#==============================================
#  Two OPEN letters to the Fans of Dark Skies
#==============================================
#  First letter of May 2, 1997 prior to the 
#  announcement of cancellation by NBC, then a 
#  second letter dated May 12 from Bryce Zabel 
#  regarding the official cancellation. - KR
#==============================================

STROKE OF MIDNIGHT
Dark Skies Over Hollywood

BRYCE ZABEL
Co-Creator/Executive Producer

VERSION #2
Updated May 2, 1997


Welcome to the Resistance.

By now, most of you know the litany of injustice: bad time-
slot, constant pre-emptions, no repeats, little promotion 
after getting on-the-air and misguided critics acting like 
somebody else owned the copyright to UFOs and government 
conspiracy.  It all adds up to a show on the verge of 
extinction.  Just another one-season wonder, destined to 
fade into distant memory.

Do you have to accept this fate for a show you care about?  
Not necessarily.  After all, John Loengard had to face an 
alien invasion that went after the woman he loved and 
threatened to destroy the planet, as well as a government 
which felt it was more important to keep the secret than to 
tell the people.  He fought back and spoke out and you can, 
too.

While producing our twenty hours of programming during the 
past season, I have kept close watch on the message boards 
and web sites.  I understand your frustration.  Since NBC 
put the show into a record-breaking nine-week pre-emption 
last March 15, many of you have no idea what’s happening.  
Since then my e-mail box has overflowed with messages 
telling me to do something to keep "Dark Skies" on-the-air.

The truth is simply this.  A writer/producer can’t save the 
show.  Only a genuine expression from you, the fans  well 
timed, clearly stated and numerically significant  can do 
that.  You have the power and you can use it if you choose 
to.  

THIS LETTER WILL MAKE CLEAR EXACTLY WHAT OUR SITUATION IS 
AND IT WILL GIVE YOU CONCRETE, SPECIFIC SUGGESTIONS FOR HOW 
YOU CAN BRING THE SERIES BACK FOR A SECOND SEASON.

In order to pull this off, you have to make a lot of noise 
to the right people.  You have to start NOW, and keep it up 
for several weeks.  Not only will your communications get 
the attention of the Powers-That-Be, but the Media will get 
wind of your passion.  That will give legitimacy to your 
effort and, possibly, create a miracle.

Let’s get one thing in perspective.  Only because NBC is 
the #1 network in a mass medium is the show ready to fold.  
You are not an insignificant group.  At least seven million 
people each week (and often more) fought to watch the show, 
against all the odds.  

The way to flex your muscles is to start COMMUNICATING your 
case.  In the world of swaying network decision makers, 
there is a clear hierarchy as to what works best.  

AN HONEST-TO-GOD LETTER ('SNAIL MAIL') STILL GETS THE BEST 
RESULT.  

It tells them you cared enough to write something, to find 
an envelope and to pay 32 cents to mail it to them.  That’s 
commitment.  It also forces them to open and process these 
letters.  That’s consciousness.  

After letters, try phone calls and e-mail.  Send a 
telegram.  Stir up your friends and fellow fans.  Whatever 
else you can think of.  This has to be your Resistance, not 
mine.

NBC will announce its fall schedule on May 12th.  They are 
already locking it in.  For example, The Pretender and 
Profiler (the other two-thirds of the Thrillogy) have 
just been given full-season orders.  Although I have not 
received any notification, it’s been reported that they 
have cancelled us.  It’s not official, however, until it’s 
announced May 12, 1997 at a big bash in New York City.

To use the E/R take, our show is on life support, and our 
NBC family is about to pull the plug.  We have to talk them 
out of it.  There is time, but it is running out fast.  
Here’s how to get in touch with NBC:

Warren Littlefield
President, NBC
3000 West Alameda Avenue,
Burbank, California 91523
(818) 840-4444
darkskies@nbc.com

Tell Warren Littlefield how much Dark Skies has meant to 
you.  Tell him how hard it’s been for you to establish a 
regular appointment with the show like other fans do with 
hit series like Friends and E/R.  If you record the 
show on your VCR, break off one of those little black 
recording tabs, and tape it to your letter.  Tell him about 
the friends you’ve shown your videotape to who are never 
measured by Nielsen ratings.  After you’ve written 
Littlefield, you may want to fire off something to Don 
Ohlmeyer, the man whose original enthusiasm caused him to 
actually buy Dark Skies for NBC in the first place.  
Ohlmeyer can be reached at the same address.

