Presleys’ Country Jubilee
Episodes 1 through 142 of a weekly country variety show that went out to thirteen countries and roughly half a million viewers a week. The show on RFD-TV.
- 142 episodes post-produced
- 13 countries broadcast
- ~500,000 weekly audience
What it was
The Presleys’ Country Jubilee is a live country and comedy variety show, staged by the Presley family in their own theatre in Branson, Missouri. The stage show became a television show, and the television show went out on the RFD Network to a weekly audience of about half a million people across thirteen countries.
I was the post producer and editor from 2009 to 2015, and I cut everything from episode 1 to episode 142. Not a team, not a rotation. Me. The show has since run twelve seasons, so mine were the first six years of it.
What the job actually was
A weekly variety show is not a prestige assignment and it is not supposed to be. It is a delivery problem. Music, comedy, multiple cameras, a full band, an audience, and a date on the calendar that does not move. Every week the show has to be assembled, the music has to sit right against the picture, and the whole thing has to be handed off finished.
What that number really represents is repetition. A hundred and forty-two times through the same process teaches you things one carefully-made film never will, mostly about what you can stop doing. Half of editing at that volume is learning which decisions do not matter.
Six years of it, every week, while teaching full time. I would not describe that as a balanced schedule, and I would do it again.
Who came through
A variety show runs on guests, and over six years a lot of them came through: Collin Raye, Debbie Boone, Neal McCoy, the Grascals, Jim Stafford, Larry Gatlin, Moe Bandy, Dusty Rogers Jr., Carrie Tillis, Les Brown Jr. and Rhonda Vincent among them. Their segments came to me the same way everything else did, which is to say as footage with a delivery date on it.
That is the honest version of a guest list. I did not work with these artists in the sense people usually mean by that phrase. I cut their performances, every week, for six years, and there is a difference worth keeping straight.
Related
The other television credit from this period is Tonight with Deborah Norville on MSNBC. The credits page has the full list.
Wondering which half of your own work is at risk?
Ten questions about how you actually get paid, and my honest read on what's exposed and what isn't. No score, because a score would be a number I made up.