Television duel in American high politics

"This is my fiancé and I couldn't be more proud of this man than I am at this historic moment." The message was shared on Facebook by Janis Friedlander Svendsen, a former marketing executive and president of a charity, along with a home photograph. It showed her fiancé, Glenn Weiss, barefoot, in a T-shirt and shorts, in a room full of cables and television screens of all sizes, each divided into multiple squares, in which American flags and planes can be seen means of gentlemen with ties. "He has spent months with endless calls from Zoom working on aspects of production and directing the Democratic National Convention," explained the bride (who, by the way, Weiss famously asked to marry him live at an Emmy gala). "First he was going to go to Milwaukee, then to Delaware and in the end, as there were so many remote live shows, he had a whole control room installed in our house."

A total of 287 speakers, 50 of them live. Connections with the public in their homes. Thousands of people involved. The producer and the director separated by more than 4,000 kilometers. And the control center in the living room of a house in Brentwood (California), in the middle of a heat wave, running on Weiss's home internet server and backed by a generator in the backyard that the director himself turned on every day 15 minutes before the show.

When, after months of changes in plans imposed by the pandemic, the Democratic Party made the decision to forgo the traditional live entertainment and that its National Convention would be an entirely virtual event, director Glenn Weiss and producer Ricky Kirshner clashed with a job unlike any they had undertaken in their long careers. Eight hours of television, divided into four nights, with pieces broadcast from dozens of locations scattered throughout the country. With several Emmy Awards behind them, nine Kirshner and 14 Weiss, and a new nomination for this year's edition for their joint work at the 2019 Tonys Theater Awards ceremony, they were clear at least one thing. "The first thing we said is that this was not going to be a gigantic Zoom call," Kirshner explained at Variety. "Our whole plan was how to make this look like live television."

The convention turned out to be a most entertaining and effective television show, praised by figures from both parties, which set the bar high for the Republican Convention, which ends Thursday with Donald Trump's acceptance speech. A president with extensive television experience, who, given the magnitude of the challenge, decided to turn to one of the producers of The Apprentice, the reality show that launched him to stardom before embarking on his presidential career. This is Sadoux Kim, who served as chief production consultant for the Convention, according to The New York Times . Kim was also a Miss Universe jury when Trump owned the show. Also working with Kim is Chuck LaBella, a former NBC entertainment executive who helped produce a satirical piece about Trump on Comedy Central.

They had even less time than the Democrats to put on their television show. The president gave up his plans to hold a traditional convention in Jacksonville, Florida, just a month before it was to take place. Four weeks to a four-day show, usually a year in advance, planned for months by Democrats, who earlier scrapped the idea of ​​the traditional convention.

A handful of advisers to the president, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, according to Politico , sat at a blank slate. There was no established budget, no cast of participants, no venue. For added stress, the president himself, a great lover of television, has been on top of every detail, correcting the length of each speech over and over again, and deciding which ones should be recorded and which ones live. The first lady has also been closely involved in the production.

The result, in both cases, was an innovative and powerful television product, but with less audience than the traditional conventions of four years ago. A drop of 29% for Republicans, and 27% for Democrats, on the first night. The data has a trick: due to the rise of digital streaming, television audiences are generally much lower than four years ago. And millions of spectators saw the conventions directly on their computers with the signal offered on social networks, newspapers or by the organizers themselves. Regarding whether there was a winner, on the first night the Democrats prevailed: 18.7 million viewers compared to 16 million for the Republicans. Those yes, as always, the preferred channel to see it was Fox News, the favorite of the Republicans.