Elizabeth Guider Reports: L.A. Screenings Recap

Buyers are still in the midst of making their way through screening the 40-plus new network shows at the Hollywood studios this week. If you missed any of the coverage from our contributing editor, Elizabeth Guider, you can catch up here, with detailed recaps of each screening session and early responses from buyers about what looks promising. Look out for more from Elizabeth tomorrow as she reports on the new pickups from NBCUniversal and Sony Pictures Television.

The Big Picture
A record-setting 1,500 foreign TV program buyers have hit Tinseltown for the annual week-long sales bazaar known as the L.A. Screenings—and this go-round they will likely leave bowled over but definitely bleary-eyed by all they have to see.

Even if they only traipse to the six major Hollywood studios and go nowhere else they’ll be confronted with some 45 to 50 new broadcast network contenders for fall and midseason, including actioner Hostages from Jerry Bruckheimer’s stable, Josh Whedon’s comic book-inspired Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., espionage thriller The Blacklist starring James Spader, dramedy Rake toplining Greg Kinnear, The CW period piece Reign and Greg Berlanti’s The Tomorrow People.

Several mini-series will also vie for viewers’ attention starting this summer with a sci-fi-inflected mystery called Under the Dome from producer Neal Baer as well as Tom Fontana’s Billy the Kid and M. Night Shyamalan’s upcoming Wayward Pines—not to mention FOX’s recently announced reboot of the Kiefer Sutherland hit 24. Homegrown minis tend to be a mainstay on European broadcasters so the reaction to the American offerings will be interesting.

And though they don’t typically travel abroad as well (or bring home as hefty license fees), comedies galore are on offer, the majority male-targeted, and feature A-list talents as diverse as Seth Green, Sean Hayes, Michael J. Fox and Robin Williams.

Why this unusual plethora of new content? Because the current broadcast season has been nothing if not bruising, with cable channels and digital platforms continuing to chip away at the over-the-air audience and to command at least some of the water-cooler chit-chat.

With an unusually high number of disappointing debuts for freshmen series and unexpected fall-offs for a few established shows, the broadcast networks have spent the last few weeks slashing and burning a larger swathe of their schedules than usual. The cancellations translate into more holes to fill on most U.S. network skeds and more pilots for international buyers to sift through. That in itself is one of the many ironies and anomalies surrounding the Screenings: the more series a studio has to sell, the more energized its sales team; but that plethora of shows also suggests that the sister network of said studio must have faltered badly if so many slots have to be filled.

Sources reckon that 80 percent of the $8 billion in annual revenues from foreign TV buyers raked in by U.S. content suppliers end up in the coffers of the six Hollywood heavyweights—Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox, Disney Media Distribution, CBS Studios International, NBCUniversal and Sony Pictures Television.

You can read this piece in its entirety here.

View from the Hyatt Century Plaza
To paraphrase what the English writer Samuel Johnson purportedly said about marriage, being an indie supplier in today’s international TV market is the triumph of hope over experience. These folks don’t get a lot of love from prospective customers, and even when they do close deals, it’s not generally for the money they might have wished.

If it was ever thus, a combination of factors has made indie efforts ever more glaringly difficult: an uncertain economic climate has put a damper on things; the escalating consolidation of programming assets in the hands of a few major players has deprived the unaffiliated of quality and quantity of content.

Making matters even more problematic for indie distributors, tight program acquisition budgets in recession-weary Europe mean that discretionary spending on oddball, untested or otherwise unexpected fare by those broadcasters has dried up.

These dogged indie suppliers—the last of a breed that once prospered under the financial interest and syndication rules commonly known as fin-syn—pine after ever more elusive, BlackBerry-distracted buyers from their suites, waiting patiently to pitch their wares to those wearied customers on their way back from the Hollywood studio lots in the late afternoon.

On the other hand, a relatively healthy mini-market among the Latin American contingent, anchored by mega-distributors like Televisa Internacional and Venevision International, has sprung up at the hotel, giving the place a certain buoyancy. To that overlay have been added a few key European companies like ITV Studios Global Entertainment and FremantleMedia, who use the Screenings principally to pitch product and formats to Latin America.

Read more about the independents at the L.A. Screenings here.

Studio Perspectives
Disney’s kick-off event brought out all that conglomerate’s relevant executives, including Alan Horn, who is now in charge of overseeing the various film banners, and Anne Sweeney, who does the same for the TV side of the company.

"Our shows and brands have a global perspective and the demand for our series abroad continues to grow," Sweeney told the assembled.

For his part, Horn, who is just completing his first year at Disney as chairman of the movie studio after a dozen at Warner Bros., touted the tentpole strategy and the international resonance of pics made under the Pixar, Marvel, Disney and Lucasfilm banners.

Coming off what is generally reckoned a lackluster broadcast season—only ten of the three dozen freshman class of dramas and sitcoms will return for a second season—Disney took the wraps off nine of its own new hopefuls, almost all destined for sibling web ABC. (One limited run drama, Intelligence, is earmarked for CBS starting in January.)

