The world of television production faces many challenges, but they’ve got it pretty rough during a pandemic. Television production is no walk in the park, and when you’re faced with unknowns like how many people will watch, how to get those people to watch and the not-so-small details like having enough crew members who are immune to the disease.
Randy Douthit is one producer who’s been uniquely positioned to leverage his experience with producing during a pandemic. He talked about the challenges of producing during a pandemic and what it was like to work on Judge Judy while millions were being infected with the corona virus.
According to Randy Douthit, the world of television production faces many challenges, but they’ve got it pretty rough during a pandemic. Television production is no walk in the park, and when you’re faced with unknowns like how many people will watch, how to get those people to watch and the not-so-small details like having enough crew members who are immune to the disease.
One of the biggest challenges that producers face during a pandemic is having enough crew members immune to the disease. This means that, as a producer, you’ve got to be prepared in case this occurs. In the case of Randy Douthit, he had to have an alternate plan for people serving as a crew members who may or may not be immune.
“You know, I’m an optimist; I always try to think up what-ifs and prepare for them. So even though we didn’t think it would happen to us, in this case it did happen to us,” said Randy . “We actually had some crew folks get very ill with the flu just before we were ready to start taping. We were ready to go, we had all the training and we had all the people who know how to deal with that. And they were not able to come in and do their job.”
Randy talked about how he took the situation and made the best of it. The producer, who’s been on television for a long time, had to improvise and get people who were immune to fill in for the crew members who were too sick to work. “So what I did is I started calling my friends; I called my wife’s friends, and I said, ‘Hey look, we’re shooting tomorrow.