• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, December 2, 2005

Lazy TV writers and producers now have a great way to stay asleep or stay at home in the morning while collecting checks for their successful shows: Have the fans write the episodes.

Showtime's "The L Word" has made a deal with Fanlib.com, a company that compiles scripts, ideas and story lines from fans. For the 12-week contest, fans will submit content for the show. A staff writer for the series will then combine the scenes into an episode, which I'm sure will be thrilling to the show's other paid writers and producers.

There is, in case you didn't know, a whole underground of viewers and aficionados who write alternative scripts and literature for many kinds of popular culture, TV shows, films, and books, for example. Fans can spend hours and days on such scripts (just like real writers who get paid).

Fanlib.com, of course, is really a marketing company, looking to expand the health and brand of TV shows and other entertainment. From a brand prospective getting fans close to their TV shows makes them perfect, unpaid, and sometimes unassuming "brand ambassadors."

In theory, it's the kind of marketing you can't buy.

Crazy young people with tons of time on their hands--many hours to craft ideas and scripts--are the target (as well as wannabe writers). I'm sure real TV writers will look at this activity and welcome the input. (Hello, Writers Guild of America!)

With marketing and advertising tools more varied and disparate, it's hard to build a critical mass for anything. That's where buzz and grassroots marketing comes in, which is rampant online. Entertainment executives, and their representatives, get on message boards to recruit their own "ambassadors" and "tastemakers" for specific TV shows, music artists, or theatrical films, all to create "word-of-mouth marketing."

But true word-of-mouth marketing isn't really manufactured by anything. "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" blew down the doors a couple of years back with $300 million-plus U.S. box office revenues with real word-of-mouth marketing (thanks to plenty of repeat business) that came out of thin air. Despite anything you heard from its savvy filmmakers, or advertising pundits, that movie's success was truly organic, lightning-in-the-jar stuff.

Other TV and films need a little push. Showtime could use the help with "The L Word" given the network's small base of subscribers and viewers.

I'm sure we don't need this for regular, mainstream TV shows--possibly not for "King of Queens." Of course I could be wrong. Perhaps Kevin James' Doug Heffernan character could quit his job, move to Iowa, work for competitor FedEx driving a truck, and become a drug czar.

Nah. Too sentimental. Get me rewrite!