Let’s start with a reality check: just because you’re good at creating live stage shows doesn’t mean you have any talent whatsoever at creating good TV shows or motion pictures. That’s like assuming that baseball players should make good football players – sure, they’re both sports – but the similarities kind of end right there.

Second City’s first forays into film and television didn’t go so well. There’s an early film called The Monitors that’s not very good and we had a host of television shows that went nowhere.

It wasn’t until Lorne Michaels raided our stable of actors to debut Saturday Night Live that Second City realized it needed to get into the TV game pronto. The results of those efforts were the quirky but brilliant sketch show SCTV. Not only did SCTV launch the careers of John Candy, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy and others, it took what Second City does best in the live arena – create memorable characters and skewer the icons of popular culture – and used the television milieu to make fun of television itself. SCTV was all about biting the hand that fed it. The show was a send up of idiot television executives, c-list celebrity talk shows and a slew of spot-on parodies of folks like Bob Hope, Woody Allen and Jerry Lewis.

After SCTV’s near ten year run, The Second City once again drifted into producing a series of pilots and short run series – nothing that had the kind of award-winning success that SCTV garnered.

But things might be looking up. Today, comedy on television is being led by an almost exclusive club of Second City alumni. Tina Fey’s 30 Rock just racked up 17 Emmy Award nominations. Her show features a cast of fellow Second City alums. Steve Carell is now a mega-star whose work on The Office also earned him an Emmy nomination. His former Daily Show partner in crime, Stephen Colbert, has become an icon of the times in his series for Comedy Central.

All those shows share a common trait. They embody the principals of improvisation as taught at The Second City:

• Play to the top of your Intelligence
• Make your partner look good
• Trust the audience

Carell and Fey have developed incredible ensembles – actors share the spotlight and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Colbert has shown fearlessness in his ability to don the cloak of a complete right wing nut. Like any great satirist, he trusts that the audience will understand that he is making fun of himself and the outrageous things that he says.

I recently did a tour of studio meetings in Los Angeles with the head of our television and film division. It’s amazing at how the industry is changing. The traditional comedy sitcom isn’t working – just check your TV guide, there’s almost no new sitcoms being aired this fall. With more content available via cable and the Internet – and the popularity of gaming continuing to soar – television executives are starting to realize that the days of developing a single comedy show that everyone watches are over. It’s more important now to develop a comedy show that has a strong appeal to a clear demographic – a demographic that the advertisers want to reach. This will actually be good in the long run for the comedy producers. We won’t have to create middle of the road material that is sure not to offend anyone. Instead, we can create highly original work that only needs to speak to a smaller part of the audience – it just needs to speak clearly and intelligently.

The comedy is coming back to television. Just stay tuned.

The SECOND?CITY has joined Campus Activities Magazine as a partner to further help address the needs of student buyers in dealing with issues they face on their campuses. We are proud of this alliance with an organization which has given nearly 50 years to the American public, turning out some of the country’s most recognizable comedy artists.

To learn more about The Second City, contact Fleming Artists at (734) 995-9066 or go to Second City.com