Gatekeeping within the simplicity regime: evaluative practices in television idea development

Abstract

This article investigates the kinds of evaluative practices that are employed when gatekeepers in TV want to maximise creativity. By analysing the evaluative regimes used in TV idea development, the analysis points to how a simplicity regime is used in the observed idea development sessions, with ideas being judged constantly as to whether they are clear and simple enough. Using observations, interviews and briefs as data sources, the article concludes that the desire of gatekeeping editors to maximise creativity can place significant pressure on developers who find it difficult to live up to these desires. In addition, the findings suggest that these developers primarily develop ideas for their immediate gatekeeping editors and that the TV viewers are not considered as equally important in their idea development process.

Keywords

creativity DR3 gatekeeper idea development production studies television

Introduction

Idea development has close ties to the concept of creativity, which is a tricky, relative and highly debatable term. While it is difficult and perhaps even futile to look for creativity in an idea development process, this article shows that it is fruitful to analyse the briefs, developers and gatekeeping editors that play a crucial part in the development process and to study their evaluation of what constitutes a good idea. Gatekeepers who have the privileged position of evaluating products and their degree of creativity can apply a label of creativity through their discourse about the products in question. TV editors that act as gatekeepers may be absent from the actual idea development and brainstorming session – and yet their preferences are very much present because developers are generally highly aware of what their gatekeepers want (Draper, 2014; Andersen, 2019). This article’s theoretical approach excludes all notions of essentialism and attempts to find creativity, being grounded instead in the literature on gatekeeping and creativity theory about gatekeepers – in particular Keith Sawyer’s four evaluative regimes (Sawyer, 2013).

Based on findings from a production study of idea development sessions at the Danish public-service TV departments DR3 and DR Ung, this article analyses how briefs, developers and gatekeeping editors use evaluative regimes and how idea development processes reveal a number of TV-specific challenges.

The empirical foundation is a three-tiered dataset based on three data sources: (1) the briefs, (2) the developers and (3) the gatekeeping editors. The article argues that it is fruitful to conceptualise creativity as idea development and thereby analyse idea development sessions because these are relatively easy to define. The contribution of this production study is a deeper contextual understanding of how a public-service television institution like DR manages idea development processes, and of how the desire for maximum creativity has a significant influence on idea development. Before analysing the material from the idea development process, I will first present and describe my case.

Case presentation

DR3 is a Danish public-service TV channel that was launched in 2013 as part of the licence fee-funded broadcaster Danmarks Radio (DR). DR3 (for ages 15–39) receives a significant part of its original content from the in-house youth content department DR Ung. In 2016, DR3 and DR Ung changed their practices from ad hoc idea development to doing idea development only twice every year. This formalisation of the development process now means that these TV developers can go several months without having to do idea development, but it also makes each semi-annual development process even more crucial. This is in stark contrast to, for example, journalists that generally need to develop ideas on a daily basis. These DR3 and DR Ung employees do collaborative projects in groups, which means that the level of their knowledge is quite homogeneous.

In order to document DR Ung’s idea development process, I visited and observed them regularly for a period of 3 months. I got access just when the idea development process was starting, and I followed their team until the pitching sessions were done. DR3 had sent out 12 different briefs to both internal and independent production companies, and the different production units pitched a total of 98 ideas to DR3’s editorial team – 40 from internal units and 58 from independent/external companies. Out of all the internal ideas, 2 ideas received a ‘yes’, 16 received a ‘maybe’ and 22 received a ‘no’. Out of all the independent ideas, 0 ideas received a ‘yes’, 14 received a ‘maybe’ and 44 ideas received a ‘no’. This total shows that the internals had a higher success rate than the independents in this particular idea development process. However, it is also remarkable that only 2 out of the 98 ideas were instantly accepted, and that the vast majority of the ideas were dismissed or sent back to the drawing board.

One key goal for these idea development processes is to create original programmes that support DR3’s brand as an ‘experimental’ TV channel that ‘breaks genre barriers’ and always offers new and interesting takes on current events and taboos in society. The head of DR3, Irene Strøyer, has explained the channel’s brand in terms of ‘the green prism’ with three core values (Drivsholm, 2017). First, DR3’s content is brutally honest, real and raw. Second, DR3 is the viewers’ wingman and does experiments on our bodies so that the viewers do not have to. Third, DR3 shines a spotlight on the absurdities in our lives and in society (interview with Irene Strøyer, 5 July 2016). These brand goals are visible in DR3’s programming and in the briefs for the particular idea development sessions that I observed (Andersen, 2018). As the analysis will demonstrate, DR3’s idea development and evaluative practices are characterised by an ambiguous desire for both creative experiments and strict simplicity.

