Cable’s Creative Culture

January 2007

Leveraging their tight business
practices, strong brand identity and deep relationships with producers, U.S.
cable channels generate some of TV’s most innovative original shows.

By Peter Caranicas

How do they do it? The
U.S. basic cable channels have programming budgets significantly lower than
those of their broadcast network competitors—lower even than the budgets
of some of their premium brethren like HBO. Yet over the last few years these
channels have produced original scripted shows that have been among the most
innovative, awarded and popular on television.

Just look at the list.
A&E’s Flight 93, TNT’s The
Closer and Into the West, and USA Network’s Monk have won Emmy after Emmy. Programs that have
scored multi-season runs include FX’s Nip/Tuck and The Shield, and Sci Fi Channel’s Battlestar
Galactica and two Stargate series. And the channels continue to attract
Hollywood’s best and brightest writers and producers, who praise the creative
freedom these networks give them.

There are several reasons
for this success, according to cable executives and producers alike. One of
them is cable’s leaner and meaner program development process, which allows the
creative community more autonomy to play with ideas.

Another is the cable
channels’ brand identity. Unlike the major broadcast networks, which are often
defined by little more than three letters and which have to be all things to
all people, cable channels program for narrower audiences, appealing to, say,
science-fiction aficionados, lovers of drama, or fans of edgy, offbeat programming.

Plus, in an increasingly
cluttered channel environment, with literally hundreds of scripted programs
competing for viewers every day, cable networks simply need to be very good at
what they do just to stay in business.

“We’re not channel 2, 4 or
7 on your dial,” says Jeff Wachtel, the executive VP of original programming at
USA Network. “We might be channel 42 or 47, so we have a bigger challenge of
bringing viewers to our network.”

Robert Debitetto, the executive VP and general
manager of A&E Network, adds, “One of the things a lot of the successful
cable nets have in common is the realization that we’re the little guy trying
to compete in a world full of Goliaths, so whatever we do has to have some
breakout potential.”

Brand
X

In cable, the channel
brand is key to attracting viewers, and channel executives make sure they
convey the nature of that brand to producers. “We reach out to TV writers and
creators based on their existing work being consistent with our brand,” says
Michael Wright, the senior VP of original programming for TNT and sister
network TBS. “When we meet with them, we spend a lot of time talking about the
tone and style of TNT.”

Cable brands focus on
demographics like women (Lifetime, WE: Women’s Entertainment, Oxygen), younger
men (Spike TV), African Americans (BET), children (Nickelodeon) and teens
(MTV), as well as interest groups like sports fans (ESPN, Golf Channel) and
outdoors enthusiasts (Outdoor Channel).

So specific is the brand
that sometimes it can even “typecast” the kind of programming a network will
attract from producers. “We’re very well branded, but we’re also battling the
minuses of that branding, because a lot of people assume it’s all spaceships
and aliens,” says Mark Stern, the executive VP of original programming at SCI
FI. “We’re educating the creative community, explaining that we’re really about
speculative fiction, with humor and emotional stories.”

Interestingly, some
producers also brand themselves and look for fits between their culture and
those of the channels they supply. “We try to find TV shows and product that
feels thematically to be part of the Lionsgate brand,” says Kevin Beggs, the
president of television programming and production at the independent studio
Lionsgate, which produces Weeds—the
ironic series about a suburban mom who sells marijuana to help make ends meet—for
the premium channel Showtime and is developing a series for FX based on the
Oscar-winning feature Crash,
the gritty, often violent film
about interconnected characters of many races and ethnicities in modern-day Los
Angeles.

“Weeds and Crash, although one is a comedy and one is an earnest drama, are cut from
the same cloth,” he says. “They contain strong, subversive ideas about the
clash of suburban and urban cultures.

“We want to be producing
things for TV that you would see and say, ‘That feels like a Lionsgate film,’”
continues Beggs. He defines that brand as “edgy and provocative” and cites
Lionsgate’s Lovespring International, a half-hour comedy series set in a matchmaking agency that ran a
single season on Lifetime. “They took a really big chance on it,” he says. “In
the final analysis it was maybe too edgy for Lifetime, but it’s exactly the
kind of show we should be doing. It didn’t work out for that particular outlet,
but creatively it was a home run.”

Leaner,
Meaner, Quicker

“The big broadcast
networks make three or four times more drama or comedy pilots than they need,”
says Nick Grad, the executive VP of original programming at FX. “We don’t.
Since The Shield, we’ve made
nine drama pilots and we’ve put seven of them on the air. We don’t make pilots
just to make pilots. We make them because it’s material that we believe in, and
once a pilot is made it’s usually an easy decision to go forward with the
series.”

