Shine America’s Rich Ross Talks Hit Series

PREMIUM: Rich Ross, the CEO of Shine America, talks to World Screen about the importance of spotting hit ideas, executing them at the highest possible level of quality and marketing them diligently.

WS: When you joined Shine America, what did you identify as its strengths and what priorities did you set for the company?
ROSS: I knew the company was a winner at doing competition reality shows, as clearly shown by The Biggest Loser and MasterChef, given their continued strengths year in and year out. I had already seen The Face and I knew that was really promising and that the team had deep skills and relationships in that arena. I knew that that was a great base to build off and what we had to do was create more opportunities for both broadcast and cable and add an incursion into the very prolific world of docusoaps and factual television. That is what we have done and we have had a very strong selling season of development and piloting.

On the flipside, I knew that the company had a very strong interest in broadening into scripted programming here in the States. I was very lucky to have seen the original version of The Bridge, Bron [which was produced by a Shine Group subsidiary in Sweden, Filmlance International] and had watched those ten hours voraciously. So the opportunity was to work really hard to make sure that the U.S. adaptation, The Bridge, was the very best, and could stand in the hallmark of all these other great dramas on cable, and then augment that with other scripted product which we have been aggressively developing and selling as well.

So the bedrock was a really strong group of people who understood scripted and unscripted. The opportunity was to expand into other genres on the unscripted side and to broaden the purview on the scripted side.

WS: Tell us about Ardaban and Shine Latino, which serve distinct target audiences.
ROSS: The additions of Ardaban and Shine Latino were actually orchestrated prior to my coming, but I can easily describe why. There is a tremendous appetite in the game world and Ardaban is really at the forefront of games; not what was traditionally known as panel game shows, but they were able to look at the lifestyle genre and come up with something like Chopped, which is a game show in the food world. Chachi Senior [the CEO of Ardaban] and his team have developed properties, have sold five shows and did a pilot, Secrets & Lies, for E!. It’s a very lucrative, creative area and needed area. So we were very excited to add Chachi and his team.

In the U.S., the Hispanic community is one that needs to be served and should be served. Latinos watch a ton of Spanish-language television and it was a great opportunity to take a leader like Cristina Palacio, who was one of the queens of Colombian television and one of the greatest producers of Spanish-language television in the world, and bring her aboard to focus on establishing herself in Colombia but also develop and produce for the Spanish-language broadcasters. While she has been here, Minuto para ganar, the Spanish-language version of our very successful Minute to Win It, recently had its second season on MundoFOX. Cristina and her team are working with the U.S. players like Telemundo, Univision and MundoFOX, as well as the local broadcasters in Colombia. That is a real opportunity for us to take the formats we have that can work in Spanish-language television, as well as come up with original concepts that can go the other way.

Lastly, we struck a deal for a joint venture with Nigel Lythgoe, the legend in competition reality, whether it’s his years on American Idol, or So You Think You Can Dance, and we thought it was a perfect time for him to look at his next properties and to do them in tandem with us.

WS: What opportunities and challenges do you see in the U.S market, which is so large and complex?
ROSS: The good the news is there are so many buyers of scripted and unscripted programming in today’s market. In the scripted world alone there are now 29 buyers of high-end programming. The great news is that there are a lot of people buying. The dark side of that is that there is so much content on air that it’s a cacophony of content. So you need to not only make a great program, but you also need a cable network or broadcast network partner who can and will support it with both on-air and off-air marketing. We are very lucky, whether it’s Minute to Win It that we just did with GSN, or The Face with Oxygen, or FX and The Bridge. Those networks have not only spent to make the programming but also doubled down so that the viewer knew that these shows were on. Today the great challenge in programming is similar to, “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

WS: You are no stranger to the international market. How do you encourage Shine America to stay in touch with the other Shine companies and exchange ideas and concepts?
ROSS: There was always a routing between all the different markets of getting material seen, and there was a very thorough way of doing it—very focused and creative. The thing that I changed and that I felt very strongly about was I needed someone on our team on the unscripted side, which was a lion’s share of what we were importing and exporting, to come aboard. We hired an incredible executive named Kate Shepherd, who came to us from 19 Entertainment. She is [VP of development] and for lack of a better word, the format whisperer. She is the one who speaks to our partners around the world and because she is a producer, she isn’t just someone scouring the world and saying, “What do you have? Let me make a list.” This is someone who is a peer who can talk to everyone. She not only looks at concepts and properties but also has an eye that can envision what they can become. That has dramatically affected our ability to move things more quickly, a) from a communications standpoint, and b) from a trust standpoint. She happens to be British, which to me was not incidental because I like the idea that the voice is not, “We are Americans we know better,” but, “We are television people and we want to do the best job.”

