Exclusive Interview: Shine’s Alex Mahon

PREMIUM: Alex Mahon, the CEO of the Shine Group, talks to TV Europe about the group’s expansion and continued quest for top-notch creativity.

TV EUROPE: What has been the Shine Group’s growth strategy? What production and media entities have you been looking for and how do they contribute to the group?
MAHON: What we’ve been looking for in the people we’ve been building companies with are creative entrepreneurs. Ideally, in every country we’re finding the best talented, creative individuals who are able to generate new ideas and build companies around them. The idea is if you are able to bring enough of those together you’ll be able to create the next wave of globally successful shows in both scripted and unscripted. If you look at some of the people we’ve partnered with, like Mark and Carl Fennessy in Australia, or Thierry Lachkar in France, or Rich Ross in America, or the Metronome Group in the Nordics, or companies such as Kudos in the U.K., we’re taking people who are absolutely top of their game in creating scripted or unscripted ideas and then bringing them together [and attracting the] best talent to create a new breed of group.

TV EUROPE: A studio executive once told me that managing talent is entirely different from managing a company that manufacturers, say, washing machines! When managing people and encouraging creativity, there are so many changing variables as opposed to overseeing an assembly line.
MAHON: We put a lot of effort in making sure that Shine has the right culture, that our companies are allowed to be individual and unique and have their own brands and offices and their own style and people. The overarching tenants of the Shine Group are about believing in creativity and ideas. You can have those principles in common between several very different companies but you’ve equally got to aspire to be the absolute best at what you do. You must start with thinking of a something brilliant that makes audiences tune in and makes people desperate to tell their friends about it and can’t wait until the next episode. You’ve got to go back to basics, working only with people who want to create the best stories and those are the principles that are the same between the different Shine companies. When you get our people together they have the same passion, the same sense of excitement and desire to make the absolute best shows they can. But I would agree, it’s not like making washing machines! It’s all about personal relationships.

TV EUROPE: You mentioned Rich Ross, who was recently named CEO of Shine America. What are Shine’s priorities for the North American market?
MAHON: America is a massive growth territory and a prime focus for the next couple of years, so Rich Ross is obviously a huge hire for us. He is a rare breed of an American executive who is very experienced and knows the whole system in the U.S. inside and out, but is equally very familiar with international. That’s quite hard to get. He is also extremely experienced in scripted and because of his Disney experience, he knows how to create worldwide properties. 

We are putting more investment in the U.S. market. We’ve got Rich. We’ve got Eden Gaha and our team who are making MasterChef, The Face and The Biggest Loser. We’ve just hired Christina Palacio to run our Latin American and Hispanic business and drawing on the expertise and wealth of telenovelas from Colombia and elsewhere. And then we’ve got our scripted team who are doing The Bridge for FX. We’ve also hired Chachi Senior, who runs the new entertainment label Ardaban. We’ve got unscripted entertainment, scripted series, game shows, Hispanic programming, and then of course one of our biggest recent deals is our partnership with Nigel Lythgoe for his new shows going forward. He’s one of the world’s foremost showrunners.

All of that under Rich Ross is a pretty heavy investment in the potential we see in the U.S. and the potential that we see in him—to be able to turn that into an even bigger business. And that’s already with MasterChef, The Biggest Loser and The Face on the air.

TV EUROPE: Several Shine companies have been involved in scripted programming for a long time. Is scripted becoming an even bigger priority?
MAHON: We’ve always been among the top suppliers of scripted in the U.K. and the global market with Kudos, with titles like Spooks and Hustle. We’ve been number one in the Scandinavian market for a long time with Filmlance in Sweden where, in partnership with their neighbors in Denmark, The Bridge originally came from. We have now realized that we need to be present in scripted in our other markets, so we’re launching scripted in Australia and in France, we’re setting up scripted in Spain and now in Latin America and there is also the opportunity to go into the U.S. If you look at scripted commissions in the U.S. market over the past five years they have grown by 45 percent. There are just an incredible number of buyers. Six years ago there were 16 buyers of drama and there are 29 this year, and on top of that we’ve got Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. As buyers, they are much more open to ideas coming from anywhere. That wasn’t the case a few years ago. They are open to experimentation because they don’t want to invest as much in the pilot system.

TV EUROPE: Netflix recently premiered House of Cards. Are you looking at digital platforms as an outlet for your product?
MAHON: Absolutely, Lilyhammer, which was one of our scripted shows in Norway, was one of the biggest sales ever to Netflix. So we are absolutely looking at digital. It’s been really interesting to see how House of Cards has worked and if that pattern of making an entire season available in one go will prove profitable or not. I don’t think any of us know yet. But they are a really important buyer.

TV EUROPE: It will be interesting to see if a show can be launched and get noticed without a linear channel behind it to help with the promotion.
MAHON: That’s a question for all of us when we launch shows digitally. The skills that historically we have been lacking as producers are marketing skills. That’s not where we have traditionally had experience. If we are going to strike out into digital distribution, that’s what we need to learn.

TV EUROPE: Are you looking to acquire more companies? Shine has managed to balance being prudent against taking risks.
MAHON: We are always looking for the best stuff! It’s a question of what is available, whether there is a gap in our portfolio and what the people [in the prospective company] are like. And yes, there is a fine line between balancing growth and being able to manage everything, but we are always looking.