While you’re at it, you may want to mention Robin Cooke’s: 
Invasion, a four hour mini-series which airs the first 
week of May (Sunday/Monday).  Tell NBC to order up the real 
thing (Dark Skies) for a second season since they 
obviously believe that alien invasion can be an audience 
grabber for them.  Ask them how well they think we would 
have done given the time slot for Invasion.

Having said all this, however, understand this is not about 
bashing NBC (at least from my perspective).  They gave us 
the biggest promotional send-off in the network’s history.  
Also, the creative executives we dealt with, David Nevins 
and John Landgraf, gave us the support to do the show we 
set out to do with very little interference.  

HERE’S WHERE OUR LITTLE GUERILLA SAVE-THE-SHOW MOVEMENT 
GETS UNCONVENTIONAL.  

Ordinarily, griping to NBC would be it.  Historically, 
viewers write the network which is about to cancel their 
favorite show and tell them not to.  The networks, 
naturally, do it anyway.  The fans are upset, but there’s 
no recourse and they eventually forget about it.  Well, 
this internet which binds you together isn’t the only sign 
of changing times.

For starters, we don’t live in a three network universe 
anymore.  There are five other networks besides NBC now, 
multiple cable outlets, and syndicators, all competing for 
the best product.  In other words, there are OPTIONS.  In 
the past few years, several shows have gone from one 
network to another.  Last season, NBC cancelled JAG but 
CBS picked it up.  Also last season, ABC cancelled The 
Jeff Foxworthy Show but NBC put it on their schedule.  
They also picked up Tea Leone’s The Naked Truth from 
another network.  This kind of thing is happening more and 
more it’s something of a trend.

This is probably the show’s best bet, turning this 
increasing possibility of musical chairs to work for you.  
Once you’ve made your point to NBC, keep right on going.  
Write to everyone else: ABC, CBS, FBC, UPN, WBN.

You see, right now Hollywood is in the final hours of pilot 
season.  All the series pilots have already been shot, and 
are in final editing before delivery to their respective 
networks.  It’s all part of this insane ritual the networks 
do every May when they get the pilot films, look at them 
quickly, get lobbied by the production companies, make some 
last-minute changes and then go off to New York for several 
weeks of parties as they announce the schedules.  Decisions 
are being made and changed, even as you read this.

IT IS NEVER TOO LATE.  LAST YEAR, NBC DECIDED THE FRIDAY 
BEFORE THE MONDAY ANNOUNCEMENT TO PUT DARK SKIES ON THEIR 
SCHEDULE!

So, if you want to have an impact on some of these other 
network executives, you still can.  These are the names and 
addresses you’ll need for that campaign:

UPN announces its schedule on May 20th.  Many people think 
this could be our best shot.  If our audience came over to 
UPN, we’d be a bona fide hit, at least as big or bigger 
than Star Trek: Voyager.  Their other sci-fi drama, The 
Burning Zone, came in dead last in the ratings last week.  
They could use us and SONY (our production company) could 
make them an attractive financial deal.

Lucie Salhaney
President, UPN
11800 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90025
(310) 575-7000
http://www.upn.com/email2.html

CBS-TV announces its schedule on May 22nd.  Last year when 
SONY sold Dark Skies to NBC, they were very interested in 
buying it themselves.  This could be their second chance.

