Portland, OR is my current home town. The feverish excitement the local film and television buffs have been exuding over having a third major television production shooting locally, namely NBC's newest offering Grimm, has been quite joyous in its fervor; (Portland is also home to the irreverent comedy Portlandia and TNT's crime drama Leverage). Grimm is the biggest fare yet, as it is a network show with all the customary high cost infrastructure a studio and network bring to their productions. And Portland could not be more excited.
What is perhaps even more exciting than that, is the size of the audience the premiere drew on Friday night. A Friday night that saw a Game 7 of the World Series being aired opposite. For those that know what this means, it had a 2.1/6 rating. Most would have been shocked if it hit 1.9./5 2.1?! Great news for NBC and great news for Portland, OR.
Nellie Andreeva of Deadline.com perhaps put it best:
It was by far the highest-rated NBC drama premiere this season and the highest-rated Friday non-sports telecast on any network since Dec. 31, 2010 (ABC’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve). For NBC, it was the highest 18-49 rating in the Friday 9 PM slot in almost 2 years. And Grimm accomplished that with no help from its lead-in, the final season premiere of Chuck, which managed only a 1.0/3 in 18-49 and 3.4 million viewers, a series low.
How sweet it is. How sweet exactly for us television and film lovers who want to find work in the industry and would love to do so locally (i.e. me)? As a good friend of mine, one of the bigwig local production heads here in Portland put it; these things are like snowballs. The more you can get local talent experience, the more of a base you can sell to other productions looking for a home. The more other productions come and rave about their experience, the more other producers and execs will hear about it and come to the area because of what they've been hearing. These things build on each other. Portland is poised right on the verge of becoming the next Vancouver, Canada. If our legislature continues its dedication to drawing productions in with tax incentives and if they increase the base of those as an obvious way to infuse, literally millions of dollars, into the local economy then the future for Oregon's film and television production looks not very Grimm at all, but very very bright!
Go Portland!
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