World Screen @ 35: Basic Cable Revolution

As World Screen celebrates its 35th anniversary, we want to present a series of articles that recap and highlight the best of the interviews we have conducted. We are focusing on the evolution of scripted TV series.

In our last article, we heard from writers who worked on The Sopranos and the impact it had on them and other talent. Today, we look at how the success of The Sopranos influenced significant changes in programming and the fortunes of several basic cable channels.

BASIC CABLE REVOLUTION
While HBO was breaking new ground with The Sopranos and the shows that followed, the rest of the industry took notice. How could they not, given the critical acclaim heaped onto the show and the pay service, and the dozens of awards for which the series and its actors were nominated and won. The freedom David Chase, Alan Ball and all the writers enjoyed, and the willingness of HBO executives to take risks were the envy of other writers, showrunners and executives working in basic cable.

Even though basic cable networks ran advertising, several of their executives believed they could follow HBO’s lead and pivot towards series that featured complex antiheroes.

John Landgraf, the CEO of FX Networks, said in a 2013 interview, “When you look at the explosion of quality programming that has come out of America in the past decade, particularly since The Sopranos initially premiered on HBO, and then a couple of years later when The Shield premiered on FX, we really liberated storytellers. Before that, storytellers either had to fit their ideas into a two- or three-hour film or had to make a series that would go 22 episodes a year and hopefully make well in excess of 100 episodes. That really limited the number of subjects and types of approaches one could take to a series. When The Sopranos came along, all of a sudden, you could do a 13-episode-a-year series that had continuity and was essentially a 90- hour movie told over seven years. It just exploded and opened a massive door to quality…I really believe there are all kinds of great stories that we are not telling that optimally should be told, not in 2 hours and not in 90 hours but in 10 or 20 hours or 30 hours.”

The Shield, which premiered in 2002 and ran for seven seasons, also served as a model for the type of financial rewards a basic cable show could reap when successful. Creator and showrunner Shawn Ryan told me during a panel I moderated at the L.A. Screenings in 2003 that The Shield cost less to produce than other cable shows. It didn’t come packaged with agents, managers and executive producers, and many of its locations were rundown buildings that could be rented cheaply. The considerable upside was that the series generated substantial DVD sales, and even though it wasn’t a typical procedural drama, it was licensed to numerous broadcasters worldwide.

But success had its genesis in the compelling subject and new ways of creating series. Granting writers the flexibility of crafting stories of whatever length they thought best meant trusting their vision for the show. “We try to find people with a really bold original vision—creators, writers, producers, showrunners and directors—then we build around that vision. We do give a lot of notes, but we give them from inside the vision,” continued Landgraf. “We’ve never fired a showrunner or creator off any of our shows in the more than a decade that we have been doing this. All of the advertising for each of our shows is highly individualistic. We’re intensely supportive of original creative visions. We have built our entire organization from the ground up around creative people and around how to be excellent at identifying really talented people and then supporting their vision.”

Ryan Murphy produced his first show, Popular, for a broadcast network, then called The WB, today The CW. Following its two-season run, Murphy created Nip/Tuck, about two plastic surgeons, with vastly divergent moral compasses, who run a practice together. The series premiered on FX in 2003 and ran till 2010.

“When I got Popular on the air in 1999, the landscape had started to change,” said Murphy in a 2014 interview. “Things had started to move. There were certainly Steven Bochco and David E. Kelley, and David Chase was in the middle of his great success on The Sopranos. But there was no real cable like there is today, so broadcast-network executives had a lot more power to dictate rules and say, You have to do this note, or we’re not airing your show, or, You’re fired. I remember the network executives on Popular saying some of the most appalling things about women, about gay people, about sexuality, just because they were afraid. They were afraid of protests. They were afraid of losing advertisers, and I would try and fight them the best I could. I didn’t win all those battles. Right around when Nip/Tuck started, that’s when things started to change, and that’s when the term “showrunner” came in. That began in the early 2000s, the rise of auteur television, and that was about a vision, and that vision is everything. It’s respected and admired and listened to more than it ever was before. Now, I don’t really get notes from executives. I get this amazing thing—I get brilliant ideas from them. They say, Look, this is your show, and you’re going to do what you want to do, and we have empowered you and believe in you, but what if we tried this or what if we tried that? And that is what showrunners are lucky enough to do now. It feels more creative, and it’s about a singular voice. The landscape of how notes are given has changed. And now [network executives] want you to push the envelope; now they want you to be more daring. Back then, forget it, it was not in the water, at least not in my experience. There is much more freedom now. Different voices are more celebrated than ever before because with a strong voice comes success and ratings.”

The original programming produced by cable networks attracted ratings, critical acclaim and delivered new revenue streams. As Bonnie Hammer, then the president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment and Universal CableProductions, said in 2009, “The goal is to create a lot of quality content that has a long tail. Because now that we own the studio, when we make decisions for USA or SCI FI, we’re not only thinking how will the programming succeed in terms of ratings. We will ask, Will this series be five, six, seven, eight seasons long? Can it sell as a DVD? Can we distribute it internationally and domestically? We look at the long tail of what we hope the profits will be of this show. So we might spend a little bit more money upfront, because we believe that ultimately we will make a lot of money down the road for the company at large. We look at the franchise as a whole, or what I call “ultimate profit by project,” as opposed to just looking at the license fee a program can generate.

