Behind the (TV) scenes w/ a guinea pig

Did I ever mention that I grew up watching hours and hours of television, day after day? To give credit to whom credit is due, I owe much of my correct phonics and knowledge of concepts like "cooperation" and "the people in your neighborhood" to Sesame Street (not to mention, openness to imaginary friends). And Little House on the Prairie was a subtle testament (at least in my mind) that family togetherness and not abundance in material comforts played a key factor in attaining personal happiness.

Here's a fascinating peek into what goes on behind the scenes before TV show makes it to a regular time slot:

The testing process begins in one of the two 48-seat theaters at ASI. Members of the Television Critics Association, invited to ASI for a demonstration, gather in the black screening room, no food or drinks in hand. "The equipment is very sensitive," says Neal LaVine, the theater director. Two large tinted glass panes stare back at us from the front of the room. In a normal test, clients who have paid some $20,000 for two-hours worth of testing watch the proceedings from plush, black-leather chairs behind those windows. Two average-sized TV screens blink down at us from high on the wall. No high-def or giant screens here, because that's not what the average viewer owns, says CEO David Castler. "We're not going to go with plasma to enhance the program," he adds.

The seats have fold-up tabletops. Velcroed to the side is a pencil and the wired dial pad with five degrees of "like" to "dislike" on its face. We also have a phone pad of buttons on which I find the red button telling ASI that if I were home, I'd hit the remote.

But that's only two minutes or so into the show, which turns out to be an unaired (gee, really?) UPN pilot called "I Spike," from the 2000 season. The show speeds on, full of silly car chases, scantily clad young women, and lots of serious posing and pouting reminiscent of early Aaron Spelling fare. By the time the show finishes, the room has dissolved into banks of hoots and snickers. A graph with falling stock-market-type spider lines shows up on the screen. Mr. Castler explains that the red line represents the women's responses while the blue line shows the men's. When this graph is superimposed in real time over the show itself, the clients can actually see, second by second, exactly which bits the audience liked/disliked.

Read Before TV shows air, they have to survive...The Lab
We spend the morning being guinea pigs at ASI, the firm that does audience testing of new TV shows.
By Gloria Goodale | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor