Character

Ken Levine is doing a series of posts about the second “season” of his show Almost Perfect starring Nancy Travis. (“Season” in quotation marks because CBS didn’t give them a full season and finally pulled the show with several episodes unaired.) The whole premise of the show, the logline if you will, was that Travis’s character gets her dream job — running a television show — at the same time that she meets the man of her dreams, and has to deal with the problems that ensue when the perfect romance and perfect job don’t turn out to be as perfect as expected. (Hence the title.) But as Levine explains, the boyfriend (Kevin Kilner) did not test as well as the rest of the show, and the network’s condition for doing a second season was that they get rid of the boyfriend character. Tomorrow he’ll talk more about how they dealt with the problem of manufacturing a breakup between two characters who were intended to be together for the whole run of the series.

Just to add a bit to my digression, in an earlier post, about “premise-driven” shows vs. “character-driven” shows: obviously you can’t make an absolute distinction between those two types of shows. Every television show with continuing characters is based in part on the hope that we, the audience, will find the characters interesting, and every show has a premise that is hopefully good enough to create cool stories for those characters. Even an anthology show can’t be called strictly premise-driven because we’re supposed to get involved with the characters, if only for one week.