Theories about gatekeeping and creativity

Several research contributions about media industries deal with the topic of media production processes and autonomy, which I want to address. The contributions from, for example, David Hesmondhalgh and from John T. Caldwell, describe, respectively, how workers are used by the cultural industries to achieve capitalist goals and how these workers have very restricted agency (Caldwell, 2008; Hesmondhalgh, 2013; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011). Notably, Timothy Havens and Amanda Lotz describe this dynamic differently through their concept of circumscribed agency and that these workers actually have a degree of autonomy but within a set of cultural and structural restrictions from the organisation and its management (Havens and Lotz, 2016: 11). However, none of these contributions describe or point to idea development processes in media production, even though this phase directly shows how workers are given autonomy by being able to suggest new ideas to the management. In this sense, the existing literature within media production studies has not been interested in idea development and is not particularly helpful when it comes to analysing idea development processes. Because of this, the following theoretical framework consists of a variety of theories with an interest in idea development from studies of creativity in psychology and design, from journalism and from studies of media industries as well.

A relevant concept in this regard is that of gatekeeping, which has been studied for many years in news journalism (Shoemaker, 1991; Shoemaker and Vos, 2009), both at an individual level and at an organisational level. A gatekeeper has been defined by David Manning White as an individual or group responsible for making the decision between ‘in’ and ‘out’ within a specific area or ‘gate’. His study of an editor at a small-city newspaper showed that this gatekeeper selected which news stories to run based on highly subjective evaluation criteria and personal taste (White, 1950). This conclusion shares some similarities with Jimmy Draper’s recent article on the concept of discerned savvy (Draper, 2014). Draper studied editors and writers at men’s magazines and found that the writers evaluated and adjusted their ideas based on their knowledge of the taste and track record of their gatekeepers. What these theories have not revealed is what discerned savvy means for idea development processes in a field like TV production. While news articles often have one or a few authors, it is usually difficult to pinpoint any single author of a product in TV production because TV production is a collective production process (McIntyre, 2012: 130). This article uses the theoretical concept of the gatekeeper to describe the unavoidably important role that commissioning editors have in decision-making processes within TV production by calling them gatekeeping editors.

The discipline with the longest tradition for studying gatekeeping, creativity and collective production processes is that of creativity studies within psychology. Originally, these psychologists and creativity researchers were preoccupied with identifying, isolating and studying creativity as a personality trait in geniuses (Guilford, 1950), which led to an understanding of creativity that was predominantly oriented towards individuals and their mental processes. In the 1980s, sociocultural creativity researchers, such as Teresa Amabile and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, argued that understanding the social and historical context was crucial to any study of creative processes, and that creativity was not merely a matter of individual genius but was highly influenced by the judgement of gatekeepers (Amabile, 1983; Csikszentmihalyi, 1988). Csikszentmihalyi claims that any given field has a range of gatekeepers that assess new works based on their knowledge of existing work (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997: 28). The article uses the term gatekeeping editors to avoid confusion and to separate their role from other potential gatekeepers, who may still be crucial to most successful TV programmes but are not the focus of this article.

In recent years, the American psychologist Keith Sawyer has written extensively about creativity and group processes (Sawyer, 2003; Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009). This article understands creativity as a relative term, and as such it is comparable to terms like quality, value and success. Whether something is creative or not boils down to a normative evaluation in the context of a specific field with established norms. This perspective is supported by Sawyer’s article, in which he argues that we need to investigate evaluative practices because creative processes are often collective and products pass through many evaluations and judgements made by a range of different gatekeepers including the creators themselves. Sawyer finds that most evaluations fall within four different categories, which he calls evaluative regimes where products are judged and valued based on the following subjective criteria (Sawyer, 2013: 281):¹

An aesthetic regime judging whether the product design is new and interesting;

A craft/professional regime judging whether the product is well made and lives up to a professional standard;

A manufacturing regime judging whether the product can be made in a reliable way and at a reasonable cost;

A brand/genre regime judging whether the product aligns with the brand in question and represents the genre in a suitable way.

With this generic but useful categorisation, Sawyer describes how a clash between different regimes can cause tensions and how professionals sometimes mix several regimes at once, but can also be quite strategic with their evaluations during face-to-face evaluations (Sawyer, 2013: 286, 289). Developers know that gatekeepers will evaluate their products, and they anticipate the evaluation. The motivation for developers (as well as managers) may be to generate a product that receives a positive summative evaluation and therefore will be produced and sold, earning them a reputation (Sawyer, 2013: 296).