Grad also notes that cable’s
restricted budgets “breed a certain amount of innovation and creativity. We
take a lot more time in deciding what to order to pilot because resources are
limited. We have to make more informed decisions.”

“We don’t do as much
original programming as the broadcast networks, so we can spend a lot more
time, energy and care on developing what we do have,” says SCI FI’s Stern. “We
measure our success by different numbers. I’m not developing 70 scripts to get
10 pilots to try to get four or five new series on the air. I’m doing one or
two pilots a year to get one or two new series. The downside of that is that my
success rate has to be, in essence, 100 percent.”

SCI FI original series
that have gone beyond a single season include Eureka, about a secret town populated by scientific
geniuses; Battlestar Galactica,
a saga of humanity’s last survivors and their quest to find a new home while
fleeing from their deadly Cylon enemies; Stargate Atlantis, centered on a secret base abandoned by an ancient
civilization; and Stargate SG-1,
a series of tales of extraplanetary adventures. The two Stargate shows are from MGM, while Galactica and Eureka are from SCI FI’s sister company NBC Universal Television Studio.

Beggs, of Lionsgate, which
deals with several cable networks, agrees that program development in cable
differs from the same process in broadcast qualitatively as well as
quantitatively. “In cable they develop far less, put on far less, but what they
put on they are genuinely committed to, creatively, emotionally and
financially,” he says. “They don’t have the luxury to do what a broadcast
network does and cancel after a few episodes. They’ll run the full cycle. As a
supplier, that’s really refreshing.”

Ted Harbert, the president
and CEO of the Comcast Entertainment Group, shares that view. “In cable, we’re
thrilled with our smaller audience,” he declares. “When we repeat our shows, we
come up with huge audiences. I see the broadcasters coming ever so slowly
towards the cable model of repeating their good shows and not picking up as
many of the lower-tier shows. We have the chance to fail, and when you really
feel you have the chance to fail, you will win.

“If I put on a show that
doesn’t work, it doesn’t really threaten the financial security of the network,”
he adds, “because the brand delivers day in and day out, and successful
programs are frequently building on the brand, whereas the broadcasters have no
brand. They only have hit shows to depend on.… So [cable] is just a better
business where you are encouraged to take chances.”

Cable’s flexibility is
illustrated by the twists and turns taken by programs at ABC Family. “Our
biggest original thus far has been Kyle XY [from Touchstone Television], which premiered last summer,” says
Tom Zappala, the senior VP of program acquisitions and scheduling at the
channel. “It set record ratings. It was so successful [that] it was
repurposed on ABC the same week, was the focus of our broadband player and
was available on iTunes. I think we covered every conceivable platform
with the show, and that contributed to its success.”

Zappala added that this
multiplatform approach helped many people discover ABC Family, which in turn “allowed
the show to build over the summer to a finale, which was our highest-rated
scripted original ever.”

ABC Family’s goal is to
air originals all year round. “It’s not just series; it’s specials and
movies,” continues Zappala. “We had two original episodes of Scariest
Places on Earth for our [branded holiday
event] 13 Nights of Halloween,
as well as an original movie, The Initiation of Sarah. We also had two original movies in December
as part of 25 Days of Christmas.
Series are certainly a focus, but we’re keeping our toe in the water in other
areas as well.”

“One of things the
creative community appreciates about working with us and our [cable] competitors is that, as organizations, we tend to be more streamlined,” says
A&E’s DeBitetto. “We don’t have the layers of decision-making typical of
the broadcast networks.”

Last year, A&E scored
a home run with its TV movie Flight 93, based on the story of the passengers’ takeover of that United
Airlines flight, hijacked on 9/11, which they crashed into a field in
Pennsylvania rather than allowing it to be flown into the White House or the
Capitol in Washington, as the hijackers had intended.

Case
Study: Flight 93

“Flight 93 was the highest-rated program in our network’s
22-year history,” says DeBitetto. “The project was brought to us by Fox
Television [Studios], and we embraced it. At the time there was concern because
there had not yet been a scripted program or any dramatization of the 9/11
events.”

The film was executive
produced by David Gerber, a four-time Emmy nominee and a veteran of more than
50 made-for-TV movies and dramas. Gerber says he got the idea for the movie
after reading an article about how the passengers, who knew they were doomed,
were in touch by phone with their loved ones before the plane went down. “That
intrigued the hell out of me,” he said. “I said, Oh my God, we have to do this.”

