Kevin Reilly

January 13, 2012 World Screen Interviews

It is fair to say that Kevin Reilly has a good instinct for what makes a hit TV show. He has proven this in every job he’s had and he has certainly displayed this skill since he was appointed president of entertainment at the Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX) in July of 2007. He has overseen a network that has consistently scored high ratings among the much coveted young demographic.

Early in his career, while at NBC Entertainment, Reilly was part of the development team that created ER, Homicide: Life on the Street and Law & Order. Later, as president of Brad Grey Television, Reilly was responsible for shepherding the pilot of the groundbreaking series The Sopranos. He then joined FX and as president of entertainment helped transform it from a fledgling channel into a profitable one and a destination for cutting-edge series like The Shield (which broke cable ratings records and earned a Golden Globe for best drama series and an Emmy for outstanding lead actor for Michael Chiklis), Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me. Reilly then returned to NBC, where he was appointed president of entertainment and oversaw the development of shows in every genre: the comedies The Office and 30 Rock, the reality show The Biggest Loser and the futuristic drama Heroes.

After joining FOX, Reilly introduced the industry’s first year-round programming-and-development system, a way of developing and rolling out new shows that is more efficient than the traditional way of premiering all new shows in the fall.

Under his leadership, FOX premiered some of the most critically acclaimed shows now airing on television, including the hits Glee, Seth MacFarlane’s The Cleveland Show, and New Girl, the breakout comedy hit of this season.

Besides coming up with cost-effective business models, Reilly is particularly keen on constantly stimulating the creative process and encouraging his team to think differently. As he tells World Screen, it is precisely this out-of-the-box thinking that will allow traditional broadcasters to successfully navigate today’s complex digital landscape.­

WS: How does an executive walk the line between nurturing creativity, understanding the creative process, and coming up with business models that can monetize content in today’s digital world?
REILLY: More and more those lines should be blurred. Traditionally, there’s been the creative on one end and the money guys on the other—but our media landscape now requires a lot more creative thinking from both sides. That’s a very easy thing to say, but it’s what gets inside your thinking, whether you’re an executive or a creator, that is going to prevent you from considering something that may in fact be the answer. That’s the challenge of it. So you either encourage that inside an organization, you either encourage that inside a creator, or you put it down. There are a lot of things that are fairly successful in walking a conventional line, but the things that are really successful and the business challenges today call for some inspiration and encouraging what may be on the other side of that.
 
WS: In general, FOX has never been scared of pushing the envelope, has it?
REILLY: No, that’s actually what I really love about the company. The corporate culture at FOX has always rewarded risk. The nature of the organization wants you to innovate and push forward. I’ve never been chastised for making a bold bet on something. If you make five of them in a row that don’t work, you’re probably not going to be invited to stay around! [Laughs] But I can tell you last year we premiered a show on FOX that lasted one episode, Lone Star, and nobody said to me, “How did that happen?” They said, “OK, let’s move on.” A success and a failure are only separated by a few strands of DNA.
 
WS: You have started a program called the Innovators Group, which encourages creative thinking, where small teams explore ideas and then provide insights to the larger organization. How did that come about?
REILLY: You can have retreats and seminars with speakers and consul­tants who can tell you what they are doing, and what I find is that everybody leaves the room nodding yes, but then they get back to their office and they’re overwhelmed with their responsibilities. There’s just not enough time in the day, and what most people end up pushing aside is creative thinking—anything that could be stimulating to you as an individual and that you can bring into the organization and just say, “I’m excited by this!” That’s where the fertile environment comes from and you have to almost bake [creative thinking] into the day. So that’s what we’re trying to do with our Innovators Group—we want to allow employees to take time out of their day-to-day jobs to pursue projects that they find creatively stimulating or inspiring. We actually even want to reward it. Some digital businesses have done this famously, such as Google. If people can say they followed something that got everybody excited, even if it doesn’t lead to an immediate product, I think that should be rewarded.
 
WS: When I interviewed Rupert Murdoch in 2005 we talked about the importance of creative thinking, and that was when the world wasn’t as complicated technologically as it is today.
REILLY: That is the spirit; it starts from the top. It’s a curiosity to explore. Now granted, there’s no free pass on your day job, but what’s expected is that your end results will only be better by being curious about what could be done new and differently, in addition to what we are already doing.
 
