Hasta La Creative!

“I want to kill myself,” John Shea tells a conference room of about a dozen NBC Universal staffers inside 30 Rock. It’s exactly a month until the Peacock’s annual upfront hoopla, and Shea, executive creative director of the production, is getting his first look at potential set designs for the stage at the famous Radio City Music Hall. As a half-dozen possibilities flash across a screen, his brow furrows.

They spend the next few minutes debating the colors and lighting of the screen that will appear onstage, and how title cards introducing senior NBCU executives will be displayed. It’s one of the hundreds of seemingly minute elements that need to be precisely coordinated. The stage show will require 10 confetti cannons, six pyrotechnics cannons, more than 50 live performers and over 100 hours of rehearsal.

Ad Age went behind the scenes in the three months leading up to the dog-and-pony show to see firsthand what it takes to pull it all off. While Shea and his team began planning for this years’ presentation just weeks after the 2016 show concluded, it’s during these last few months that scripts must be written, celebrities corralled, video skits edited and the truly difficult decisions made.

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