Gerber, writer Nevin
Schreiner and director Peter Markle were fully aware of the project’s sensitive
nature and created a script based exclusively on dialogue that could be
substantiated by transcripts of phone calls, radio transmissions and interviews
with family members. Nevertheless, they were “turned down by every single
broadcast and cable network,” Gerber says, until A&E agreed to do it.

“We were willing to take a
calculated risk,” says DeBitetto. “We were careful not to fictionalize; we didn’t
want to turn this into a melodramatic TV movie. The script was annotated and
supportable, and the creators delivered an incredibly emotional movie that
garnered six Emmy nominations.”

Gerber finds producing for
cable channels is less onerous than producing for broadcasters. “In cable you
have more leeway,” he says. “They want to do against-the-grain stuff. They
constantly say, ‘We don’t want to do anything that you could sell to prime
time.’ They’re looking for something different.”

Echoing the experiences of
several producers, Gerber also points out that in cable there are fewer people
to deal with in developing ideas. “You work with a smaller group,” he says. “In
[broadcast] prime time, you have 10 or 15 people you have to deal with in
casting alone!”

Bright
Ideas

Program development in
U.S. basic cable tends to take place under less pressure than in broadcast
television, according to executives involved in the process. Much of that has
to do with the cable channels’ targeted audiences and brands, which circumscribe
the kind of shows that are considered. Within this narrower context, producers
generally have more freedom to develop ideas.

“Producers will bring us
ideas, or we’ll tell them of an area we’re interested in,” says TNT’s Wright. “For
example, we may tell them we’re looking for a crime procedural with a certain
point of view, then we’ll let them go out and do their thing.”

Wright elaborates: “With The
Closer, we said to [executive
producer] James Duff and the other creators that we’re looking for an original
series that might be a companion to Law & Order, which we had acquired. That way, fans of
procedural drama who are watching Law & Order will gravitate to the new show.” The Closer came to TNT from Shephard/Robin Company in
association with Warner Bros. Television.

“People come in with
pitches, and we also go out to the community and talk about what we want to do
and—as importantly—about what we’re not interested in doing,” says
SCI FI’s Stern.

“Program development is an
incredibly abstract process,” explains FX’s Grad. “If you approach it with a
formula, you’ll be vexed. We work with writers and have a lot of respect for
what they want to do and try not to mold them. Because of where we are on the
dial in most homes, we have to offer viewers something they’re not getting
anywhere else.”

To illustrate the variety
of ways in which programming gets developed, Grad points out that “The
Shield was a spec script that was
sent over. Nip/Tuck was a pitch
from the creator, Ryan Murphy, which we bought. Rescue Me was an existing script from executive producer
Peter Tolan, although the version we ended up doing was slightly different. And
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
started out as a 20-minute pilot that these guys shot on their own for $500. So
there are no hard-and-fast rules to development.”

The one-hour drama series Rescue
Me stars Tolan’s writing partner,
Denis Leary, as New York City firefighter Tommy Gavin, who struggles to cope
with the stress of his many years on the job—pre- and post-9/11. The
Shield, the dark police drama
starring Michael Chiklis, is executive produced by Scott Brazil, Shawn Ryan and
Glen Mazzara. Both shows are from Sony Pictures Television.

In the view of USA’s
Wachtel, program development “is always a collaboration, but the network sets a
target, the type of show. Then it’s up to the producer to come up with a unique
creative vision. If you try to force-feed writers and producers, you get
something no one is satisfied with. You need to give guidance to the creative
team, but also allow them freedom to come up with solutions.”

Case
Study: Monk

USA’s brief to producers
is to come up with “character-centric dramas that go against the grain,” says
Wachtel. “When we launched Monk,
there hadn’t been any detective shows since Murder, She Wrote. The Dead Zone and The 4400 were the first science-fiction shows on TV, other than on Sci Fi, since The X-Files.”

In the case of Monk, which is produced by NBC Universal Television
Studio in association with Mandeville Films and Touchstone Tele­vision, the
aim was to base the show on the character of an obsessive-compulsive detective,
someone who solves crimes but is very finicky.

Monk is also a case where a show that could have been a
success on broadcast television happened to go to cable. David Hoberman, Monk’s creator and executive producer, recalls that
several years ago he asked ABC about their programming needs, and they said “they
were looking for a quirky detective show. So somehow I came up with the idea
for this character who is a brilliant detective but has all these phobias and
anxiety issues that interfere with his life and his job.”

