Showtime Networks’ David Nevins Talks Docs

While Showtime is home to a slew of hit original dramas and comedies, documentaries hold a special place in its schedule. It was recently announced that, for the first time in network history, Showtime will bring two highly-anticipated films to theaters across the U.S. under the newly created banner Showtime Documentary Films. David Nevins, the president of Showtime Networks, was integral to the pay cable channel’s push into the documentary world. He tells TV Real Weekly about the value of docs in this premium space.

WS: What has been the mission behind your original series, and is there a common fiber that connects them?
NEVINS: We want to have the best, most adventurous shows on television, and the last three years have been a great time for us. There is not just one show that matters to us. Every week of the year we have cutting-edge, Emmy-caliber shows. Last year at the Emmys, eight of our nine shows received nominations. In fact, we had more series nominations than any network on television. It was not just Homeland [that got nominate]; it was Ray Donovan, Masters of Sex, The Affair. The accolades were pretty broadly distributed across our shows. The common denominator is sophisticated, cutting-edge, original programming.

WS: The whole landscape of original programming has become so crowded and competitive. Has this influenced your programming choices in any way?
NEVINS: Well, there are definitely more people making original programming and more people trying to play in the premium space, which used to be occupied by just Showtime and HBO. So, you have to work harder to get noticed, but fortunately [this climate has] coincided with a time when the best actors, the best writers and the best filmmakers want to be doing television. The pool of talent has opened up, and we’ve been able to get amazing creative talents like Cameron Crowe, Liev Schreiber and Paul Giamatti [for our shows].

WS: The fourth season of Homeland was an incredible reboot of the series. Did that come from the showrunners, or did you and your team have a say in the setting and direction of the story lines?
NEVINS: It really did all come about from the showrunners. The fundamental premise of the show is a spy thriller, and the fundamental concept is what America’s place is in the world in the 21st century. We began the series with this interesting, complicated relationship between Brody and Carrie that took place back in Washington, D.C., and was built around the strange circumstances of his homecoming, but we always knew that ultimately the show was about a CIA operative out in the world. That was the direction of the reboot; let’s put Carrie out in the world in a difficult, fascinating situation and see what the show becomes. [The showrunners] really proved that that’s the fundamental [element] of the show: Carrie in the world at a moment when it’s not easy to be an operative among all the forces that are out there. By doing that, they demonstrated that the show can go in a number of directions. It will go in another very different direction this year. We’ve shown that the show is about a highly trained, complicated woman working as an intelligence operative, not just about the tortured relationship between Carrie and Brody.

WS: Would you give another example of how you work with showrunners?
NEVINS: I’ve been a producer and am still a producer at heart, so I tend to work very closely with our showrunners. I love the people that I’m in business with, and that’s part of what gets you on the air—I believe in somebody’s creative vision, whether it’s [co-creator] Sarah Treem on The Affair or someone else. With Sarah, there is a lot of conversation about what the parameters of the show are. Can we expand the point of view of the show? How do we re-create it for the second season? There are some very exciting things on the horizon that came out of these conversations.

WS: In The Affair, the story is told from two different points of view, those of the lead characters Noah and Alison. Was that part of the pitch of the show?
NEVINS: Yes, it was part of Sarah and Hagai’s [Hagai Levi, co-creator of The Affair] original conception. But the question is, How do you use that dual point of view and not repeat the same beats? There was a lot conversation about how we use that interesting structure but keep driving the narrative forward. I think Sarah did a really good job of figuring that out. She and Hagai are going to expand that point of view. It’s not necessarily always going to be just Noah and Alison. There are two other people in those core partnerships and you are going to see their points of view in this next season as well.

WS: Taking any series as examples, what are the creative challenges as series move into the second, third, fourth, even sixth season?
NEVINS: Shows can’t stand still. I tend to get bored fairly quickly, so I am always willing to reinvent. If you are willing to continue to reinvent a show in the way that Homeland does, it can have a long life. Look at the shows in recent television history that have been long running. The great thing on 24 was that it reinvented itself every year; some years were better than others, but it moved and the showrunners weren’t scared. In our shows, we try to give real human psychology to our characters so that they don’t stand still, and we put them in real situations. There is an art to re-
creating your concepts over time.

WS: Does the fact that you are a producer give showrunners a certain level of comfort when you work with them?
NEVINS: They know that I understand their world and their issues. A showrunner has maybe the most complicated job in the entertainment business—balancing the needs of the actors, the needs of the overall storytelling and budgetary demands. You may have begun life as a solitary writer, but now you have to be the captain of a 200-person cast and crew, and I understand all that. So, I try to be as helpful as I can in managing those relationships, and helping with both the creative and the management challenges. I also tend to be very involved with our actors. I try hard to hire actors with leadership skills, because at the end of the day, the lead actors have an awful lot to say about the direction of the show. If you hire the right kind of actor, the right kind of collaborator and the right kind of leader, they can be a force for good.
WS: In a recent interview, Viola Davis told me that if the lead actor is difficult, that behavior could ruin the whole production.
NEVINS: Yes, I agree, and I try to cast actors with that in mind. We happen to have some very smart actors in our shows. Liev Schreiber, Claire Danes, Lizzy Caplan, Don Cheadle—these are extremely high-IQ people and they all take responsibility for the big picture, not just for their character.

