by Lynda Obst
In the end, you get there, after being sent to a back parking lot, which further delays your arrival and forces you to sprint to the meeting and arrive out of breath and disheveled. In the network waiting room, eleven bigger pitches with comedy stars attached await, and the network president himself comes out to visit with them. How can you make them laugh after that? Sweat forms on the brow of your writer. It’s all part of the game.
SO THIS YEAR 2012
Having gotten absolutely nothing on the air the previous year, I was determined to get it right in 2012. I studied the calendar. I hadn’t scheduled any trips over the summer. I studied my IPs (intellectual properties, or books, as they’re called in other cities) in Kirkus and watched TV like I was a cross between a slacker and Alessandra Stanley, television reviewer for the New York Times. I discovered a network show that I got hooked on like crack—Revenge, on ABC (which, as it turns out, was based on The Count of Monte Cristo). I spent months reviewing every classic novel I had ever read or not read for plot ideas. Emily Thorne, the heroine of Revenge, was a kick-ass female lead, pretending to be someone she wasn’t in order to avenge her father’s death, even daring to marry into the family who murdered him so she could exact her punishment. I became a student of how it generated and rapidly burned up story. I had to be ready by the time the industry returned from the “upfronts”—still sort of mysterious to me, as I hadn’t yet earned my ticket there by winning a slot on a network schedule. Every May there’s a huge hoopla when everyone who matters in television is in New York attending the upfronts. Equally as important, the time slots and full schedule are announced, throwing everything into turmoil when old shows are moved and new shows get fantastic or terrible time slots. Then the execs come home and start staffing the selected shows with writers, and the whole season starts over again with June pitches.
Sony had a new head of drama, Suzanne Patmore-Gibbs, and everyone told me I would love working with her. We were both alumni of Pomona College, she a lit major, and the whole thing seemed almost too good to be true. It was an exciting hire for Sony, as Suzanne had just been head of drama at ABC, where she had developed many of their hits, including—as it turned out—Revenge!
To prepare for our first meeting, I met with a very talented friend who had also had a hand in bringing Revenge to life, Patrick Moran. Moran, the boyfriend of my writer Jordan Budde, who created my Texas procedural Emily Swan, was the smart, natty and charming senior vice president and head of creative development for ABC Studios. He had been a Fox executive on Glee, and is known to work wonderfully with writers. He joined ABC as head of drama, and two years later was promoted to senior vice president of the studio in charge of drama and comedy. I was thrilled when he agreed to give me his take on the genesis of Revenge and help get me ready for my new season.
We sat in his office at ABC on a rare slow day; the upfronts were going on in New York, and for a brief moment the decisions were out of our hands.
Patrick’s priority is to provide shows to his own network, but he has made a great case to his network president, Paul Lee, that he can attract better writers to his studio if the writers he makes deals with feel they can sell their ideas to other networks as well. His studio makes huge profits for Disney by selling their shows overseas and to cable, hoping for syndication dollars. This is where the money is in television, as networks can only make advertising dollars.
He said, “I’d been wanting to do an updated Count of Monte Cristo for a long time, and just hadn’t been able to get it to work.”
I later read that Paul Lee also wanted to update The Count, and his deputy Suzanne told me she did as well. This was obviously an idea waiting to pop. The question was, who could break it?
Patrick continued: “And then, when I came here, I wanted very much to work with Mike Kelley [Swingtown], who had a deal at ABC. He was working on something else that he loved too, but that ultimately didn’t work for various reasons. I pitched this Monte Cristo idea to him, but he turned me down. He didn’t respond to it at all. I pitched it again, and he still didn’t respond. The producers he was working with [Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen, of the Twilight franchise] were excited about doing a show set in the Hamptons and kept at him until he finally relented and said he’d give it a try, though without any commitments. This was very late in the season, around October.”
October! My God! No one can get anything on in October—unless, of course, you’re the main supplier to the ABC network.
“And then, after working on it for a while,” Patrick continued, “suddenly it started to click for Mike.”
“What was it that clicked?” I asked.
Patrick thought for a moment. “It was Emily’s revenge, her single-minded determination to redeem her father at all costs. The madness of it was clicking in the writing. Mike was enjoying it.”
And so was I, along with so many other women I knew.
“Casting was the key,” Patrick added. “If the heroine had been a bit older, she’d lose sympathy; any younger, she’d be insane. They cast her perfectly, with an actress, Emily VanCamp, who had a following from the long-running series Brothers and Sisters.” Patrick went on, “Madeleine Stowe was a dream ‘get.’ She wasn’t afraid of the part, as many other actresses were.”
“She’s divine,” I said. “This is the best thing she’s done since Last of the Mohicans.”
“You are a fan,” Patrick said.
