“So, you’re pulling us off the air, and you ‘don’t know’ if we’ll still be on Hulu, which is where most people who do stream the show are streaming it. And you’re instead moving us entirely to the NBC website? We’re now a web series?”
There is more back-and-forth, with executives injecting meaningless phrases like “we remain committed to the show” and “we are excited to pledge additional digital resources to market Sunnyside.”
It’s all too silly. We had had a conversation like this before, when I made the advertising data request that they ignored. They’re repeating themselves without giving us answers. I am confused and the producer in me needs them to be direct.
“Let me ask you something,” I say, remembering from my White House days that conversations like this work best if I eliminate passion and emotion from my voice to keep things professional. “You’ve spent the last four months telling us how committed you are to our show, how much you love the diversity, how much you love the jokes, how you know it takes many months for a comedy to find its audience. You’ve said since the start that you were supporting Sunnyside. We believed you, but clearly if you’ve made the decision to pull it off the air after only three episodes, none of that is true. You don’t support us, and you weren’t actually committed to the show finding its audience over time. Why should we believe—and how can we trust—that you’ll be supporting us by putting the show on NBC.com and a phone app?”
Unable to remain professional, one executive explodes. “You know what? I can pull this show right now! I can pull it! I can end it! I can shut you down and pull it off the air right now if I wanted to, but I’m not!”
A good deal of life is knowing when and how far to push. I’ve stood up for myself, acquiesced, and negotiated in Hollywood and Washington enough times to know when I’m talking to someone who is not able to have a straightforward conversation. Maybe the executive is frustrated too. After having cared for the show from the beginning, maybe they’re being told by one of their higher-ups that they need to “move us to digital” and are caught in the tricky middle. Or perhaps they’re defensive because I questioned their intentions, and they know I’m right. I don’t know which it is. But I do know that in speaking this way to me—the only person of color on our call—the subtext of their rant (gaslighting, withholding information, changing the subject) feels familiar: I hold all the cards, brown man. You have none of them. Don’t question my authority. If I want to, I can end you and your employees and not blink an eye.
I don’t want my writers, who are trying not to stare through the window, to lose their jobs; the two hundred people that make up the cast and crew—and who have labored so hard to make something so good—to lose their jobs. I don’t think our exec actually wants to shut us down either. They’ve just lost the ability to have a civil conversation. I swallow this bitter pill, accept the “move to digital” (whatever that actually means), and get back to finishing out the season, which I remain very, very fortunate and thankful to still be able to do.
Television is indeed magic. They’re not canceling us. They’re just making us disappear.
* * *
The network went public with news of our cancellation the very next day, with an announcement that season three of the Will & Grace reboot would replace us in the time slot. Given that show’s status as a relic of an older, bygone television era, Joel Kim Booster expressed how we all felt:
With those tweets, the network was finally unhappy with Joel’s posts. I got a panicked call from an NBC publicist.
“Kal, can you please talk to Joel? Can you have him delete the tweets he posted about the cancellation?”
“Happy to speak to him. What’s the issue?”
“He said the Sunnyside time slot got colonized because we’re putting an all-white cast, Will & Grace, in its place.”
“Right.” (There was a long, long pause.) “Sorry, what’s the issue?”
“We don’t like the message it sends. Saying that we pulled a diverse show off the air and replaced it with an all-white show might discourage other actors and writers from working with NBC in the future.”
I politely told the publicist that I wasn’t going to police Joel’s Twitter account, especially since he was posting the truth. Still, I kind of felt bad for them. What they acknowledged had unlocked NBC’s primary motivation for the we’re-not-canceling-you-but-we’re-canceling-you routine—it’s not that they thought Sunnyside would do well digitally, they just didn’t want to signal to others in Hollywood that they could be such a fickle partner.4
The reality is that networks don’t really straight-up cancel shows anymore. They relocate them to digital platforms where they at least have the small potential to make some money while protecting a larger brand. That’s an important part of the changing nature of broadcast television. As audiences move to streaming platforms, the big networks continue to lose a lot of their power and advertising revenue. It turns out that what I had hoped to do—unify live audiences gathered around their televisions at a specific time; change hearts and minds through comedy—isn’t as possible in the traditional network format anymore because most people consume streaming content through premium platforms. Americans don’t even have cable television like they used to—US cable companies lost 4.9 million subscribers in 2019.5
* * *
On Thursday, October 17, the day NBC would air our fourth episode before moving us to their website, our wonderful makeup artist Michelle gently asked me, “How are you doing today? I figured things might be especially rough because of the Ad Age article…”
“What Ad Age article?”
“Oh, you haven’t seen it?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry…,” she said as she handed me her phone.
The advertising industry magazine Ad Age had published a piece about NBC’s marketing budget for the two new shows in its Thursday Night Comedy Block: our historically diverse Sunnyside, and Perfect Harmony, which had a talented but more-traditional cast dynamic. The article rightfully acknowledged that advertisers want higher ratings numbers than Sunnyside was delivering. Even though other shows also had historically low ratings that were only marginally better than ours, the business is a competitive marketplace. We were the lowest by a tenth of a point, so we had to go. That was all reasonable and logical.
But it was the final paragraph that seemed to sadly confirm what I had long hoped was merely my own paranoid suspicion—that the network had been undermining us all along.
“NBC,” Ad Age wrote about Sunnyside, “didn’t seem to be tremendously enthused about the project from the get-go.” In promoting Sunnyside on other networks, NBC spent $250,000; in promoting Perfect Harmony that number increased by 580 percent to $1.7 million. In promoting Sunnyside on its own stations NBC ran forty-three promotional spots; in promoting Perfect Harmony, 1,368 spots—an increase of 3,081 percent.
1,368 ads for Perfect Harmony. Forty-three for Sunnyside.
* * *