Social media is providing fans with a direct line to TV comedy producer Ash Atalla for their views on his shows, although he admits that this can be a “double-edged sword” when they are being critical.
“I now get personal feedback from every bastard in the whole world who can contact me directly with their thoughts on our show!” he joked, during an appearance at the MIPTV conference in Cannes.
“In truth, I kinda love it, and of course I absolutely hate it. There was a tweet last week saying ‘I wouldn’t want to be Ash Atalla tomorrow morning, because he’s going to get fired’ after watching one of our shows. I thought that was quite humorous.”
Not least because as managing director of production company Roughcut Television, Atalla is his own boss, in a career that has included Emmy and Golden Globe awards for The Office, which he executive produced.
At MIPTV, Atalla warned of the dangers of subjecting comedy to too much feedback during the creative process, although he stressed that he is not against using research in a smarter way.
“You can have too much feedback very easily. When you get so many voices encroaching on what you’re trying to do you can lose your mind,” he said. “Some of the most interesting work that has happened on planet earth would never have made it through research.”
Atalla talked about the challenges of making comedy that travels beyond its home country, pointing to the existence of remakes of shows – The Office included – as a necessary strategy to ensure that they appeal to viewers elsewhere.
“It’s just hard to make people laugh. It’s hard to make your friends laugh in a bar. It’s hard to make your family laugh. It’s hard to make one country laugh, so trying to make the world laugh is insane,” he said, while noting that The Office – “the most British thing I’ve made” – turned out to be the show that travelled best.
Atalla said these are exciting times for producers of TV comedy, thanks to the boom in services delivering TV online, including Netflix and Amazon.
“There’s never been a better moment to be doing what I do. I don’t mind where the show plays ... the number of places we can take work to has exploded,” he said. “The world has become a smaller place for a company like mine: you have 30, 40, 50 places you can take a single project.”
Atalla was speaking on a panel that also included Viacom International Media Networks’ Caroline Beaton and Comedy Central’s Jill Offman, who both agreed that comedy can travel ever more widely – a trend that did not start with the digital age.
Beaton cited shows like South Park, The Daily Show, Modern Family and 30 Rock as prime examples. “It’s really been a couple of decades now that comedy has been becoming more and more transferable from market to market,” she said.
Offman said that Comedy Central has the research from its 73 countries to prove that comedy can travel well. “There’s certain things that make everybody laugh. Very sophisticated things like farting and falling over! Always good for a laugh everywhere,” she quipped.
“Physical humour travels. Verbal jokes are a struggle. The multi-camera sitcom with a laugh track works much easier than a single-camera comedy without a laugh track, because people need those cues.”
Offman’s current role includes heading up Comedy Central UK, where the network is developing shows with a range of British comedians and writers.
“We go through hundreds and hundreds of scripts until we hear the right voice. And even then there’s a huge, laborious process. We’re nurturing a lot of young writers, and that takes time,” she said.
Offman added that younger British writers “are raised on American sitcoms in a way that Brits of 10 or 15 years ago would never have admitted to. They will sit there for 10 or 15 minutes and do riffs from Big Bang Theory”, but warned that some can be stuck in specific sub-genres. “We don’t want 100 flat-share comedies, which is really what we get pitched: ‘the next Friends’.”
The panel also featured Joe Lewis, head of original comedy programming at Amazon, which is commissioning comedies and making them available through its Instant Video service around the world. He cited The Office as an example of a show where “characters have real inner lives”, adding that Amazon looks for this when commissioning a new comedy.
“The only way that works is if the characters have real inner lives: there’s no one there who just shows up, delivers a joke and leaves,” he said, adding that Amazon’s pilots system – it makes pilots of new shows and makes them available to watch, then uses reviews and data on how people watched and rewatched to decide which to commission as full series – gives new ideas a chance to thrive, including those from other countries.
“If you’re on a service that’s archival, it might take longer to get people to watch it, but if you make something great, people will find it,” he said. “You’re going to see a lot of things changing, and I think people will watch things that are different from them culturally.”
