Thanks to Adult Swim's "Development Meeting", The Future of Television Has Arrived (And It's Called "Skeleton Landlord")

A pilot called Skeleton Landlord aired on Adult Swim on May 5th at four in the morning, and it may be the most intriguing television pilot in recent memory. The premise is simple: Skeleton Landlord is a skeleton who is a landlord for an apartment complex. The pilot concerns his attempts to get a group of "cool kids" to pay rent. Skeleton tries to be a nice landlord, but uh-oh, not only won't the cool kids pay rent, they make fun of him because he's old! Skeleton then hatches a plan to start a band to get the cool kids to like him, and all he has to do is find a way to look younger. The whole thing has an old TV filter and the production consists of intentionally bad CGI mixed with live actors over a greenscreen.

In other words, it's exactly the kind of thing Adult Swim would air. The intriguing part of it is how they came to air it. The pilot came about after the creators called up Walter Newman and Cameron Tang, the respective VP and Director of Development at Adult Swim. They sent them a link to their pilot on YouTube in an online chatroom. The following week, they were paid $10,000 to develop it into a pilot. See, since 2016, Adult Swim has quietly been leading what I consider a revolutionary experiment in television production. Every week, the network's website airs a show called Development Meeting, in which they will listen to the show ideas of literally anyone who calls in. They'll watch demos and read pitches, and then give constructive feedback on whether or not it would make a good show on the network. Recently, they've also awarded small cash prizes to the pitches they like the best. There's also a release form, so that they can air your raw material on the network proper (even if it only airs once at four in the morning). The show has even done specials at San Diego Comic Con and New York Comic Con, where eager congoers line up for a live pitch meeting. It's a cool way to get exposure for your work and get real opinions from actual television executives.

Yet despite the seemingly too-good-to-be-true premise of the series and the freewheeling tone of the show, Walt and Cam are 100% serious about what they're doing. They know that somewhere in the sea of callers is a genuine talent with a idea that they may otherwise not have known about. In the show's second year, they awarded their first development deal from the series, and other deals have followed. Now, after four years of doing the show, their efforts have finally paid off with the Skeleton Landlord pilot, and they're already trying to bring it to series. Another special airing on Adult Swim, Spooky Dreams, started as a pitch to Development Meeting in 2017, with the creators getting hired by the network soon after to develop content.

Development Meeting is just one of literally dozens of live online shows on Adult Swim's website that mix the accessibility of modern streaming content with the interactivity and unpredictability of public-access television. Most shows contain a call-in element for viewers to access the show directly, and the hosts interact with an online chatroom running on the site of the screen. The streams started in September 2014, and became a source of content for the network proper in 2015, when abridged reruns of FishCenter Live began airing on Adult Swim. FishCenter is a parody sports talk show in which the fish in the office fish tank engage in an ongoing sports competition to earn points by swimming over coins placed on the screen. The show started as a segment on a live feed of the office fishtank and has since garnered a following, over 1000 hours of content, and frequent musical guests.

Other shows on the website include the news commentary series Stupid Morning Bullshit, Williams Street Swap Shop, a home shopping program entitled As Seen on Adult Swim, Bloodfeast, in which viewers solve the New York Times Crossword, and Toonami Pre-Flight, an anime-centric talk show. All of these shows have accumulated thousands of hours of content combined over more than five years, and provide a great way for the network to connect with their fans in a new and exciting way. Some of the shows (including all the ones listed here) are also replayed on the channel itself, so callers can appear on television. The shows' hosts even show up at the network's live events at various conventions and at the Adult Swim Festival in Los Angeles, broadcasting the events online. Not even the virus has stopped them, and they've been producing hours of content daily from home.

The one with the most potential however, is Development Meeting. We live in a world in which anyone can upload their work online and get it seen, and yet so few do. YouTube is now more business than video sharing site, and algorithms put bankable people first. Even when making their own original shows, they still go for known talent. Plus, with the ocean of amateur and unknown video content available online, it's hard to get seen anyway. It's safe to say that most major TV networks will not accept the YouTube clips emailed to them. There should be a way to balance the business needs of a professional television network with the exciting potential of unknown content creators. If there's anyone to bridge this gap, it's Adult Swim, who have built their entire brand on giving shows to those no other network will listen to, and Development Meeting may be the way to do it.

There is however, one small caveat preventing Development Meeting from becoming as big as I feel it should be, and that is the fact that it's on Adult Swim. It's true that network's reputation is certainly high given high-profile shows like Rick and Morty, Samurai Jack, and The Boondocks. Plus, it airs as part of Cartoon Network, which has a massive library of fan-favorite original animated programming, including recent hits like Adventure Time and Steven Universe. If anything, the network may be more mainstream than it has in the past, which makes their willingness to let anyone join them exciting. That said, it's still on Adult Swim, and not only will they will only take shows that fit their brand, they have to be comedies. Despite green-lighting a number of original action series and having a large presence of syndicated animated action shows, they're still focused on the demented, absurdist strain of comedy that made them big. I also find it odd that they won't allow animated action and drama series because the mainstream potential for them has never been higher. The real question is if it will catch on with other networks.

While it's possible that other networks may not want to follow in the footsteps of Development Meeting, it's don't know if they even know the show exists. I haven't seen that much news on the show or the streams in general. Where's the Wired article on this story? Maybe when the show was still trying to make content, it was seen as more of a cool thing for the network's fans. However, I find it a bit poetic that the first thing to come out of the show aired during the pandemic. At some point, the amount of produced television may run out, and networks are going to need some new talent to fill the gap when the pandemic ends. Also, there should really be contingency plan in case another pandemic hits to organize development meetings from home....which Development Meeting immediately began doing after the pandemic was announced. The show was never too-good-to-be-true, it's just that now they have the proof it works, and more may be on the way. Another pitch was recently given a deal, and Spooky Dreams, while not automatically given a deal, was still pitched on the show first. This could be the future of television development, it just needs more exposure.

Anyway, if you have any ideas for a television comedy, Adult Swim is taking pitches: https://www.adultswim.com/videos/development-meeting