Big Fish Entertainment’s Dan Cesareo

The true-crime genre has been a major part of A&E’s brand identity for years, but faced with increasing competition, the cable network knew it needed to innovate in this space. Courtesy of Big Fish Entertainment, it has done so with Live PD. In its second season, the show, which delivers live coverage of law enforcement officers across the U.S. for three hours each on Friday and Saturday nights, is the number one program on cable (excluding sports and movies) in its time slot among adults 18 to 49 and 25 to 54. Dan Cesareo, the founder and president of Big Fish, tells TV Real Weekly about the logistics of being live, the challenges for the control room as they jump from one location to the next and the importance of tracking social-media responses to the series.

TV REAL: How did the idea for Live PD come about?
CESAREO: [We are known for] taking a genre that has historically worked on television and finding a way to flip it on its head. That’s how we develop. With Live PD, we had been working closely with A&E and we knew that they were looking to make some bets in the live space. Until Live PD, we had never produced a live hour of television, but we were known as a company that was able to solve difficult production scenarios. We sold Live PD to A&E basically on a phone call. We didn’t know from a technological standpoint if we could pull it off at the scale we wanted to do it. It became a math problem. How many officers do you need to be with? How many cities do you need to film in for it to be compelling and for there to be enough activity that it’s an exciting and dynamic proposition live? We spent time looking at ride-alongs. We spent a lot of time talking about what ride-alongs look like and what the average length of a call is. With some fuzzy numbers and back-of-the-envelope math, we landed on this idea that we were going to have to be in a minimum of four to six cities, or with 8 to 12 officers, to carry two hours of programming.

We sold the show to A&E as a two-hour block out of the gate. (You have to do two hours because the cost per hour is not going to make any sense on a one-hour show.) We knew that satellite presents all kinds of cost-prohibitive issues to be in more than a couple of cities. And then we were going to run into line-of-sight issues, and it felt like a very old-school, dinosaur approach to producing the show. We were aware of some pieces of technology that we thought would allow us to lower the cost and do it at the scale that we’re doing it at. We spent a year in development. The biggest problems we had to solve were access and the technological challenge of broadcast. How were we going to transmit all of this material?

It was an 8×120-minute order to start with. The first few weeks were pretty bumpy. We had done some run-throughs, but there’s nothing like being live until you go live. There wasn’t a rhythm to it until about halfway into what was an expensive first run for A&E. We were showing little bits of growth and A&E believed in it. I don’t know if any other network would have had the stomach to stay in. They ordered another nine weeks. And then they said, Can we try three hours? We noticed that as we were going off the air at 11 p.m., there was always crazy stuff happening! The later you get, criminal activity and the busyness of law enforcement ramps up. A&E came back to us and asked to try a Saturday, so we did and that did well too. So A&E said, Can we have Friday and Saturday? We needed to add some personnel and more [police] departments if we were going to be broadcasting for three hours on Friday night and three hours on Saturday night. We were about 40 episodes in when they picked up the [additional] 100 episodes.

TV REAL:In the studio, Dan Abrams and your experts are jumping back and forth between locations. How do you manage the logistics of that?
CESAREO:The team that works on Live PD has over 10,000 hours of live news experience. Our director, John Gonzalez, has directed nine Super Bowls and six Olympic Games opening and closing ceremonies. Our teams in the field and the control room have a background in law-enforcement programming. It’s a marriage of those worlds that make it a success. The show can’t feel like the evening news, so we need people who are experienced in law enforcement and ride-along-driven programming, but none of those people have live television experience. It was also important that we bring a high level of journalism ethics to the table.

In the control room, it’s controlled chaos. It’s like a car wreck every single night! It probably lacks some of the decorum and protocol that exists on other live shows because we genuinely never know what’s going to happen next. We program 126 minutes of content on Friday and Saturday nights and there’s no rundown. Even in live sports, someone is trying to put a ball in an end zone or a goal, so you have an expectation in terms of what is going to happen. That was a huge part of the learning curve. It’s such a challenging, frustrating and rewarding show to make. We’re still learning things. No two shows are the same and no two situations are the same. Dan Abrams has the hardest job in television. He has an amazing ability to manage the traffic in his ear—he can speak and listen at the same time. He can be talking about something and have the producer in his ear telling him where we’re going next. It’s hard. His ability to manage the flow of the show is incredible.

TV REAL: What kind of feedback do you get from social media?
CESAREO:As a company, we have some of the stickier, more social shows on cable. So we’ve always used it as a tool. What are people reacting to? What are they rejecting? The unique thing with Live PD is, we can monitor it as we’re making the show. We have real-time feedback on a second-by-second basis. I would never have predicted the show’s massive social following. It is typically, excluding sports, the number one social show on Friday and Saturday nights on cable. The viewers have deemed themselves Live PD Nation. [Viewer feedback aided in the capture of] eight people who were wanted. Several missing children were found. [Viewers] have alerted the departments that we follow that they witnessed people throwing out drugs or committing some additional crime while we’re broadcasting. Things are happening so fast in the control room, so it’s not stuff we noticed. It’s amazing.

TV REAL: You’ve obviously seen a lot while filming the show. Is there any one thing that stands out to you?
CESAREO: There is a slight delay because we do have a responsibility to the advertisers, the network and the viewers at home. That said, recently we had someone overdose lying in a parking lot. Officers had to give him multiple doses of Narcan before he responded. The crazy thing about it is, the very next night our officer gets flagged down as he’s driving on patrol—we’re live—and it is the guy who OD’d the night before, and he’s thanking the officer for saving his life!

There have also been some hair-raising chases, some violent scuffles; you never know what’s going to happen. Any time there’s a full moon on a Friday or Saturday night, the most insane things happen.

TV REAL: What are some of the other things you’re working on in the live space?
CESAREO:We are now well positioned as one of the largest producers of live content in the country. We have new live projects in development with A&E and other networks. I look at live reality as a new genre. It took a while for the viewer to learn to watch it differently. The viewer was pre-conditioned for 25 to 30 years in terms of how a law-enforcement show worked. There had to be a payoff after however many minutes. The show drove towards that ending. Live PD is not always neat, we don’t always have perfect visual endings, our camera work can be bumpy in places because people are jumping over fences. It’s real. With how we’re approaching live moving forward, we’re trying to put the real back in reality.