First an apology. “Would you watch a TV show called Schrödinger’s Dogs?” and “What do you think it would be about?” are horrible questions to throw at you cold.

Sorry.

But I did it anyway and the replies were unexpected, informative and fun.

Let’s start with the insightful @montimer:

Pulling your replies together I realised that I hadn’t bothered to let anyone know what the show is actually about…

Luckily, Toby has already let that particular cat out of the bag:

Lots of flesh to stick on those bones in another post.

But for now let’s finish with the insightful @montimer:

Well, that’s one of the things we’re finding out…

So what hell kind of a name is Schrödinger’s Dogs for a TV show?

Well, it’s a working title.

It obviously stems from here, but how obvious that is was the first question we had to address. And are still addressing. As a working title I love it. It’s a little nod to Tarantino and a movie which owes its name to a video store customer getting irate over being recommended Au revoir les enfants:

“I don’t want to see no reservoir dogs!”

Perfect.

Doesn’t help us though. And while our fall back title of Glitch is fine, for me at least, it lags far behind SD. Good initials too. Strontium Dog. Sleepydog. Scooby Doo…

But there was an (external) worry that we’d have to explain just what the hell a Schrödinger was to too many people. I prefer to think the audience is smart and curious, but a lot of TV has to tick a lot of boxes – some of them more annoying than others. There’s a great post over on Boing Boing about this at the moment and trust me that a) I know a lot more about this than I’d like to and b) the title is both the most important and least important part of the process.

When we have it we’ll have nailed it. Until then it stays in flux.

Like the cat.

Next: the unscientific method of proving smarts in a non-focussed group and why SD is a pretty good title

Update: Lee has pretty much nailed in the first comment why SD won’t be the final title. Probably. Good t shirt though…

So this could get interesting.

First an update. Everything is going great. Let me break that down and get into the details… oh… I can’t.

The problem (and I admit it’s a great problem to have) is that the closer Slingers gets to being made a lot of things have to slide into position. Every time one of these boxes gets ticked or a lever gets pulled the right way then our instinct is to jump on Twitter and spill. But because so many things are dependent on so many other things we can’t do that. And damn, it’s frustrating.

So we had a conversation about this and came up with an idea. What if we chose another show on the Sleepydog slate and opened up the development process as completely as we possibly could and just see what happens…

So that’s what we’re going to do.

Right now we’re working on a number of shows that are cued up behind Slingers and what we’d like to do with one of them is run a little online experiment and see if being this open this early will derail the process or not. The show we’ve picked to trial this on is a concept that I really like. It’s certainly not a lame duck that we’re leaving out here to sacrifice. I believe it’s an idea that could become a show that would hold its own against anything else on air right now, but I’m also keen to see how throwing open the development process effects it going forward.

Exciting stuff.

Lots more to dig into the hows and whys behind this and that’s just one of the reasons to do it. To create conversation about all aspects of the process.

But for now let’s just revist a question I asked on Twitter late last night:

Answers after the break…