• • •
Of course, what Patrick didn’t know is that the president of my company, Rachel Abarbanell, had been enduring versions of Revenge for six months. Heroine as blighted orphan, à la Jane Eyre. Heroine as abandoned-at-birth aristocrat (a loosely updated take on Anastasia) showing up at her real family’s current estate, only to be thrown out by her siblings. My drama meeting with Sony was two weeks away. The upfronts were ending, and I was reading Deadline Hollywood to get the last of the pilot pickups when Rachel suddenly burst through my door.
“Read the log line of Notorious, which NBC just put on its schedule,” she cried.
“You read it,” I said.
“A female detective goes undercover in the home of the rich family for whom her mother was a maid to solve the murder of the daughter who was once her best friend.”
“It’s a Revenge,” I said in despair. “I’m too late. Who is the producer?”
“Gail Berman,” she said.
I started to laugh. I was one full buying season behind. “Well, at least if I get beat by a season, it’s by a master.”
Onward. Nextino.
• • •
Still, I had my Revenge, which was so ridiculously complicated that it had taken me all season to develop, and by the time my fabulous writer and I were ready, ABC was filled to the brim with soaps. I was saved by a fresh and funny procedural from Dexter showrunner Manny Coto, a kind of Moneyball meets Homicide that he called The Defectives. Even though ABC had hung out a sign at the beginning of the season that said no procedurals, by that time they were so loaded up with Revengea-likes that they needed a procedural again, so they bit. Manny turned in a terrific script, and we crossed our fingers and waited to hear. They didn’t pick it up. We were crestfallen. He was a wonderful collaborator, and the show would have been so much fun.
Then, out of the blue, a spec pilot from a first-time writer named Cameron Porsandeh, who had done a thousand interesting things in his life besides write TV, was submitted to me by WME. It was about a very scary man-made virus that runs amok in an outlaw lab in the Arctic. After a little work, I brought it to Sony and they bought it, attaching a major showrunner, Ron Moore (Battlestar Galactica), with whom they had a deal. We were going to go out competitively with the pilot when SyFy offered a rare pilot-to-series order (meaning they were committing to a thirteen-episode series, not contingent on seeing the pilot first). Blackjack! I was getting something on the air this fall, albeit from left field.
At dinner one night with Patrick and Jordan at the Chateau Marmont, I shared my go
od fortune. Patrick gave me lots of advice—for instance, we should delay our production to make sure we wouldn’t be casting at the same time as the networks and competing for the same pool of actors. At one point I asked him how to keep a show like ours going—a show without a precinct, a hospital or a spaceship chasing Cylons, in which the bad guy keeps mutating. As ever, he had fascinating things to say, and used Revenge as a departure point for our discussion.
Patrick explained that Revenge was the soap descendent of a different kind of show called the “Brightly Burning Show.” The model was different from that of a normal show in that it was not picked up because it could obviously generate a hundred episodes. It was called a brightly burning show because it burned through story so fast and generated a lot of heat. He pinpointed 24 as the prime example of this genre. Perhaps our show too could be a brightly burning show, and if we hit the bull’s-eye with story, we could burn just as bright and fast as the virus could consume the facility.
“I remember when 24 launched I was working at UPN [United Paramount Network] at the time,” Patrick said. “My boss thought it was ridiculous. He said, ‘How is that ever going to work? They’ll be lucky to get through a season.’
“I said, ‘But that’s what’s fun about 24—how can they up this?’ And that’s what made for water-cooler talk and compulsive viewing.
“At that time the business shifted slightly, and that show became such an asset to the studio because the DVD sales were enormous. The success of those early adrenaline shows coincided with the success of the DVD market, which has since gone away,” Patrick recalled.
Boy, did that sound familiar.
“People were buying DVDs and watching them in these marathon sittings. They burn through five or six episodes at a time. Suddenly a different paradigm was born. The question was not only can you keep the series going for seven years, but also what is the value for the series outside of that? So we talked about shows that would burn very bright and very fast. You think about them slightly differently. The network was no longer hung up on having to sustain it for a hundred episodes if you could create a sensation behind a show.”
Digital outlets are now starting to make a huge financial impact on critically acclaimed shows with cultural cachet and devoted followings, but with a fraction of the viewers that a traditional hit once had. AMC’s Mad Men sold exclusive online streaming rights to Netflix as a way for Netflix to garner more subscribers. Netflix paid $75 million for those rights; that’s $1 million an episode. This is a whole new universe for hotly burning cable shows.
Nextino. Just as I learn something, it changes.
• • •
But here’s the other crucial thing I learned, not for my network meetings but for the business: These shows are streaming online now, and the studios that create them are making online deals with all kinds of new providers. In general, they are not yet generating as much profit as DVDs did, but the studios are starting to make some profits on exclusive sales of their shows to venues like Netflix. TV writers are starting to see that Internet profit model they were looking for.
The profit models are changing because the platforms are changing. These shows that sell new platforms generate buzz.
Patrick says, “If a show seems to hold people’s attention—even if it feels like it might burn fast but bright—if it pops, it’s still meaningful, because it helps you to cut through the clutter.”
