Soaring to New Heights

The veteran actor Timothy Hutton is in a good place to make some observations about the way U.S. basic-cable networks are overtaking the big four broadcast networks when it comes to scripted dramas.
You see, a couple of seasons ago, Hutton was the star of one of that year’s biggest series, Kidnapped, made by Sony Pictures Television for NBC. It cost between $2.5 million and $2.75 million an episode to make and it was the hottest property at the 2006 L.A. Screenings for international buyers.

Last month, Hutton’s newest drama series, Leverage, premiered on TNT. It was directed by Dean Devlin, the chairman and CEO of the independent studio Electric Entertainment. It probably cost $2 million or less per episode.

It’s funny how those shows worked out. Kidnapped premiered September 20, 2006, to an audience of 7.5 million. After a couple more episodes aired, a disappointed NBC yanked it from the schedule. Leverage premiered December 7, 2008, commercial-free, to an audience two-thirds the size of Kidnapped’s debut. TNT put out a news release saying that it was “thrilled” with the reception, and Leverage’s order of 13 episodes will almost certainly air in full.

So one of the observations that Hutton and others in the business of producing scripted television drama might well make is that the game has shifted dramatically, so to speak, in ways that favor cable.

Some are calling it the beginning of a golden age of cable drama, and not just on the premium services like HBO and Showtime. Last year, Mad Men, on AMC, was the first basic-cable series to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series. Contenders for Emmys and other awards included Damages and The Riches on FX, Monk and Psych on USA, and The Closer and Saving Grace on TNT.

Robert Del Valle, who has producer credits on such dramas as Shark and Melrose Place on the networks and Six Feet Under and John Adams on HBO, says the key advantages the cable nets have is that they can focus on fewer original series and they don’t measure the success of a series solely on ratings.

CREATIVE FLEXIBILITY

“They can put their resources into fewer shows,” Del Valle says. “They have the ability to allow the show’s creators a little more flexibility to be creative, be forward thinking, to take more chances. They’re trying to attract an audience with things that the audience feels they can’t get if they go to look at a procedural on CBS. The cable networks aren’t going to do CSI. They’re going to have something like The Shield or Monk, something they and the audience feel isn’t going to be delivered on one of the broadcast networks. They’re willing to take more chances and they’re willing to leave things on the air longer.”
Del Valle, the author of The One-Hour Drama Series: Producing Episodic Television, points out that broadcast networks have no choice but to quickly cancel high-profile shows like Kidnapped or, this season, My Own Worst Enemy, because they are totally dependent on ratings and ad spending. “With a cable network there is a sense, creatively, that once we know and trust you, we’re going to leave you alone, and give you more of a chance to let a show develop.”

Program executives on cable networks like FX, USA and TNT, which are heavily invested in original drama, along with their counterparts on networks like Lifetime Television, SCI FI Channel and AMC, which have fewer such shows, endorse Del Valle’s take. They acknowledge that maturation of the cable business and their second revenue stream of subscriber fees both play roles in their success with original drama, but mostly they point to a special relationship with the creative community.

“If there is any one hallmark of the ratio of success that cable enjoys, it is that we tend to look for somebody who comes to us with what you might call a passion project,” says Jeff Wachtel, the executive VP of original programming at USA Network.

Wachtel, who also is a co-head of original content for Universal Cable Productions, compares the mind-set of creatives in his orbit now with what he experienced when he ran Columbia’s prime-time division in the ’90s. “As soon as we got a show on the air back then, all we were thinking about was, ‘OK, what else can they do for us? What’s next?’ I can say without exception, everyone who is doing a show on our air right now is doing what they want to do. Matt Nix wants to be doing Burn Notice. He isn’t running around town trying to figure out what his next show is going to be. Andy Breckman has been on Monk from day one and will be on it until we wrap production. Steve Franks, who does Psych, is a successful screenwriter who always wanted to tell this particular story this particular way. This is what he wants to do. That does seem to be different from what you find in the broadcast game. We love how committed they are to the shows.”
Nick Grad, the executive VP of original programming at FX, says strong relationships with show creatives comes out of shared objectives. “For the most part we have the same goal,” he says, “which is greatness. We have a lot more common ground. We don’t find ourselves having different agendas. We don’t have to make a show that reaches a broad audience. We’re an 18-to-49 network. We’re focused on making shows for adults. We don’t have to reach 15 million people.”

Grad cites FX’s relationship with Todd A. Kessler, Glenn Kessler and Daniel Zelman, the co-creators of Damages, which recently started its second season.

ON A JOURNEY

“These guys are perfectionists. These shows are all about something, specific characters. Creators get very attached to what that is. The creators want to get to the answer of who these people are and where their journey ends. If it’s creatively satisfying, why would you want to hand it off to someone? With procedural shows there isn’t as big an over-arching journey, so it’s probably easier to hand it off. It becomes a weekly execution.”