As Nanna Inie and Peter Dalsgaard have rightly pointed out, research contributions about idea development sometimes give very vague definitions of what an idea is. Their overview demonstrates a large variety of idea definitions ranging from specific solutions to suggestions that entirely reframe the problem in question (Inie and Dalsgaard, 2017). While Inie and Dalsgaard’s overview focuses on the definition of an idea, I focus on how an idea is evaluated and on the relationship between briefs, developers and the gatekeepers that make evaluations. This article uses Sawyer’s four evaluative regimes as an analytical tool in order to identify similarities and differences in the priorities made in the briefs and by the developers and gatekeeping editors. However, the article also asks what the TV-specific conditions are when it comes to evaluative regimes.

Methodological remarks

The article’s methodological approach uses the tradition of media production analysis. Production studies are often sociologically oriented and analyse the underlying industry processes that are usually hidden from the public’s view (Banks et al., 2015; Frandsen, 2007; Havens, 2018; Ytreberg, 2000).

This article’s empirical material involves 3 months of on–off observations of idea development sessions and meetings at DR3 and DR Ung, as well as a gatekeeper study in which I interviewed four crucial gatekeepers in these departments and analysed the briefs that DR3 distributed. This means that I include pre-production in my conceptualisation of what a production study can be, and that I focus on the early stages of development. When narrowing the focus to idea development in pre-production, we disregard several other stages (shooting, editing, post-production, promotion, distribution, etc.) in TV production, even though these processes are highly relevant to media industries research. This choice is based on the assumption that if we want to study the importance of gatekeepers and the evaluative practices in the TV industry, the idea development phase is particularly essential. Concerning the four gatekeepers, they were all employed as editors at DR3 or DR Ung and were the leaders of these departments. This means that they had an absolutely crucial role in the evaluation of ideas because they were the actual evaluators with the power to say yes or no to all of the new ideas.

Compared to the confidentiality issues that many researchers in the creative industries experience when they seek access to production processes (Sawyer, 2013: 287), I was generally quite privileged, allowed to participate in pitching sessions and record several idea development sessions and meetings. During the pitching sessions, they did not allow me to record. Because of this, it was only possible to make notes of what happened at the time and then interview the editors later and ask them questions retrospectively as exclusive informants with crucial knowledge about these pre-production processes (Bruun, 2014).

This article mixes qualitative methods, combines data sources and uses documents, interviews with exclusive informants and observations to validate its findings. I coded the transcriptions of the gatekeeper interviews and the contents of the briefs using the qualitative data analysis software NVivo 12 in order to gain a better and more concise overview of the material (Saldaña, 2013). In the coding process, I combined existing theoretical categories and data-driven categories, drawing on grounded theory and allowing the concepts used by my informants to be the inspiration for many of the coding categories (Kvale and Brinkmann, 2015: 263). I used Sawyer’s four evaluative regimes in my coding, but when I coded the data it became clear that I needed to make a distinction concerning whether it was defined positively or negatively. During this process, I also developed a fifth evaluative regime based on my data material – the simplicity regime – in order to conceptualise the evaluations that I found in the data, which I will describe in further detail in the following analysis.

Briefs

In this case, the briefs are templates for action developed in-house by editors that ask for specific types of TV content. DR Ung initially received 10 out of the 12 DR3 briefs. The titles of these 10 briefs were as follows:

‘Topicality on DR3’;

‘That damned love – DR3 wants to solve the riddle. The honest story of love, dating and sex’;

‘Grandma is lying – DR3 clears up Danish history’;

‘The explosive question – You never saw it coming’;

‘DR3 laughs – DR3 wants to have more fun in 2017 [. . .]’;

‘DR3 neutralises the journalistic law of gravity – Investigative journalism in new ways’;

‘DR3 saves the world’;

‘DR3’s next big experiment – The flagship you can’t live without watching’;

‘Brutal honesty on DR3’;

‘No access except for DR3 – The unique access’.

DR Ung worked with six of these briefs: #1, #2, #3, #5, #8 and #10. In the very early stages, DR3 and DR Ung met to discuss the content of these briefs because this was the first time that the departments had used this procedure instead of ad hoc idea development. During this meeting, it was clear that the editors and developers from DR Ung needed clarification because of the vague wording in some of the briefs – especially in #8 DR3’s next big experiment. The developers asked the gatekeeping editors from DR3 to be more specific about what they wanted, and to clarify ‘what is allowed within the brief’. In this sense, the developers wanted further constraints – but the gatekeeping editors were reluctant to narrow the options.

