It’s Time Again

The Time is Right Now.

About 17 years ago I had what I thought was a great idea. I was in the throws of motherhood with 5 kids aged 3-11. My mind scurried from one problem to another, one situation to another and who to ask about what. My TV background lurched to the surface and suddenly intersected with my current world. Wait a minute! Why isn’t there a TV show for this. All I see are vapid experts spouting out the same old same old who’ve never been through the experience themselves. Useless information.

And so I thought WOW we can do this! We can make a real TV show really relevant to moms who are seeking answers. We’ll get the answers from real moms who’ve been through the trenches or are currently wading through the trenches. Nobody’s doing that, not even close.

It took a long time to convince others, well my husband, what a brilliant idea this was. Where are you going to get the experts he asked? That would depend on your definition of an expert I would guess. Someone with an “education” or someone with “experience”? And so for years it went where all good ideas go, on the back burner! I would bring it up a lot, but not knowing exactly what to do with it, it traveled back to the back burner.

My husband grew tired of my constant refrain and suggested we do a test! Let’s get a group of moms in our living room, set up a camera and see what happens. What happened was astonishing. The moms opened up, shared stories, laughed, came up with better ways, helped each other and had an amazing time! It was fascinating! It was working.

So what now? Let’s test it again. Get some set topics. Match up different moms, maybe even moms we don’t know. Test it with just moms and test it with a local celebrity host that happens to be a mom. See what happens. It happened again. Amazing results. Powerful shows. Something that made a difference.

Where do we go with this? New York & LA where programs get programmed. And who did we talk to? Men. They kind of understood, they even kinda liked it, they thought their wives would like it, but they wanted to reshape it to fit in the same parameters that every other program did.

No we don’t want it to be on an expensive stage like Oprah, no we don’t want movie stars as the moms, no we don’t want a studio audience. We just want honest moms sharing their life and their experience. We think that will be interesting in its own right.

We had one studio in Hollywood that loved the idea, but still wanted the standard changes. That wasn’t the show though. I just didn’t want to duplicate everything else that was on the air, even if “moms” was the new angle. So we walked away and more time went by.

And then we thought, maybe a local station would like this show. And so we talked to a couple. One station said it would be impossible for me to keep up with the load and give them a half hour show 5 days a week, the other station said ok we’ll try it. No money just some inventory in the show that we could sell.

We hired a production company to set up the cameras & equipment & record the show and hired a small team of editors to fit the show in the 22 minutes of time and leave room for the commercials. I won’t go into all the production details producing 20+ shows in a weekend, plus different segments to edit into those shows. It was a simple formula, but it was also intricate. We had so many different, amazing moms and fitting them into their topics & time slots was absolutely crazy! But it worked.

We produced over 120 shows that ran Monday through Friday for 6 months. Life happened during that time, a lot of life happened. We had a lot of help, but it was a shoestring. We sold some ads, but not enough. It just cost us way too much. By then the Housewives of Orange County and every other city & state was on and the station expected us to fight. That wasn’t really the show though. There were some disagreements that broke out and some disagreements that the moms backed off on and they did not like that. They wanted to be friendly and helpful, not argumentative and mean.

Meanwhile back in Hollywood at CBS, they took my idea and produced the show the way they wanted it. It’s called “The Talk” and is still on the air, though it’s morphed into something a little bit different over the years.

We didn’t really know what we had and what we were providing to people. I certainly don’t think I realized or valued in all that workload, that we were helping families, that we had this terrific, strong resource to provide moms and dads and families with quality information to strengthen and enlighten and encourage and promote the family. I think deep down I realized that the world was working to destroy that strong family unit, but in trying to keep all the balls in the air and fighting what the world wanted, I didn’t recognize what we had to offer.

We started the show in the 2nd half of 2009, 12 years ago. Now with all the amazing technology available, I think it’s time to reset and restart and reoffer this solid resource to families. After all that’s taken place in the last 12 years, we have a much clearer understanding of what we’ve been up against and how we can each contribute to rebuilding our country one family at a time.

Maybe we were 12 years ahead of time. Maybe we needed that 6 months of time to put some pieces in place that we could pick up later when people were ready. I think we’re ready now. I think we can make a difference now. The Great Awakening is happening on many fronts. The family and especially moms are my focus.

Let’s do this.