A big part of the dialogue that TNT has with its creative teams involves the teams’ commitment to the shows, says Michael Wright, the executive VP and head of programming for TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies. “If you bring us your show, we’re going to support you creatively and commercially,” he says, “but we’re also going to insist you do the same. ‘It’s your show—own it, live with it, make it better.’ We want the writer’s voice on-screen, not the network’s.”
Wright says the Turner team works to make TNT and TBS artist-friendly.

“If you watch The Closer, that is [creator] James Duff’s voice married to Kyra Sedgwick’s performance. The network didn’t try to change his voice. We didn’t say, ‘Can you make this sound more like a TNT show?’ We want his style on-screen. If you knew Nancy Miller, who created Saving Grace, the show is an expression of who Nancy is, as seen through the filter of Holly Hunter’s great gift. We think, if that writer writes in his or her voice to this creative target we’ve agreed we want to pursue, that ought to work here.”

Setting the target right for the creatives is a big part of the road to success. TNT was very specific in terms of what it wanted with The Closer. “We said, ‘We want a show that is compatible with Law & Order,’ and we said it will premiere Mondays at 9 o’clock, coming out of Law & Order,” Wright says. “We had an audience coming for that and we said, ‘Let’s develop an original series that the Law & Order audience would look at and say, ‘That seems appealing,’ and once they came to it they would appreciate it for what it was, its own personality and something of a cable sensibility.”

Similarly, Saving Grace and Raising the Bar were developed to be companions to The Closer, and Leverage was developed to reach TNT’s weekend audience for theatricals, which skews somewhat younger and more male than most of the network.

The cable networks are able to attract dedicated producers, says Joel Stillerman, AMC’s senior VP of original programming, production and digital content, because the medium embraces sophisticated, more character-driven stories.

“Cable saw an opening to create the kind of drama that the networks were moving away from,” he says. “AMC is certainly part of that. It’s a natural place for this channel to evolve from its movie brand. The idea of doing scripted series with a kind of cinematic style was a natural.”
AMC’s two original dramas, Mad Men, created by Matt Weiner, and Breaking Bad, created by Vince Gilligan, both won Emmys last year. Mad Men won for drama series and writing for a drama series, and Breaking Bad’sBryan Cranston won for outstanding lead actor in a drama series.

Both shows would be unlikely to see the light of day on a broadcast network, Mad Men being about 1960s advertising execs and Breaking Bad about a high school teacher with a handicapped son, a pregnant wife and terminal lung cancer who turns to crime to provide his family with a nest egg before he dies.

“I can’t imagine Matt or Vince being any more dedicated to making these shows come alive,” Stillerman says. “There is nothing even mildly resembling that factory mentality with either of them. They’re both incredibly dedicated and hypervigilant about every detail of the shows.”

SPECIAL ATTENTION

The other side of that special relationship with creatives comes from the attention that cable networks can pay to their original series. Unlike the broadcast networks, cable has almost always rolled out its shows one at a time over the course of the year.

A network like Lifetime, which has only one original drama, Army Wives, can put a hefty portion of its promotion budget behind it during its first, 13-episode season and its second, 19-episode season, which began last June.

“On a broadcast network sometimes we would develop 60, maybe 80 scripts,” says a former NBC executive, JoAnn Alfano, who is now the executive VP of entertainment at Lifetime Networks. “We don’t have that kind of money. Whatever we buy we have to be sure we really believe in it. Whatever we do put on the air, we put everything behind. That’s something that’s harder to do on a broadcast network because you have multiple nights and shows and you premiere a lot of things at the same time.”

Lifetime will likely add a second drama next season, says Alfano, who developed the sitcoms Will & Grace and Scrubs, and the dramas Ed, Providence and Profiler for NBC.

“Army Wives is the top-rated drama in cable for women 18 to 49,” she says. “It’s very important to us, and when it was set to premiere we put all our ducks in a row in telling the audience it’s back. It’s a really good brand fit for us, which is an important part of the equation. It’s a signature show. Having a strong marketing budget is a really important part of the cable network. The difference is you can put your assets toward one goal, as opposed to broadcast, where you might have to split that up. The dollars are significant.”

Like Mad Men for AMC, Battlestar Galactica has enhanced the brand of the SCI FI Channel and “transformed the network and the way the network is perceived,” according to Mark Stern, the executive VP of original programming for SCI FI.

SCI FI’s support for Battlestar Galactica and its newer series begins early in the development process. “Cable is particularly adept at [using] innovative ways to promote our shows,” Stern says. “It speaks to our being so invested at the outset. The green-light process involves every aspect of our company, scheduling, PR, marketing. Everyone has input into what we move forward on and they’re very invested in it. By the time a series comes on the air, you’ve got a team of people very immersed in what those shows are and how to find ways to promote them for not a lot of money.”

A leg up comes from the channel’s parent company. “NBC Universal is amazing at cross-promotion,” Stern says. “That includes having airings of Battlestar Galactica on NBC Saturday nights. That brought in viewers. Having our promos on their air, being able to put some of our people on the Today and Tonight shows has added up to major benefits for us.”

