Robert Greenblatt

April 2008

In 2003, when Showtime stepped up its efforts to take on HBO as the destination for original entertainment in the premium-channel space, it lured the successful producer Robert Greenblatt to become its president of entertainment. While at The Greenblatt Janollari Studio, Greenblatt had worked on such acclaimed productions as HBO’s own Six Feet Under. He also had experience running a network, following a stint as the executive VP of prime-time programming at FOX. Greenblatt has ushered in a host of successful originals at Showtime, from The L Word to Weeds to, more recently, Dexter, The Tudors and Californication, among many others. He speaks to World Screen about his original programming strategy.

WS: What challenges did you face when you came into Showtime?

GREENBLATT: The biggest challenge was that this is a small network in terms of the number of households we’re in. On top of that, Showtime was primarily a TV-movie company. There had been a few series that had been dabbled with over the years, like Queer As Folk and Soul Food, but there wasn’t a really strong original-programming agenda in terms of series. That was a disadvantage. We were starting from ground zero. The big critical decision we made was that it was important to move from being an original-TV-movie company to being an original-series company.

WS: How did you go about attracting talent?

GREENBLATT: Part of it was just sitting down with everybody here and reorienting them to what we were going to look for and getting the message out to the Hollywood community, to the agencies, that we were going in a new direction. In large part, I tapped into my own experience, both as a producer and as an executive at the FOX network. By the time I came here, I had put on dozens of series and supervised hundreds of pilots. It was a matter of looking at who was out there and getting the word out that we wanted to raise the bar. It was tricky early on because people didn’t really know who we were. We hadn’t had the benefit of a bunch of hit shows that communicated who we were. So people were unsure. Now, people know who we are and they know the kinds of things we’re doing. Once you have a few of those shows work, then people start coming to you, as opposed to us having to go convince agents that we’re the place to be in business. You want to be able to have the best people coming in the door. It takes time to build that.

WS: As you’re sifting through those ideas, what do you look for?

GREENBLATT: The mandate is that we need shows that have some kind of extraordinary hook to them. They’ve got to be inherently provocative or surprising. There is a lot of clutter and we are on the smaller end of things. We can’t get away with just a good cop show, or a really good law show. We have to do something that in its very description makes people sit up and lean forward. We have to have an idea that immediately makes you cock your head and go, ooh, how is that going to work? Then you have to figure out how to make it really extraordinary—that’s the easier part!

WS: Weeds is heading into its fourth season. How do you keep these shows compelling, year after year?

GREENBLATT: That’s the beauty of series television. A lot of shows have survived for many, many years from doing the same thing every single week, every single year. Here’s the setup, here are the characters, here’s the case. You solve the case at the end and you can do that for 500 episodes. We don’t need to do that. For our shows, it’s really exciting to move the characters and the concept in different directions from year to year. [Weeds is going to have] an interesting fourth season. The writers are really invigorated about [it being] not just the same old characters in the same neighborhood with the same stories. Same with Dexter—from year to year, he can’t be in the same place every season, almost getting caught. As that show moves forward, you’re going to see some fundamental changes in it, which I think will make it really exciting.

WS: With the lack of fresh scripted episodes during the writers’ strike, CBS picked up Dexter for broadcast this season. How do you think it will play on network TV?

GREENBLATT: Conceptually it looks like a CBS show in that they have a number of cop franchises. [The main character] is a forensic cop on the one hand, so it will feel very organic, [following] some of their other shows. The flip side, which is an interesting experiment, is it’s fundamentally different than those shows because the main character is also the psychologically disturbed character. Even if it’s not the biggest hit in terms of ratings for CBS, it will out-do anything we have, because they have so many more households and so many more viewers. The promotion we’re going to get from them launching the show and it being on there for three months; I can’t even measure the benefit it will have for us.

WS: There has been a lot of talk about the efficiency of the pilot process, as networks look to cut costs in the wake of the writers’ strike.

GREENBLATT: Having done this for 18 or 19 years, I think the pilot process is an excellent way to go about finding your shows. It’s ridiculous to do 30 or 40 pilots and pick up five shows—you can manage costs and make the pilot process really efficient. The networks tend to throw so much money into pilots, many of which they know will never go beyond the pilot because they’re just not that good. That said, [it’s important to have] the ability to put together the show and then step back from it for a few months and analyze what worked and didn’t work and see where the show should go. If you forgo a pilot, and then you get that first episode cut together and look at it and you go, this isn’t working the way we thought, and you’ve written the next four episodes and shot them, you can’t correct it. What we do here at Showtime is we make three or four pilots a year and we’ll pick up two or three shows out of them. We’re very efficient about the pilots we make. We feel good about them before we ever make them, so the chances of them going to series are really good. You have to be very confident about the things you actually order to pilot, which is usually not the case at network tele-vision. I’ve done it. You know that half of them are terrible. [Networks are] picking them up [because they have a long-term deal with a writer], or because talent is attached.

WS: Does that model of long-term writers’ deals need to change?

GREENBLATT: I think it has needed to be changed for ten years. The studios and the networks have been very frivolous about the number of those deals and the amount of money they’ve spent. They rarely yield anything. There are a couple of very successful writers, from whom you can count on getting a few hit shows. But it’s so rare to get more than one hit show out of somebody. Now a lot of times you will wrap an overall deal around a writer who is going to be providing services on a show; you want to keep that person in your stable and available to you, I get that. But there are a lot of deals made that are just useless, and I think everybody is going to be reevaluating those things.

WS: Switching over to acquisitions, you recently acquired a British series, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, from IMG. Are you looking to the international market for other pickups?

GREENBLATT: We’re always open. We don’t have that much volume in any given season; it’s not like we have to fill a whole bunch of slots and we’re looking outside to different countries to do that. But, opportunistically, if something comes along that really strikes our fancy, sure, we’ll do that. This is a show that was brought to me by Chris Albrecht, who used to be the head of HBO and who I worked with when I was producing Six Feet Under. Once he moved on to IMG, he called me. He said, ‘We just finished the show, it’s just gone on the air in the U.K. and was hugely successful and we think there’s a great play for it in the U.S. market.’ My first thought was, let me take a look at it and we should probably consider doing an American version. I watched it and thought to myself, we could easily remake the show but we would probably literally use these scripts and just change the location. After a couple of minutes of watching it, the British accents don’t feel like a barrier. With the growth of BBC America and other British things making their way into this culture, I don’t think it’s a big concern anymore. It seemed perfect for us.

WS: What do you enjoy most about your job?

GREENBLATT: I love the fact that this is a company where we don’t have to put on 20 or 30 shows a year. We can put on seven or eight, and therefore each one can be really hand-made. I love that we’re in the premium-cable landscape, which means we have to do shows that are unique and provocative and attention-getting. I’m not just filling hours that are supported by advertisers. Every show on my network is a show that I would want to watch, which isn’t true when you’re on a [broadcast] network—you have to fill time periods and throw stuff in that you would never personally really care about. I can be much more engaged.