My mentor, Bob Greenway, always used to joke that the two easiest jobs in television were Executive Producer and Head of Programming. After all, everyone watches television shows, and everyone has an opinion about how to make them better. Of course, they'd rather review the baby at the end of the process, and not its messy birth. It's easy to make suggestions; hard to implement them.
When you're working on your idea, remember you don't have to listen to all the executive producers in your life. Your friends, family, co-workers, and even your hair dresser will all have opinions. If you take all of their suggestions, you will end up with a muddled mess, very far from your original conception. You must protect your idea against this death from a thousand opinions.
Get one or at most two people -- ideally people who know something about the media business -- whose opinion you trust and use only them, as a sounding board. You can take their advice or not, but remember you are responsible for the execution of your idea.
If you get to the point where a network is willing to pay cash for your idea, then you might want to discuss possible changes with them. How you do that will be the subject of a future post.
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