Exclusive Interview: ABC Entertainment Group’s Paul Lee

PREMIUM: Paul Lee, the president of the ABC Entertainment Group, discusses with World Screen his responsibilities for shepherding some of broadcast television’s biggest hits.

WS: How would you describe the ABC brand?
LEE: We do an internal branding study and the ABC brand is clearly defined for the U.S. audience. The wonderful thing is that it comes out as the number one brand in the U.S. for the 18-to-49 audience. That is because we do great storytelling that is smart but has a huge amount of heart. And the shows that we make are always imbued with quality, with character and with great storytelling. We also do shows that become buzz-worthy. We do shows that are noticed by the culture, shows like Modern Family or Grey’s Anatomy or Once Upon a Time, shows that are really discussed, and that is one of the reasons why it’s such a valuable brand for our advertisers.

WS: What considerations, whether the idea, pedigree of the showrunner, time slot, or target audience, go into greenlighting a show?
LEE: First of all we need to find shows that move you. We used a tagline for one of our campaigns at our last Upfront, which was, Why Just Watch When You Can Feel? There is no question that moving you—either to laughter or tears—is always at the top of our list. We look of course at the pedigree of the showrunner, the auspices are tremendously important, and you want to find a show that is going to run hopefully five or six years and hundreds of episodes. You look for something that’s going to fit the brand but is also going to break the mold. That sounds contradictory but effectively, the shows we select need to sit on ABC, they need to fulfill the brand promise that we give our audience, but they also want to be different enough to become hits. Nobody thought that fairy tales could work in prime time and one of the reasons that Once Upon a Time broke out is that nobody had tried. The other reason is that the showrunners are such huge talents—Adam [Horowitz] and Eddie [Kitsis] who run it are superb showrunners. So, we look at the showrunners, we look at the show, we look at the emotion and we look at the brand.

WS: In today’s super competitive television landscape, what factors go into deciding whether to keep or cancel a show?
LEE: That’s a really good question because you almost have two contradictory forces at play. On the one hand you have tremendously complicated ratings data streams coming in and it takes time to figure out who the audience is, on what platforms they are watching the show and how passionate they are. Our shows have a bigger C3 and C7 bump than other shows because they are definitely appointment television and that drives up the viewing. On the other hand, there are even more pressures in a super competitive environment to do something about a show that is under performing. So those two forces make that decision more difficult.

This is what we do: if we believe in the show, even if it starts out a little bit weaker, and we believe it’s got long-term value in terms of its creativity, and we believe in the cast and the showrunners—a great example of that is Scandal—then we will stick by it. Scandal had an OK launch last year. Now it is a big hit for us because it’s really found its feet. Kerry Washington [in the lead role of Olivia Pope] is superb and Shonda Rhimes is knocking it out of the park. We gave Scandal time to find itself and find an audience and now it really has.

WS: When you find talented showrunners like Shonda Rhimes, how do you give them enough creative freedom to follow their vision while making sure they deliver a show that fits the ABC brand?
LEE: It’s a conversation. I used to be a showrunner. When I took this job I felt very strongly that we should create a very showrunner-friendly culture because we want to get that balance right. The truth is that Shonda understands the ABC brand and we gave her a huge amount of creative freedom. We like to think that ABC is a place where great voices can be heard and can fulfill their visions. There is no question that we do that with Shonda, we do that with Adam and Eddie, we do that with Steven [Levitan] and Chris [Lloyd] on Modern Family. They know, as does our audience, the strength of the ABC brand, and they will play into that. If you look at Modern Family, it’s an amazing comedy but it’s also a tremendously emotional and relatable show and the characters are perhaps the strongest on television. And that is very much the heart of our brand, so we give the best showrunners a lot of space.

WS: Modern Family not only brought back comedy to television in a big way but it redefined the sitcom. Are you planning to build more comedy into your schedule?
LEE: We are extraordinarily proud of Modern Family. It has redefined comedy and it does have a spectacular balance of creativity, a totally fresh view of the world, extreme relatability, it’s hilarious and it’s very moving. This year, we have successfully opened comedy onto Friday nights, so we have multicamera [sitcoms] on Friday. We are looking to build comedy and some of it is single-camera sophisticated comedy like Modern Family and some are the multicameras that we do on Friday.

WS: Is it harder to get a comedy right than a drama?
LEE: They are all tremendously hard, dramas are hard, too, but yes, I think comedies are especially hard. Dramas are rational; there is something irrational and unpredictable about a comedy. Comedies are an act of faith and drama is an act of reason and that makes comedies particularly difficult to get the chemistry right. And if a comedy doesn’t work it’s much harder to solve. But when it works, it’s just so sweet!

WS: How are social media helping to create awareness of shows and providing fans with a stronger connection with their favorite shows?
LEE: Social media is absolutely critical to the entire conversation and buzz that surround a show. We do what we call viral storming when we launch a show, we’ll not only pre-sample it, we’ll have a huge amount of activity with the showrunners and stars on Facebook pages, on Twitter, on every single platform. The truth is, with a great show it gains a life of its own. If you look at a show like Scandal I think it is the number one highest social metric show on broadcast television. We did a spectacular job of listening to, reaching out to and connecting with our audience on Scandal, and that audience is now so passionate and so vocal about what they think of the show. And by the way Shonda has a fantastic Twitter feed—that helps. The show has gained a life of its own and honestly, it’s impossible to imagine what it was like before the social media.

WS: With so much time-shifted or on-demand viewing, what does the industry need to do to provide reliable ratings data?
LEE: We are half way through this revolution. It’s a wonderful thing that we have C3 ratings but we really want to get to a point where all our audiences on all platforms, whether digital or linear, are fully counted and we get to see exactly who’s watching what where when and how. When we get to that point we can really serve up more detailed information to our advertisers. And the step beyond that is addressable advertising where not only do we know where everybody is, but we can address advertising to them.

WS: You have worked in the U.K., on a TV Globo telenovela, and you have written, produced and directed TV movies. With such an international perspective, what are the strengths of the American system of developing and creating prime-time shows? 
LEE: I’m a Brit and I am tremendously proud of the storytelling that England has done in my lifetime, not just on television but also in movies. It’s storytelling that is exported around the world and continues to be incredibly creative and fertile. Nobody, however, matches the broad reach and ability to tell five or six seasons of 22 to 24 episodes of storytelling like the American system: the writing rooms, the ability to sustain a timeslot in the network and market it in the U.S. and internationally. I loved working in England and I think it’s a huge privilege to be at the heart of American storytelling.

WS: Can America learn from the British and European way of producing shows?
LEE: America is already in a “mixed economy” where we can continue to make amazing storytelling like One Upon a Time, Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal and syndicate them in the U.S. and around the world. There is no business model that matches that. At the same time, there are plenty of limited series now on both cable and broadcast and starting on Netflix and Amazon, which can really help define a brand. So I believe that the future is going to have a mixed economy of both long-running, sustained American storytelling and defining, high-profile, high-quality series.