American Dream

This article originally appeared in the MIPTV 2013 issue of World Screen.

 

Quirky, all-consuming and outrageously ex­pen­sive—and that’s before anything actually gets on the air. The broadcast-network development season in the U.S. is a phenomenon unique in global media, and despite its oddities and excesses, not likely to be abandoned anytime soon. From the frenzy of pilot shoots to the wackiness of writers’ rooms, no country creates television shows in quite the same manic yet miraculous fashion as the U.S.

 

“It’s nuts—but somehow we all get in line and do it,” says Betsy Beers, the executive producer on Scandal as well as on Grey’s Anatomy, both for ABC and both with producing partner Shonda Rhimes. “The challenge is everyone’s doing it at the same time—competing for the same writers, scrambling for cast, crew and a city to shoot in and racing against the clock.”

 

In describing her experience of the ordeal, though, Beers sounds more exhilarated than aggravated. Ditto several others.

 

Robert Doherty, an executive producer of CBS’s Elementary, comments, “The development season? A free-for-all. Art colliding with commerce is rarely pretty. But having come all the way through the machine, I get why it works.”

 

In fact, it’s hard to find a producer with a series on broadcast TV who wouldn’t jump through such hoops again for the privilege of appearing in prime time.

 

Despite the toll the game takes—especially on those whose projects get the ax at a stage too early to monetize their efforts—the procedures and processes put in place decades ago show little sign of disintegrating. What has happened is that the system has been chipped away at, filed down and/or smoothed out to blanket the entire calendar year.

“Inertia and familiarity” will probably keep the basic structure intact, opines the producer David Zucker, who is the president of Scott Free Television, the company behind the fourth-year drama The Good Wife for CBS. What has changed, Zucker points out, is that nowadays there are new outlets to pitch to, new formats to play with and new funding sources to tap. That makes creating content a broader, more flexible, more inclusive game. Like so many other creative outfits around town, Scott Free Television also produces for a variety of cable outlets and for upstart Internet players.

 

However much cable networks and Internet upstarts are perceived to be sexier and more forward-looking, though, broadcast TV series are still what attract the most eyeballs and the biggest bucks from stations around the world.

 

“OK, Girls is hot, but at best that HBO show attracts 700,000 viewers. The Big Bang Theory: we’re talking 19 million; NCIS: 22 million and counting, and that’s week in and week out over ten years,” says one veteran media observer.

 

“What we saw at the recent Golden Globes awards show was instructive,” says Sandra Stern, Lions­gate Television’s COO. “TV was holding its head up high, unapologetically, next to all those film people.” Not that anyone can be complacent, she adds, “but if you ask me if programming is in peril, I’d say no. Rather, TV itself needs to be redefined to include all the new ways and new devices we have for making and viewing content.”

 

Stern thinks the biggest challenge is figuring out how to maintain the economic basis of the business as viewing becomes ever more fragmentary and individualized. But that doesn’t mean avoiding the biggest sandbox on the playground: after a decade of providing edgy or offbeat projects to cable (hits like Weeds and Mad Men among them), the mini-major has scored with the broadcast series Nashville, a nighttime sudser for ABC that is lathered with country music.

 

“We wanted to take a few more risks,” Stern says in explaining the rationale behind Lionsgate’s plunge into broadcast waters, “but we only did so when we could play with the house’s money, as it were.” She also points to the incentives that Tennessee dangled for filming in Nashville itself, as well as the nice bit of change coming in from sales of the series’ soundtrack. (Alongside its hit on ABC, Lionsgate is moving into the digital space, producing Orange Is the New Black for Netflix.)

 

Another rising indie supplier, Canada’s Entertainment One (eOne), also takes a strategic approach to pitching to broadcast. Last year the company got the go-ahead for a straight-to-series version of John Grisham’s The Firm for NBC, which did not go beyond 13 episodes. This go-round eOne is spearheading a British-originated cop show called Rogue, the first original fiction series commissioned by the satellite platform DIRECTV.

 

“As an indie, you’re looking for where the holes are in the TV firmament and in our case partnering on projects to limit our exposure,” says John Morayniss, the Los Angeles–based CEO of eOne Television. “Fortunately,” he adds, “there are many more outlets to pitch to and these buyers are placing hybrid orders.” Rogue, which stars Thandie Newton, has wrapped 10 episodes in Vancouver and will go on air in April.

 

Scott Free Television is partnering with eOne to produce the mini-series Klondike, about the Gold Rush, for the Discovery Channel. “Nonfiction content will always remain at Discovery’s core, but we also see the value in commissioning scripted programming events that complement our nonfiction series and are on brand for our networks,” says David Zaslav, the president and CEO of Discovery Communications. “Klondike, for example, is a perfect complement to [our factual shows] Gold Rush, Yukon Men and Bering Sea Gold.”

 

So what does it take to get a show up and running in prime time on one of the Big Five broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX or The CW?

