When is good, good enough?

Having finished shooting the first season of “Rust”, our web series – Warren’s editing it and it’s looking very good – we decided, as producers, to develop it for television.  I was charged with writing the pilot, since I wrote the first season.

I had originally written a second season, and as I moved into writing the “bible” for the series, I realized it probably wouldn’t do as a TV pilot. So, I changed course, and started rejigging what we’d already shot into a pilot format.

It didn’t take too long on this change of course before I asked myself, “why are we throwing out everything we have”?

Well, for one, what we have probably wouldn’t be to network production values. It’s very good, but that’s just the way it is – the network, when we find one, will want better. They’ll expect a budget. They’ll expect names. They’ll expect polish.

But then, why shouldn’t they?  That’s what the existing paradigm is. Low budget tends to equate in people’s minds to low quality.

What that paradigm doesn’t factor in is craftsmanship and care – character, plot and story.

We’ve been going through the budget for a television pilot, full blown, and it’s enormous. The final tally for a one-hour pilot should roll in at about, my guess, $1 million. That’s well over 100 times what we’ve spent on the series to date. Well over. Certainly we want to pay our people more (including ourselves!). We want them to benefit from all the effort they put into the project and all the heart and soul they brought to it. And we know of a number places where we might want to spend a little more next time.

But I can’t see a result 100 times better than what we have. Twice as good, possibly. But 100 times? Not a chance.

So we’ve decided to pick up the story where we left off – and write the pilot from there. What we’ve got is definitely good enough. (Very good, if you ask me!)

We’re betting that people who’ve started following the series on the web, will be willing to continue following it on television. And that people who follow on TV will want to see what went before – on the web. Whether the networks agree or not, that’s not up to us.

If you’re thinking about revising a project you’ve finished – repurposing it for another media, another development, another tenant – consider, hard, the value, the quality, of what you’ve already got.

It may well be good enough.