Les Moonves
President, CBS-TV
7800 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(213) 852-2345
audsvcs@cbs.com

ABC-TV announces its schedule on May 19th.  They’ve gone 
through a lot of changes this year but Jamie Tarses, the 
new president, was at NBC when Dark Skies was being 
developed.  Also, ABC knows that our time slot (8 pm, 
Saturdays) is a show killer.  They just moved Lois and 
Clark: The New Adventures of Superman into the slot and 
it’s getting crushed.  The ratings for that show are far 
worse than ours ever were.

Jamie Tarses
President, ABC-TV
2040 Avenue of the Stars
Los Angeles, CA 90067
(310) 557-7777

FBC-TV announces its schedule on May 20th.  They’re a 
natural for a show like ours, except for the fact that they 
also have The X-Files and Chris Carter has made it clear 
he doesn’t much like us around.  We’ve heard that he’s even 
forbidden any Thrillogy writers from ever being considered 
for one of his shows.  Fortunately, Chris isn’t running the 
network yet.  For the time being, you can write to:

Peter Roth
President, FBC-TV
10201 W. Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90035
(310) 369-1000

WBN announces its schedule on May 13th.  This could be a 
longer shot than most since they seem to be aiming for 
ethnic comedies but, as with UPN, if even half our NBC 
audience transferred over to them, they’d have a hit on 
their hands.

Jamie Kellner
President, WBN
4000 Warner Blvd.
Burbank, CA 91522
(818) 977-5000

Tell the presidents of these other five networks that you 
watch Dark Skies and that if NBC is foolish enough to 
cancel us and they’re smart enough to pick us up, you will 
follow the show to their network.  Don’t forget to mention 
that you will tell all your friends what a terrific network 
they have become thanks to this enlightened decision.

Hopefully, you will all be able to weave what you’ve seen 
of the series on-the-air so far, what you’ve thought and 
felt, conversations with friends, and the rest of this 
letter, into some heart-felt arguments for Dark Skies. 

So what happened?  How did a series which began with the 
biggest promotional push in the entire history of the NBC 
network end up at the bottom of the heap for the season in 
need of a letter-writing campaign to keep it alive?

It started with our time slot.  Saturday nights are 
historically the worst viewing nights.  People go out, they 
party, they see movies, and they have dinner.  They don’t 
maintain regular viewing habits.  

The 8 o’clock slot on Saturday nights is the worst time 
slot on the worst night.  Granted, our competition, Doctor 
Quinn: Medicine Woman, did well there but their family 
audience is home watching TV while ours tended to be out 
having a life.  And, even so, Quinn has been on for a 
number of years and had time to build an audience.

Some people thought that even if we were on Saturdays we 
should have been on at 9 or 10 o’clock.  Our concepts were 
adult, they reasoned, and so were our story lines.  The 
Pretender, in contrast, seemed much more acceptable to a 
younger, family audience.  They got a try-out in our time 
slot and, apparently, NBC is going to give The Pretender 
the 8 o’clock slot next season.  That series was even 
exposed twice in the coveted E/R time slot this season.  
Dark Skies never was tried anywhere on the schedule but 
its original death slot.

Death slot or not, if people are going to even have a 
chance to watch, you still have to be on-the-air.  It’s the 
immutable law of TV.  We routinely ran across people in our 
internet chat groups who saw the show mentioned in their 
local TV listings but couldn’t find it on the tube because 
local stations had pre-empted us for everything from 
college basketball to Billy Graham.  Those people got upset 
and angry and I don’t know if they ever came back.  

Many of you were also upset by all the network scheduled 
pre-emptions.  After only two airings, for example, we were 
taken off the schedule for two weeks by NBC because of the 
baseball play-offs and the World Series.  We faced four 
more sets of pre-emptions of two to three weeks each time.  
Networks have to pre-empt, of course, because they don’t 
make as many episodes as there are weeks in the year, but 
often they run re-runs or promos telling your audience when 
you’ll be back.  

We were never repeated at all this season, not once.  Even 
when we went into a pre-empt, there was never a notice at 
the end of one of our last shows when the next show would 
air.  On the other hand, both The Pretender and 
Profiler had multiple repeats.