WS: You mentioned The Bridge. How did it come to the U.S. and what had to be done to adapt it to the American audience?
ROSS: There is a fascinating part of the original show, Bron: the Swedes were trying to figure out how to expand into other markets, including Denmark. A writer came up with the incredible idea of staging a murder on the bridge between the two countries, setting up the whole drama. Bron had done really well and there was tremendous interest in the format because Scandinavian drama had drawn a lot of interest due to the success of The Killing and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. A number of networks in the U.S. began to be very interested in an American version. FX was one of those networks but was less intrigued by the original idea, which was to set it on the U.S. and Canadian border. Then Meredith Stiehm came aboard, who had been a writer on Homeland. She also was intrigued in the show, but not intrigued by that boarder. Both she and Elwood Reid [previously an executive producer on Cold Case and Hawaii Five-O] said it seemed the bigger story was about the boarder between the U.S. and Mexico. With the combination of Meredith and Elwood being the experts they were and the excitement about using the U.S.-Mexican boarder as the setting, FX signed up, Meredith and Elwood signed up and we were off to the races. Of course, what is unforeseen in maybe the most dramatic sense is that at the same time, the immigration issue would move to the forefront of the policy conversation here in the U.S. So as we debuted the show, everybody had their own viewpoint: the Senate votes in their viewpoint, the House rebukes it, the President [wants a bill to get passed] and news programs, including those on Univision and Telemundo, are talking about it. A show that [originally displayed] the differences between first world countries like Sweden and Denmark, is now a ripped-from-the-headlines crime drama in the U.S. You cannot plan this!

WS: Come on fess up—you planned it!
ROSS: What I loved about it was it’s a top drama that should work at any time and any place, but it has a topicality that really forces people to think about the issues that are brought up in the show. It’s set on a porous border, which has always existed and now The Bridge and all the talk in the news of walls, escapes and fences, makes us think about events happening only a mile away. There are a lot of twists and turns in the original show, but I am thrilled by the conversation surrounding The Bridge. It’s forcing people to think about what’s beyond that world and so is the story about detective Sonya Cross [played by Diane Kruger] a woman who has Asperger’s syndrome and is relatively fully functioning in society. The show is asking the question, what does that mean? How is that operating in our world today? So there was never an easy route about the stories told but it’s provocative and we’re very, very lucky that FX loves stories that are well told and subject matter that forces a conversation.

WS: I also think it’s brilliant that The Bridge is bilingual.
ROSS: When I saw it for the first time, I thought how revolutionary and it’s about time! I loved that in its very embodiment it becomes exciting for a group like FOX International Channels, which is our partner, because it makes the show, by the very nature of how it’s built, global in its appeal.

WS: Tell me about some of Shine America’s unscripted projects.
ROSS: What is exciting for me is that the partners we are working with are cable networks that now compete in a hand-to-hand combat with the broadcast networks. An example is, we announced a deal for a property called The Big Deal for TNT. Does the consumer know the difference between TNT and CBS today? I can’t tell you they can. TNT has full distribution and a very aggressive appetite for high-quality, well-viewed commercial properties. That is the place we wanted to go and I have always been a fan of Michael Wright [the president and head of programming for TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies (TCM)]. We had a property that had been developed in Australia that had never been produced, and TNT essentially bought it in the room [during the pitch]. We hope it goes to pilot. There is also a property that we are working on with Spike TV. It’s a pilot called Covert Kitchens. Graham Elliotis one of the judges from MasterChef who loved the project and he was perfect for it. He loved the idea of pop-up kitchens [one-night-only culinary events] and had worked on some. Here was a more extreme pop-up idea and we just delivered the pilot to Spike [a network that targets men 18 to 34].

These are big networks that have a great appetite for unscripted and are working with us to really understand the competitive reality world. We are looking forward to seeing how these shows come together.

WS: With the extensive experience you have creating brands that can exist on different platforms, how have you applied the multiplatform concept to the scripted and unscripted shows that you have at Shine America?
ROSS: What I have been able to do working very closely with Vivi Zigler, who came in to run what we call Shine 360° & Digital, is really look at the totality of our programming with a holistic approach. We look at properties that have succeeded on television for a long time like The Biggest Loser and MasterChef and see how we can expand them. We just brought in a marketing executive working for Vivi to look at these properties and have them work not only on a multiplatform basis but also on a multi-dimensional basis. We are able to expand the opportunities on MasterChef by launching on FOX in prime time this fall MasterChef Junior. That is a great example of showing how expansion can work.

You always have to start with a very strong concept, which leads to a strong show and strong ratings. And if you get that then you can expand in these 360-degree ways, but it all has to start with that. No one is more thrilled that MasterChef is the number one show on television on Wednesday nights on FOX, and NBC has The Biggest Loser, which is the number one show on their air in the spring. It has to start with great shows, very well viewed and then you have opportunities that flow from that.

WS: Are you using digital platforms and social media to help reach viewers when launching a new show or to strengthen the bond between viewers and a brand?
ROSS: Yes, we are very lucky that we are working with networks that are very aggressive in how they market shows and reach the viewer.

We have a small team that partners with the networks and represents us because we have the content. But what Oxygen did with The Face and what FX has done on social media with The Bridge are really exceptional examples. It’s been immeasurably important because you see it when they trend on Twitter, or the opportunities when we do things like Google Hangouts and how people respond, that’s why it’s a partnership. It’s never been more important to work with networks who are modern in their approach to getting the viewer, but who are dogged in making sure there are eyeballs for the show and not just after an ephemeral success that lasts a week.