I Love Lucy

Let’s go back, way back and peer through the primordial ooze into the early 90s.

We’re going in search of one of the most closely guarded secrets of content production, a secret locked deep in the beating heart of TV Land’s evening lineup.

Ask yourself —

  • Why did you watch insipid, preachy pap like Full House and Family Matters and love every second of it?

  • Why can you remember who said “More Power!” and “Did I do that?” but can’t even keep your kid’s birthday’s straight?

  • Why did some small part of you really want to ask Al Bundy for relationship advice or Tim “The Toolman” Taylor how to soup up your riding mower?

It’s because ladies and germs, Hollywood knows something that most modern content producers have forgotten — the power of a good story and how critical it is to own it.

What do Bill Gates, Cher, Merlin Mann, Tom Cruise and iJustine all have in common? They all tell a great story. They live their careers like a treatment to a primetime sitcom. We want to watch them exist because in many ways they exist to have us watch them.

Look at the celebrities in whatever microcosm you exist in and I’ll bet you’ll find the same thing. They act out their careers like a stage performance, and feed their audiences exactly what their audiences want to be fed. Whether you like them, love them or hate them, it’s all a part of the same vaudeville act. You can count on them to give you just the right punch line and no matter how hard you cry out for them to change their wicked ways, in the back of your mind you know that if they did — you wouldn’t care anymore.

People like people who they can sum up on the back of a business card. This isn’t to say that great content producers lack depth, but when you look at the myths of great leaders, celebrities, and just about anyone known on a wide scale you’ll find that their public persona’s consist of instance after instance of the same common threads, repackaged and resold for the entirety of their careers. Their personalities are bullet-points carved into concrete and are just as difficult to tip over.

What does that mean for you?

Whether you are branding your product or your career, ask yourself what your life would look like on the back of a business card. What four or five points run true whether you looked at them now or six years from now? In fact, don’t just think about it, go out and get an index card and see what you come up with.

Once you find out what your show is about, start building the episodes. Push those points out into the world and make sure that everything you do has those fundamentals at its core. Cast your characters, find your setting and discover what moral you want people to take away from every 23 minute block.

I still can’t guarantee anyone will watch, but you have a much better chance than you did at the reality TV table for one.

(Forum)

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