Kevin Beggs

February 2, 2009 World Screen
President, Television Programming & Production
Lionsgate

Lionsgate is a leading independent film studio known for the Oscar winner Crash, the Saw franchise and the Tyler Perry franchise. The company has had an equally distinguished track record on the television side with the critically acclaimed series Weeds and Mad Men, the first basic-cable show to win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series. More recent shows include a Crash series for Starz and the dark comedy Nurse Jackie for Showtime. Kevin Beggs, the company’s president of television programming and production, talks about how his division’s attention to quality and cost-saving production models is yielding hit shows. 

WS: What type of business model do you try to follow on your shows? 
BEGGS: The film and television models at Lionsgate are similar in that we try to be extremely disciplined financially and deliver high, high quality on the creative and production [sides]. The cable model is generally one day less of production on a drama than a broadcast network drama series, and [it] generally has fewer name stars. Cable also looks to contain the above-the-line costs and build shows around singular visions like a Matt Weiner [creator of Mad Men] or a Jenji Kohan [creator of Weeds], who really are pure show runners in every sense of the word. They have a hand in every aspect of the preproduction, production, post-production. They are craftspeople really hand-making these shows. If you do that, and do it right, with talented partners like them, you can really control that cycle of runaway expenses that so many of the larger studios and networks can often get into. 
Also, when we go into any project, the elements of the show have to work for the creative people involved—it all has to work internationally, it has to work for DVD, and the show has to have a potential second life cycle past its initial broadcast. If any one of those elements doesn’t measure up, it’s very rare that we will proceed. We are very selective about what we choose to develop, and about [the pitches we receive]. There are plenty of great shows out there that we might not ever do because they don’t fit the model.

WS: How long from when you get a pitch or start something internally to when you actually get into production? 
BEGGS: Actually, we move pretty quickly. We’re very efficient in deciding on the things that we are going to do and presenting them, but we are at the mercy of the buyers for a while. If there is ever a slowdown, it’s only in that process, which is entirely de­pendent upon the buying cycles of our partners. Are they taking pitches? Are they doing scripts? Are they doing series deals, and how long are they taking to evaluate the various projects that they have? Then, if they opt to go forward, we are very familiar and comfortable on the production side. One of our strengths is efficient production as well and moving these things forward. 
We do the shows that we are passionate about. The good side of being an indie is that we should only pursue projects that we think make sense. And we have a stable of really solid returning shows. So I don’t think we get up every morning saying, “Oh my God, we have to sell a show today,” because that is a sure-fire way to make a misstep creatively. And by the way, most creative missteps, inevitably, end up being business missteps.

WS: How is new media helping your series be seen? 
BEGGS: Many of our shows have become iconic iTunes performers, such as Weeds and Mad Men. I look at those as business opportunities but also as promotional opportunities because getting the brand out there is so difficult. There are so many shows, so many channels, so many networks. One of the biggest challenges is just cutting through the clutter. When you get that iTunes phenomenon, or a show is working on Hulu, I think you have to say this is good for the overall brand. There is a huge online community that follows our shows through the various shows’ websites and other social networks like Twitter. These are the people who are going to see you through to many, many seasons and whom our advertisers, in the case that we are on ad-supported networks, are hoping to reach. So we embrace new media and the DVD business, which build awareness just as well and have been a huge part of our TV model. Frankly, without the DVD component, many of these shows would not be as attractive to us.

WS: And certainly the TV side of the DVD business is doing better than the film side.
BEGGS: If the show is a hit, it’s a hit on all platforms. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, that’s the old adage. When shows work on television they also seem to be working for us in the DVD space. And I credit a huge amount of this to our DVD team. They give our television product the best creative packaging and sales approach. They treat it like a blockbuster film. That is another reason why Lionsgate has some advantages versus some of our competitors, whose TV product is competing with Harry Potter and other huge [properties] that are so incredibly important to their financial model that sometimes the TV product can get squeezed off to the side.