Greg Berlanti & Sophie Turner Laing

There is hardly a side of the television business that Sophie Turner Laing has not experienced firsthand. She has been a distributor, buyer, commissioner and managing director of content. She is now CEO of the Endemol Shine Group, which creates and distributes global scripted and unscripted hits.

Greg Berlanti has been a storyteller all his life, starting as a child when he would put on puppet shows at children’s birthday parties. He later became a writer and showrunner and today has 14 scripted series on the air, from superhero shows based on DC Comics characters like The Flash and Supergirl to dramas such as Blindspot and You across broadcast, cable and streaming services.

In recognition of their accomplishments, the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences awarded Turner Laing its Directorate Award and Berlanti the Founders Award. They sat down with World Screen’s group editorial director, Anna Carugati, to discuss a broad range of topics, from finding and securing talent to the impact of streaming services on the TV business to diversity and the #MeToo movement.

WS: There is worldwide demand for drama. How is this demand changing your business?
TURNER LAING: What is interesting for us is that there are new customers and the OTTs have created a very different marketplace for scripted. What people are figuring out is how that sits alongside the terrestrial broadcasters. There is a lot of noise in the marketplace about the traditional linear broadcasters being beaten out of the competition because prices are high. And because of that, the scarcity of talent is very, very acute. So, you may have a marvelous idea but the lack of writers, directors, etc.—that’s where the pitch point is and I’m not sure there is an answer.
BERLANTI: Crew, cast, directors, everyone across the board, as well as the scripts, have to be better because you are always going into a room trying to convince someone to do your show, as opposed to the other 15 scripts that will arrive at their office or their house tomorrow. So, we focus on how we can make the material even better. Overall, the quality of television—the amount of time we are spending in preproduction, production and postproduction—is much more what people are used to at the feature-film level in terms of the number of hours we are spending now on anything from a visual effect or the score or on something in postproduction, to the number of days we shoot some of the episodes and the number of scenes we have. [This increased demand for drama is] affecting us in that way. The other great thing is that there are so many places [offering drama]. If you have the right story, there is an outlet for it, but you have to know on the other end that it’s going to hit the audience. We all, as audience members, have been told about a great show and thought, Yeah, I have to add that to the list of things I have to watch. As a producer, you are also biding your time once you are on the air, hoping there is a different way people are finding and discovering shows and that you have enough of a passionate fan base to keep the show going.
TURNER LAING: The challenge outside the U.S. is that the writers’ room is still really not in existence. And the Europeans have much more time to make drama than the frenetic [process in the U.S.] of getting a pilot order, then a pickup and start delivering in September. European writers would throw their hands up in horror if they’d have to move that fast! It does mean that you have this logjam waiting for the great writers to come on and most of them are booked up for four or five years.

WS: Not all of your shows have the traditional network run of 22 episodes. Are you moving toward shorter runs?
BERLANTI: Yes, definitely. We’re also doing fewer pilots and going more and more straight to series on a lot of shows. So, the first five or six episodes are considered the pilot because of the amount you are learning about what’s working or not working—what story elements are working, what actors are working, what chemistry is not working. The challenge is that you’ve written episode 10 or 12 and you’re just watching episode 3 or 4 and you know the snowball effect that is going to have on everything. You either choose to scramble or not; hopefully you do try to augment the show based on what you are learning and seeing.
TURNER LAING: What is most scary is the number of shows that don’t make it past the first season. Years ago, you could know that probably the first season was going to be a bit bumpy. It wasn’t going to be perfect, but if there was a strong characterization or relationship, you knew, most times out of ten, they would take a roll on it again. The hardest thing is the percentage of cancellations, and you wonder where this is going to lead.
BERLANTI: Another thing that has happened is you think a show is dead and then six months later something happens and people discover it and binge it. You are also seeing shows that were very successful and had been canceled are now being resuscitated. It has so much to do with how people are discovering shows.
TURNER LAING: There is a great feeling of nostalgia that is transferring across to non-scripted as well. Fear Factor came back on MTV. Operación Triunfo, which is an enormous success in Spain, was off the air for years. There is a feeling of being able to relaunch a show in a slightly different way but have this familiarity with the audience because marketing is the hardest thing. With all that competition out there, how do you get the eyeballs to that particular show?