Because of the sporadic exposure for Dark Skies, as early 
as October many viewers simply assumed the series was 
cancelled.  My own friends thought this and the constant 
rumor on all our web sites all year long was that NBC had 
taken us off the air for good.  This is not the kind of 
environment in which a series can hold an audience, let 
alone build one.

Why the preferential treatment of one show over another?  
Well, both The Pretender and Profiler are either owned 
or partially owned by NBC-TV.  I have no evidence that this 
has made a difference, but there are people in the business 
who tell me it probably did.  A few years ago, the U-S 
Congress allowed the networks to own their own shows 
instead of buying them from others.  It was supposed to 
increase competition but it’s had the opposite effect.  
After all, is it any wonder that a network would care more 
about a series in which it has a financial interest?

There were other obstacles to our success which went beyond 
NBC programming choices.  Fox, for example, runs network 
programming at 8 o’clock and they don’t at 10 o’clock.  We 
had to face Fox’s Cops which, with its heavy male appeal, 
struck straight at our core audience every airing while 
Profiler faced only local news.  Plus, depending on your 
local station, we often found ourselves up against 
Hercules and Star Trek, splitting the sci-fi crowd even 
further.

Speaking of something that hurt us badly at the first of 
the year was the perception in the sci-fi community that we 
were an X-Files rip-off.  This was the easy hook for 
critics to use in writing their reviews.  It soon became a 
loyalty test.  You couldn’t like Dark Skies if you liked 
X-Files.  This makes no more sense, of course, than 
telling viewers they couldn’t like NYPD Blue and 
Homicide or that once they made Bonanza nobody could 
ever make another western without ripping it off.

Eventually people who watched Dark Skies decided, for 
better or worse, we were not the same show at all, but the 
perception cut into our natural constituency, and we were 
only beginning to recover from it in the last few months.

Around the rest of the planet, however, critics and 
audiences alike were more receptive to the uniqueness of 
what we were up to.  In England, where we are on weeknights 
at 9 o’clock without pre-emptions, we’re getting a 21 
share, tied with the E/R numbers.  Dark Skies is 
currently a world-wide series, airing in Germany, South 
Africa, Australia, Brazil, etc.  It’s doing well in all 
these countries.  We have web sites all over the globe.  
SONY gets enough money from these international sales that 
all they need to keep things financially viable is a US 
buyer.  Anybody will do.

All of this damn near created a situation where people in 
the rest of the world got to see all the episodes but those 
of you in the United States did not.  Fortunately, that 
will not happen.  You will still have the opportunity to 
see how the season turned out.  NBC is still planning on 
airing the final two episodes. 

Strangers in the Night will air May 24th.  Our season 
finale, Bloodlines, will air on May 31st.  There is more 
story packed into Bloodlines than a normal five episodes.  
Mark your calendars for that one.

That final episode takes you to San Francisco in the 
Summer of Love where you’ll meet Timothy Leary, Carl 
Sagan, Ronald Reagan and Charlie Manson, among others.  
You’ll find out what happens to Kim, whether John finds his 
son or not, and you’ll hear about a tenth planet, Project 
Intruder, and the bloodlines concept.  

This potentially final episode is a terrific example of 
what has made Dark Skies unique: Big Ideas, Outrageous 
Concepts, and Twisted History.  In fact, when you write NBC 
tell them to actually watch this episode before it airs on 
May 31st.  Tell them to consider it a bonus pilot, and to 
compare it to what they’ve just shelled out a lot of money 
to produce.  When you write the other networks, tell them 
to call SONY and ask for a copy themselves.

Your priority is to write NBC first, then to try the other 
five networks who are setting their schedules in the next 
couple of weeks.  However, you needn’t stop there.

KEEP HOPE ALIVE.

Write the Sci-Fi Channel.  They wanted to pick us up and we 
even had a meeting to that effect.  The problem is they 
don’t have the money.  Maybe buried under an avalanche of 
letters they’d find some more.  At the very least, badger 
them to buy the first 20 hours and put them on right away.  
The Sci-Fi Channel is owned and operated by the USA 
Network.