The network is investing heavily in original reality shows, but it has also greenlighted Warehouse 13, a drama from Universal Cable Productions set in a massive top-secret storage facility in South Dakota that houses every strange artifact, mysterious relic and supernatural souvenir ever collected by the U.S. government.
Even networks more heavily in­vested in drama consistently roll out original series one at a time. “If you’re trying to launch too many shows at one time, the message gets diluted,” says FX’s Grad. But in September, FX launched Sons of Anarchy, its motorcycle-gang show, the day after The Shield’s final season premiere. “In some ways there is a benefit to having The Shield on at the same time as Sons of Anarchy, which to me would have a similar appeal to a certain viewer. You launch both shows, you can focus on marketing the new show, but you have them both on the air so maybe they can feed off each other.”
One characteristic of cable dramas is longevity. They are almost never pulled mid-season, and they are often renewed even when ratings appear less than stellar. The bottom line is, a lot more than hard numbers goes into the decisions.

TNT’s Wright, reflecting on the comparison between Kidnapped and Leverage, notes that an important consideration for renewal is a show’s ratings compared with its network’s prime-time average. “With Leverage it’s almost triple,” he says. “One of the models in cable series television also is the encore. We aggregate a number. Leverage encored really well, so when you aggregate three or four runs, now you’re at, or above, in some instances, the broadcast network number.”

A number of execs cite Mad Men as an example of a show that couldn’t be profitable based on its relatively small audience, but that was renewed twice based on audience growth, the show’s quality and its importance to the network brand.

“We’re fortunate enough to be able to make those decisions on a metric that does include quality,” says AMC’s Stillerman. “It’s not strictly a ratings-driven universe for us. We think the show will continue to grow, and we’ll continue to treat it like the incredibly important franchise it is. It is important to our brand. It was definitely a no-brainer to renew for season three.”

Stillerman lauds the show’s creator and executive producer, Matt Weiner, and his production staff for creating a broadcast look on a cable budget.

“They give the show a real scale,” he says. “The majority of it takes place in a few standing sets. They choose very wisely their opp­or­tunities to leave those sets and find things that give the show a real scope.”

In June, Weiner told The New York Times that his budget is $2.3 million per episode, some half-million dollars less than what is spent on a broadcast drama.

SCI FI’s Stern says that many factors go into the renewal decision. “It’s definitely not a profitability question. One of the great things about cable is that we are more nurturing of our shows. We’re not in the broadcast game of three episodes and out if you don’t hit your number. Sometimes the renewal decision is easy. Sometimes the numbers are strong enough that it’s a done deal. Sometimes it’s a discussion around where we think the potential is, ways to change it and make it better.”

At USA, a more mature and developed network, Wachtel says ratings are the biggest factor in renewals, but not the only one. “When we’re looking at a show like The Starter Wife, which we brought back for a second season, a big part of that decision was the ten Emmy nominations, being in business with a star like Debra Messing, and the very positive critical attention and word of mouth that the show garnered.”

The executives acknowledged that subscriber fees provided a cushion to fund shows that weren’t profitable based on ad sales, but that those dollars weren’t formally allocated to individual show budgets. More important are things that show runners do to keep costs down. Most shoot on a seven-day schedule rather than the broadcast norm of eight.

“We can’t spend as much as the networks, so we find ways to get more bang for our buck,” says FX’s Grad. “Nip/Tuck has very long scenes, so we have fewer scenes than most television shows. Every show has a trick. Rescue Me, we block-shoot two episodes at a time, so we’re much more efficient with locations. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, we block-shoot maybe five episodes at a time. Rescue Me and Damages shoot in New York, where we get phenomenal tax breaks.”

Wachtel says budgets typically range from 20 percent to 35 percent less than those of broadcast shows. “It starts with the pitch. You’ve got to be savvy from the get-go. We’ll tend to have a smaller regular cast. There is less emphasis on expensive sets and major action sequences. We look for locations that provide tax benefits, tax breaks, a favorable exchange rate.”

THE PATH AHEAD

There are a lot of signs that the future of scripted drama lies more with cable than the broadcast networks. Most networks indicate that they plan to add more series, while the most ominous sign from the broadcast side was NBC’s announcement last month that in 2010 it would turn over its 10 p.m. time slot, Monday through Friday, to Jay Leno for talk and comedy.

“If at 10 o’clock at night you want to watch a scripted drama, you’re not going to get it on NBC,” says TNT’s Wright. “That’s one less competitor. Come watch Saving Grace or Raising the Bar. Next summer or 2010, our stated goal is to grow to three nights of original programming, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, certain times of the year. Three hours that might include encores.”

Although cable budgets are smaller, by 10 percent or 20 percent, Wright says he sees little difference between broadcast and cable drama. “Certainly there are still some that are 100-percent distinguishable—this is a broadcast show and this is a cable show,” he says. “But there is a large and growing segment of viewers who turn on the TV and surf their 10 or 15 favorite channels and they don’t distinguish.”