Chris Albrecht

This interview originally appeared in the MIPTV 2014 issues of World Screen and TV Drama.

For the past several years, the U.S. premium service Starz has been boosting its roster of original productions. Spartacus and Magic City were followed by The White Queen, Da Vinci’s Demons and Black Sails. Starz CEO Chris Albrecht, who was instrumental during his years at HBO in creating high-quality award-winning programming, wants to introduce viewers to characters and worlds not often seen on television. As Starz produces more of its series and sells them internationally, audiences around the world will also have the chance to immerse themselves in new environments and even travel through time.

WS: Are you still pursuing the strategy of going straight to series on a project instead of producing a pilot?
ALBRECHT: That is one of the things that people are copying from us. It’s what Netflix is doing. It’s what HBO just did with True Detective. People are now realizing that the straight-to-series order is not unusual, it’s a viable option when they are thinking about how to get in business with people. We’ve learned how difficult it is, especially with these big serialized dramas, to just go right into production without a pilot, so we’ve been spending more money in the development process. If we get a script and we like it, we’ll then put together a small writers’ room. We will then break out the entire season and a few episodes so we really are much more prepared when we go into production. By getting as much of the writing done, you have a better chance of understanding where the series is going. Even though that doesn’t solve all of the issues such as, Do I have the right actor in the right role? Is my cinematographer shooting it the way that I hoped he would? Those are a few of the things you get to see when you do a pilot. We are getting better at anticipating the challenges of working without a pilot. When I was at HBO we didn’t do a pilot for Rome. We went right to Rome and shot it and looked at the first three episodes and went, Oh oh! This isn’t what we were hoping for, but we had so much money we went back and re-shot it. The days of spending that kind of money are over.

WS: Tell us about the upcoming series Power.
ALBRECHT: We’re excited to be in business on a contemporary show that is shot in New York, which is a place where I have shot several shows in my career. It’s always an exciting place. Power was a great idea that was brought to us by Curtis Jackson, who is also the rapper 50 Cent. This is a case where a writer, Courtney Kemp Agboh [executive producer and showrunner of Power] came to us and had never done her own show before. She had been a writer for a while and had recently been in a really good [production] system on The Good Wife. She had a really strong point of view about this world and the characters in Power. It’s got a lot of the flash that appeals to people: the glamour of New York, the danger of crime and drugs, but the heart of it is also a love triangle, a star-crossed romance that is very much driven by two people who made a choice early in their lives not to pursue a relationship and then have to live with the question, What would have happened if I had taken that path? I certainly think that is something that a lot of people can relate to. The faces and the characters in this show are people that I don’t think you see in other series on television. Power has a lot of African-American characters and Hispanic characters who look like people who live out there in the world and not necessarily people who just inhabit television shows. The fact that we are able to bring Power to MIPTV and have it be the world premiere there is also very good for us because it’s an important part of our strategy of being able to afford these shows, of getting our brand known in places outside the U.S. and selling these shows around the world.

WS: And Da Vinci’s Demons and Black Sails are returning for second seasons?
ALBRECHT: Yes. What we have been trying to do with our shows—Power, Black Sails, Da Vinci’s Demons and even Outlander—is depict worlds and characters that aren’t on television elsewhere. It’s hard to say that in an absolute sense because there are so many shows, and people can make analogies from one thing to another. But particularly when you look at Da Vinci’s Demons through the mind of David Goyer, you see historical characters in a world of historical fantasy-action-adventure who are also superhero-like. In season two we go from Florence to the New World to Goyer’s vision of the Inca civilization and Machu Pichu. It’s exciting, it’s lavish, it’s fun and to me it’s unlike anything that is on television. If you think that we shoot it all in Wales, then you really go, Wow, how do they do that?

Da Vinci’s Demons follows Black Sails and then there is Power and then we go into Outlander, which is based on the international best-selling series of historical fiction, fantasy-sci-fi novels by Diana Gabaldon. She has tens of millions of fans around the world. The fans are already blowing up the Internet with their passion for any information we can give them about what’s happening, the casting or story lines. It’s about an English woman, a nurse, who returns from the war in 1945 to her husband who she hasn’t seen since the war began. He was in intelligence. They go to Inverness in Scotland to reunite and reconnect. They are a little estranged from each other and after the recreation of a pagan druid ceremony, she finds herself back in the early 18th century in exactly the same geographical place that she left and can’t get back. She’s forced to marry another man and it’s a great time-travel romance across centuries. It’s a great love story and it’s also uniquely a very fun and accurate look at a period and a lifestyle that I think will not only be interesting to the audience, but in some cases will make you wish you could just go back and live that way.

WS: Are you satisfying fans through social media and giving them little tidbits of what’s to come?  Do you find that social media can help you promote your shows?
ALBRECHT: I think social media is critical. We need to be great at it. There is obviously a learning curve because it’s always changing. Ron Moore, who is an executive producer on Outlander, came to me early on, because I was a little worried about doling out information about the show on social media, and he said the fans want as much as you can give them. No pun intended, fan the fans! He said, I’ve done this on Battlestar Galactica, I’m telling you; you can’t give these people enough. So we followed that. We’ve been targeting the fans and letting them be the insiders and then using that core to start to build awareness through social media for people who may not be aware of the book but may be interested in the area. Because the best advocates you can have now for other people wanting to see shows—don’t take this the wrong way—isn’t necessarily reporters and the press, but it’s other fans.

