Twentieth Century Fox’s Gary Newman

October 2006

By Anna Carugati

Over the last
two decades, drama series produced by Twentieth Century Fox Television have
been famous for their innovative storytelling techniques and high-quality
production values, from L.A. Law, Ally McBeal and Buffy
the Vampire Slayer to The X-Files, NYPD Blue, and more
recently 24 and Prison Break. Gary Newman, the company’s
copresident, explains why Fox’s dramas are so successful.

WS: How do you keep a show like 24 fresh season
after season?

NEWMAN: Oh boy! If we knew the formula,
we’d probably bottle it and sell it or guard it carefully! I think that the key
creative team of Joel Surnow, Bob Cochran, Howard Gordon and Evan Katz deserve
an enormous amount of credit for finding ways to continue to top themselves
with twists and turns each season. At the core, we have a star who has
incredible charisma and is magnetic, and people just love Kiefer in this role.
Even though the audience knows that at the end he’s going to succeed, they just
love the ride. And I guess that if the show has done anything particularly well
that has caused it to stand out, and keep people feeling that it’s fresh, it’s
that literally each season there are four or five surprises that you just don’t
see on network television: from Nina being the mole in season one, to Jack
shooting his boss, to the twist at the end of last season with the Chinese
government. It’s those sorts of surprises that just when you think they’re
going to save the day, they don’t save the day—in one season nerve gas
[was actually released]. In other shows they manage to save the day before the
unthinkable happens.

WS: As the show become more successful and moves on to more
seasons, inevitably its costs go up. How does Fox deal with the escalating cost
of dramas?

NEWMAN: It’s a real challenge. We look at our dramas a
little bit like a portfolio. It’s okay to have a show like 24 that costs a
lot of money because it’s also generating a great deal of revenue. On
first-year series when you’re not sure whether or not you are going to have
something that’s successful, I think you tend to be a little bit more
disciplined and a little tougher on the costs. We’d like to think that most
years we’ll come up with at least one or two dramas that we can produce a little
bit less expensively than the others, although we have not had quite as much
success with that recently! But it’s a big challenge and, fortunately, the more
successful dramas [find a place] either in syndication or home video or
international sales, which allows us to absorb the costs and still make an
appropriate profit on the shows.

WS: Does Fox give writers a good
amount of creative freedom?

NEWMAN: Yes. We really believe in the theory that most of
these shows start with a great idea from a writer and we don’t really believe
in giving writers assignments. The shows need to come from their gut and be
about something that they really understand and are so passionate about that
they can dig deep enough to get to the essence of the relationships and the essence
of the stories. We think this is a key ingredient to making shows resonate for
an audience. So there’s nothing that makes us happier than when a pitch starts
off “I base this pitch on my family,” or “I base this pitch on my first job,”
or some such thing. We find these always seem to have much deeper emotional
cores, and we’re fans of that.

WS: What elements have contributed
to the success of Prison Break or The Unit?

NEWMAN: Well, they’re very different shows. Prison
Break is an adrenaline-washed, serialized story where the characters are
constantly in jeopardy and seem to be up against impossible odds. But at its
heart, it’s a very, very relatable story. A brother trying to save his falsely
accused brother—people understand that and emotionally connect with it.

The Unit is quite a
different show. It is brilliantly cast. Dennis Haysbert seems to be imbued with
that heroic nature that his character on The Unit has. Similar,
in a way, to the David Palmer role he had in 24. The audience
loves to see him succeed and they feel tremendous confidence that someone like
him is protecting the country. The Unit is a very unusual show in that
it has interesting military action stories every week, but at the same time it
has very honest, emotional stories going on back on the base, generally with
the wives, frequently with the colonel or one of the other men in the unit, and
I think that honesty is part of why this show is resonating with audiences.

WS: How closely do you work with
the international sales division?

NEWMAN: When we
are developing shows we have one of our drama executives pitch our ideas to
[the international sales people]. And if they come across an idea they feel
would not work internationally, we take steps to change it or consider not
doing it. We really do need these shows to work to justify the expense of
producing them.