Garth Ancier

January 2008

When BBC Worldwide was looking for someone to develop the BBC brand in the U.S. and build on the relationships and partnerships it had already established there, it sought an executive with extensive experience in the highly complex and competitive U.S. market. That person was Garth Ancier, who today is the president of BBC Worldwide America.

Ancier is one of only two U.S. television executives to have headed up the entertainment divisions of three networks. The other is the legendary Fred Silverman. Ancier began his career as a radio reporter and executive producer but switched to television and joined NBC Entertainment. There he supervised top network comedies including The Cosby Show, Cheers and Golden Girls. He was then part of the team that launched the FOX Broadcasting Company and, as the network’s first president of programming, he developed and scheduled such hits as The Simpsons and Married…with Children. He was also chief programmer for The WB Television Network and oversaw production of hit shows aimed at teens and young adults, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek, 7th Heaven and Charmed; he later became The WB’s chairman. He also served as president of NBC Entertainment, where he scheduled hit series such as The West Wing and developed shows including Ed, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Scrubs and Fear Factor.

Later, at Turner Broadcasting System, he revamped CNN’s programming with the shows American Morning and Anderson Cooper 360, fine-tuned TBS and TNT to serve distinct audiences, and expanded the footprint of the Adult Swim block on Cartoon Network. Prior to joining BBC Worldwide America in 2007, Ancier ran In2TV, Warner Bros. and AOL’s broadband television network.

Ancier came to BBC Worldwide America with the necessary expertise to run the division’s many businesses. These include the channel BBC America, which offers U.S. viewers the best in British programming, much of it sourced from the BBC. He is also responsible for expanding BBC Worldwide’s portfolio of channels in the U.S. on a variety of platforms. He oversees TV and home-video sales and BBC Worldwide’s production operation in the U.S., whose biggest success to date has been Dancing with the Stars. A top-rated show on ABC, this reality competition is a remake of the BBC hit Strictly Come Dancing.

Not one to shy away from trying something new, Ancier found the chance to work for BBC Worldwide as an opportunity “to learn a whole different TV vocabulary from Britain and apply it to a local market I know really well,” he says. “That’s what appealed to me. Otherwise you end up rehashing your earlier experiences over and over again, and for someone like me, that’s not very challenging.”

WS: What does the BBC brand represent in the U.S.?

ANCIER: Most Americans view the BBC primarily as a news brand. If you walk down the street, which we have actually done, and ask, “Do you know the BBC and what do [you] think they do?” the answer you most commonly get is “news.” Occasionally you’ll hear, “Don’t you do costume dramas for Masterpiece Theatre?” But basically it’s mostly been about news, some period drama and some sitcoms, like The Office.

What I’ve been trying to do in this role, along with my colleagues, is look at all the things the BBC does. News is the core brand of the BBC, but they make a lot of comedy, a lot of drama, a lot of factual programming and a lot of kids’ programming. And right now [those genres are] all over the dial in the U.S. The costume drama has really become associated with Masterpiece Theatre on PBS and WGBH has been an amazing partner over the years. The factual programming like Planet Earth has been associated more with Discovery. We have a long-term relationship with Discovery to supply them with factual content via a first-look agreement. Although it doesn’t stop there, we also work closely with National Geographic, who took Galapagos recently. We have added more production in the U.S., so people are starting to realize that we produce things like Dancing with the Stars for ABC and Clash of the Choirs for NBC.

WS: What new shows have you brought to BBC America?

ANCIER: We’ve launched BBC World News America, and it can be seen in Britain at the same time [although] without commercials. There was a period where BBC America started trying to compete with PBS in the period-drama area. The fact is that PBS does such a good job in branding themselves with that product, we really felt we should become more contemporary at BBC America with shows like Doctor Who, Torchwood, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Top Gear, Hotel Babylon, Robin Hood, rather than us just chasing that PBS audience.

WS: And that has paid off. You have broadened your audience.

