The Amazing Screw-On Pilot

The Amazing Screw-On HeadHere is an e-mail I received Friday afternoon:

Here’s the deal. Sci Fi.com has posted a pilot episode of The Amazing Screw On Head on its website. Its an animated show based on a comic by Mike Mignola (creator of Hellboy) produced by Bryan Fuller (creator of Wonderfalls) and features the voice work of Paul Giamatti as the title character. Its damn hilarious and looks amazing to boot. Now here is where the readership of MMF comes in. After you watch the pilot, Sci Fi wants everyone to fill out a survey about the pilot and based on viewer reaction, they will then decide whether or not to pick up the show and make it into a series. Crazy, no? The suvey itself is only 9 questions and takes about a minute to fill out. So please, for the love of God, post about this on MMF Rick. This might be the only chance I get to care about the Sci Fi channel.

Also, it might be wise to remind people that the pauses in the show (I thought my comp froze) are just where the commercials would be. It is a full 20 minute pilot.

http://www.scifi.com/amazingscrewonhead/

AK

Who am I to say no to that?

So I went to the site and watched the pilot. It was good. It was really good. Its the type of animated program that is cool for the same reasons Batman the Animated Series was cool, but funnier. In fact, it continued to get funnier as it went along. After the first minute or so it just appears to be an action show (though with an amazing look and feel), but then there’s this monkey with a gun and…

Look, just check it out.

Though what struck me about this whole thing is that it seems illustrate the exact trend Chuck Klosterman wrote about in this month’s Esquire (even if his take on the issue was suspect at best).

I’m curious what everyone else makes of this idea– the idea being that of media companies attempting to give the people EXACTLY what they want instead of just guessing blindly.

More from me after some sleep (and some rock and roll).

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 15th, 2006 at 3:15 am and is filed under Commentary, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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One Response to “The Amazing Screw-On Pilot”

  1. rick Says:
    July 18th, 2006 at 10:27 pm

    There’s a trend in TV-Land (as opposed to a trend on TV-Land) in handing over the fate of a series to the viewer instead of, say, leaving it in the hands of faceless corporate suits. Perhaps this is in response to the cancelation of a few much-loved shows over the past six years. Perhaps the elimination of Firefly, Arrested Development, Wonderfalls, Andy Richter Controls the Universe (among others), and the related public outcry (and DVD) support has made the higher ups reassess its own audience. Maybe these “viewers” know what kind of shows they’d like to watch.

    So they’re giving us the reigns. FX picked up It’s Always Sunny… based on the tape submission of a few friends, and this year have promised to produce another series the same way (the audience got to vote on their favorite submissions on MySpace). Then comes the future of The Amazing Screw-On Head with Sci-Fi, and now it seems that IFC has entered the outsourcing of development game.

    But is all of this actually good for television?

    I’m split.

    Sure, the idea that viewers are being given actual input (even if by voting) on what shows make it to air is encouraging– anything that keeps us from simply being a Neilsen number is good in my book. But with that being said, I don’t trust most of the television audience to begin with. This whole trend of letting us “pick” the shows sounds like they’re giving us the control, but really its all about them not having to take responsibility for putting something edgy on the air. Most of the interesting shows on television are there because some “faceless suit” decided to take a chance. The generic crap (your Two and a Half Men’s of the world) are there because a different “faceless suit” thought he knew what American’s wanted to see (and based on the ratings, he might not have been wrong).

    The point I’m making is that television democracy isn’t a bad thing, but what the landscape really needs is just more networks that are willing to give their development departments a chance. Think about it, even though Arrested Development was canceled, it DID make it on the air and ran for two and a half seasons before FOX had to cut its losses– and that was done within the system that most people claim to be broken.

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