Producing Experience

    Thursday Nite Live is a late-night sketch comedy television series produced by the students of Hofstra University.  The show is broadcast live-to-air monthly on Hofstra’s on-campus cable network, as well as Facebook Live.  Thursday Nite Live began in 2001, and has been produced by students with very little faculty involvement for nearly two decades.

     I began working with Thursday Nite Live as a content creator for the pre-recorded sketches that supplement the live ones, referred to internally as packages.  During my freshman year I was promoted to Package Producer, overseeing all the students creating package content for each month’s show.  In my senior year, I was promoted to Executive Producer, overseeing all aspects of production, as well as team management and University relations.  

     Thursday Nite Live, which is an homage to SNL, is an incredibly ambitious show with many moving parts.  The live-to-air show has four live sketches on different sets that need to be decorated and fixed while the show is on-air, several roll-in packages, a live musical segment where local artists perform 3 songs, and a “Weekend Update” style comedy news segment called “Thursday Newsbreak”.  You can view episodes of Thursday Nite Live from the season I produced by clicking here.

     During my time at TNL, most of my time was spent coming up with ways to enhance the show’s infrastructure.  Originally, TNL was only broadcast live on our campus cable network, so you could only watch the show live if you lived in Hofstra dormitories.  I came up with the concept and set up the hardware to begin streaming on Facebook in 2017, which led to over a thousand new monthly viewers, and stronger club involvement.  This practice quickly spread to other Hofstra TV shows, and is still used to this day.

     I also created a website for the show, using lots of custom code and my knowledge of web design.  I also launched a large-scale project to digitize old Mini DV and DVCPro tapes to create the most comprehensive archive possible, which can be found on the “episodes” page of the website.

     As a producer, I created a submission package for the Television Academy’s College Television Awards, informally known as the College Emmy Awards.  We were all extremely proud to be nominated for a College Emmy Award, and it was eventually announced live on YouTube by Jimmy Fallon that we won the award!

     My time at TNL was not without its difficulties, as it can be tough to get your bearings producing such a large-scale show while balancing schoolwork and internships.  The knowledge of how to actually produce the show was always passed down from producer to producer by word of mouth, and I decided to write a manual for how to produce the show.  This manual contains all the technical knowledge necessary, as well as advice from myself on how I approached the job, and similar advice from past producers.  This manual wound up being nearly 100 pages long.  You can view a small sample of it by clicking here.

    Additionally, I wrote and edited several packages, did graphic design for the logo you see above as well as others, and created the intro sequence two years in a row.

     My final show before graduation was fundamentally complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic.  The in-person show was canceled, so I came up with the idea to create a 45-minute special called Thursday Not Live.  This special consisted of combination of unused packages, new packages filmed in the homes of our cast writers and crew, and even a musical segment that was filmed using safe social distancing practices.  Creating this special was incredibly difficult logistically, but wound up being one of my proudest accomplishments as a producer on TNL.