WS: As the television experience becomes more personal, with viewers watching programming on demand on TV, laptops, iPads and other portable devices, what does a linear network have to do to maintain its relevance?
REILLY: Well, that’s one of the big questions. The [network business] can create a very split personality because some days you come in [to work] and look and there it is, the old-fashioned business is alive and well, the viewers showed up [the night before to watch your shows]. Other days you look and ask, Well, where did the viewers go? Sometimes they manifest themselves in different places. There’s a discovery down the line. It turns out [there’s] this online viewing experience that hasn’t yet resulted in a live daily rating, but all of a sudden, critical mass is reached and there they are. What we have to [start realizing is that] this is not going to happen overnight. But the bottom has not dropped out. The business is not dead.

All those proclamations people were making even five years ago: “This is dead!” and “That’s over!” and “You don’t get it” and “This is a thing of the past.” I just found that silly. It was frustrating because I knew the business wasn’t dead, it is transforming. But just because it’s not dead doesn’t mean you can be in denial. It is transforming and our content is moving on all of these different platforms. Facebook can see how much dialogue is taking place around our content and people want to immediately be a part of it. They want to discover it and build it up. They’d like to have extensions when people are passionate about a show. I’m amazed at just how much more they’d like to either consume or participate in. With Glee, I couldn’t believe the stuff I was seeing. People were [singing and dancing] in their own living rooms. The question is, how do we feed that? [Social media] now has to be a very, very important part of our business. Our companies were not structured that way, so we’ve done a lot of [experimenting]. We’re trying to figure out how we can feed [social media] and get that to scale the same way we do with a television show.

WS: Are you seeing the possibility of spending less on traditional promotion because of what social networks can do for your shows?
REILLY: That would be nice! [Laughs] We haven’t seen that yet. I can talk about being courageous all I want, but I’m not yet so confident in my job that we can say, “Let’s put something out without any marketing.” But I can say this: it’s way more efficient because, again, it’s not either-or. Marketers of our advertising partners are just as challenged and have made some very fumbling, ill-advised moves in trying to be in a conversation with their consumers. Now a lot of them have gone back to network television realizing that you simply can’t drive the same level of brand equity without television. So how do we win on both fronts? How is television a part of that digital experience, part of a brand, but not just embedding 30-second spots in between the shows? I think the 30-second spot still endures and will endure, but it needs to go hand in hand with other elements.
 
WS: The theme of the upcoming show Touch is interconnectivity. How are you incorporating this into the series’ online presence?
REILLY: Well, that was one of the things I was really excited about. I just thought it was a timely theme. In the entire world there’s no country you can look to and say, “Oh, they seem to have it easy.” Everybody [is facing challenges and] wondering, “What’s going on here?” So there’s a comforting aspect to this show even though we’re going to deal with some challenging drama. I feel from an entertainment perspective it’s the right timing.

And we have some pretty big ambitions in the digital space. We want to encourage the show’s idea of interconnectivity and the global nature of a lot of its stories. I would love to see it literally connect people around the world. I would love to see people say—I know it sounds corny but—“I found my long-lost sister through this” or “I made a connection with somebody that I never thought I would see again.” These things can happen around the show in the digital space.

WS: How has the TV season been so far for FOX?
REILLY: We’re off to a good start. I really felt going in this year that we had a lot of things that had tremendous potential. Terra Nova got off on a bit of a soft start in the U.S. and yet we looked at the DVR numbers and all of a sudden they jumped up. I’m very heartened by New Girl too; our comedy in the U.S. is so important. I knew that show was a winner. That’s another great thing, when you think, “God, I feel this could really be it,” and then the audience is there. The old-fashioned audience response is still alive and well!
 
WS: You love what you do.
REILLY: Some days. [Laughs] It’s just torture other days!
 
WS: Is programming what excites you the most?
REILLY: Yes. I love it. You’d think, it’s television, it should be fun, but because it never stops, that is the hard part of it. If you want to make good shows and you want to make shows that can really move people, the pace just never stops—now more than ever. That is the hard part of it. Sometimes you’d like to just slow down and say, We need a little more time, but there just isn’t any. But it’s fun; I wouldn’t trade places with anybody.