I think it because they air in Canada on Sundays.

Oh wait, I see them posted elsewhere that they're "available" tonight but I didn't realize that they were actually airing.

Yeah, it's essentially a burn off. They decided to air the extra episodes of 666 Park Avenue in the summer instead of HE and Apt23.

Okay but seriously how is there no Pretty Little Liars thread? It's one of the best shows on TV right now and I'm just starting to get into it. Completely irresistible television programming. And the season resumes TONIGHT at 8 ET!

lol, pretty little liars is a total disaster of a show. Completely ashamed that I watch it, but I just do anyway because **** it, once I see some of a show I have a hard time dropping it. It is really bad tho, and progresses at a terribly slow rate. The entire show is on Laguerta time.

main girl is super cute imo

jesus christ

Wow, someone's trying to make sure Charlie Sheen honors his contract or something...lol.

I knew they were filming the 90 episodes in 2 years but I thought they would spread them out.

It probably takes a day or so to tape each one (don't know if it's a live audience, in which case it would probably be less than a day, though I'm not really up on how long a multi-cam sitcom takes to shoot these days), and they could probably get soap opera directors or something to make strip shooting more viable. I just don't know how they can write that many episodes quickly. Maybe they're heavy duty into writing, and then will just pound through making the shows.

It probably wouldn't be a very fun post job to work on. I'm thinking there's at least some possibility that they are expected to turn around 2 shows per week (start to finish, unless they write two shows per week or something), which means that it would take a little less than a year to do everything. It's really rare to have year round productions, so my guess (possibly wrong) is that they're just going to compress the schedule into traditional production/post (as opposed to 22 episodes in 8 months, 45), causing lots of pain to the people working on it.

No matter how it's being done, it's probably going to be done "factory" style. Interesting model, though.

I think we need a Joe Schmo Show thread, b/c the first 2 episodes were awesome. They hit a home run with the new schmo.

EDIT - my bad, i just found one. move along

Shameless, House of Lies, and Californication premiers are on demand.

ive never watched the show, but from the day it was announced they basically said they'd shoot at least 100. that's absolutely insane.

Rendle might know the exact info for sure, but I'm pretty sure there was some kind of ratings threshold for Anger Management that if it exceeded it an automatic triggering of the 100 episode thing would happen. It crushed the threshold in the ratings, initially, and I think the decision for the 100 episodes was made maybe 3 weeks into its run. What's amazing is that they're planning on making all of the episodes in 2 years. That's obviously nearly the equivalent of a 5 year run on network TV, and FX shows tend to have 13 episode seasons. Either there will be no intention of making a quality show, or people will be dropping like flies in the production of it. That's a brutal schedule, but lucrative for whatever company landed the post.

a cbs/abc/fox/nbc show that last 1 hour has around 22 episodes a year. this show is 30 mins so whats the difference besides the fact its on fx?

Those are differently styled shows. We have a comedy writer on the site (who probably won't comment), but I would imagine, for sitcoms, that the writing process is the longest part. For dramas, I would imagine the production is the longest part. On sitcoms, it's obviously important to keep the quality high enough for viewers to keep watching. Also, remember that the budgets are significantly less on sitcoms than they are on dramas, which might mean smaller teams (meaning more time). Typically, in the industry, for scripted TV there is an 8 to 9 month work time (this model has changed drastically with all of the basic cable TV programming that is being done at an extremely high quality level). The people who work on that stuff typically just work the TV season and take summer off (until this industry change I just wrote).

The main point is that it's just not common for TV to work at that level of churning of product. It's one thing to write a singular story that takes up a longer period of time. It's completely something else to have to write 45 separate stories that take up a shorter amount of time. It obviously can be done, as there are tons of motivated people in the business, but in modern day production it just doesn't happen (especially considering that many people work on several different productions at the same time). Back in the 60s, there were a lot of shows that had 40+ episodes per year for a little while, and the old studio system of the 30s and 40s churned out an absolutely unbelievable amount of movies every year (they would frequently completely from production to finish make good films in ten days or so).

A show like this would likely take less than 1 day to mix, and that won't pay the bills for a company, so you need a lot of other work. It will make a company with a lot of shows work much harder than they would otherwise to accommodate the extra work load.

Just to give you an example, the top (most prolific/decorated) sitcom Re-Recording Mixer is probably Charlie McDaniel. This guy has mixed a ton of sitcoms, dating back to the 1980s. If, as I said, it takes a day to mix one of these (half day bookings are kind of uncommon for TV shows), he would have one day available per week to do this. Here are the other shows he's currently working on (just listing shows that are 2012, though some schedules won't overlap):

The Big Bang Theory
Hot in Cleveland
How I Met Your Mother
Happily Divorced
Sullivan and Son
The Exes
Shake It Up
Rules of Engagement

That's just one guy, and there are others who are like him, who work on tons of productions at once (the mixers of House and The Office are also mixing several primetime series at once). At some point, it gets too difficult to do the work efficiently and well, unless it's just a complete factory. As I said, it either means tons of overtime (burn out), or the quality will drop quite a bit, both in writing and probably some other considerations (slightly lower quality crew overall), though it shouldn't be massively difficult to match a style of a multi-cam show. I think it would be impossible to do this schedule today if it were single cam, but it will still present tons of scheduling conflicts during post even as multi-cam. Good on them, though. Not sure if this made any sense, but whatever.

am I the only one who watches Face Off?

yep

Almost finished watching Rome. Such a god damn shame they only made 2 seasons.

blame people who took 5 years to finally buy? (lol) and watch it.

Rome and Deadwood were both abruptly canceled because HBO wanted to slash the budgets. Tilts me every time I think about it.

Carnivale too, just when it was getting really good.

Makes me worry terribly for GoT.

I wouldn't worry about GoT that much, except for that finishing the whole series of books, some of which aren't even written, might be tough. It's hard for any series to survive the 8 seasons or whatever length they'd need to go. The 4th season won't be the end of GoT.

GoT is too popular. I don't believe Rome or Deadwood was very popular when they aired.

Watched the last episode of Rome tonight.

I literally yelled "NOOOOOOOOO!" at the TV when it was over. I think the season finale of S2 was good enough for a series finale though. Maybe they were aware there wasn't going to be a 3rd season?

Has anyone seen Rescue Me? If so what did you think? It's on netflix I see.