Elizabeth Guider Reports: SPT’s Blacklist Strikes Chord with Buyers

PREMIUM: If it breaks out domestically, a show called The Blacklist could turn Sony Pictures Television into the hottest “indie” studio in town, making its international arm the de facto biggest winner of this week’s L.A. Screenings marathon.

Toplining James Spader, the drama will air Stateside on NBC on Monday nights as the 10 p.m. lead-out to arguably the strongest show currently on the Peacock grid, The Voice.

The word from foreign buyers who have attended one or another of the all-day sessions at Sony’s Culver City lot is that the espionage thriller is easily “the top ticket” at that supplier this time around. Several buyers also said it was “a plus” to see just how much Sony has bulked up with additional network shows on offer.

Almost a decade ago, Howard Stringer, then the head of Sony’s entertainment operations in the U.S., publicly declared the studio would “scale back” its production efforts for prime-time network television series because of the high cost of playing in that sandbox. It’s taken years for the studio to get back into that game big-time, especially since it is, among the Hollywood majors, the only studio without the advantage of an owned sister network. (Warner Bros. at least has a 50-percent stake in The CW and contributes a number of shows to it; the other major studios are all vertically integrated with broadcasters and produce largely for their sibling.)

Of course, it helps when shows not only get pick-ups but also manage to get renewed. “In the end it’s about stickiness,” as one longtime buyer put it. Up until now, Sony has not managed that feat on the all-important prime-time drama side, Last Resort being its disappointment from last season.

This go-round, the Spader vehicle, which is exec produced by John Davis, is leading a pack of Sony contenders for this fall. Among the other hours on tap are Rake, a dramedy starring Greg Kinnear as a self-destructive criminal lawyer, which is destined for FOX, and the medical ensemble Night Shift, which is for NBC.

Comedies range from the multi-generational family laffer The Goldbergs, slotted on CBS; Us & Them, reversioned from a British format and earmarked for FOX; The Michael J. Fox Show and Welcome to the Family, both of which were ordered by NBC for its Thursday comedy block; to the just announced pickup Bad Teacher, an adaptation of the hit movie, which CBS has greenlit.

Several buyers who have seen that last pilot called it “hilarious” and “outrageous.” The movie grossed upwards of $200 million back in 2009.

As Sony’s president of international distribution, Keith Le Goy, stressed, Sony now can boast “something for everyone.” Le Goy described The Blacklist as “the buzziest show at the Screenings with the best time slot on the networks.”

What’s changed in the last few years, Le Goy continued, is that “we’re working with amazing storytellers” and that fact in turn has helped the studio become “a consistent supplier to all the networks.”

Not that Le Goy and his team are short-changing the other product in the company’s catalog: Breaking Bad, the much ballyhooed cable hit on AMC, has been licensed widely to upscale niche players around the world and now SPT is handling another ground-breaking asset, the well-reviewed series House of Cards, whose first window is on Netflix.

“Video-on-demand around the world is becoming a very important window. Just as great original content helped catapult cable into such prominence, great movies and TV series like House of Cards are starting to do the same for and on these new platforms.”

And, just as Sony rode the wave of cable expansion with foreign deals for The Shield, Rescue Me, Justified and Breaking Bad, Le Goy believes original content on services like Netflix are “game-changing.” For creators and suppliers to the international market like Sony, it means “a new place to tell great stories and a new way to distribute them.”