WS: How does diversity in front of and behind the camera benefit the whole process, from finding ideas to bringing on new talent and voices?
BERLANTI: I was a product of it. I was writing shows about being gay and that got me my first job and my second job. I’ve always been of a mindset that diversity allows people to be more specific with their storytelling. [The call for diversity] also happened at the same time as the audience [was being inundated] with the same kind of stories and storytelling. Viewers are rewarding story­telling that is different, new and fresh, and looks and feels like they do. There is an economic reward too, but also in the writers’ room and on the sound stages and with the directors and the crews behind the camera. People can be cynical about the business, but the truth is what I’ve seen most is people wanting to give new people and new voices a chance. It’s very rewarding to do that and it’s nice that the industry is embracing that in a larger way because when you make a TV show and you send it out to the world, you don’t always feel the effects of what you are doing. But when you change a person’s life or give them the opportunity to direct for the first time or write a script for the first time or be an art director for the first time or whatever, you get to feel the results of the change you’ve made in someone’s life.

WS: With so many companies in so many countries, how is diversity helping Endemol Shine Group as a whole?
TURNER LAING: Obviously, diversity means different things in different countries. It’s important to us if we are going to deliver local shows to the local entities that they reflect the local environment they are in because I think it’s very wrong of us to force an Anglo-Saxon attitude on different countries around the world. However, that doesn’t stop you from having very good conversations about how to be more inclusive. A lot of progress has been made on camera. Where I find the challenges, and especially when I was at Sky, is behind the camera. The U.K., for example, has a very large BAME [black, Asian and minority ethnic] population, but it’s very hard to get people of color on crews. Equally, you go to India and there are very few women on those crews. You’ve got to do it step by step, but I think sharing a spotlight of what good looks like and what inclusion means is what our jobs are for.

WS: It’s been a little over a year since the beginning of the #MeToo movement. What is being done to make workplaces safe—both in preventing harassment and inappropriate behavior and in making sure victims are heard?
BERLANTI: Everyone is a lot more aware of it and we are putting a lot more systems in place to make sure that everyone at every level of production feels heard and safe. It’s about a commitment so that as information comes in, you find all sorts of ways to make the workplace better, whether it’s safer or even more creative. [We have to make sure] that people know they are taken seriously. We have a much more open atmosphere now, where everyone feels safer and heard, than we did a year ago.
TURNER LAING: Respect is very important. I do worry that we end up with systems when actually it’s common sense that you should treat people with respect, which unfortunately doesn’t always happen on every single occasion. We try to use best practices and we have challenges because of different countries and cultures around the world and what respect means and where the barriers are. I want people to enjoy coming to work and do their best stuff, and therefore you need to make sure that it’s a welcoming and safe environment. And, as I’m much quoted, I have a “no arseholes” policy! That continues.

WS: Sophie, it’s fair to say you’ve seen the business from every possible angle. Have there been aha moments that have served you as you have moved on?
TURNER LAING: I’ve been very lucky. I have loved every single job I have ever done and the reason I have moved is not because I had worked out a career path and needed to go somewhere next. But I felt like I’d had that discussion enough times that I just wanted a new challenge. It’s been enormous fun, starting with selling, then buying and now back around again, so I’ve been around the wheel more than once or twice!

The aha moments [have been that] there are definitely things you screw up along the way, but you have to learn from those mistakes and try not to replicate them. And learn from working with people; try to grab the best bits out of people so that when you have your own teams, you can make life and working with them a great experience. There is that adage of making people leave the room even more excited and fulfilled than when they entered the room—that’s a really important thing. But if I ever get tempted to merge companies again, please shoot me!

WS: Greg, any aha moments for you?
BERLANTI: I feel I always have them. The great thing about television is that there is still so much about it that I don’t know and I’m still learning. It’s changed so much. When we started, we would get a box of fan mail at Dawson’s Creek once every two months. Now we are getting feedback on the shows the first minute into an episode, so the connectivity between the audience and us is different now. I was at one time the youngest person in the room and now very often I’m the oldest person in a lot of the writers’ rooms!