Find the failure before the failure finds you.
A written failure analysis of your format, before you spend money developing it. £350, five working days.
Every format that failed looked fine on the day it was greenlit.
Nobody commissions something they expect to fail. The reasons were there, in the document and in the first meeting, but everyone in the room was looking for reasons it would work.
The Premortem turns that around. We assume your format has launched, run, and failed. Then we work backwards and write the account of why.
That shift, from “will this work” to “this did not work, explain it”, changes what people can see. Research on prospective hindsight found people give far more concrete reasons when explaining an outcome than when predicting it. Gary Klein brought it into business decision making. Engineering, medicine and defence have used it for years. Format development hasn’t. It should.
Who it’s for
- Creators and development teams with a format heading for a pitch.
- Distributors, format owners and buyers with a slate to sort.
- Broadcast, streaming, YouTube and social-first formats alike. The process is the same.
What you get
A written report, adjudicated by me:
- The predicted failure, and why it happened.
- An eight-dimension weighted scorecard, with reasons.
- A comparison set of real formats from the library.
- The broadcaster and platform read.
- The audience read.
- A clear decision: pitch, develop, fix or kill.
Most people get “fix”. That is the point. It is cheaper to find the crack now.
What to send
- The title and a one-line logline.
- Your pitch deck or format bible.
A one-page taster on its own limits what the analysis can find. The more of the format I can see, the more useful the report.
Price and timing
- £350. Written report, five working days.
- Want to talk it through? Upgrade to a Format Health Check (90-minute session) for £245.
- Got a slate? I price blocks of formats for distributors and format owners. Email me with how many.
What sits behind it
The analysis runs against four data sets I have built and maintain personally.
The Format Library. Over 750 formats going back to 1950, tagged by engine, gameplay mechanic, trend and outcome. What the show actually did, what the audience came back for, and where it broke.
The Broadcaster and Platform Intelligence Hub. Broadcasters, streamers and platforms worldwide. Tone, appetite, what they pay, what they said no to and why. Forty years of rooms and conversations. It can’t be scraped.
Know Your Audience. A standing panel of 26 audience avatars, built on age against values, covering how people actually watch now: together, alone, and in clips. Each carries its own hooks and exit triggers.
The Format Trend Heat Map. Where your idea lands on the timing curve by the time it is made, not on the day you pitch. Arriving late is the most common avoidable failure in this business, and it is predictable.
There is one gate a format cannot pass without. If the premise does not rest on an experience your audience has actually lived, nothing else on the scorecard saves it.
What it is not
It is not an AI report. There is no button that produces this. AI lets me interrogate large data sets quickly. The judgement on top is mine, from forty years of creating, producing and selling formats.
Your material is used for your report only. It is not added to my format library, shared, or used to train any AI model.
See a worked example
A full Premortem on The Neighbourhood, run from my own one-pager with no knowledge of how it actually performed.
Start with an email
Tell me about your format or slate. I reply personally.
Or write to jonathan@jgm.ltd
Jonathan Glazier
Format creator and executive producer, altmedia
TV format consultant and former BBC Head of Light Entertainment and International Formats
I am dyslexic. AI helps me make my writing readable. The thoughts, the analysis and the opinions are my own. Nothing here is auto-generated, and I read and research with rigour.