This is a fine essay on the importance of having a marketable concept. That said, I'm a bit concerned that he's overgeneralizing from a biased sample set: His

This is a fine essay on the importance of having a marketable concept. That said, I'm a bit concerned that he's overgeneralizing from a biased sample set: His major examples (besides his own comic) are TV series. TV series often take time to get started; they always have. To pick some examples close to the geek heart: Star Trek:TNG had a crappy first season. Babylon Five had a very spotty first season. There's a reason for this: traditionally, the first half-season of the typical TV show was written by a team of more-or-less freelance writers who worked from a "series bible": A big book written by the series creator that describes the characters and the setting and some of the possible plot directions. [1] They might also have had a pilot script, or even an actual pilot, to work from. But these writers would not necessarily have seen the actors performing in their roles. They might not even have known who the actors were. So their scripts would form an odd patchwork that would be stitched together by the producer, the director, and the actors on the fly. By the third season, however, things would have sorted themselves out: The producers would have found a stable of writers they like, the writers would have seen the older episodes and have some idea of how the actors inhabited the characters, there would be a canon to draw upon, and so on. --- [1] This has changed, of course, particularly for drama series. Heroes was awesome from the first moment; most people agree that it was all downhill from season one. Other shows -- Firefly, the new Doctor Who -- also exhibit the pattern of initial awesomeness. This is arguably because the economics of TV series production has changed a lot: The rise of DVD box sets has changed the target audience and the product life cycle for TV series, and the way shows are pitched, produced, and financed has changed. And it's probably also because writers and producers have learned from the experience of shows like Babylon Five and X-Files and, later, Buffy: Show runners seem to have a greater tendency to be highly capable writers who are given much more control over the early episodes, often to the point where they will write most of those episodes personally.