 

A lot of hurry up and wait, an intense effort to corral talent, and an amount of money that makes producers wince when asked about it. A few drama pilots have been nudging the $6-million mark, though no single studio executive will cop to such for any particular series. All they will say is that money on the screen is part of the promotional push to get to a series pickup, and that puny pilots are apt to get passed over.

 

Best estimates from several in-the-know executives are that the overall cost of making pilots for each season ranges between $80 million and $100 million. Generally, some three dozen get the thumbs-up from among the Big Five; roughly twice that number get sent packing.

Nevertheless, many executives consider pilots indispensable, despite the cost. “As much as it’s tempting not to make a pilot because it looks better economically to forego the added expense and the potential loss implied by making a pilot and not picking it up, I really think the only way to achieve the quality level that we aspire to is to make pilots,” says John Landgraf, the president and general manager of FX Networks.

 

“Pilots are a necessary step because it’s just so hard, particularly when you are trying to make a show that is excellent and has a different tone and a point of view that hasn’t been seen on television before; it takes great precision and effort to get it right,” continues Landgraf. “And having that opportunity to stop and shut down production and cut something together, look at it, look at it again, and really talk about it, and ultimately benefit from what you learned from making that pilot before you move forward on the production of the first season of the series, is really vital from my viewpoint.”

 

Of course, not all pilots get picked up. Andrew Kreisberg is an executive producer on the CW freshman hit Arrow. Like practically every producer in town, he’s had projects rejected at one stage or another, including a script called Halley’s Comet, which intrigued David E. Kelley enough for him to shoot a pilot. “In this business there’s a lot of failure—but also so much success to be extracted from it. So many random good things came out of that situation: Kelley eventually hired me to work on Boston Legal, I’m still close to some of the writers, and an actress on that pilot just auditioned with us.”

 

In short, producers tend to do what the song calls for: they pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again.

 

“On the face of it, the pilot season and the sweeps don’t make any sense,” says Brad Adgate, the senior VP and director of research at Horizon Media. “Broadcasters are slow to adopt changes, for whatever reason, cost or habit, and cable has taken advantage of what’s calcified in the system.” Still, Adgate goes on to say, the machine has chugged along since the early 1960s, when ABC, an upstart at the time, first held an upfront, intended to get its shows out in front of advertisers during one intense week. (NBC and CBS soon followed suit.) Nowadays the new upstarts, Hulu, Netflix, Yahoo et al., are holding their own “infronts” for advertisers. Estimates suggest they’ll pull in a respectable $4 billion for their efforts this spring.

 

Obviously, Hollywood studio and network executives see the development season differently and are quick to point out that commissioning and launching shows, fiction as well as reality, is now a year-round affair.

 

CBS, for example, is banking on a high-profile fiction project for the summer called Under the Dome, from the pen of Stephen King and the producing prowess of Steven Spielberg. Neal Baer, its executive producer, says, “Not only is the thinking at CBS (and elsewhere) becoming more flexible, but given the auspices of [Spielberg and King] they’ve commissioned us to go ahead without a pilot. The business is, of course, still a lot about trust.” (Baer was working on John Wells’s ER back when CBS’s current entertainment president, Nina Tassler, was an executive at Warner Bros. His year-old company, Baer Bones, is set up on the CBS lot.) Relationships still explain a lot about who works with whom in the town.

 

Over at Twentieth Century Fox, production executives increasingly pride themselves on being a year-round shop with a mandate to take risks, its sibling broadcast network, FOX, having traditionally zigged (most notably in January with its American Idol juggernaut as a lead-in) when the Big Three, ABC, CBS and NBC, zagged.

 

“If a great idea comes in at whatever time, we’re conditioned to look for the next window of opportunity, or if we have something in the hopper, we’re just as apt to wait until the right slot on the schedule opens up,” says Twentieth Century Fox Television’s executive VP of comedy development and animation, Jonathan Davis. “It’s a hell of a lot more work, but our approach often pays off.”

 

Davis argues that mainstream comedy has found its footing once again on broadcast television. For one thing, he notes, the diversity and variety in the culture helps. “Families, friendships, marriage, all look different and less predictable today than ever before. Our aim is to be broad and irreverent and reflect these changes in society.” He points to an upcoming project called Dads, which Seth MacFarlane is involved with, as a series that promises to tap into the current zeitgeist.  

 

And not everything costs an arm and a leg, Davis emphasizes. Take Modern Family, which Twentieth Century Fox makes for ABC. “We don’t overcook it. We get the funny and get out of there.” While Davis wouldn’t be drawn into money details, comedies traditionally cost considerably less than hour-long dramas, especially since so many of the latter now ape the look of feature films.

 

Once a pilot has been picked up to series, generally in the second week of May, things only become more intense. Producers have to hustle a second time to assemble their teams and get ready to shoot in the middle of the summer.

 

Revving up a writers’ room to flesh out the plotlines and to speak with a unified, coherent voice is the next big challenge. What executive producers and showrunners—be they writers themselves or not—must manage to do is put their imprimatur on the material without tamping down the creativity in the room. Equally as important, they must be able to handle the onslaught of notes from different quarters, taking onboard the helpful ones and quietly putting aside those that aren’t.