Rod Perth
USA Network - Los Angeles
2049 Century Park East, Suite 2550
Los Angeles, CA. 90067

Write HBO and Showtime.  We could really do a memorable 
show on a cable channel.  Imagine Dark Skies unleashed  
no restrictions on nudity, language, violence and certainly 
none on sheer outrageous energy.

HBO Original Programming
2049 Century Park East, Suite 4200
Los Angeles, CA. 90067
http://www.hbo.com/cmp.feedback.html

Showtime Networks, Inc.
10880 Wilshire Blvd., Suites 1500  1600
Los Angeles, CA. 90024

Bottom line: there is time, but it is running out.  If 
you’ve read this letter on a website posting, tell other 
fans about it.  If you’ve had it attached and e-mailed to 
you, attach and e-mail it to as many of your friends and 
fellow travelers as you can.  Make this the international 
chain letter that sets the standard for fan activism in the 
new Millennium.

Let’s start our own little conspiracy.  Maybe we’ll save 
the show.  But if any guys in black suits and shades come 
to your door asking where you got these addresses  we 
never had this conversation.  Okay?

Resist Singularity,

BRYCE ZABEL
Co-Creator, Executive Producer Dark Skies


#================================================================


KEEPING THE SKIES DARK
Fan Campaign to Save "Dark Skies"
Phase Two
Updated May 12, 1997

NBC officially announced today that they will not have Dark Skies on the
fall schedule. This is what we expected. Fan's letters, e-mail,
telegrams and faxes to them, however, have already helped by starting
decision-makers in Hollywood talking about your efforts. Now, your
attention must turn to finding the new home for the series.

Your communications fire-power now goes in the direction of the other
networks, who announce their schedules after NBC. In reality, it was a
bonus that the Peacock went first because it leaves everyone else open
to your persuasion. Those crucial new players are: 

Jamie Tarses
President, ABC-TV
2040 Avenue of the Stars
Los Angeles, CA 90067
(310) 557-7777
Announces schedule on May 19.

Peter Roth
President, FBC-TV
10201 W. Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90035
(310) 369-1000
Announces schedule on May 20.

Lucie Salhaney (President, UPN)
 and/or 
Kerry McCluggage (Chairman, Paramount Television Group)
11800 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90025
(310) 575-7000
 http://www.upn.com/email2.html
High Priority!  Announces schedule on May 20.

Les Moonves
President, CBS-TV
7800 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(213) 852-2345
audsvcs@cbs.com
Wanted Dark Skies last year.  Anounces schedule May 22.

Rod Perth
USA Network - Los Angeles
Attention: Sci-Fi Channel
2049 Century Park East, Suite 2550
Los Angeles, CA. 90067
Already expressed interest in "Dark Skies."

HBO Original Programming
2049 Century Park East, Suite 4200
Los Angeles, CA. 90067
http://www.hbo.com/cmp.feedback.html

Showtime Networks, Inc.
10880 Wilshire Blvd., Suites 1500 - 1600
Los Angeles, CA. 90024

The explanations for low ratings on NBC are as follows:
* Worst time slot (8pm) on worst viewing night (Saturday).
* Early and consistent pre-emptions.
* No repeats.
* No real promos after the launch of the series.
* Because of this, many potential viewers thought the show was cancelled.
* Most potential viewers of this material are out on Saturday night anyway.

Key points to make to these people:
* You will follow Dark Skies to their network and tell your friends.
* Based on people you know, Dark Skies was just starting to find an audience.
* Dark Skies will work much better on their network than it did on NBC.
* Like X-Files and Star Trek, Dark Skies needs a second season to really take off.

Remember, when communicating your thoughts to network executives, a real
letter (snail mail) works best. It tells them you care enough to write
something, to find an envelope and to pay 32 cents to mail it to them.
That's commitment. It also forces them to open and process these
letters. That's consciousness. 

So let's go out and raise a little more of it in Hollywood ...

Resist Singularity!