WS: What can you tell us about the upcoming show Billions?
NEVINS: I love Billions. It’s a cutting-edge, timely show that looks at our relationship with the super rich: what’s fair, and what’s not fair. You’ve got a clash of two incredibly powerful characters embodied by two great actors, Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis. They are electric on screen together. Damian is playing a hedge-fund guy—a billionaire, but with real emotional and moral complexity. He’s got Paul Giamatti (as a U.S. attorney) coming hard after him, and how does he handle that? How does Paul’s character handle it? And, Damian’s character has got his own issues and challenges. There’s nothing better than watching two great actors challenge each other straight on.

WS: Tell us about HAPPYish, the new comedy starring Steve Coogan.
NEVINS: HAPPYish is really funny. It’s got a really smart take on [American] culture, and it’s also outrageously funny. [Creator] Shalom Auslander is, I’m convinced, an important new comedic voice in our culture. The marketing has emphasized the relatable relationship between a husband and wife trying to remain happy, and their struggle to protect their family in a youth- and brand-obsessed world. Part of what is really fun about the show are the outrageous flights of comic fancy that come [from] Shalom’s skewering of our consumerist culture. He’s never been on television. He’s been a novelist. He was on [the radio show] This American Life, and HAPPYish is a hard comedy, which I’ve been looking for.

WS: With so much scripted television available, how do you make sure that the first episode of a new series gets sampled?
NEVINS: We all do all sorts of tricks to make sure we get sampled. We did a sneak peak of HAPPYish behind the Shameless finale, which got big numbers for us. We offer our distributors the first episode of many new shows in advance. We like to give people access to the first episode and hopefully it hooks them.

WS: What has been the strategy for your documentary lineup?
NEVINS: The great thing about documentaries is that they create a lot of buzz for you and they are getting more viewership than ever. If you pick the right subjects, people will want to write about them. When the Suge Knight documentary comes out, which Antoine Fuqua has been working on for a couple of years, people are going to want to write about it. When the Marlon Brando documentary premiered at Sundance, people wanted to write about Marlon Brando. I look at documentaries in a similar way as I look at series—I am looking for complicated, sometimes subversive personalities that have moved the culture. That’s what defines Homeland or Masters of Sex, and I think that’s what defines our documentaries.

WS: Does premium cable also offer audiences for documentaries that are cumulatively larger than what theatrical releases can offer?
NEVINS: Yes, definitely. A show goes on air, runs several times, and exists on demand in the Showtime Anytime platform. Documentaries get a lot of views. They can make a real difference. Prophet’s Prey, which also premiered at Sundance and is about Warren Jeffs and the FLDS Church, is a very current and ongoing story. I think it’s going to generate a lot of news when it comes out and probably will be a whole new way to focus on things that are happening within that church in the U.S. It’s a church of tens of thousands of people. Just because Warren Jeffs is in jail [serving a life sentence for sexually assaulting minors] doesn’t mean that that story is over.

WS: Of all the programming you offer, are mostly the original series driving viewer loyalty?
NEVINS: Yes, we think the core of our brand is original series. Of all the people doing premium programming, we feel that we have the broadest and deepest bench of series that matter.

WS: I know there are a couple of Showtime series that I don’t want to be without. Is that the strategy for retaining subscribers?
NEVINS: In any household, if you can have two shows that really matter to somebody, they are going to keep the subscription going. That can be Ray Donovan plus boxing. That can be Homeland and Masters of Sex. That can be Shameless plus House of Lies. You also have to appeal to multiple people in the household.

WS: Where are people watching the most: on the linear channel, or on Showtime On Demand or Showtime Anytime?
NEVINS: With our traditional distributors there is still more watching on linear, but Showtime Anytime and Showtime On Demand are making up a larger and larger percentage of viewing.

WS: I’ve read that there is an upcoming streaming service for Showtime.
NEVINS: It’s coming, and we’ve been saying that. There is huge demand for it, and demand for our own brand of programming. We are trying to do it in a way that works best with our current ecosystem, but we feel that there is a huge opportunity.

WS: How have you seen viewer expectations change since you started in the business?
NEVINS: I feel like the business model has moved toward the kind of programming that I like and that I’ve always done. As a producer, I tended to make shows that were on the edge for broadcast television: Arrested Development, Friday Night Lights, 24 and Parenthood. Of those, one of them broke through to huge mainstream success—that was 24. The others always had critical success but didn’t quite reach massive success on network television. But now, those kinds of shows are exactly the kind that is rewarded in pay cable because they inspire great loyalty and great passion from a select audience. Those shows can be better monetized in a subscription system than they were in a broadcast advertiser-supported system. The evolution of the business has been good for me; it has moved in the direction of the kind of shows I like to make.

WS: Looking across the entire TV landscape, is there a move away from shows about ordinary people and instead toward ones about very complex, morally compromised people? Is normal losing out now?
NEVINS: The cable world moved to the fringes with shows like Dexter, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. But now, I’m putting on a show like HAPPYish, which could not be more mainstream in the conception of its characters. I think the pendulum is actually going to start moving back. You can’t keep moving to the left of Walter White!