Kevin Beggs

Kevin Beggs, the chairman of Lionsgate’s television group, talks to World Screen about working with talent, digital platforms and new ways of producing television.

WS: Lionsgate has announced a number of joint ventures and producer deals. How have you been casting the net wider when looking for projects?
BEGGS: The idea of the JVs and producer deals and writer deals and pod deals, which have expanded over time, is simply to give ourselves more bite of the apple with really smart, talented people that are each driving their own businesses, and that benefit our TV group in the aggregate. Whether it’s doing something with Televisa’s South Shore, which has been productive so far (Chasing Life at ABC Family was our first piece of business); or a lot of the high-profile development we have with Sea to Sky Entertainment, a joint venture with Frank Giustra’s Thunderbird Films (Frank was our founder, he started Lionsgate in 1997); or even the project we are doing with Rola [Bauer] and Tim [Halkin] at TANDEM [Communications], Sex, Lies and Handwriting—all of those are win-wins for everybody. Within these ventures, our partners focus on their business, and these joint projects become a big part of what they are focused on. We are focused on these partnerships in addition to our other core businesses, so it just feels like you can get more done. Our only limitation now—because there are so many buyers, so much opportunity to create amazing TV content in this second golden age of television—are the available hours of the day.

WS: Lionsgate was one of the first companies to work with Netflix and Hulu. Creatively, how have those working relationships been?
BEGGS: It’s been fantastic. We’ve had a long relationship with Netflix as a studio. They are also our partner in the EPIX channel venture. They were early buyers of Mad Men and Weeds. So of course we were excited when word started to leak out that they might be interested in originals. We’ve been banging on their door for years, saying, Are you going to do originals? And then they were. Orange Is the New Black has been a great experience. They have created an amazing creative environment; Jenji [Kohan, creator of Weeds and Orange Is the New Black] has spoken to this publicly. They gave her and us a lot of freedom to make the show she wanted to make. The show has worked and we are deep into season two. We love working there and look forward to doing more.

Hulu has focused for now on different programming needs—more comedies and a little more young-skewing, and more subversive and maybe aligned with what’s working with their partners. But they have been equally fun to work with. We’re doing Deadbeat, a really subversive funny idea about an overweight exorcist. That one has been an adventure. We’re shooting it for extremely low money in New York, on location. It is equally interesting because we put together an amazing cast, as we did on Orange Is the New Black, and one of the reasons we were able to do so is because it was a new platform. These actors might have passed on it if it were on a more traditional [outlet].

WS: These new platforms are also very interested in limited series—8, 10, up to 13 episodes.
BEGGS: What’s happening is that there are a number of places that are saying, Let’s forgo the pilot process, because when you start thinking about shows that are streaming, shows that are delivered in a non-weekly way, that whole feeling that everything has to find its way into the pilot and the pilot must be perfect and it must answer everything for all people, is inapplicable for those platforms. And when you can start rolling out stories slowly, in the streaming environment, there may very well be a regular cast member that is not in your first episode. That is really antithetical to how it goes in traditional piloting for broadcasters or cablers that do pilots because they are going to test that, they are going to know if that character is going to be likeable. It’s very difficult to do pilots. I applaud everyone who has ever done one, including the ones that we have done. It’s extremely difficult because you are being asked, usually, to set up a premise, which requires a fair amount of exposition, and deliver a story that would be a typical episode. It’s a Herculean task and you usually only have 44 minutes to do it. And sometimes pilots suffer from not being very good at either, what we call “pilotitis.” They didn’t want to rely on a premise pilot because it doesn’t tell you what the show is every week. On the other hand, you can’t just set up a scenario for somebody without explaining why they happen to be there. Every now and then there is the magic of, say, a Modern Family, and family and cops and legal and medical procedurals are usually easier to get into because you don’t have to explain what police do. You’re in the car on a ride-along and there is an arrest and a burglary, and so on. But other shows that are more non-traditional, like Weeds or even Mad Men, with worlds that you haven’t been in, require a fair amount of setup. And it doesn’t necessarily happen all in one episode. So the beauty of streaming, if you ask the creators that work in that medium, is that you take your time, novelistically, spread it out and draw an audience in. And where you begin may be very different than where you end on a season—that is atypical of TV.

WS: Even linear broadcast and cable networks have been airing limited series.
BEGGS: Hatfields & McCoys [a mini-series that aired on HISTORY in 2012] really reminded everybody about the power and the ability to aggregate a mass audience around an event beyond sports. For three nights in a row, Hatfields & McCoys delivered [huge] numbers and everybody’s heads turned to say, Wow, I didn’t know that was possible. When you are trying to deliver eyeballs and brand awareness to your network, or changing its direction, or [programming] off-cycle, for example in the summer, as CBS did with Under the Dome, or what FOX is looking to do with its 10- to 12-episode limited series, they serve a bunch of purposes beyond just ratings and create reasons to not just say, Oh, broadcasters, I’m going to forget about them all summer because cable is here. Under the Dome really sent that message and CBS immediately renewed it. From a supplier’s point of view, it’s fantastic.