In this context, Ana Alačovska has written specifically about briefs and how they are used when writing travel guidebooks. One of Alačovska’s informants, a guidebook writer called Daisy, expresses some of the same wishes as the DR Ung developers and says that she can do a better job if she has more constraints (Alačovska, 2013: 175). However, in both cases these wishes could also be a result of wanting to secure your job by satisfying the gatekeepers, and in order to do this you need clear guidelines – or in other words, you want to develop your discerned savvy and make sure that you are commissioned again. Sawyer states that briefs can be used to secure a strong editorial voice across a product range with many different authors and volumes, and to maintain a very clear brand even though the work has involved lots of different authors (Sawyer, 2013: 285), and this is mirrored in DR3’s case.

In DR3’s briefs, the brand/genre regime is very much present whenever the briefs express that ideas and pitches should be ‘on brand’, and DR3’s so-called ‘green prism’ is even mentioned several times. Various genres are also represented: satire, dating shows and investigative journalism, for instance. The briefs are all very positively oriented and vaguely describe what DR3 wants (as opposed to describing what they do not want). This is also true of the dominant use of the aesthetic regime by all the briefs when they constantly highlight that all ideas should have new and interesting approaches but without ever defining what that does not include (what is an old and uninteresting approach?). In addition, the briefs regularly mention the target audience, whereas the manufacturing regime and all financial constraints are strikingly absent. This may be because the gatekeeping editors classify financial details as sensitive information, or because they feel that such conditions are naturally implicit.

In the process of analysing the briefs, it became clear that most of them contained a statement explaining that ideas should be constructed and explained clearly: ‘Simple and clear premise – if it is too complicated to explain the basic premise and idea, then it is not working’. I have decided to call this evaluative practice the simplicity regime. The simplicity regime is used in the briefs as a way of making sure that the ideas for content are ‘appropriate for TV’ and for the pitching sessions, at which developers only have 10 minutes to pitch each idea. The extent of this regime and its use among the developers and gatekeeping editors will be elaborated later.

Finally, the most notable aspect of the briefs is that they are used to structure the overall idea development process. During every step of the process, the brief is king and the state of the idea development is assessed and compared in relation to the brief in question: Is this idea an answer to what the brief is asking for? To which brief does this idea belong? Are we ready to pitch ideas for that particular brief? In this way, the briefs limit the realm of possibility in both positive and negative ways by cementing a structure around the product development. Consequently, such briefs function as the starting point as well as the end point for both developers and gatekeeping editors.

Developers and idea development sessions

The initial idea development process lasted for about 33–54 days (depending on the brief) from the first meeting about the briefs to the final series of pitches to DR3. The process was as follows:

Day 1: Meeting between DR Ung and DR3 about the briefs;

Days 3 and 4: Idea development sessions for developers (all six briefs);

Days 7–15: Researching and modifying ideas for internal pitch;

Days 16: Internal pitch and feedback with DR Ung editors;

Days 17–22: Researching and modifying ideas;

Day 23: Extra idea development session to crack brief #8 DR3’s next big experiment;

Days 24–32: Researching and modifying ideas for pitch to DR3;

Day 33: Final pitch to DR3 editors (Briefs #2 Dating and #8 DR3’s next big experiment);

Day 40: Final pitch to DR3 editors (Brief #5 Satire and comedy);

Day 47: Final pitch to DR3 editors (Briefs #3 Danish history and #10 No access);

Day 54: Final pitch to DR3 editors (Brief #1 Topicality).

In this section, I will focus on my observations during the idea development sessions on days 3 and 4. There were eight developers (aged 25–40) from DR Ung present, and most of them were so-called programme developers or programme editors (trained journalists or university graduates from the humanities). None of the gatekeeping editors were present. Two of the developers were responsible for planning the sessions, and they had decided to use a change of scenery as a tactic (or tool) to inspire the group by going to a nearby architectural centre with smaller meeting rooms. This is theoretically on par with several studies, which indicate that the room or environment in which subjects are situated can measurably affect their creative ability. For instance, if a room offers a view of the countryside or contains green plants, this can potentially improve your ‘visual creativity’ but has no impact on your ‘verbal creativity’ (Shibata and Suzuki, 2002; Studente et al., 2016).