Given its fourth place finish in the ratings this season, ABC is bulking up big time for the fall, with several high-cost, high-intensity dramas, most notably the spinoff Once Upon a Time in Wonderland and Marvel’s Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Both series drew warm applause and positive comments from the assembled foreign clients Sunday as did a half-hour comedy called Mixology.

Read more here.

Some 400 overseas execs traipsed to the Burbank studio backlot Monday morning for the first full unveiling of Warner Bros.’ ten new pickups for the upcoming broadcast season, including contenders from über-producers Jerry Bruckheimer, Greg Berlanti, Chuck Lorre, J.J. Abrams, Bill Lawrence and Kevin Williamson.

Before the auditorium was darkened for the all-day screening session, top brass at the studio, including Barry Meyer, chairman of the studio, and Kevin Tsujihara, its newly appointed CEO, addressed the assembled buyers. Both put the accent on the increasing importance of international support in order to finance such hefty slates each season.

“Given the ups and downs of a notoriously cyclical business, we simply couldn’t produce the quantity nor the quality without you,” said Meyer. For his part, Tsujihara, attending his first Screenings event, added that revenues from international partners were “absolutely essential” to the studio’s success.

Tsujihara then went on to re-introduce, as it were, the trio of recently promoted execs who are directly responsible for the key components of the Warner Bros. Television Group: Peter Roth, who as president and chief content officer, oversees all production, Craig Hunegs, president of business and strategy, and Jeffrey Schlesinger, who now handles domestic as well as the international distribution operation.

Schlesinger’s stats on the state of the business spoke for themselves: the studio is once again number one in total series—41 across broadcast and cable—number one in new series picked up and number one in returning shows. The feat, he added, has been accomplished 22 out of the last 27 years, and in nine of the last ten.

Read more on the Warner Bros. slate here.

An estimated 250 overseas buyers, mostly Europeans, spent Tuesday combing through ten new offerings from Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution for the fall broadcast season, double the number they had to sift through last May. Last year it was all sitcoms on sale but none of them survived the season.

After welcoming remarks from the distribution division’s longtime president, Mark Kaner, buyers screened a sizeable crop of fall and midseason contenders plus promos for the company’s upcoming films—and a teaser for a limited run sequel series of 24 toplining Kiefer Sutherland in his role as the indefatigable, much-put-upon Jack Bauer.

Of the ten new broadcast series on offer, the highest marks from buyers queried over lunch went to an hour drama called Crisis, which stars Dermot Mulroney and Rachael Taylor and is executive produced by Rand Ravich. Several buyers also responded well to the single camera workplace comedy set in the advertising world called The Crazy Ones. Destined for CBS’s Thursday night comedy block, it stars Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar and is exec produced by David E. Kelley.

The company’s president of international television, Marion Edwards, is as upbeat as her customers. "Dramas, good dramas, make all the difference and this year we have them."

Read more here.

It’s one of the oddities of the global TV biz: the fewer shows a program supplier tied to a network has to sell, the more reassuring to buyers that those series will be there for the long run. For CBS, its global distribution arm is in the seemingly embarrassing yet actually enviable position of having relatively few new broadcast contenders to pitch to foreign customers this week: of new dramas, there’s a summer suspenser called Under the Dome and a midseason legal series called Reckless.

That’s because its sister network, the top-rated Eye, can boast a record 20 returning shows for this fall and hence had few slots open to fill. In fact, the network airs nine of the top ten dramas on broadcast TV, the chief genre that appeals to foreign program buyers. "It’s hard just to get on the CBS schedule," said Armando Nuñez, president and CEO of the CBS Global Distribution Group, adding that "consistency and stability" of product are what makes overseas buyers feel confident in doing deals with CBS.

As a general rule too, Nuñez added, a show has to work in the U.S. to have a future abroad. "Just being a high concept show that’s over and out in seven episodes doesn’t cut it (at our shop)," he said. Thirty years from now, Nuñez mused, "folks here will still have a revenue line for reruns of our CSI and NCIS franchises from outlets and platforms abroad."

The focus at CBS’s L.A. Screenings sessions this week has been widened to include offerings produced for The CW, Showtime, and cablers such as TNT. Regarding Reign for The CW, one northern European buyer had this to say: "OK, the intrigue at the French court is portrayed like high school but it’s done with such verve that historical accuracy just doesn’t matter." Several other buyers were overheard chatting animatedly about the series’ pros and cons over lunch.

It was left to the final entry of the afternoon, a Showtime drama, to close out the afternoon session on a high note. "A little talky but nonetheless riveting," was how one buyer, a Scandinavian, described Ray Donovan, a complex drama about a Hollywood fixer, his clients and his highly dysfunctional family. Starring Liev Schreiber and exec produced by Ann Biderman and Mark Gordon, the series would seem to be this year’s single most talked about show, certainly among those who focus on pay cable fare. Screenings at CBS Studios International and other studios continue through Friday.

Read this piece in its entirety here.