I Decided to Make a TV show and All I Got Was This Lousy Existential Crisis.

Production Apprentice by Joe Dorsey

The year of our Lord 2012 was an interesting one for my career – to say the least.

I left the comfortable solace of my former production company, which made mostly soul-crushing corporate and event videos to pursue my ultimate career goal – to have my own TV show glow back at me from an idiot box. I’d like to say, “Little did I know how challenging it would be,” or some other cliche, but honestly, I knew how challenging it would be, and it actually still exceeded my expectations.

I think most of us in the industry want to produce either films or shows of some sort. I doubt most of us enjoy making sales training videos for a company that makes seasoning salt. Some cope with it, as I did for 10 years, others dream a bigger dream and work towards it. I was not working towards it, and I could feel myself getting more and more “Dead behind the eyes.”

Not living in LA or NYC, but settled here in Orlando, Florida, I didn’t know one single person who had cracked the code, and had a successful television show on the air nationally. I knew many who had tried. I knew a lot of people, including myself, that had made local television – even good local television, but not for themselves. I knew many with awesome ideas, but if there is one thing I learned while trying to make my show it was this…everyone has great ideas, almost no one gets them to air.

So, even though I had – what I thought – were good ideas, I knew they wouldn’t be what made me successful at my endeavor. It would be “Who I knew” not “What I knew.” This immediately put me at a disadvantage, as I know like – 8 people, and generally shun “Power networking events.” However, I had some untapped connections I knew I had to exploit. My business partner in the show, and owner of this blog, we’ll call him Jean Tamayo, has a wife who works for a television syndicator in town. If you know anything about syndication companies, you know they are the ones that producers pay a hefty fee to in order for them to find placement for your show. read more...