The group had a very loose, relaxed approach to the sessions, interrupted each other many times, and were very knowledgeable about TV programmes and TV production. When they brainstormed and thought of a programming idea, they usually gave it a title within the first few seconds. Once they had found a short and catchy title, it was easier for the group to remember what the idea was about – also later in the process, when they had to choose which ideas to work with. We could regard this practice as a manifestation of how the simplicity regime also comes into play latently: if an idea was too complicated and did not have a short and catchy title, the group found it hard to remember its basic premise. One example of this was a fruitful idea that emerged when one developer mentioned the topic of ‘swinging’:

Developer 1:

DR3 Swinger. [. . .]

Developer 2:

It could be fun, in those swinger clubs, there is always that bar. It could be fun, just conversations from that bar.

Developer 3:

Conversations from the Swinger Club [Part 1, 48:15] (27 April 2016)

The third developer suggested a title that went on to become the actual title of the final programme: Samtaler fra Swingerklubben [Eng.: Conversations from the Swinger Club]. A mere 15 seconds after the first mention of the topic, the group had conceptualised a simple idea which they all felt very confident about, and they went on to discuss a few of the details. Less than a minute later, they put it on the list and moved on to another idea. This illustrates how quickly an idea can happen and how the developers all played a part in the collective and distributed creation process (Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009). No objections, no worries, but just a strong confidence that this was exactly what the channel was looking for. And their faith in the idea turned out to be well founded, because when they pitched this idea to the channel, the editors instantly said ‘yes’ and put it into production (this only happened to 2 out of the 98 ideas). In fact, this example demonstrates how the developers as a group had a strong sense of whether the gatekeeping editors would like an idea and how discerned savvy can actually work as a group-validated process.

The developers knew that they liked the idea about swinger clubs, but it was difficult for them to duplicate that process and generate another idea that they liked just as much. In this regard, it is easy to understand why both editors and developers talked about idea development and creativity as something elusive that they did not know how to control. This is similar to how Coughlan and Johnson describe the irregular nature of idea development: the process of inspiration is not one that we can easily duplicate and apply to another topic (Coughlan and Johnson, 2008).

The developers were highly focused on the aesthetic regime in both a positive and negative sense: they had recurring discussions about whether an idea was too similar to any existing programmes. This might be because the brand and the briefs were so preoccupied with developing new and interesting takes. The group thought of many outrageous ideas, which was exactly what the channel was asking for. During this process, they discussed whether it would be okay to ‘break the rules’:

Developer 1:

But isn’t there something great about doing the opposite? That we don’t always –

Developer 2:

Sure, that is one hundred percent what I have been shouting for. This thing about how DR3 should do something they’re not allowed to do.

Developer 3:

Well, [Gatekeeper A] has talked about breaking the rules and then saying sorry afterwards. Well, that was basically what [Gatekeeper A] was saying in that presentation. [Part 3, 16:43] (27 April 2016)

The developers were very much on board when it came to breaking the rules, especially because that sort of behaviour, according to the quote, was aligned with (at least one of) the gatekeeping editors’ preferences. The developers’ goal was seemingly to get as many programming ideas approved as possible. More programmes going into production would mean more jobs for everyone. In this process, it was a group effort that generated the ideas. They were generous with regard to sharing their ideas with everyone in the group, and I saw hardly any signs of anyone trying to take solitary ownership of an idea, which demonstrates how an idea can be shared and used by multiple people at the same time (see also Li et al., 2013). However, most of the outrageous ideas never made it to the pitch, seemingly because of the group’s recurring worries about ethics. During this process, the developers subtly merged some of the outrageous ideas with more moderate ideas, resulting in more ethically correct combinations. This shows how the group functioned as a collective evaluation mechanism (that also imposed self-censorship), particularly in the convergence phase.

In these sessions, there were no mentions of the audience. However, the gatekeepers were definitely present in their minds. Sawyer underlines that user/customer evaluations are absent in the majority of the cases, that users are only mentioned through anecdotes and opinions from the professional’s point of view and that the statements of actual users are not mentioned (Sawyer, 2013: 300).

In general, the developers were highly focused on the manufacturing regime and the practical logistics of turning ideas into actual programmes, on how to operationalise ideas and on whether ideas might lead to any problems later on. Many of these manufacturing evaluations focused on ethics and financial constraints: the fact that some ideas would be too expensive to carry out. Interestingly, the briefs only mentioned ethics once, but the developers were very aware of this topic – possibly because DR3 had previously encountered ethical problems regarding their participants in some of their shows (which can become an issue in reality TV). After the session ended, the group went to a nearby bar and had drinks. The next day, it was clear that they had discussed both new and existing ideas at the bar, effectively continuing the session. This mirrors Coughlan and Johnson’s description of inspiration as unpredictable: ‘It is therefore clear that the time and place of inspiration is unpredictable, and that important idea generation occurs away from contexts where creative work is intentionally performed’ (Coughlan and Johnson, 2008: 3082).