Ahh, getting the signal through the noise. And, to come full circle, we return to the way the movie business thinks.
If an idea pops, if it gets through the clutter, then the television studios will find a way to monetize it, even if it doesn’t follow the network model of one hundred episodes for syndication. Nothing has yet come out to replace the DVD bundle for those marathon sittings, but the appetite for shows we watch in that manner has been created, and we watch them now on our tablets (and maybe soon on our phones) without it yet making up for what was once significant revenue. Packaging multiple seasons of beloved “hot-burning series” and selling them online will be a business, especially as we find a foolproof firewall from piracy and a cloud for storage. Then it will be something worth WGA striking for. And you can be sure it will be worth the AMPTP fighting to hold on to as well.
• • •
Every day, new venues for creating original programming emerge: Amazon, Hulu, Apple, Google, Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft and many more are all creating new scripted and reality shows for your computers or devices, or to be distributed on their own platforms. And these are just the well-known corporate players. Facebook is becoming a distributor for TV and films. Funny or Die, a venue born during the strike that creates product for its own Web site, just formed a strategic partnership with Turner Broadcasting System (TBS and Adult Swim). It also just created its own experiment in iPad publishing: The Occasional, a new iPad magazine. Soon webisodes moving to cable will be as common as cable being watched on the Web.
The icing on the cake of this changing menu was applied in 2012, when Microsoft lured Nancy Tellem, longtime number two to Les Moonves at CBS and among the most highly respected network executives in the business, to head its digital and media production studio, overseeing the launch of new “interactive and linear content” to turn its Xbox gaming console into a leading entertainment platform. That means you will be watching exclusive series, which she knows how to develop as well as anyone, on your (or your child’s) Xbox. It is to be a destination as well for interactive movies and music. Xbox is aiming to be a total entertainment experience, and has the means, talent and distribution channel into every household with a boy to do it.
I had to turn my television into a computer this week because I sold a show to Amazon and I want to be able to watch it. The speed of change is alarming, exciting—you’re panicking and galloping along with a headless horseman looking for a buck that’s hidden in the house like the matzo at Passover. Everyone is looking to replace the revenue that once came from DVDs.
Someone will soon be making money on the Net somewhere. At the very least, it means work for writers, more niche programming, and more opportunities for a multitude of voices. Each venue is looking for an identity to single itself out. With so many alternative venues, so many shots for every idea, they can drown each other out. No wonder ideas have to pop.
Nextino.
After my drama meeting, I met with Sony’s head of international television. That’s an arena where profits are being made, as TV shows are sold (and cofinanced) overseas to various markets, though it’s not driving what gets produced. Hopefully, our SyFy series will do well for Sony overseas. For years our shows have been seen in syndication off network in America and around the world. It is a huge revenue stream for the financiers of the shows, the studios. Now, in the way we are buying foreign formats like Homeland (Israel) and American Idol (Britain) to remake as ours, the rest of the world is also now buying our formats and remaking them in indigenous versions, as they do with our movies: Turkey has its own Desperate Housewives; Sony has remade Married … with Children a dozen times around the world; Gossip Girl is getting an international do-over; and on and on. All this is a new source of vital international revenue. It’s beginning to sound very much like one giant global entertainment ecosystem, transforming like Gaia, the living earth, in response to attacks on its existence.
But television is thriving, outpacing movies in profits on a scale that no one would have believed twenty years ago, when the movie divisions of entertainment companies were their profit engines and television was treated as a stepchild. Now movie divisions look like the specialty-art divisions of their respective entertainment conglomerates, and the two media have reversed positions. For example, at Time Warner, the movie division made $600 million in profits last year, and the television division $5.5 billion (see chart). It’s a similar ratio at the other entertainment conglomerates, where movie divisions generate revenue in the hundreds of millions while the TV divisions generate billions. It’s
a different world than the one my dad was born into, or the one I joined during the Old Abnormal. It is clear which bank Willie Sutton has chosen to rob.
PROFITS AT A GLANCE
Movies
TV
Viacom
$341 M
$3.85 B
Disney
$618 M
$6.15 B
Time Warner
$600 M
$5.05 B
News Corp.
$927 M
$3.67 B
NBCU
$27 M
$3.318 B
Total
$2.513 B
$22.038 B
Source: thewrap.com.
My conversation with Rick, below, explains the source of these enormous profits.
BILLION-DOLLAR BABIES: TELEVISION
I was, of course, inclined to do cable when I started television. It was the most movielike and had the most creative freedom. Most of the writers I first had access to wanted to do cable too. I loved Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Big Love, and now, of course, Homeland. I was thinking movie-think. But subtly I felt my studio, Sony, and my agency pushing me toward network-think. Not being entirely stupid, I gradually got the joke. Network was the bull’s-eye. Cable might make the most money for its carriers, but network makes the most money for its producers.