WS: What upcoming projects is Starz preparing?
ALBRECHT: We recently announced Survivor’s Remorse, our first comedy. And even though comedies don’t often travel well outside the U.S., this one is set in the world of basketball and professional basketball is one American sport that travels well outside the U.S. and it’s a world we haven’t seen before on television. Two of our partners are LeBron James, who is the probably the greatest basketball player on the planet right now, and Tom Werner, who along with Marcy Carsey executive produced some of the best sitcoms, The Cosby Show, Roseanne and many others, and now is the chairman of the Boston Red Sox. We have a very funny script. We are trying to put together a great cast. That show will probably be on in late third quarter of this year and we are still firming up some plans for the fourth quarter. We announced a show that will be on in 2015 which is called Flesh and Bone. Again, it’s from a writer who hasn’t done her own show before but has come up in a great system, this time Breaking Bad. A woman named Moira Walley-Beckett. Although it’s set in the world of ballet, it’s a lot more about women’s images, as seen by themselves, as seen by other women, as seen by men. Unlike the film Black Swan, we decided that seeing these dancers do what they do was really the very essence of the show. So we did a very unusual thing: we went out and held an actual worldwide casting process with real dancers—they had to be professional dancers. Instead of looking for actors who could dance, we did the opposite. We looked for dancers who might be able to act. It was an amazing and exciting process. The scripts for this show are terrific but you see these dancers, and I’ve gotten to go to some of the semi-final auditions and then the final auditions, and you realize these people can basically fly! The things that they can do with their bodies are just incredible and it so informs the drama and the characters. I always say we’re going to do this show with no net. This is one I am particularly excited about simply because I know no one has ever approached a show this way before.

WS: At HBO, you spearheaded the shift toward high-quality dramas and comedies. If we think back to those days, was it difficult to draw talent to the pay-television environment?
ALBRECHT: Yes, it was. The financial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was the result of successful series airing on a broadcast channel and then being sold in syndication. The idea that theatrical talent would cross over to television was almost unheard of. It was very difficult to draw talent, but we were able to convey that we had something unique to offer from a creative point of view, a platform, a way to tell a story differently, these big serialized dramas, a different kind of comedy, and that attracted a certain amount of people. Once we were able to add real financial reward for producers and partners—a show becoming a big hit and selling a lot of DVDs, which was a business that never existed before, syndication for shows like The Sopranos and Sex and the City and big international sales—we started to have more of a complete story to tell when we were trying to get people to work with us. The work that the early pioneers, if you will, at HBO did, attracted people who just were drawn by the desire to do something that they are very passionate about.

WS: There are a lot more networks, premium and basic, producing originals. Is there enough talent for the kinds of shows you want?
ALBRECHT: Yes, there is a sufficient pool of talent. To make sure that we have those talented, passionate people, instead of trying to compete for people who have already done a successful show—and the list of people who have done one successful television series is now getting rather long—[the key] is to go after people who have done two successful shows, because that list is still pretty short!

Also, because there are fine shows out there, there are a lot of people that are being trained in great systems [writers working alongside talented showrunners] and they haven’t done their own great show yet. So the idea of working with people who are really passionate about their first big idea is a way to access top-quality talent, without getting into the arms race, if you will, about issues such as: how many episodes you’re going to give somebody, how much money the episodes are going to be, are you going straight to series on something or are you going to ask them to write a script first. There are so many things that we started at HBO that people copied or that we’ve started here at Starz that people are copying now that it’s important to constantly rethink how you are going to access the talent pool that you need. Our willingness to produce overseas, our willingness to co-produce with partners, where you’re not just investing financially but you are actually involved with another end-user in the creative evolution of the show, is something that we are willing to do. A lot of other channels are not willing to do that because, understandably, they want to make sure that they are in the driver’s seat so that they get the product they need to fulfill whatever goals they have. We are actively doing business with people as co-production partners where in some cases we only have consultation and not creative approval and rely on the relationship we have with the creative teams of the production company and of the other network, and that allows us to expand the talent pool that we can access.

WS: Starz’ subscriber base has been increasing. Is it fair to say that originals have played a role in this?
ALBRECHT: Certainly [subscriptions] have been growing. There is no correlation—and this goes back to my entire career in the pay premium space—that anyone can ever draw between a successful show and the number of subscribers that you have. I think it’s fair to say that as more originals appear on a channel that catch the eye of the viewer and the third parties—press, social media—then what starts to happen is that we have more opportunities to market our services with our distribution partners. That is really where you see the opportunity to acquire new subscribers. It’s kind of an indirect direct result of the programs that you have on the air. But there are no equations that allow you to make a one-to-one analogy on the cause and effect of any one particular show and subscriber uptick.