Working In Television

Before I went back to working a million hours on this Internet TV venture that is the soaps (which premiered today!), I spent many non-working hours figuring out how to transfer my skill set to something other than television. After all, I had been coordinating people and digital images and paperwork for lots of years. Wouldn't that make me marketable to do any one of those things in a non-TV world?
 
The transferring skills thing never amounted to much (though it made perfect sense to me), and before I knew it, I was back doing essentially the same thing I'd done for years, just with some different rules and a commute to a different state.
 
But today, as I read about the online premiere of the soaps I've been working on, I was reminded of some of the really great things about working in television. Here are a few:
 
1. Not always, but sometimes, a whole bunch of people write articles about what you're working on. Pretty cool.
 
2. You get to work with highly creative, and often quirky, people (which automatically gives you permission to be quirky when you want to be--as evidenced by my sushi socks and checked sneakers). Also pretty cool.
 
3. You get to tell stories. Or help other people tell better stories. Which is just plain fun.
 
4. Even people who don't watch the shows you work on think your job must be very exciting. And, though it may not be glamorous every moment, it is pretty exciting.
 
5. Hours spent together + quirkiness tends to make a group of people look a whole lot like a family. And it's kinda fun to go to work with family.
 
I still believe in transferable skills, and I am sure there will be countless opportunities down the road to transfer some of mine. But for now, I will happily work in television. There are still plenty of stories left to tell.