TV EUROPE: In which genres or geographic areas do you see potential for growth in the next year or so?
MAHON: We just started kids’ programming with Andrew Davenport, who co-created Teletubbies and In the Night Garden. We’ve started working with him on his next show, so that is a new area for us. We are doing more in comedy. We just started shooting the comedy Vicious in the U.K., starring Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi, which is a massive deal for us in the U.K. They play a gay couple who live together in Soho. We’ll be rolling that out at MIPTV. Gary Janetti is the showrunner, who was a writer on Will & Grace and Family Guy. We’ll do more in comedy and there is plenty going on in terms of new genres already within the company.

TV EUROPE: Tell us about Shine’s new show, The Face.
MAHON: It will be one of the shows we will launch at MIPTV. We started with a pre-Fashion Week casting event in New York, prior to the show’s launch on February 12. The Face airs on Oxygen but its premiere was road-blocked [aired simultaneously] on Oxygen, Bravo and Style at the same time, at 9 p.m., which is the first time they have ever done that, and that is an example of the channel’s faith in the show. The Face has Naomi Campbell, Karolina Kurkova and Coco Rocha as supermodel coaches looking to find the newest face for a high street brand. It’s hosted by photographer Nigel Barker, who was a judge on America’s Next Top Model. To get someone as spectacular as Naomi Campbell on the show is another example of the high-class and top-tier talent that we tend to go after. It’s a really exciting show for us and it’s exciting that Bravo and Style believed in it so much to road-block it and not just launch it on Oxygen.

TV EUROPE: What has made MasterChef so successful and given it such staying power?
MAHON: It’s on in almost 50 countries now. At the heart of it is the fact that cooking is part of the culture of any country. As opposed to singing or dancing competition shows, you don’t have to get up and sing or dance every day. But all of us have to get up and either eat or cook—you pretty much can’t get away without doing that everyday! But equally, food and recipes are very close to the heart and mind and culture of every country, so there is a universality to that, which means the show works everywhere, from India to Croatia. And because it’s not a cooking show, we never give out a recipe on the show, it’s quite authentic; it’s about how the contestants transform through the show, what their aspirations are, and what they can do that perhaps they never thought they could do in the first place. Nowadays, the shows that are really working are very authentic and what’s not working are shows that are over manipulated, or over produced or where the viewer feels perhaps cheated. Since what is really breaking out are shows that people feel are very authentic, we’ve hit our moment with MasterChef. We’ve touched people’s hearts and minds in each country we’ve done MasterChef because viewers see normal people making huge strides for places they never believed they would be in their lives.

TV EUROPE: Are you seeing any other trends in what buyers are looking for?
MAHON: There is definitely a trend for scripted formats. There is also a blurring of lines between entertainment and formatted factual, so that factual entertainment is becoming more prevalent and even the traditional observational documentary needs to become more entertainment-like. Talent competition is still incredibly strong. The Voice rejuvenated a genre that we all thought maybe didn’t have much left in it, so people still watch talent shows. But a trend toward authenticity and a lack of manipulation is definitely a strong one.

TV EUROPE: Tell us about Shine’s deal with Nigel Lythgoe.
MAHON: He knows we are completely focused on the biggest, shiny-floor studio shows of the highest quality and caliber. I think what he was excited about was coming into a place that is quite entrepreneurial, quite nimble, quite fast-paced and quite excited about rolling out shows internationally. So working with someone like Nigel is huge for us because he is an on-screen star and he is a creator and he believes in global talent hits. We’ve got quite a few shows in development with him and I think we will get some things off the ground quite quickly. But he is quite typical of the people we go after—big talent and people we believe are best in class.

TV EUROPE: What has made The Bridge such a successful scripted format and one so adaptable to different countries and cultures?
MAHON: You should watch The Bridge because it’s a really interesting example of how a scripted concept can travel and remain unique. We did it in Sweden, between Sweden and Denmark, and now we are making it between France and the U.K. and between the U.S. and Mexico with FX. It’s a brilliant simple conceit for creating a multi-layered story across two countries. In each of the places where we are doing it, the opening scene is a body on a bridge that is on the border between two countries and a body is laying over the border line, so when they come to pick up the body it’s in two halves. It’s a story about how two police forces from two different countries have to work together and it’s unfolding crime. And each time we do it comes a stand-alone story with a different cultural impact and different factors to it, so that in France and the U.K., [where the show is called The Tunnel], there is a very different direction to it. The version with the U.S. and Mexico, it’s so current because it’s got the whole world of the narco trafficking on the border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez and it’s darker because it’s for FX. It’s really quite exciting to see how with a scripted rollout you can begin to carve something completely different for different countries.

TV EUROPE: Are you seeing a demand for formats that can live on multiple screens; formats that have iterations for the tablets or smartphones?
MAHON: There is a demand for the second-screen opportunity. We all sit in front of the television with our iPhone and want extra content about a show or wonder how can I find out more about this. Once something is expected by viewers it naturally becomes part of shows. We have yet to see an outstanding scripted format that really works for a two-screen experience. And I still have questions in my mind as to whether we as viewers want a co-viewing experience while watching a drama, or do we want to wait to get additional content or information after watching a drama episode. I don’t know if that is generational but we as an industry haven’t been able to make that work yet.