Must See TV or Must Keep TV: The Nuances of Creative Performance and Team Composition in Television

This study investigates the impact of creative team composition on two performance outcomes: commercial viability and survival. While prior research has tended to emphasize the benefits of insider-outsider balance, we find that television viewers and network executives react differently to shows produced by staffs featuring various staffing levels. Analyzing viewership numbers and renewal (i.e., survival) outcomes among US comedy shows airing on broadcast television (1987-2006), our empirical findings suggest that, while both viewers and executives demonstrate concerns over the impact of staffing choices on creative content, executives are more sensitive to various team composition choices. We unexpectedly find that executives prefer shows produced by teams with more extreme (very high and very low) levels of collaboration experience and plot content, while preferring shows featuring a balanced proportion of newcomers to the domain ("rookies"). Audience convergence appears in a specific way, as executives and viewers both prefer series produced by teams with a proportion of genre-spanning writers that matches the average throughout the genre. Our insights into the performance of creative teams, their staffing, and the role of executives in introducing novelty into a creative domain invites future research into the mechanisms driving success, selection, and innovation in project-based creative settings.