Brief #8 about ‘the next big experiment’ was particularly frustrating for the developers, who struggled to come up with ideas and live up to the brief’s expectations about delivering experimental programming ideas that also lived up to ethical standards. The experiment brief was so difficult for the group that they eventually had to carry out a new idea development session on day 23, where they went to a local amusement park. Even this extra effort did not provide the department with a satisfactory result in their own opinion. This frustration is an understandable consequence of the wish to maximise creativity. If the expectation is to maximise creativity, it can lead to feelings of inadequacy if you realise that maximum creativity is especially difficult to achieve within a broadly and vaguely defined framework (the brief).

Gatekeeping editors

This section about the gatekeeping editors comes after discussing briefs and developers. But one could argue that gatekeeping editors should have been dealt with first because they contribute to writing the briefs and – in this case, at least – the gatekeeping editors aided the developers in interpreting what the briefs meant. In this regard, the gatekeeping editor’s role is not just to make decisions and to say a final yes or no to an idea. The gatekeeping editor’s role begins long before this moment, when the briefs are distributed and interpreted and the developers ask for clarification.

Unlike the briefs, the gatekeeping editors often mentioned financial constraints (the manufacturing regime), which prevented them from making certain genres and especially fiction. They all highlighted that a good idea should be ‘on brand’ and referenced DR3’s green prism as being at the core of what DR3 stands for. They all pointed to the aesthetic regime and explained that a good idea delivered a new and interesting take on a relevant topic. Furthermore, some of them expressed a fondness for the simplicity regime and the notion that the best ideas have a ‘clear and simple premise’. Nevertheless, there were also differences in the tastes of individual gatekeeping editors, which make it difficult to generalise.

These gatekeeping editors did not intentionally choose the ideas that came from the departments or companies that knew their taste best. In fact, DR3’s editors have deliberately made efforts to cooperate and co-produce with many different production teams (also independent). In this way, the channel plays a significant role as a distribution outlet for independent Danish production companies. This demonstrates that gatekeeping is not a matter of just saying strictly yes or no – it also involves curating the content: at DR3, the editors consider the development of the programme and give feedback and ask for changes, but still enter into a dialogue with the production team. One gatekeeping editor describes their use of what we could call a dialogue-based model (Søndergaard, 2003) as follows:

[. . .] It’s not like what I am saying is: You have to do this, end of story. I enter into more of a dialogue where I say: Could this be a way to show it by doing more like this? But I don’t come out on set and look the director over the shoulder. (Interview with Gatekeeper B, 3 February 2017)

This quote shows that the practice of curating co-produced content – particularly in new collaborations with independent production companies – is a matter of explaining the core values of the DR3 brand to these new partners. We can describe this process as an example of gatekeeping editors trying to teach discerned savvy to new and less established players without strictly dictating the production process.

In the end, only two ideas got a ‘yes’ from the gatekeeping editors, and these positive evaluations only contained very short positive statements. They said almost nothing about the approved ideas but merely ‘great, let’s move on to the next idea’. The ideas that received a ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ received longer and more careful evaluations, which mirrors Sawyer’s earlier statement about how summative and face-to-face evaluations are managed in a more cautious and strategic way. The DR3 editors were very pleased with an idea for a show that combined dating with travelling called Ticket To Love [Danish: Billet Til Kærlighed] that was similar to several existing DR3 programmes, and they commissioned this idea instantly. However, the DR3 editors never saw this choice as contradictory to their strategic goal to experiment and find new and interesting takes, because it satisfied a need by filling an empty slot in an upcoming schedule. Other gatekeepers might have deemed the idea too similar to previous DR3 programmes, but these gatekeeping editors labelled it as ‘just what we were looking for’. This demonstrates the ambiguity in the editors’ desire for both experiments and simplicity at the same time.

Comparison

The following section will compare the results from each data source and highlight some of the most notable similarities and differences regarding their use of the varying evaluative regimes in the condensed table below. I have graded each regime and data source ‘high’, ‘medium’ or ‘low’ depending on the degree of their use; and ‘positive’, ‘negative’ or ‘mixed’ in terms of their ‘general tone’, depending on whether they defined their evaluations in a positive (what we want) or a negative way (what we do not want).