 

Each does it differently. Scandal’s Beers says about her process, “Shonda and I both came from movies, and over the years we gathered a trusted group of collaborators. We think of ourselves as cheerleaders, facilitators and sometimes gladiators.’’ Although the cliché is that networks just want clones of the hits they’re already airing, Beers insists that ABC encourages its producers to break the mold. For one thing, Scandal features Kerry Washington as the first black female lead in a broadcast series since Diahann Carroll in Julia 40 years ago, though the series is deftly postracial in its approach. The character Washington portrays is complex, defying conventional portrayals of minorities. “Shonda and I believe stories should reflect the world we live in and characters should be interesting, flawed, complicated people.” 

 

Arrow’s Kreisberg adds, about the comic book-inspired show he’s working on alongside Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim, “It sort of does work, all the notes and advice you get. The stronger your idea and the sturdier the structure of your pilot, the more the series can withstand myriad notes. In fact, they then become additive rather than destructive.” On Arrow, in fact, the input of executives and writers from DC Comics is helping to shape the characters, Kreisberg says.

Just getting a disparate group of writers into gear is a challenge, especially since the first few episodes can make or break a series in terms of ratings.

 

Doherty, who along with Carl Beverly is the executive producer of the first-year detective drama Elementary for CBS, says, “We started out with a proven commodity, Sherlock Holmes, but nonetheless once we got the call, celebration quickly gave way to panic. As the showrunner, I had to start over selling things to the network. So many opinions have to be factored in. Admittedly, we were gummed up in the beginning.” Doherty runs a room of seven writers, while his partner in crime, Beverly, oversees the actual shoot in New York.

 

When Jane Tranter, the former controller of fiction at the BBC, crossed the pond to become the head of BBC Worldwide Productions in Los Angeles, she thought she knew a lot about how American television worked, but there were striking discoveries to be made once she was in Hollywood.

 

In the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, a single writer often toils alone and uninterrupted on a script and shows are often commissioned based on an instinctive response to the material. “I knew the spec for Life on Mars needed work to get from A to G, say, but nonetheless we just went for it,” she remembers. In America, on the other hand, “everything is assessed meticulously from every angle before a step is taken. Nothing is done precipitously; rather, patterns and routines are respected.”

 

From Tranter’s perspective, that tendency to quantify and calibrate is not only about the vast sums at stake with each project, but also about a more consciously egalitarian approach to decision-making. “Collaboration is key to the American method of creation,” she points out.

 

Tranter, who has been based in the U.S. for the last four years, also thinks that writers’ rooms are “a brilliant construct” for launching and keeping a long-running series fresh.

 

Indeed, once a series becomes a hit, challenges do not recede. How to keep a show fresh and the characters interesting is arguably harder than getting the plot going. 

 

Gary Glasberg, an executive producer of the CBS megahit NCIS, says he wanted this season “to rattle the cages a little bit.” The deaths of two recurring characters—of all things, in the middle of the season—is how he and his team did it. “Just when viewers are lulled into a false sense of security we shook things up.” Now in his fourth year on the CBS procedural, Glasberg points out that NCIS doesn’t utilize a writers’ room per se. “I just traipse from one office to another, each writer having a board, and we talk. Others may walk in. The important thing is that with such terrific writers and cast, we’re still scratching the surface as to who the characters are. Their lives are as important as the crimes that get solved.” 

 

As for extracting the best work from the disparate members of a writers’ room, experience helps, but so does experimentation.

 

Coming off his long stints first with John Wells (China Beach, ER) and then with Dick Wolf Productions (on Law & Order: SVU), Under the Dome’s Baer describes his role as analogous to that of a conductor or a chef. “You can’t do it yourself. Everybody puts in their ingredients and if you mix it well, season it well, a gourmet meal is cooked up.”

 

The team Baer has assembled for Under the Dome means he’s now fulfilled what he calls “a long-time dream.” Everyone in there is a collaborator, some more experienced than others, plus, for the first time, he has a former investigative journalist in the mix. “I believe in research, and having someone so adept and quick to resolve questions that come up as we develop the story is ideal. It’s also a marvelous use of the Internet.”

 

The premise of the piece is that an invisible force field has settled over an unsuspecting town in New England. With a 13-episode order, the series premieres June 24 on CBS. Baer Bones has three other pilots in contention for the fall.

 

“I love the idea of a series for the summer, and hopefully for more than one summer! If all goes well, we’d be freed up to tackle something for fall launch,” Baer says. “I like that rhythm.”

 

Finally, one thing producers relish, nail-biting though it can be, is shooting while the show is airing so that they can see what characters are standing out, which plot lines are resonating, and which ones aren’t. 

 

Kreisberg, for example, says the writers’ room on Arrow is “totally attuned” to the Twitter-verse as well as to the reactions of family and friends. In fact, one of the series’s characters, Felicity Smoak, has had her role enhanced by the writers partially because of reactions from viewers.