, which launched five months ago with some heavyweight financial backers.

It invites aspiring TV makers to post a “sizzle” reel of up to 2 minutes in length that demonstrates an idea’s potential to become a series. The public gets to judge the proposals, with research methodology used to analyze the results and create a popularity ranking, said CEO Tom Zito.

The goal is to sell the top ideas to the exploding number of content-hungry broadcast, cable and online outlets with Big Picture Inc., the website’s parent company, on board as a producer. The investors include William Randolph Hearst III; former AOL chairman and CEO Barry Schuler; and John Fisher of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

I’d Watch That is designed as an open marketplace of TV ideas in a closed, relationship-bound industry, an approach that aims to turn the annual multibillion-dollar process of developing new series “on its head,” said Zito, a journalist turned entrepreneur.

In the traditional approach, “until money is spent to get shows made into pilots, no consumer sees a project,” he said. Even Amazon, which does online testing of potential new series, makes full pilot episodes for consumers to assess, Zito said.

One proposal featured on I’d Watch That is a 1960s drama about women working at a Cosmopolitan-like magazine during the dawn of feminism (“Mad Men” meets “Sex and the City,” Zito calls it) from a filmmaker-writer, PJ Posner.

Another is “The Last Templar,” about a 14th-century vengeance-seeking survivor of the soldiers whose duties included protecting the Roman Catholic Church until they were betrayed.

Its creator is Daniel Madore, who earned a media and film degree in 2011 from the University of San Francisco. He’s been paying his dues in a variety of jobs, including production assistant, art director and grip, while directing music videos and short films on the side.

“When it comes to getting your work shown, it is quite the headache and the grind,” he said, with uncertainty surrounding every avenue from film festivals to YouTube. While he’s cautiously optimistic about what the I’d Watch That website might yield, he says the concept has merit.

“Crowdsourcing is part of a new generation of viewers. The audience now has a very strong voice, and one would be foolish to ignore it,” Madore said in an email exchange.