Frances Berwick

World Screen Weekly, February 8, 2007

Executive VP, Programming and Production

Bravo

Her accent may betray her roots in the U.K., but Frances Berwick is a true mid-Atlantic citizen, with knowledge and connections on both sides of the pond. Now based in New York and responsible for all of Bravo’s programming—including original production, development, scheduling and acquisitions—she first worked in television at Britain’s Channel 4, where she headed international distribution.

“I was licensing TV shows from Channel 4 and also doing co-productions, including with the U.S.,” she recalls. “One of my bigger clients was Bravo. They used to buy a lot of both our scripted and unscripted shows.”

It’s not uncommon in business for a seller to be hired by one of his or her customers, and that’s exactly what happened to Berwick, who made her transatlantic move in 1996. She joined Bravo at a critical moment in its history, when it was switching from a pay network to an advertiser-supported channel. Berwick quickly made her mark there. Six months ago—in the wake of a significant uptick in the network’s ratings, and coinciding with her 10th anniversary at Bravo—she was promoted from senior VP to executive VP.

Over the years Berwick has helped Bravo develop original shows such as Bravo Profiles, Michael Moore’s The Awful Truth, Cirque du Soleil: Fire Within and The It Factor. In addition, she has overseen production of the channel’s 12-time Emmy-nominated series Inside the Actors Studio.

The more recent and popular series that Berwick has developed and produced include Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Celebrity Poker Showdown, Project Runway, Top Chef, The Real Housewives of Orange County, and the Emmy-nominated Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List. Bravo’s latest competition-reality series, Top Design, debuted on January 31.

According to Berwick, Bravo’s relatively small size and strong connection with its audience is the key to its success. “We can move faster than the broadcasters, and often even more quickly than the bigger cable networks,” she says. “We have a small core team making decisions, and this allows us to be pretty quick to react to ideas that come from the outside, and to internal ideas as well. If you’re programming to a very specific niche, you have a greater potential of success because you’re so focused on that particular audience.”

She describes Bravo’s viewers as “highly educated, upscale, and somewhat more liberal. That has allowed us,” she adds, “to get shows like Queer Eye on the air. Quite frankly, the title alone would have prevented it from going through the green-light process at most other networks.”

How does Berwick define the Bravo brand? “It’s all about exploring pop culture, the creative arts, and looking behind the scenes at the creative process,” she says. “Over the years, that mission hasn’t changed dramatically, but the way we execute on that has changed considerably. We’re trying to expose the creative process, cultural trends and pop culture in a way that is as widely accessible as possible. For example, Project Runway explores the fashion industry and the creative processes behind that business.”

Before finding its footing, Bravo underwent many changes. When Berwick joined, it was in the throes of transition from a premium to an ad-supported model. At that time Bravo was owned by Cablevision’s Rainbow Media Holdings, and for a while Berwick oversaw programming for fellow Rainbow network the Independent Film Channel and also programmed the Bravo and IFC networks in Latin America and Canada. (In 2002, Bravo was acquired by NBC, now part of NBC Universal.)

With Bravo now having found the right programming formula and gaining traction in the marketplace, Berwick intends to stick to what works best: unscripted series. “In the past we’ve dabbled on a couple of improvised comedy formats,” she explains, “but our core focus is the unscripted world. We are selective about shows, but it’s very energizing when we come across something that we think is perfect for us. When we come up with an idea we feel strongly enough about to green-light it, that’s very exciting.”

—By Peter Caranicas