Behind the Scenes 
Television
Off With the Show
Austin Stories was every network’s dream: cheap to produce, highly rated, and critically acclaimed. So why did MTV pull the plug?
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And then the trouble began. Before the show went into production, MTV brought in a new executive vice president, Brian Graden, who would come to oversee Lisa Berger; as such, he would now be the one making decisions that affected Austin Stories. “That’s when things got real shaky,” Howard says. The premiere came off amid a flurry of promotion, and when USA Today gave the show three and a half stars out of four, the network sent everyone a bottle of champagne—yet almost immediately, according to Jones and the cast members, MTV began cutting back on advertising and often preempted the show without warning. “They never said ‘Austin Stories isn’t airing this week.’” Howard says. “You just turned on the television, and there was some other show on.”
Although Graden never told anyone on the show directly, he made it clear through executive producer Carol Eng that he was dissatisfied with the scripts. “The writing wasn’t weak for the New York Times or anybody else, but it was weak for Graden,” Howard recalls, “so that became the party line.” Tensions escalated when production on the eighth episode shut down for a week while the producers and the network haggled over the script. If it wasn’t fixed, MTV warned, there would be no shoot. All was resolved, but the show was behind schedule and had exhausted its budget, and MTV decided not to shoot a thirteenth episode. The trouble, Jones believes, was that because Graden wasn’t involved in the creation of the show, he had no stake in its success. “Austin Stories was perceived as a Lisa Berger production,” Jones says. “This is all speculation, but he had a certain amount of money to spend, and he had his own pilots he wanted to produce.”
An entertainment executive who has done deals with MTV for ten years believes that the network was undergoing a transformation. While it was airing some non-music shows, its ratings were sagging across the board, and it now wanted to shift back to its musical roots, especially since its sister network, VH1, was doing very nicely with musical programs like Pop-Up Video. “Graden came into a firepit,” says the executive, who asked not to be named. “Austin Stories didn’t get attacked as much as it fell through the cracks. It did moderately well in the ratings—not extraordinarily well, like Beavis and Butt-head—and might have been a critical success, but it didn’t fit into the vision of the channel. What was he supposed to do with a show like that? He had an order to turn around programming. He was just doing his job.”
When shooting wrapped in November, Jones quit and later took a job at Castle Rock Entertainment, and the cast members were left to sit tight until MTV gave them a sign. They were supposed to have been told if they would have a second season by the fifth episode, but well after the final show had aired, they still hadn’t heard. “First it was, ‘We’ll know by the fifth show,’ then by the last, then by Christmas, then by Valentine’s Day,” Laura says. “You go on and live your life in a way, but it was like I had one foot in MTV. I didn’t get a job; I thought I was going to be working. If I had it to do over again, I would say, ‘They haven’t promised me anything’ and just sign up for guitar lessons.”
The cast members suspect that MTV was exercising a clause in their contract that said the network could keep them on a leash until five months after the final episode had aired. Though the eleventh episode had aired in November, MTV held the twelfth and final one until January. “No promotion,” Howard says. “It just came on one day.” Was this part of MTV’s grand plan? “I don’t know if they’re smart enough to have thought that far ahead,” Weitzman says.
In January Graden commissioned a record number of pilots for MTV. At the same time, the network suggested that Laura, Chip, and Howard fly out to Los Angeles and meet a team of new writers for a two-month writing period. Basically, they were in the position of having to repitch their show. “It was like, ‘Even though you’ve made twelve episodes of the show, we’ll find some new writers, and you’ll come out for two months and write three or four scripts to show what this new season is going to be like,’” Howard says. “And since they had problems with the writing, we’ll shore up the problems. ‘And, hey, if this comes out good, we’ll pick up the show.’ The thing is, How do you not know what the show is? We’re not a new show in development.”
A month later, MTV switched gears: The cast members would have two days in L.A. to write two shows. They would each receive $500 for their trouble. “They hired writers without consulting Howard, Chip, or Laura,” Weitzman says. “They sat them in a room with writers they’d never met before. And they would only put them up for two days. It was mind-boggling. Here are three people who’ve done twelve episodes for your network, and I can’t even get you to reimburse them for rental cars?”
“At that point we realized that ultimately their decision was going to have nothing to do with these scripts,” says Howard. “Once [Graden] found out what he was getting back from development, he’d find out if he had enough juice to cancel Austin Stories.”
On May 8 the five-month waiting period was over, and things suddenly looked up: MTV gave each of them $5,000 to hold on until the end of the month. “God bless them,” Laura remembers thinking. But it turned out that the money was a parting gift. At the end of the day on June 1, someone from the Business Affairs division of MTV called their agents to say the show would not be picked up. “Nobody deserves to be treated badly,” Weitzman says. “The whole process was one big sign that said ‘We don’t care.’ Quite honestly, I gotta think twice about taking people to MTV again.”
“I would say I have mixed feelings about what they did,” Howard says. “They were the only ones who wanted to do business with us. I’ll always feel appreciative of that because they got us so much exposure, and we were able to parlay that into getting managers and agents. So that’s cool.”
And with that, Austin Stories joined the cult-show graveyard, though the careers of its three stars are far from dead. Howard and Chip have signed on to play Dude One and Dude Two in Milos Forman’s Andy Kaufman biopic. Laura has appeared on Comedy Central’s Premium Blend and has plans to do a week of stand-up in Houston with Margaret Cho. They all expect to have to abandon Austin for Los Angeles in the next few months. Work calls. Until then, they can watch Loveline and sleep in.
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