ANCIER: It’s paid off in two ways. It’s brought the age of the audience down. When I got here the average age was about 56; it’s now about 46. That’s a pretty big shift for a television network. Granted it’s a small television network, but I will tell you that changing a channel that radically in this amount of time is pretty remarkable based on my experience at other networks.

The other thing that has happened is that we have grown the audience. We were up about 50 percent in our demo just from October 2006 to October 2007. That happens when you start programming more accessibly and when you create block nights so you have shows on at the same time every night and there is a consistency to the whole schedule that makes sense to American viewers.

WS: I imagine your audience is upscale and educated.

ANCIER: Yes, it’s upscale, educated. I love the 46-year-old median age because it’s right in the middle of the 25-to-54 demo, and a lot of networks [in the U.S. skew] older than that. Even BBC World News on BBC America, the median age is hovering around 50 years old—that is at least 10 years younger than every other newscast in the country. Our audience is a little tech-centric. They love their sci-fi. They love their Top Gear. They love their news. Given this whole bunch of product we have to play with, we are still fine-tuning what exactly they respond to and what they don’t respond to.

WS: What else do you have planned for BBC America?

ANCIER: We’ve done a good job of finding some of the better formats from the U.K. and bringing them over. We’re trying to get the longer-running series in Britain, to the degree that they make them. Their whole television industry is very different from ours in terms of the length of series. They are starting to make more 13-episode series like Torchwood and Robin Hood.

I’d love to see us do more in the comedy area. We are going through all the more contemporary British comedies that are on the air. In February we’re introducing a show from two comedians, David Mitchell and Robert Webb. These guys did the Apple commercials in Europe and you can imagine what they are like [if they are] doing Apple commercials! We are looking for that next big thing out of Britain like The Office, like Coupling, like Ab Fab or Little Britain that will pop here [in the U.S.] because it’s just different.

WS: Are there plans to launch any of the other BBC channels in the U.S., like CBeebies or BBC Lifestyle?

ANCIER: The difference between the U.S. and the rest of the world is that there is a real lack of channel space in the U.S. The reason you really don’t see that many channels launching here is because there simply isn’t enough carriage available. We are almost 10 years old and just now we’re in nearly 60 million homes, and that is the critical threshold of a full network.

We are going to launch BBC America in high definition, which is our next big move. We are going to put some of the other brands like CBeebies on VOD because we do offer VOD for most of our cable subscribers. So if you are on Comcast or Time Warner and you go to VOD you’ll see BBC America on demand and we’ll have a section for kids that will be renamed CBeebies. We’re going to put a lot more product into that going forward.

Our VOD product has become very popular, and we expand brands there because there really isn’t linear channel distribution available. The other challenge is that over the years the BBC has done with kids what they have done with factual programming with Discovery and costume drama with PBS, and that is that a lot of it is already playing in the U.S. PBS, for example, has Teletubbies, and Charlie and Lola is on Playhouse Disney. A lot of the more popular kids’ programming is [already airing], so we are trying to figure out what we can offer the audience that they haven’t seen yet, either from the archives or from new product that we feel we can expose to the U.S. marketplace.

WS: What are your plans for broadband?

ANCIER: Broadband is another area we definitely want to enter this year. We’re just trying to figure out some of the rights that are involved. But the nice thing about broadband is that there is really no limit to capacity. So we can go very deep into the BBC library, which is a huge library, and present things that really don’t have a place on the linear channel, or that we don’t have enough room for on traditional cable VOD, but we can offer on a streaming channel.

WS: And how are TV and video sales of BBC product in the U.S.?

ANCIER: In our TV sales—it’s an interesting market—we have one real advantage, which is that the BBC has a lot of high-definition product that is in demand. In addition, we buy from all the British broadcasters for BBC America and we represent a lot of them in the U.S., not just BBC product. Since they’ve been shooting in PAL and PAL has a higher resolution than NTSC and also has a 16 by 9 aspect ratio, it’s a very easy up-convert—to take PAL 16 by 9, which is high resolution anyway—to make it high def. A lot of people who we license shows to are asking us to up-convert those shows to high def because they look very close to high def when you do it right and you really can’t do it with NTSC because the standard is too different.

