Focus groups are treated like a symbol of everything that's wrong with Hollywood. Instead of taking creative risks, networks will put a new TV show in front of a bunch of random nobodies and either alter it to their whims or kill it altogether. It seems very weird and deeply unscientific, so we had to know more. We talked with Tyler, who has helped run focus groups for a whole bunch of shows, most of which never made it to your screens. He says ...

6 Networks Will Try To Get The Answers They Want

The process sounds simple, if you've never actually done it. "We would lead people to rooms," says Tyler, "they watch the pilot or episode, and to keep track, [they] all have a knob that goes from 0 to 100, 0 meaning no interest in a certain part to 100 for total interest. There's also an option for them to 'click off,' which means it would be the part at which they would change the channel or choose to stop watching it."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

After that, there's a list of questions, either written by the testers or the network. And here is where you start to see the ways an interested party can put their thumb on the scale. "We've been asked to treat something as 'special' before. You can tell they're really pulling for a show or want to make a certain actor look good, or at least try to push them."

Tyler specifically remembers actor Jason O'Mara, who's starred in so many doomed TV shows that he's basically an Irish Nathan Fillion. "Each year the questions got more and more desperate. They went from 'What do you think about the main character?' to 'What don't you like about the main character?' to his last show we had that blatantly asked 'Why don't you like the main character?' By the end, they were asking focus groups assuming they were going to hate him again. That's how bad it got."