Hoberman hired fellow
executive producer Andy Breckman, with whom he had worked in features, to help
him develop the concept further. They wrote a script that ABC liked, but for
two years were unable to cast it. “They couldn’t come up with anyone I liked,
and I couldn’t come up with anyone they liked,” says Hoberman.

The project went into
turnaround and, in a prime example of the critical role of personal connections
in the entertainment industry, it subsequently landed at USA Network because
Jackie Lyons, a former ABC executive who had migrated to the cable side, had
become senior VP of programming there.

Wachtel considers Monk, with its multiple Emmy wins, to be USA’s “pride
and joy, and a flagship show” that has allowed the network to build programming
blocks and to support its other successful originals, such at The 4400, which is produced by CBS Paramount Network Television
in association with Sky Tele­vision, Renegade 83 and American Zoetrope; The
Dead Zone, produced by Lionsgate
and CBS Paramount International Television; and Psych, executive produced by Steve Franks in association
with Tagline Pictures’ Kelly Kulchak, Chris Henze and NBC Universal Television
Studio.

Scary
Moment

Once a show is developed
and written, the scary moment arrives when the channel must make the decision
to turn on the green light and go to production—in other words, to make a
hard financial commitment. Most program executives take it in stride.

“There’s no science to it,”
says A&E’s DeBitetto. “There are some very talented executives in this
business, but the fact is nobody really knows how a show will do. Every pilot,
movie, special and series is a calculated risk. It’s all about being smart
about risk taking. To succeed in television, you have to be very comfortable in
a risk-taking environment. You have to have fearlessness. Hopefully these risks
pay off for you more often than not.”

“Sure, there’s
nervousness, but I just so love this business and it’s exciting,” says TNT’s
Wright. “It’s important to understand that in television a lot of what you do
is not going to work. I can list a hundred great shows that did not find a
sufficiently large audience to merit renewal on their respective networks.”

“The moment of commitment
is exciting,” agrees SCI FI’s Stern. “It’s the whole reason we’re in this
business. Look, there’s always a certain trepidation in any decision you make,
but when we decide to go and do something, it’s with a tremendous amount of
commitment, and there’s very little fear in that decision.”

Growth
and Coming Attractions

The growth of original
programming on U.S. basic cable is being fueled by robust ratings increases
among the ad-supported networks over the past several years. According to the
Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau, at the completion of the November 2006
sweeps period, the share point gap between basic cable and the major broadcast
networks was 9.9 for the cumulative season.

Even though broadcasters
use the sweeps period to shoot their biggest guns, cable managed to outpace the
competition by 6.7 million households and 6.0 rating points. Measured over the
past five years, cable networks’ share is up 16 percent whereas broadcast
networks have slid 19 percent.

Capitalizing on this
growth, basic channels continue to add scripted programs to their schedules.
New shows scheduled by USA Network this year include The Starter Wife, starring Debra Messing and Joe Mantegna, from 3
Arts Entertainment and NBC Universal Television Studio. The limited series of
six hours is based on the bestselling book of the same name by Gigi Levangie
Grazer (who happens to be producer Brian Grazer’s wife). “We have three other
pilots on deck now and at least one of them will get a green light,” says USA’s
Wachtel.

FX is most excited about
its new series Dirt, which
debuted in early January. It stars Courtney Cox as a gossip columnist in her
first TV role since Friends. “The
subject matter of the show feels particularly trenchant now,” says FX’s Grad.
Other original projects in the works at FX include The Riches, a series featuring Eddie Izzard and Minnie
Driver as traveling con artists, and a pilot for an unnamed legal drama
starring Glenn Close.

Over at SCI FI, Stern has
high expectations for The Dresden Files, a 12-episode series beginning in January, based on the book by Jim
Butcher in which a private-eye wizard investigates crimes involving magic and
the supernatural. “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but dealing in a real world, not
an abracadabra world, which is what attracted us to it,” says Stern. “It is
grounded in the present day, with a relatable humorous character.” The series
is from Lionsgate and NBC Universal Television Studio.

Finally, TNT recently
announced a deal with DreamWorks Television in which Steven Spielberg is
executive producing The Talisman,
a mini-series adopted from the fantasy novel by Stephen King and Peter Straub.
The relationship builds upon Spielberg’s earlier collaboration with TNT on the
mini-series Into the West,
which was watched by 81 million viewers during its six-week run. The
Talisman is set to air in the
summer of 2008.