CBS Execs Talk Franchises, Limited Series

CANNES: David Stapf, the president of CBS Television Studios, and Armando Nuñez, the president and CEO of CBS Global Distribution Group, discussed the NCIS and CSI franchises, limited series and procedurals versus serialized storytelling in their MIPCOM session, moderated by World Screen’s Anna Carugati.

Carugati, whose own journalism career began at CBS, started the session by asking Stapf and Nuñez about how they collaborate when CBS Television Studios is developing content. Stapf noted that the latest NCIS spinoff, NCIS: New Orleans, is a good example of how the two divisions inform each other. Stapf says Nuñez asked him, “Why can’t we have another NCIS?” given the show’s massive international reach. “Candidly, we tried it a year ago and didn’t quite get it right. So we went at it again. It was born out of an organic story line that was just going to be a part of the original NCIS, based on an actual guy in New Orleans. When we heard that story we thought, Wow, that could be another show. My first call was to Armando…. We talk two to three times a day. It’s an incredibly collaborative partnership and valuable to me. I trust his knowledge and experience.”

Nunez added, “As much as I, leading a global distribution operation, would take any permutation whatsoever of NCIS or CSI—and I think any permutation would sell well around the world—the franchises are important. So it had to be the right time, the right place, the right idea, and an executable idea. That’s something David and his group always do. It’s underestimated in the process. You could have the greatest idea for a pilot, have an incredible $12 million pilot, but what’s more important than the pilot is the ability to execute on that concept for 13 or 22 episodes, for five years.”

New NCIS and CSI extensions “were always for me a no-brainer,” Nuñez added. “It wasn’t a matter of if, it was a matter of when.”

“These are two incredibly valuable franchises that we nurture and care very much about. Just as important, we have great partners around the world who make our content successful. You don’t just throw a show on a platform. It requires great marketing, great promotion, great instincts.”

Stapf, who has not attended MIPCOM before, said that “one of the great things about the last few days has been meeting with the buyers, who are as passionate and committed and intimately involved in these shows as I am. These are their shows. That is so gratifying to hear.”

While international success is vitally important, any new series from CBS Television Studios must first demonstrate that it can be a hit in the U.S. “If a show is a failure in the U.S., it has no chance of working outside the U.S.," Nuñez said. "Success in the U.S. increases the possibility and probability of it succeeding globally.”

Carugati then steered the conversation to CBS procedurals that use some elements of serialized storytelling. “In the case of NCIS, they created characters you fell in love with,” Stapf said. “The interaction and the banter between them in the office is oftentimes as important as the case. We never lost sight of having a beginning, a middle and an end and a salient case to deal with, but what people are passionate about is [the chemistry between characters]. That’s what gets the audience to lean in a little more.”

However, Stapf continued, “For us the big paradigm shift came with The Good Wife. It strikes that balance [between procedural and serialized] so well. And respected the audience. We don’t have to start a case at the beginning. We can start it in the middle. The audience is smart enough to figure it out. It allows a new way of storytelling that I think enabled our audience to look at our shows in a different way. We never really looked at our shows as pure procedurals. There is always character development. It’s just, how much do you ratchet it up or down?”

For the distribution side, “The great thing about procedurals is, when they’re successful, they play very well in a first telecast, and then they repeat very well,” Nuñez said. Shows that are successful and return season after season “will live forever on different distribution platforms around the world,” he said. "They become valuable assets to our library.”

Carugati also asked the CBS execs about the company’s innovative model for limited-run event series in the summer. This has included two seasons of Under the Dome and this year’s Extant. Next up will be James Patterson’s adaptation Zoo.

Nuñez said that when Stapf approached him about some limited-run summer fare, one of the first issues he had to consider was, “How do we explain to our client base that we’re going to do a big-budget event series over the summer where stereotypically you have repeats, you have reality programming? The U.S. broadcasters typically don’t put their best content on in the summer. So we had our hands full communicating to our clients the concept of this event series. We were one of the first to do something like this. The reaction was very favorable from everyone around the world. And we were off and running.”

“It was too good a project not to do,” said Stapf on Under the Dome. “It was serialized, it was expensive, it didn’t necessarily fit in the normal—which isn’t normal anymore—season that any network had. Yet we had to do it. The challenge was, where do we put it and how do we pay for it?”

Nuñez’s division has reaped licensing fees from digital platforms—as well as TV broadcasters—from distributing the series. “Serialized shows do tend to perform well in a digital environment. That’s when the digital players come into play and make that model work."

The proliferation of nonlinear content buyers “is a good thing,” Nuñez said. “For anybody that is a distributor of content, [the newer digital players are] a good thing. It’s more platforms to place content on. The trick is figuring out how to do this in a way which doesn’t cannibalize your core business…. Anybody in the distribution business right now can’t help but be excited about the opportunities out there as a result of digital in general. It also does create a lot of angst. Anytime new distribution methods are introduced, there is always angst created by technology. Usually with time the dust settles and there’s some sort of equilibrium in the marketplace and usually everyone coexists.”

Stapf agreed that “the more platforms there are, the better. We create content. There’s always going to be the need for a story, no matter what platform we’re playing on.”

Balancing high production values with fiscal responsibility, Stapf said that Nuñez’s division “is bringing in more money and we’re constantly examining how to be more cost efficient, how to produce more efficiently…. The key to any successful show always starts with the showrunner. [A good showrunner] knows how to take a script that may be too expensive and trim it back to make it affordable without taking away what makes it creatively viable.”

Carugati also asked Stapf and Nuñez about the strong relationships they’ve built with producers, writers, actors and platforms. “The art comes first, the business will be sorted out,” said Stapf from the CBS Television Studios perspective. “We recognize that everybody we’re dealing with is an artist, they’re painting a painting. We respect that, and respect what they’re trying to do. We know what’s going to work for the network. Our experience can help. It’s that mutual respect of, the art and the business have to be choreographed. That’s what enables us to do well.

“We’re fortunate that we’ve had shows that stay on the air. It’s just as important for us to get the 16th season pickup of CSI as it is to get a new show on the air. We put a lot of time and money and investment and energy into making sure every episode is the best episode it can be.”

“It is a relationship business,” Nuñez said. “We have output arrangements, volume arrangements, with some clients for many, many years.”

The conversation then moved on to the complex business of windowing. “In markets where we don’t have preexisting commitments, pricing is going to determine how windows take place or exclusivity takes place,” Nuñez said. “It becomes a function of pricing.”

Nuñez also mentioned the breadth of CBS Global Distribution’s slate, with content available from CBS, The CW and Showtime, plus other networks.

Stapf then talked about how CBS Television Studios is now pitching to a wider range of networks. “We can’t just sell to CBS, The CW and Showtime. We need to enable the project to live where it belongs. We’re also a little bit a victim of our own success. We have filled up the shelf space at CBS—with the long-running series we have, there was less and less space. It was imperative for us [to pitch to other platforms].”

Watch the session in its entirety below.