On the video side, we’ve always put out the latest and greatest show of the year. This year was a particularly good one in that Planet Earth has been a huge seller.

WS: It’s an amazing show. It drove the acquisition of a wide-screen TV in my home.

ANCIER: It was funny, I’m in Los Angeles and I was listening to a radio show recently and they were talking about Blu-ray and HD DVD and the host of the talk show was saying that the first disc you have to get, whether you buy Blu-ray or HD DVD, is Planet Earth. I thought, wow, that’s really cool!

WS: Tell us about BBC Worldwide productions and, from your perspective, what it’s like taking ideas generated outside the U.S. to Hollywood.

ANCIER: Hollywood has always taken ideas [from the outside]. It’s been going on for years! The irony here to me is that the British system of production, and particularly the BBC’s production system, is not based on ratings and advertising. It’s based upon creativity. And there is a downside to that, believe me. Sometimes people get attached to shows because they are creatively great but they don’t work with the audience. But the upside of that is that people take really wild shots at shows. I don’t think an American network would be doing Little Britain.

We’ve taken more and more of these formats over the last couple of years, both old and new formats, and are remaking them. For example, Dancing with the Stars was a 20-something-year-old format that the BBC owned way back when and re-made as Strictly Come Dancing [the original show was Come Dancing] and then it was redone in the U.S. as Dancing with the Stars. And Dancing with the Stars is now being remade in local languages everywhere from China, where it is one of the top-rated shows, to India and Australia and to almost every country that has a major-media business.

We did Clash of the Choirs for NBC, which is actually not a BBC format but an interesting idea of having musical stars [return to their hometowns to assemble an amateur choir and prepare them to compete live in a studio for the title of America’s best choir].

We have more recently started also doing shows for cable, and we set up a New York production office that opened January 1, with Allison Wallach, who came from Lifetime to run it.

Through our L.A. production office we’ve done How Much Is Enough? It’s a game-show series for GSN. We’re doing a pilot for FOX called Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, which is a slapstick comedy show from about 30 years ago. We’re hoping to do a version of Top Gear for a U.S. broadcaster because we have the British version on BBC America, just as we run the British version of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and now there is an American version on FOX.

We’re doing a pilot of a reality show for Lifetime called The Week the Women Went, which is perfect for their audience because the idea of men being totally helpless when women leave is kind of fun!

We have a lot of shows in pre-production, but we are trying not to go too fast in this area, because frankly, we could probably sell a lot more shows than we are selling, but we want to make sure that when we make shows we make them well. You are always going to have shows that don’t work. We make pilots every year—we did a pilot for CBS, Viva Laughlin, that was a really wild, out-of-the-box attempt that didn’t work, but I think that everyone is proud of what came out.

The key corporate ethic is to make quality product, and understanding that when you are working with anything that creative, you are going to have failure as often as success, if not more often.

WS: What do you enjoy most about what you are doing now, since there is so much on your plate?

ANCIER: Actually, part of it is that all the stuff that is on my plate and my colleagues’ plates is enjoyable because we are expanding in so many different directions. For me, personally, I am most proud of having put on BBC World News America, because that takes advantage of a core value of the BBC in a new way. I’m thrilled with the show and thrilled with the work that we’ve done on it and I know it’s going to get better [considering we] get to do a show on two continents simultaneously.

Even from the first day the editorial content was absolutely at the top of news in this country. You can watch this for an hour and really be way ahead of the curve of what people are going to see probably for the next day or two on American television news. I’m not saying this because of the Britishness of it. The thing I find so amazing about it—and I am somewhat of a news junkie, including from my CNN days—is that when I see a story on BBC World News America that had been commissioned by Rome Hartman and produced in London or produced in the U.S. and I’ll think, that’s an odd story, I haven’t seen that story anyplace else. And then a day or two later, I swear, in a lot of cases I see it on American news. BBC World News America just seems like it’s a beat ahead.