Long-running series, in success, are probably the most profitable thing you could do. You have to make economic sense of these limited series because you could just do those, and they come and go, but they are not enough to create that vast library that you want to have. But they are a good business if done right and they hopefully have a lot of ancillary value overseas, digitally and in packaged media. If you play it right, it’s probably a good business for everybody.

WS: Does the 10/90 model continue to be a good model for you?
BEGGS: It’s a great model, and I think we are going to see more companies adopting it if they can, but we were really the first movers because of the unique relationship we have with Debmar-Mercury. [Co-presidents] Mort [Marcus] and Ira [Bernstein] are really the experts on the structure and the business model. Now, working together with us, they can take advantage of our creative relationships with the buyers and [our] original production, so it’s one plus one makes three. We’ve had a fantastic run already with FX for Anger Management with Charlie Sheen. We are in post-production on Saint George, the George Lopez comedy vehicle. We are casting and in the final stages of getting our ten scripts in order to start shooting in January a show from Kelsey Grammer and Martin Lawrence. We are going to do something with Kevin James. That is in the early stages; we are thinking about the right writers and concepts to bring to the market. Things have been great.

WS: Lionsgate Television is also involved with unscripted shows.
BEGGS: We never talk too much about our unscripted only because it’s been a bit of a smaller business for us, but it’s doing great. We have nine series on the air. We had a great success this summer with a show on TBS called Deal With It. It’s from a Keshet format. Roy Bank developed it for the U.S. market. With Roy, with whom we’ve had an overall deal in the nonfiction group, and with our overall deal with Eli Frankel, between the two of them, they’ve got eight or nine shows on and some other big ones in the pipeline.

It’s a fun business and of course you hope that out of any of these a Duck Dynasty might emerge. We are working to expand because nonfiction continues to be a huge business domestically and globally.

WS: Tell us about some of the creative ventures with producers and how those relationships work.
BEGGS: We have a whole roster. We have an overall television deal with Allison Shearmur. Alli ran our feature film group, as the head of creative for about four years, and brought into development and production The Hunger Games, and with that changed the entire course of the company. After the Summit transaction, she segued into a producing deal. She was a big TV fan and had been very involved with us on the TV side and introduced us to producers and writers. As a natural outgrowth of going independent, she said maybe we can do some TV together and we thought that was a great idea. She has already sold the three projects she has taken out to the market. We have the American Psycho [sequel series] at FX; we have a project at ABC, The Thirteen; and a third one, and there are more we are working on.

We have a deal with Roughcut TV, the U.K.-based comedy producer behind The Office and The IT Crowd. They have a huge hit in the U.K. right now called Cuckoo, which was on BBC Three and then migrated to BBC One and stars Andy Samberg [from Saturday Night Live] as a zany hippie who marries into an upper-middle-class British family and completely upends their world. As an outgrowth of our first-look deal with them in the U.S., the format rights became available on that project, which they produced in the U.K. We had a fantastic bidding situation and very soon we will be sending the script to NBC.

We’ve had a great relationship with Jason Blum, the man behind Paranormal Activity, and have a couple of things that are very close to going forward. He has a tight relationship with our film group and he is the king of horror; we like him!

We have a multiyear deal with Clyde Phillips, who ran Dexter for the first four seasons and has been running Nurse Jackie for the past two seasons for us. He is also a prolific developer and one of the great showrunners in our business, who incidentally, and it’s rare, has done both comedy and drama.

We are in business with Dee Johnson, who is the showrunner of Nashville and also ran Boss for us. We have an overall deal with her in partnership with ABC Studios. Nashville has become a fantastic show and franchise for us, for the network and for our partners at ABC Studios. It has really come into its own this year with great ratings growth and, creatively, the network is really pleased, and the music just continues to work like gangbusters.

We have an overall deal with Evolution Entertainment, which is run by Mark Burg. They are the partners behind our Saw movie franchise, and they represent Charlie Sheen as a client and have all kinds of interesting actor, director and writer clients. We are in business with them, pitching and developing projects.

We are in business with Jamie Foxx and his production company in a deal very similar to the one we have with Kevin Costner. We are nine years into the relationship with Jenji Kohan, who not only scored with Weeds but also has made Netflix appointment television with Orange Is the New Black.

We’ve made a deal that has really paid off in a big way with Steve McPherson, who ran ABC for many years and has set up six or seven network projects in a very short time, and four or five of those are ours.

We have an overall TV relationship with Matt Williams, who created Roseanne and Home Improvement and is doing the George Lopez 10/90 for us.

That is a lot of activity and a lot of people working, and hopefully working toward the greater good of Lionsgate TV and the overall company, but it’s a lot to manage, so we are on our toes!