Mark interviews writer Alan Zweibel.
The Mark Simone Show
iHeartRadio and Mark Simone
4.3 • 694 Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | The show continues now. |
| 0:03.3 | Well, Alan Zweibel, the great writer, producer, comedian, best-selling author. Get his book, his life story. It's very funny. A lot of great stories. It's called Laugh Lif Lif Lines. You can get it on Amazon, Laugh Lif Lys. And it's great to have him back with us. Alan Zwey Bell, how you doing? I'm great. How are you, Mark? I'm good. |
| 0:21.8 | Hey, first, I want to ask you about |
| 0:23.0 | the network TV, |
| 0:24.1 | primetime network TV used to be the biggest sitcoms and dramas. It's all going away, you know, even Blue Blood's highest rated gets canceled because it costs too much money to do car chases and it's like making a movie every week and they replace it |
| 0:38.2 | they replace it with game shows and stuff well game shows are very very cheap to produce right |
| 0:45.2 | yeah and um very few car chases you know in a game show okay now family feud i never saw a car chase |
| 0:53.5 | yeah you know it's uh what it, yeah, you've got escalating a production course. |
| 0:59.7 | You have, as a series gets older and older, its cast gets more money and more money. |
| 1:05.5 | And after a while, I guess the networks look at it and go, okay, what kind of return are we getting on these investments? |
| 1:13.1 | And it's a shame because a lot of good shows get canceled for that reason. |
| 1:17.6 | Yeah, and years ago, prime time, you got the 30 million viewers. |
| 1:20.4 | You could pay for everything. |
| 1:21.3 | But now if you're going to get 2 million viewers, you can't have 25 cars in a chase scene and 4,000 trailers. |
| 1:27.8 | You know what it is? |
| 1:28.9 | The pie is split into so many pieces now, so many sections. |
| 1:33.8 | You know, you would go back, we're showing our age, but there was a time where there was only |
| 1:38.1 | ABC, CBS, and NBC. |
| 1:40.9 | And then Fox came along in the late 80s. |
| 1:44.2 | He had four networks. |
| 1:46.0 | Now, cable, streaming, all the other platforms, everybody is fighting for a little piece of that same pie, meaning the viewing audience. |
| 1:56.6 | Plus, you know, it's no longer a communal gathering to watch a show. |
... |
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