As cable networks started to shore up their schedules with originals, they needed to differentiate themselves from the competition. In the early 2000s, the cable bundle was still an attractive proposition for viewers. In the much-touted “500-channel universe,” having a distinct brand that communicated what the channel was all about was essential. 

“The key for both [USA Network and SCI FI] and to their success is the clarity of the brand and what we call a brand filter, continued Hammer. “Everything we do—whether it’s the pilots we greenlight, the tone of a marketing campaign or an on-air campaign, or our choices for content for digital or mobile—has to go through a very clear filter that specifies the qualities of each of the channels. If something doesn’t fit the brand, even if we love it, it doesn’t make the air, it doesn’t make a marketing campaign, it doesn’t get written about in a press release. We give everybody a lot of creative freedom, but they have parameters within which they have to work. At first, people may think, ‘Oh my goodness, you’re locking us into some very specific guidelines,’ but the truth is, it allows people tremendous clarity and freedom to run because they actually know what they’re looking for and what they’re supposed to do. Our success is really tied to very clear, smart brands mixed with some savvy scheduling and an awful lot of competitive research.

SHOWS BECOME BRANDS
Many cable originals engendered passionate communities of fans. Some series became so popular, such cultural icons that they transformed viewers’, critics’ and advertisers’ perceptions of the basic cable channels on which they aired. These shows transformed otherwise overlooked channels into destinations, and in the process, became brands in and of themselves.

TNT followed the example of other cable channels, such as USA Network and FX, and got into the originals game.

“The need for originals came about as a reaction to industry trends,” explained Michael Wright, then the executive VP and head of programming for TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies. “If you go back to 2003—and a tip of the hat to both USA and FX who started early with Monk and The Shield respectively and Nip/Tuck after The Shield—there had been this assumption that cable originals were somehow inferior either in production quality or writing or both to broadcast series. I think those three shows, in particular, really gave the lie to that. It was evident to a lot of people that you could put an original series on cable and do something you could be very proud of, and that equally and more importantly, the advertisers would be really happy to put their dollars into it. So TNT was just reacting to the industry.”

Before they started producing original series, cable channels relied heavily on reruns of broadcast network shows. “At the time, in 2003, which was two years before The Closer premiered, [management] said let’s get in this business,” continued Wright. “We looked at our schedule, and if you are trying to introduce something new, the best idea is usually to look at who is already coming to the network and taking that audience and trying to lead them into a new program. In 2003, Law & Order was huge on TNT. It was on ten to 12 hours a week and [comprised] a third of the prime-time lineup. So we went around to the showrunners and studios in town and said, Monday night at 10 p.m., we are going to put an original series behind Law & Order. We’d like to do something in the procedural space that fans of Law & Order will recognize and give a shot at because they like that kind of storytelling, and they’ll come to it. At the same time, we’ll bring our own voice to it. It will have a cable sensibility, simply meaning maybe a bit quirkier, less traditional, with a voice behind it. We developed about ten scripts, shot three pilots [and we chose] The Closer. From the initial meetings with Jim Duff and Mike Robin to the casting of Kyra Sedgwick and that marvelous cast around her to Warner Bros. being a great partner, it was one of those shows that worked from the beginning to the last episode, what a joy.”

The Closer starred Kyra Sedgwick as the flawed but extremely effective Deputy Police Chief Brenda Johnson, who often resorted to somewhat unorthodox methods in extracting confessions from suspects. The show also helped change the perception and acceptance of women as lead roles in police dramas.

“I think The Closer was a hugely instrumental part of that,” Sedgwick said in an interview in 2017. “That show was so successful, monetarily as well as critically, that suddenly people were thinking leading roles in television shows can be played by women and they can be extremely successful.”

Shows were becoming the magnets that attracted viewers to cable channels. Landgraf said of FX in 2013, “our brand is really an aggregate of a whole series of sub-brands and the sub-brands are really the shows themselves: Louie, Justified, American Horror Story, Sons of Anarchy, Wilfred and Archer. And that goes all the way back to The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me.”

The television industry witnessed a reversal of the usual trend of how shows premiered. It was not FX that launched The Shield; instead, The Shield launched FX. Similarly, it was not AMC that launched Mad Men; Mad Men turned AMC, whose name stood for American Movie Classics, from a movie channel to a hot destination for quality serialized drama.

Joshua Sapan, the president and CEO of AMC Networks, said in a 2011 interview, “Our overall approach has been to add original programming to what were historically movie channels. It’s designed to give a greater perception of differentiation and propriety in the minds of consumers, to make the brands more distinctive in a world in which it’s increasingly challenging to be distinctive and to ultimately have greater control over our destiny—in as much as we have greater control over those shows. AMC has had the most transformative quality from what earlier was a classic movie channel. Its original programming set out to add differentiation, define the brand, increase our audience and our perception among our commercial constituents.”

We will examine how Mad Men turned AMC into a must-watch destination for quality television in our next post.