John Landgraf

WS: What has been FX’s programming philosophy?

LANDGRAF: I would say that most brands are top-down-managed processes where a brand defines itself with a certain number of characteristics and then essentially imposes those characteristics on the product that it makes and the way it markets that product. I look at our brand more as a top-up brand in which certainly there are common characteristics amongst our shows: they tend to be adult, they tend to be very original, quite bold. They tend to be excellent; virtually all of them are very critically acclaimed. But when you get past those obvious correlations, what you find is that our brand is really an aggregate of a whole series of sub-brands and the sub-brands are really the shows themselves: Louie, Justified, American Horror Story, Sons of Anarchy, Wilfred and Archer. And that goes all the way back to The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me. We try to find people with a really bold original vision—creators, writers, producers, showrunners and directors—then we build around that vision. We do give a lot of notes, but we give them from inside the vision. We’ve never fired a showrunner or creator off any of our shows in the more than a decade that we have been doing this. All of the advertising for each of our shows is highly individualistic. We’re intensely supportive of original creative visions. We have built our entire organization from the ground up around creative people and around how to be excellent at identifying really talented people and then supporting their vision.

 

WS: When greenlighting shows, which considerations are content-driven and which are marketing-driven?

LANDGRAF: I’d say they are somewhat related. We are most successful from a marketing standpoint when we put a show on the air that is not on the air. In other words, we live in a very crowded marketplace. There were 143 scripted original television series that aired on premium and basic cable last year (that doesn’t include broadcast) and there are 100 commercially measured channels. When we put something on the air that the audience can sit up and say, “Hey, wait a minute, that’s different, that’s like nothing I’ve seen before,” that’s when we do best. Within that difference, there has to be some kind of appeal, and that’s where characters come in. What we are constantly looking for, in both our comedies and dramas, are character points of view that are very original and sometimes very challenging, but are very emotionally resonant and accessible character points of view. In Louie, Louis C.K.’s point of view is pretty challenging, and yet as a newly single father, sharing custody of his two daughters and parenting in Manhattan, even in the midst of that bracingly original vision, there is a point of view that people can relate to. Or take The Americans. American audiences have never been exposed to the point of view of undercover KGB agents working [in the U.S.] against America in the past. But the point of view of Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, the two main characters, is just a very universally resonant point of view. It’s that unique combination of something that is different, very different, sometimes challengingly different, but has these universal access points, as opposed to many other channels that are looking first and foremost for those universal access points and then maybe a little bit of differentiation. We start from the other direction, which is, how can we find something that is really distinctive and original, and then how can we work with the creators really, really hard on the execution to find those universal access points in terms of character and the emotional resonance of the leads of the show?

 

WS: Will you be doing more limited series like American Horror Story?

LANDGRAF: Yes. In general we just want to do more original series. We’ve been expanding pretty consistently during the time I’ve been at the channel. When I arrived we had two original series on the air. Today we have 13 original series on the air, and over the next several years we will probably double that output again, so we’ll be close to 25. Part of it is pushing into other genres. But part of it is that I get really excited about American Horror Story and the iterations that Ryan Murphy has created with the notion of an anthological series. It is really a new original mini-series that is marketed under the same title, but each year it goes to a new location with a new cast and is an entirely new self-contained story. I thought that was a really interesting idea and an innovation that I think is going to be followed. There is a series HBO is making called True Detective that is patterned on the model put forth by American Horror Story. But more than that, part of what I realized is that when you look at the explosion of quality programming that has come out of America in the past decade, particularly since The Sopranos initially premiered on HBO, and then a couple of years later, when The Shield premiered on FX, we really liberated storytellers. Before that, storytellers either had to fit their ideas into a two- or three-hour film, or had to make a series that would go 22 episodes a year and hopefully make well in excess of 100 episodes. That really limited the number of subjects and types of approaches one could take to a series.

 

When The Sopranos came along, all of a sudden you could do a 13-episode-a-year series that had continuity and was essentially a 90-hour movie told over seven years. It just exploded and opened a massive door to quality. I could name so many amazing series that came out of that. While we absolutely are still going to continue to make what I call these 90-hour movies that are essentially 7-year and 13-episode television series (and hopefully Justified will go the distance and Sons of Anarchy will go the distance and The Americans will go many years), I really believe there are all kinds of great stories that we are not telling that optimally should be told, not in 2 hours and not in 90 hours but in 10 or 20 hours or 30 hours. So, for example, we’ve made a deal for a show called The Strain with noted director Guillermo del Toro. When Guillermo came in and pitched it, it was based on a trilogy of books that he and his co-author Chuck Hogan had written. As he said, this will either be three, four or five seasons, but it won’t be two and it won’t be six or seven. It will be somewhere between 39 and 65 episodes. When I read the books I thought, He’s definitely right, we’d have to compact it to do fewer and we’d have to stretch it to do more. So part of what we realized is we really need to figure out how to adapt our business models to create even more flexibility in terms of the types of choices that storytellers make. The more we can figure out the business model around a story that is good, the better the content that we are going to get.

 

WS: What do linear channels have to do to maintain their relevance when people are viewing so much on screens other than the TV set?

LANDGRAF: I continue to think that brands are a very helpful filter for consumers. Imagine what it would be like if you walked into a grocery store to shop for food and household products and there were no brands. Imagine how difficult and disorganized the experience of choosing products would be. So I tend to look at channels as the equivalent of brands in that they do seem relevant to the consumer; they provide some hallmark of quality and a sense of, if you’ve liked the programming that a certain channel or certain brand has had in the past, you will come back to it.

 

There is also the factor that people really do spend a lot of time watching television passively, even though the bulk of the press goes to what you’d call “active viewing” [watching a show while tweeting or chatting about it or searching for more information about the show online] surrounding live sporting events or live award shows or reality programming or the kind of scripted programs that inspire live television viewing. The truth of the matter is that when you actually look at the number of hours spent watching television, all forms of active viewing account for less than 20 percent of all television viewing, closer to 10 percent; 80 to 90 percent of it is essentially lean-back viewing—that is to say, passive viewing. The overwhelming number of viewers subscribe to cable and use channels for passive viewing. It’s not that I’m not concerned about it, because certainly I am. We talk every day about how to maintain promotional power and relevance.

 

While there are other businesses like Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu that are becoming an important part of the ecosystem, the bulk of the ecosystem still surrounds linear television, which is very much trying to provide consumers with more of what they want.