New Season New Shows

It’s the time of year when the networks release their fall schedules, and with the influx of submissions, there’s a few things contributors should keep in mind.

Useful articles to review include:

Sourcing Your Material

Episode Submission Criteria

Editor Submission Guidelines

Don’t cut-n-paste

This rules applies for new shows as well as old ones. TV.com wants unique information, even if press releases are publicly available.

The existing rules still apply

A new episode submission still needs two out of three of confirmed title, air date, and/or summary. “Pilot” is not an acceptable title unless it can be confirmed. Whether you’re submitting show stars, show summaries, or episode summaries, provide a URL for confirmation. Don’t guess at production codes: some sites use 101, 102, 103, etc. as a default but these are not necessary the “official” production codes.

TV.com has talked about this here, but to repeat; we prefer official reliable sources. Someone posting anonymously at a site is not a reliable or verifiable source.

Check all the sources you can

Check all possible sources before submitting. It’s easy to find one source that has a character name wrong or a company name misspelled, and submit with the wrong information. Check other sources as well and then submit.

Take your time

Yes, there’s a lot of information out there and sometimes it is updated daily (sometimes hourly!). Wait until you have done all your research and have as much accurate information as possible before submitting. Please try and avoid the “oh, just one more thing” syndrome where you submit, decide to cruise a little more, and find something new. This can be avoided simply by checking everything, writing it up, and then submitting it as the last thing you do before you call it quits for that work session.

Submit complete info whenever possible

Again, this isn’t an absolute rule, but whenever possible include complete names. If we’re talking show stars, it’s pretty rare that someone is credited “Bob’s Dad.” Wait until you can find out what the full name of the character is and submit that.

Understand what a “pilot” is

Believe it or not, not every first episode is a pilot. Oddly enough, according to some Hollywood TV producers we’ve talked to, some first episodes are titled “Pilot” but aren’t pilots either. A pilot is typically a standalone episode that is contracted months in advance as a “demo” to sell a series to the networks. Many times an established producer doesn’t need to make a pilot, and gets a guaranteed contract for X number of episodes. If you can’t confirm the first episode was contracted as a pilot, don’t list it as “Pilot.”

Don’t guess

If you don’t know what the plot of the first episode is, don’t guess. If you’re not sure what the genres are, don’t guess. Taking the show summary and rewriting it to make a summary for the first episode is not acceptable. Look at many existing shows out there and look at the show summary, then compare it to the first episode summary. On most of them, the episode summary has much more detail and deals with the actual plot of the first episode.

The show summary air date is sometimes an approximate

All show summaries must have an air date as a placeholder. Any source you provide for new episodes must have a verified source for their air dates. Of course, if you confirm the air date of the first episode, you can then update the show summary’s air date as well.

Don’t anticipate

Advance commercials and previews often feature quotes that don’t actually appear in the episode when it is aired. As always, the best way to confirm a quote is to watch the episode.

Just because you can’t confirm, that doesn’t mean someone else can’t

TV.com has a lot of contributors (including industry insiders) with access to lots of different sources. Please don’t delete existing information just because you can’t confirm it. If the information was accepted, it was because TV.com staff were confident it should be accepted.

Don’t fight

If TV.com accepted a previous submission of a show description or a genre, then they reviewed the submission and approved it. Typos do slip through, and you can fix those as well as add new information. But changing something just because you’re not happy with it isn’t acceptable. The person whose submission you’re “correcting” will just edit it back again and it will go back… and forth… and back… and forth. Two or three or four months in advance, nobody knows everything for sure.

Production Notes

A Show Trivia page may eventually be added to shows. For now, overall production notes should be added to the first episode’s Notes section. Unique information should be submitted: a 13-week contract is pretty standard, for instance. Actor information should be submitted to the actor unless it relates to how the episode was produced and should relate to other information for the series. “George Barker is Bob’s fourth leading role in a TV show” can be found on his bio page under Appearances. “Bob was chosen for the role of George Barker after auditioning three times,” Star Trivia. “Bob was chosen for the role of George Barker because he and producer Bryan Bryanson worked together on Bob’s last show” would be acceptable. As with Star Trivia, sometimes too much is as bad as too little.

Next column: Bio Writing 101

---

Previous columns:

Write Like You Talk
Sourcing Your Material
Know Your Capitals!
A Matter of Timing
Soundalikes and You
Periods and Commas and Colons, Oh My!
Apostrophes, Hyphens, and Quotation Marks, Oh My!
Numbers and You