The use of evaluative regimes	Briefs	Developers	Gatekeepers
Aesthetic	High	High	High
Craft/professional	Medium	Medium	Medium
Manufacturing	Low	High	Medium
Brand/genre	High	High	High
Simplicity	High	Medium	Medium/low
Audience awareness	Medium	Low	Medium
General tone	Positive	Negative	Mixed

The table shows that the briefs and gatekeepers use evaluative regimes in a similar manner, which is hardly surprising since the gatekeepers helped to formulate the briefs. As for the aesthetic regime, only the positive aesthetic evaluations are mentioned in the briefs and by the gatekeepers. The briefs in particular are overly positive. By contrast, the gatekeeping editors and developers provide examples of both positive and negative evaluations. The developers are generally more negative or problem-oriented and make many negative evaluations in terms of both the craft/professional regime (the ethical evaluations) and the manufacturing regime (this idea is too difficult or expensive to carry out). All three of the data sources mention the simplicity regime regularly and the brand/genre regime even more. The briefs and gatekeeping editors only provide examples of positive brand/genre evaluations. In contrast, the developers work with both positive and negative brand/genre evaluations by asking questions such as, ‘Is that DR3-ish?’ The briefs, developers and gatekeeping editors all mention DR3’s green prism and share a similar core narrative about DR3’s brand values. The briefs and the gatekeeping editors were conscious of the importance of the audience and embedded whatever knowledge they had of the audience’s preferences within their evaluations. However, the developers did not mirror this awareness or talk about the audience during the brainstorming sessions (although this awareness may have appeared later in production).

Discussion: the TV-specific challenges

So what does all of this tell us about gatekeeping editors, evaluations and idea development in the TV industry? The TV industry’s graveyard for ideas that are never broadcast is endless. However, getting an idea rejected (even early in the process) by gatekeeping editors is not necessarily the same as failing. It just means that the idea ‘needs more development’, and next time it may be transformed or approved. Because only 2% of these ideas were instantly approved, we could describe this practice as deeply ineffective, but we could also describe it as an ordinary part of any development process, especially in view of the large number of internals and independents that want to pitch their ideas. These evaluative practices also show that ideas are not stable entities. Even if two developers create an idea together, they could still describe it in different ways. Ideas are usually pitched in a way that leaves room for interpretation and improvisation depending on the gatekeeping editors’ initial reaction. Even if an idea is accepted and put into production, the continuing process of convincing the gatekeeper of its viability is still ongoing. In such a process, the product is negotiated constantly between the developers and the gatekeeping editors (Andersen, 2017). In other words, ideas are not finite. They go through an iterative process and are continuously subject to both individual and socially negotiated evaluations up until the TV broadcast ends.

Another challenge regarding TV is that gatekeeping editors are under pressure to make the ‘right’ decisions and choose the most suitable ideas, because failures can be expensive. Are gatekeeping editors under pressure to maximise creativity? In this case, the editors chose this strategic goal for the channel and can presumably remove it again if they wish. However, these gatekeeping editors express a rather ambivalent perception of so-called failures. On the one hand, they take them lightly and focus on getting back into the saddle; but on the other hand, they sometimes mention the fear of public scrutiny or legal repercussions (interview with Gatekeeper A, 5 July 2016). Gatekeeper A even links failure to a lack of observance of the simplicity regime because the ideas behind the programmes were ‘not clear and simple enough’. This demonstrates that the simplicity regime may be a TV-specific challenge and part of the industry lore (Havens and Lotz, 2016: 162), and that these gatekeeping editors accept the simplicity regime as a commonsensical fact that prevents them from making complex TV programmes.

Another TV-specific challenge is caused by the constant need for new content (a high renewal rate). The gatekeeping editors explained that once they put an idea into production, they were often reluctant to discontinue production even though they might regard a particular production as potentially problematic or less than satisfactory. Their reluctance to shut down unsatisfactory productions was related to the need to fill the TV schedule and to the fact that production is costly, which is why they only cancelled a production in extreme cases. Nevertheless, the gatekeeping editors mentioned that they could get away with programming mistakes because of this youth channel’s relatively low ratings. Even if mistakes were made, very few viewers saw them and they remained unnoticed by the Danish news media. This circumstance gave the editors a sense of freedom and enabled them to carry on with so-called ‘experimental programmes’.

In TV production and in the creative industries in general, creative freedom and autonomy is often highly praised and lauded by both scholars and practitioners. However, we tend to overlook the fact that a large degree of freedom can result in bigger expectations among both gatekeepers and the developers themselves, as this case illustrates. In this sense, greater creative freedom can lead to bigger expectations and to a greater pressure on those who have to deliver concrete ideas based on very vague briefs. In this case, they worried that their ideas would not be good enough. Such a claim challenges the understanding of autonomy within creative labour studies (as seen in Hesmondhalgh, 2007), and indicates that the social mechanisms and expectations that come with larger creative freedom are complex and multifaceted.

Conclusion

Based on a production analysis of the DR3/DR Ung case using a three-tiered dataset with the briefs, developers and gatekeeping editors as sources, the results of this article can be summarised in three major points:

This article shows that the briefs, developers and gatekeeping editors use and prioritise evaluative regimes in rather different ways. In this particular case, DR3 and DR Ung generally demonstrate the excessive use of what I have called the simplicity regime, in which ideas are evaluated depending on whether they are clear and simple. According to this regime, only simple ideas for content are appropriate for TV and for 10-minute pitching sessions, making this a TV-specific challenge and probably a domain-specific constraint as well. DR3 probably has this desire for simplicity in order to ensure that programming ideas are indeed marketable, pitchable and can be communicated clearly to the audience when promoting new programmes. However, their evaluative practice seems ambiguous since they ask for very experimental ideas but at the same time commission incremental ideas that are very similar to existing DR3-programmes. This evaluative practice illustrates how these gatekeeping editors have several conflicting preferences and try to navigate between the need for experimental ideas and the need for simple ideas that communicate a clear brand identity.

In this case, the developers primarily developed ideas for their immediate gatekeeping editors and the TV viewers were not considered as equally important in their idea development process. These developers used their knowledge about those preferences to generate suitable ideas to match the editors’ taste, similarly known as discerned savvy (Draper, 2014). This case study not only confirms Draper’s claims but also contributes with new insight into this concept and finds that discerned savvy is not exclusively an individual skill, but can work as a group-validated process with a group of developers making such evaluations as a collective. In this case, the developers used their discerned savvy and tried to guess which evaluative regimes they would be judged on, as well as trying to make the gatekeepers clarify their tastes so they could worry less about the quality of their ideas. The analysis shows that discerned savvy can even be used to describe the way that gatekeeping editors try to teach their preferences and the channel’s brand values to new partners. However, this does not mean that discerned savvy is used inevitably. There are still some cases in which the principle of discerned savvy is not followed by production teams, as I have discussed elsewhere (Andersen, 2017).

In this case, the intention to maximise creativity was present through a set of vague and open briefs. Within the group of developers, these briefs meant that the expectations for new ideas were equally elevated, which the developers found difficult to live up to in practice. Another explanation for why they found it difficult might be due to the group’s eventual use of self-censorship, where the developers abandoned some quite radical ideas because of ethical issues and organisational structures. This points to how DR3’s desire to experiment is somewhat opposed by DR’s organisational culture, because the developers assumed that such radical ideas would be rejected by the gatekeepers or by the larger surrounding DR organisation, which can potentially stop initiatives that go too far (and are, for example, unethical) or too fast compared to the organisation’s usual procedures.

This article has focused on a single case study and a mix of sources within this case, generating results that are probably mostly revealing for experimental public-service TV channels. Therefore, the results are not necessarily true for other kinds of TV channels and it would be interesting to compare this study with the idea development processes at independent/external production companies, or with the use of briefs in other media sectors, in order to find crucial differences and similarities between the media practices surrounding idea development. As Keith Sawyer has argued, we need more ethnographic studies of creative practices and idea development to further this research area (Sawyer, 2013: 301).

Creativity continues to be a tricky and debatable concept and there are no easy answers as to how creativity works since it is a multifaceted phenomenon. Based on my case study, creativity in television production can best be described as a complex interplay between a series of social mechanisms where systemic structures and powerful editors play an important role in the evaluation of, which products and ideas are ‘creative’. In many ways, DR3/DR Ung regard creativity as something that is beyond their control. Individuals and groups involved in TV idea development definitely experience sudden and mysterious inspiration occasionally (indicating that creativity is the result of individual or group genius). However, this case study also demonstrates that the decision of whether an idea is deemed creative also depends a great deal on gatekeeping editors and their individual tastes and evaluations, indicating that creativity is the result of sociocultural and social constructivist mechanisms.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Mads Møller T. Andersen

Notes

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