One of the ideas floated today in a production meeting was to put a camera in the control room. The idea was to bring the viewer into the process of how TV gets on the air. That's not going to happen for now but as a consolation prize I'll do my best to post a nightly blog with a little insider perspective on how the evening's program played out. (I sit in the second row of the control room, what we call the "Back Row", behind the senior producer who is running the show, either Charlie Moore or Ted Fine depending on the night.)
Producing a live TV program can be wildly fun and simoultaneously insanely stressful. Rarely does an entire hour go according to our artfully crafted and meticulously scripted plan. Yet surprisingly, we always figure out a way to make it work and hopefully you the viewer aren't aware of the potential disasters that were avoided, sometimes by only minutes or even seconds, in the process.
Here's an example from last night. We had planned to have John King on at 10:30p to recap the Republican debate from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. However, due to restrictions we could not use any of the footage of the debate until it was over. As we headed into a three minute commercial break at 10:28p we realized that there was no way the debate was going to be over by the time we came out of commercial. So we had the three minutes while we were in commercial to decide what Plan B was and how we were going to make it work. (We decided to move up our report on the missing pregnant Marine but we had to scramble to get that ready too since they weren't expecting to go air until about 10:40p.) It's fun stuff.
See you after the program.
