The trouble with receiving reviews in real time

Rob Long says television commentary panellists are worried about what you think

Television pundit do know – and care – what you're saying about them on Twitter. Charlie Neibergall / AP

Panellists on TV programmes read your tweets and then respond to what you say about them

The way show business is supposed to work is this: you work hard on a project for many months – or even years – and after putting together the footage and fixing the sound and adding music, you send it out into the world in as good a shape as you can.

People working on a movie or television show don’t really know, despite their confident huffing and arrogant chest thumping – if what they’re working on is really good or really bad. The nature of putting together a piece of filmed entertainment dictates that you’re always racing from one scene to another, out of order, in a disjointed and frantic fashion.

So when a movie hits the cinema or a television series flickers to life across a continent, the professionals responsible for the product – the writers, actors, directors and financiers – don’t really know how it’s all going to turn out. They have to wait for the box-office returns or the tele­vision ratings to tell them if the product of many months was worth the time and treasure.

The waiting period between being finished with a project and the audience’s reaction is a gruelling and stressful time. It’s made worse by the fact that there’s really nothing anyone can do about it once it’s left the editor’s workstation. In the entertainment business, things can’t get fixed on the fly.

Mostly, anyway. Last weekend, I appeared on a live television news programme – one of the dozens and dozens dedicated to rehashing and replaying the presidential inauguration ceremonies and the subsequent protests across the United States. I’ve done a fair amount of chat-show television before, and it’s almost always the same. You arrive at the studio about 20 minutes before you’re scheduled, you sit in a chair while makeup is applied (in my case, lots of it) and your hair is anchored into place. Someone hands you a short rundown of the topics on the agenda, and you’re ushered into your place on the set while a technician wires you for sound, in the form of a small microphone pinned to your shirt and an almost-invisible earpiece, which is wrapped around the outside of your ear and then left dangling by the technician. It’s your job to push the earpiece into your ear.

When the show begins, you’re supposed to lean forward in a highly engaged posture, to signal your all-consuming interest in whatever topic is being bruited about. You’re encouraged to make decisive hand gestures, verbal lists (“There are three major forces at work here, Greg.”) and be able to sum up your basic attitude in six or seven words. Before you know it, the show is over and you either wipe the makeup off your face before you head to dinner – which, in my case, gives your complexion a raw and ruddy look – or you wear it out, which can raise eyebrows from other people at the restaurant.

Last weekend, though, I was appearing live – that is, the show was broadcast everywhere and anywhere as we did it. I was on with several television journalists, professionals all, and when the time came for an advertising break, they all instantly reached for their phones to see what the audience was saying about them on Twitter.

“They hate me,” one of the journalists said as he scrolled through his timeline. “Especially what I said about Trump’s speech.”

Another one laughed a bit and read a nice tweet about her outfit. When I reached for my phone to do the same, one of the old pros held my arm.

“Don’t,” he said. “You’re not ready for this.”

It turns out he was correct, because I did check Twitter several times during the course of the live show – there were a lot of advertising breaks – and each time was surprised by the number of people who really do not like to see me on television. There were tweets about my hair and my weight and my shoes and my shirt – and even a few about the things I said – and it was impossible, when the advertisements were over and the show was back on, not to make subtle adjustments to my performance.

I sucked in my gut. I uncrossed my legs to hide my shoes. And I even – for which I’m utterly ashamed – found myself attenuating some of my more withering insights into the inauguration of the new president. All because I was reading my reviews in real time, in the middle of my appearance.

It was in many ways the very thing we dream about in the entertainment business: the ability to fix and adjust a project on the fly, as the audience reacts. How odd, though, that I was able to make all sorts of mid-course corrections in order to increase my audience appeal when I was on a news programme, which is supposed to be fact-based and serious. When it comes to giving the audience what it wants, I learned, the entertainment business has a lot to learn from the news industry.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl