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< BACK TO Fresh Intelligence The Show VH1 Hopes You Find on Your Own
According to the show's co-producer, Dan Harmon, the network has done almost nothing to promote Acceptable, which is a collection of mini TV show "pilots" that the audience gets to vote to keep or trash via the show's website, acceptable.tv. Think Channel 101 (where Harmon honed his craft) but with a budget. [More groundbreaking—and windbreaking—video after the jump!] Harmon was so incensed by the lack of publicity that he ripped VH1 a new one in a screed to famed movie-nerd website Ain't It Cool News. "[VH1] think[s] their release of a commercial to TMZ, combined with Viacom's suing of YouTube, is groundbreaking cross-platform marketing. They also think Web Junk 20 is a good idea. They think lots of things. In the meantime, nobody really knows our show is going to be on the air." It's not the first time Harmon had to take matters into his own hands. A pilot he wrote for Fox called Heat Vision and Jack, about a rogue astronaut played by Black and a talking motorcycle voiced by Owen Wilson, never aired, but thanks to Harmon's hustling, it became a viral phenomenon on the Web. Could VH1 be banking on the same DIY approach with Acceptable? "I don't think they've thought it through that much." Harmon tells Radar. "[VH1] is just an incredibly bureaucratic place. It's like this clump of departments with no authority over each other. It's basically a daisy chain of buck-passing and shrugging." He calls the VH1-run website for Acceptable "an un-navigable mess. It's like a junk pile." The pilots currently on acceptable.tv have been up for about three weeks now, and they only have "1,000 to 2,000 views. Some only have 50 views." In addition to four pilots written by Harmon and his pals, Acceptable will air one viewer submitted pilot each night. Harmon does concede that the sheer number of times a week Acceptable will air is promotion in and of itself. "It will be on something like four times a week, two times a night. It's basic cable and it will be running constantly." As for whether Acceptable, um, will be in the eyes of the suits, he says, "I have faith that good shows get recognized."
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