TNT slates microseries with Devlin
Network gearing up for Acura pic
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Car company Acura has signed as sponsor of what TNT calls a "microseries."
Lisa Brenner will star as an amnesiac who becomes part of an experimental FBI program dedicated to solving murders by "implanting memories of the recently deceased into the living." Eric Stoltz and Clancy Brown also star.
"What we're doing is drastically segmenting a TV movie so that instead of a three-act structure, we've created a 20-act structure," said Devlin, awarding full credit to John Harrison, the writer-director of "Blank Slate." "Harrison has had to write a cliffhanger on every fifth page of the script."
TNT's scheduling of "Blank Slate" is unusual. For two consecutive Tuesdays and Wednesdays, beginning Sept. 8, the network will spread out the microseries across five back-to-back episodes of "Law & Order" over each of the four days (8 p.m. to 1 a.m.). One short "Blank Slate" episode will play, in sequence, within each of the "L&O" hours.
Linda Yaccarino, exec VP of ad sales and marketing for Turner Entertainment, said "Law & Order" reruns are the appropriate vehicle for the "Blank Slate" microseries because "L&O" "consistently grabs lots of viewers on TNT."
TNT plans an "intense marketing campaign," Yaccarino said, which makes it imperative that the amount of time dedicated to "Blank Slate" be compressed into two weeks. For people who miss a "Blank Slate" episode and need to catch up, TNT will promote the show's availability on TNT.tv, where the microseries becomes a series of webisodes. She said TNT is also working on including "Blank Slate" on TNT's on-demand platform.
Acura will not only sponsor "Blank Slate" on TNT and its website but also will embed its vehicles within the episodes themselves as a hedge against DVR users' fast-forwarding through the interstitial three-minute pods. Yaccarino said these pods will include no other commercial messages.
Devlin declined to specify how much TNT is paying for the microseries, or how much it cost his Electric Entertainment to produce the project, but said he'll try to cover the deficit through Electric's Voltage Pictures international-distribution arm.
"We're trying to cobble together the money," he said, through the sale of "Clean Slate" both in its microseries form and as a finished TV movie in countries outside the U.S. Electric still hasn't sold the domestic rights to the completed movie.
TNT has a number of other projects with Devlin, including 13 episodes of the action melodrama "Leverage," which will kick off later this year, and the third telepic in the "Librarian" adventure franchise, now in post-production.
