Report: NBC backing away from Hillary miniseries

So says FTVLive. After all the free publicity the RNC’s given them by threatening to boycott NBC News as a debate sponsor, is NBC really going to slaughter this cash cow?

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In fairness, a multi-hour miniseries about Hillary’s triumph over serial victimization would have been a terrible drag. Better to do it in a shorter, snappier format. Three words, my friends: “Hillary! The Musical”.

NBC sources tell FTVLive that the NBC suits have figured the Clinton miniseries “just isn’t worth it.”

Word is that NBC is going to let it quietly go away without saying a word.

NBC does not want to make it look like the RNC or their own news people “got [their] way,” so the project will likely die in the “in development” stage.

One NBC source told FTVLive that the miniseries has gone from a 90% “go” to more like a a 60% “No go.”

Corroborating evidence: Fox pulled the plug this weekend on producing the miniseries for NBC — purportedly over revenue. Could be that NBC’s having difficulty finding a replacement who’ll agree to the revenue terms and political risk that come with this job, but even if they find one, no one will fit the bill as well as Fox would have. That was, potentially, their trump card if they went through with it and people complained that the end product was a valentine to Clinton: “If you thought it was too biased towards Hillary, blame right-wing Fox, not us.” Now it’ll look like standard Hollywood propaganda for the Democratic nominee in waiting. Still worth doing, I’d think, given the public interest, but harder to spin.

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Reince Priebus is going to end up high-fiving every grassroots donor in sight to celebrate RNC initiatives against media bias getting results, but there’s more to this than that. When FTV’s source says it “just isn’t worth it,” I think they mean from both sides. Remember, no less a left-wing hack than David Brock called on NBC to torpedo the miniseries for fear that it would end up as, ahem, a right-wing hit job on Her Majesty. And in a way, he’s right: Any unflattering scene would be seized on by liberals as proof that NBC had caved to conservatives, no matter what the tenor of the rest of the production was. They could do six hours on Hillary, Woman of Destiny, and 10 minutes of cursory treatment on Benghazi near the end would have Media Matters wetting itself. It’s one thing to have your news division grumbling about perceptions of bias, it’s another to have both the right and the left screaming at you that you’re in the tank for the left/right. Even with the promise of solid ratings, maybe the prospect of that much aggravation makes the hassle involved prohibitive.

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David Strom 10:30 AM | November 15, 2024
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